Fly Photography – Entry Level DSLR Tutorial
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Part 3 – How to take better fly tying photos with an entry level DSLR
The purpose of this post is to show how to get the most out of your basic DSLR when taking pictures of your flies. Sure, macro lenses and off camera flash come in handy but I want to show (with pictures) how powerful your entry level equipment can be. In order to accomplish this goal I pulled out my Nikon D50 and kit lens and purposely left all the other gear in the bag. By doing this I hope you will see that the pictures come from your brain and not the camera (per se). This is stripped down naked photography and most of you already have the equipment.I have done a copy/paste of this post and put it in the fly tying photography repository.
There is a very important concept hidden in these shots – I will tell you the secret at the end.Equipment
Camera: Nikon D50 (entry level DSLR)
Lens: 18-55mm f3.5-5.5 (cheap plastic stock lens that comes with the camera)
Props: black and white background and a piece of wood
Stabilizer: Manfrotto tripod with a geared-head
Post Production Software: None. All shots are naked, no makeup.
That’s it!!!
KNOW THIS! It’s all about light. As on the river you first look at the conditions and get an idea of how to approach the situation. It’s the same with fly photography. Do you have daylight in the room or is it a dark room? How are you going to compensate? Do you need flash? Or do you need tricks like diffusion/bounce, etc. Most of the time you need flash.
Have you ever looked at flash? Seriously, look at it above. The flash unit is on the right. First notice the intense hot spot just to the left of the bulb, then notice the gentle fall-off from right to left until there is only darkness. Also notice the vertical pattern of the light. Thus, flash has “character”. Now think about how you have taken fly shots on your bench in the past – Yep, most people just hold the camera to the fly and zoom in close and use the on-camera built in flash in auto mode. Terrible. You are actually placing the fly right in the “hot spot” and that’s why you get that nasty look like a criminal under the interrogation lamp. You want to find the sweet spot, which in this example would be a bit more to the left where the light is opening up but still has good intensity.
Now think about your background (number one question people ask is how to get a black backround [or conversely, how to avoid it]). It’s simple . . . the further away the background is from the flash the blacker it will become until eventually it turns completely black. Even a bright pink background will go to black if it’s out of the range of the flash unit. Thus, flash has depth of field. However, if you re-light the background (i.e. with sunlight or a hot light or a second flash), it will reappear in the final image.
With this simple exercise we have cured 90% of the problems encountered in amateur fly photos with an entry level DSLR! Think about how you have taken pictures until now. The typical scenario involves a guy just finishing a fly on the vise and he wants to “get the shot”. He pulls out the camera hand-held, gets up close to the fly while using auto settings and auto flash and the background will be the bench itself, usually less than one foot away from the fly. Gotcha, he just did everything wrong. The fly will be flooded with intense light, the metal vise will have hot spots, the background will act like a reflector and throw the light right back at the lens and there will be glare, shadow, and halo. Sound familiar? Furthermore, your camera will be laughing at you because you chose auto mode and it will give you settings with wide aperture and prolonged shutter speed because the meter says, “hey, it’s freaking dark in here, let’s open it up”.
Solution – Take control – full throttle manual! Learn It.
The basics . . .
1) Learn to use your camera. Get out the manual or find an online review manual. Know how to change aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and exposure and flash compensation! ALL DSLRs have these functions. Few people know how to use them (or when to use them).
2) Flash compensation – critical! Remember the flash picture above and know that you can dial that intensity up-or-down and take control. On the Nikon it is easy to adjust but I will let you figure it out for time sake.
3) White balance – critical when shooting in jpeg, less critical (but still important) if shooting in RAW. Choose wrong and your beautiful fly will be off color, brown may look red, yellow may look orange, etc. By the way, at first I recommend avoiding RAW because you will be learning and those big files will hog your computer storage. I always dial my white balance in Kelvin manually but you could choose the flash white balance as a short cut. Remember, in a dark room there is nothing to meter (because it’s dark) so avoid the auto white balance setting at all cost.
4) Background – move it far away from your fly. In other words, get the fly off the tying bench if possible or at least as far away from the background as possible.
5) Hot lights – you can use a lamp or hot light, see below. It adds a nice mixture of light and shadow but remember that will add another variable to your white balance equation (i.e. flash plus incandescent).
Enough talk, let’s shoot. . .Props ;D I love them, I collect them, I use them. For this shoot I chose a wood container. Note: I purposely cropped something critical out of this picture, can you guess what? I’ll tell you at the end.
A good tripod and head are wonderful. . .
But a cheap tripod from Sam’s will work (for this kind of photography at least).
Set up a background.
You can use black material or paper or other colors. Remember that all colors will eventually turn black if you don’t use a second flash on the background (remember the flash picture above and the depth-of-flash).
For the first shot, I chose a black background. The model is a green Zima tarpon fly.
Here we go . . .
P Mode, f4.6, 1/60s, ISO 400. Wow, pretty good for auto mode and a cheap lens. This was on P-mode and the on-camera flash was set to 0 EV. Do you know why it is so good (that’s the key!)? There is something else that made this picture possible and allowed the auto mode to be effective, I’ll tell you at the end.
Aperture Priority, f11, 1 second exposure, ISO 1600. Crap! I wanted f11 so the camera chose a high ISO (on a camera that is not good in low light) and the image is over exposed. Notice also that the camera chose a shutter speed of one second, aaggghhh. That is why aperture priority mode is not good for fly shots (but conversely wonderful for landscape photography). The camera doesn’t like f/11 or small aperture and it will always choose a long exposure time which means you will get blur and also the color will be junk because the incandescent lights have “time” to creep in to your exposure. Finally, check out the background . . . hey where did that come from? The longer exposure time means more of the background was exposed despite the flash and it came back in the final exposure. Damn the spirits, live for color, avoid the incandescent glow! Do you know why the camera gave a bad exposure here vs the good exposure above while both times it was on an auto mode? I’ll tell you at the end.
That special something isn’t always available, so you must learn to shoot in manual like below.
Break on through to the other side . . . Freedom!!!!!!!!
Manual mode, f11, 1/40s, ISO 1600. Crap! I’ll bet you’ve seen this one before, it’s the dreaded first time amateur-in-manual shot. Most people stop here and give up thinking they will never be able to shoot manual.
I didn’t use the flash, that’s why it was so dark. Freedom requires knowledge and discipline – Don’t rely others to help you out.
Here is the same shot in manual at f/11, 1/40s, ISO 800 but with on-camera flash at – 0.3EV. I moved the camera closer and then cropped in. Notice that the metal vise lacks a harsh flash signal – that is good, you want that.
Same settings, but simply turning the fly a bit to give the effect of depth. This is good for streamers and long flies.
Finishing move – Same settings, change to a prop for effect. Done! Not bad for a quick tutorial shot.
That’s about as good as it gets for this particