Pawsey Photography – Blog

Pawsey Photography projects, shoots and other info

Category Archives: Shoot blogs

Sony a99 and Back Button Focusing

There is a lot of advice out there about back button focusing and it’s benefits. I thought that I would write about my experiences with it using my Sony a99v.

What is back button focusing?
Back button focusing is, as the name suggests, focusing with a button on the back of the camera! In a standard configuration, most (if not all) DSLR/T/mirrorless cameras come with the focus/exposure and shutter all linked to the same button. This kinda works for the majority of camera users, it is one button, half press, wait for the focus confirmation and complete the press to take your frame. Great! But wait, not always is the best composition to have the point of focus in the middle of the frame. In face, if you are following the rule of thirds, it most likely isn’t. So what do most people do then? Well, you put the object/person on a focus point, half-press the shutter, hold in place, recompose, and then finish pressing the shutter… simple! Well, it kind of is… but not compared to Back Button Focusing.

If the shutter method of focusing works, why change it?
Of course you don’t have to change it… and most people don’t. Most just get used to the focus, hold, recompose, shoot method. That is, until you try back button focusing. The simplicity of pressing a separate button to focus, letting that button go and recompose for as long as you need then shooting is liberating! It is difficult to explain how much the focusing and recomposing gets when you are trying to half hold the shutter and then taking a shot. That is another thing… with the conventional setup, when you release the shutter button then press to take another frame, the first thing your camera does… refocuses! I have had that to me many times, and you have to get into the habit of always focus/recompose/shoot… no matter what. However, with back button focusing you de-couple the focusing from the shutter button, so once your focus is locked in, you can press and release the shutter button as many times as you like.

I changed my method of focusing some time ago, and I believe that the Sony a99 is a great camera to make the switch with… why? Focus peaking.

There are a couple of different methods of achieving Back Button Focus (BBF) with the a99. One of them is to use the AF/MF button in a slightly modified way. This is how I first started on the BBF journey. By default this button is for switching between Auto Focus and Manual Focus. What you can do, however is to set your camera to de-couple focusing from the shutter button and have your camera in Manual Focus by default. You then go into the camera menu to change the function of the AF/MF button from a toggle to a Hold. What this does is whilst the button is held down the camera performs autofocusing, and when released it goes back to manual focus. If you have your camera setup to do manual focus peaking highlighting, you will see exactly what is in focus as soon as you release the AF/MF button. This, for me, was the turning point… I was hooked! It has made life so much easier, focus, release, recompose, shoot! Another great point to this method is that when you release the focusing button the camera reverts back to manual focus. This means that you can fine-tune your focus easily and manually if you want.

However, this was not the end… I was shooting like this for about a year quite happily. Then, however, I started to raise some questions… the Sony a99 has many useful features, such as face detect, smile detect and so on…. none of these seem to be available using the above method. The above method is simply a Manual Focus/Spot Auto Focus system.

Whitby Abbey illuminations 2017

It has been 2 years since I have been to Whitby Abbey. This year it was time to go back again.

Last time I was there the weather was not good, but the light display was good. There were not too many people there, so it made for good evenings photography.

What is Whitby Abbey illuminations weekend?

Each year the English Heritage open up the Abbey in Whitby and light it up in spectacular colours. It is to coincide with the twice yearly Goth Music festival, held in Whitby.

If you are interested in going, take a look at the Whitby Goth Weekend website.

Here are a few images that were taken from Whitby, I attended the Abbey illuminations, and Karl Wilson took some images the following day from around the streets…

Whitby Abbey goth weekend

A trip to Białowieski park Naradowy to see European Bison (Zubr)

Recently I visited the Białowieski park Naradowy in Poland, a European Bison reservation.

Photographing animals is always challenging, they are unpredictable and never seem to stay still when you need them to! However, I was looking forward to seeing European Bison “up close”, and taking photos of these animals that once roamed around Europe.

Bison are frequently associated with the open plains of America, but they actually also roamed around Europe in much the same way.

Photographing these beasts has it’s challenges, with being a dark brown fur set against the white snow your camera always wants to try and expose for the snow. Despite having white snow around, the day that I arrived was overcast and grey, and the lighting wasn’t great, making shutter speed an issue. Shooting with my Sony A99 and Minolta “beercan” 70-210mm f/4 lens meant that I couldn’t get as much light as I would have liked at low ISO, so I had to compensate by bumping the ISO to 200 to get shutter speeds at a reasonable rate. In hindsight I should have bumped it to 400 to keep the shutter even faster, but this is the reason for this blog, you can learn from my mistakes!

Exposing for detail in the dark brown fur was always top priority, creating good contrast will be important in post-processing to give these creatures the rugged look that they have. The last thing I wanted was to lose detail and make it look like they have a fluffy coat!

To achieve this I used the exposure compensation on my camera to add a couple of stops of exposure to make sure the shadows and darker part of the image still had detail. The exposure compensation setting on your camera enables you to ‘override’ your cameras guess at exposure that it has measured, and make the image lighter or darker (depending on what the situation is) than the camera has measured. The trick is to balance the details in the shadows and dark fur with the white snow, making sure that the snow is not ‘blown out’ to a complete white, and there is still shadows and greys within the snow.

Hopefully this post has given some food for thought and has been of some use to you, leave a comment below, let me know if you would like to hear anything else about the image.

St Mary’s Church, Lead night shoot

St Mary’s Church, Lead, is a redundant Anglican chapel standing in an isolated position in fields some 0.75 miles (1.2 km) to the west of the village of Saxton, North Yorkshire, England. Though technically a chapel, it is generally referred to as a church. It is managed by the Churches Conservation Trust, and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building. The chapel stands close to the site of the battle of Towton of 1461, which was part of the Wars of the Roses. In the 1930s it was saved from neglect by a local group of ramblers, and is known locally as the Ramblers’ Church
Source: Wikipedia

The picture that you see above was the culmination of a long nights shooting in the middle of a very cold field! By the time I left I had ice on my tripod and camera… I thought I must be crazy… but when I saw the end result, I decided that it was worth it.

What I was looking for in this shot, was the Milky Way rising behind the church, subtly illuminated windows and maybe a little bit of light on the outside of the church. This particular night had no moon in the sky, and the Milky Way was almost vertical at time that I had planned, all of which I planned in advance using a great app called PhotoPills. This is an app I use all the time to plan my shoots in advance, especially if I am wanting the sun, moon or Milky Way in a certain position. There are lots of other tools in the app, such as a Long Exposure Calculator, field of view augmented reality, and other useful things. I may do another blog on the usefulness of the app (afraid only available on iOS at the moment), but in the meantime if you want more info, pop on over to their website www.photopills.com.

Here is the plan as I saw it in PhotoPills:

I positioned myself approximately where the black pin is, and you can see the Milky Way position is shown by the dotted curve (meaning it would be almost vertical in the sky). From the top of the image you can see that the expected viability of the Milky Way (represented by the blue stacking bar at the top left) was almost perfect. Also depicted are the sunrise/set directions, as are the moonrise/set (orange, yellow, light/dark blue lines). Position of the sun/moon below the horizon is depicted by the curved yellow line at the bottom. From this I determined that this would be a good time to venture out, and the sky was forecast as clear.

The only downfall of PhotoPills is the fact that it doesn’t tell you what the light pollution is like in the area, this is something that you have to go to a different site for, www.lightpollutionmap.info is a great resource for checking light pollution in an area. This is the map for St Mary’s Church Lead:

From this site it looks like the pollution is a medium level… not ideal, but not awful… as long as the sky stayed clear and there was no fog/mist in the air, as this reflects any light pollution and makes it look worse.

So I arrived before sunset with a view to taking a blue hour shot of the church to blend with a later night sky shot with the Milky Way in PhotoShop. I setup my Sony A99, attached the Zeiss 16-35mm f2.8 lens, and sorted out my focussing and camera settings, taking care to fix as much as possible. The more that you can make manual when shooting in the dark the better, as it means that the camera isn’t guessing things like white balance, exposure, focus, etc. Using the 500 rule and my lens set to 24mm an exposure time of 20 seconds would comfortably get me pin point stars without trails. For those of you that are not familiar with the 500 rule, this means to divide 500 by the focal length your lens is set to (in my case 24mm) and this gives the maximum exposure length to get pin point stars without trails. Using your exposure triangle (ISO/Shutter/Aperture) you can then determine how is best to get this maximum exposure time. Set your aperture as wide as possible (f2.8 in my case), then play with the ISO setting to get the correct exposure at 20 seconds. This normally leads to a setting of 20 second exposure, f2.8 and ISO between 3200 and 6400.

Taking the blue hour shot of the church I could get a lower ISO image, so less noise, better colours and sharper image. After a while, the sun went down, the stars came out and I continued shooting, placing a torch in one of the back windows of the church to get the windows to glow. As the night went on, and the stars moved around the sky (ok, ok, technically the earth rotates, the stars stay still!), I could see that the Milky Way was not very well defined, even though the sun had long gone below the horizon. Determined not to waste the session I continued shooting until the time that PhotoPills had calculated the Milky Way would be in position, as sometimes the camera will pick up information in the sky your eyes can’t see. One thing that I could see is the one thing I didn’t want had appeared, and that was a low mist that hung on the horizon, and this made the light pollution from the nearby town very obvious. I knew that this would be difficult to get rid of, and I may need to just work with the glow on the horizon.

During the shooting I tried different methods of lighting the church, doing some very subtle light painting with my phone, painting with the torch, all to cover the eventuality that I may need to blend different shots to get the effect that I was after. All of the time being very careful not to move the camera or change the settings, so that I could use these different frames to blend without the image being moved.

It got to the time that the Milky Way was in it’s optimum position, and I shot for a little bit longer, just in case there was some drift in the apps calculations, and called it a night (a very cold one at that!!).

In post processing (in PhotoShop) I reviewed the blue hour shots, and although they were good, they just wouldn’t look right with the darkness of the sky and the orange glow on the horizon, so I opted to work with a light-painted shot, and dropped the illuminated windows in as another layer and used the ‘lighten’ blend method. Because the images were perfectly aligned the lights came on inside the church and this looked great. I then used a blue-hour shot to create a mask for the sky to drop in a further layer with the Milky Way/stars in. Using the sky mask I processed the Milky Way in Nik Tools to remove noise, give some nice contrast to the sky and to try to bring out the Milky Way dust clouds. Also, using a luminance mask I applied this to the sky to recover the stars that were ‘lost’ during the noise reduction.

With some further blending and processing in Nik Tools, and removal of a LOT of molehills, the picture that you see above was the result. Maybe not the ideal image that I had in mind, but I am planning on revisiting this site again on a more clear night to improve on this shot.

Any comments, or questions? They are always welcome below, please feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer them.

Kevin Pawsey – Pawsey Photography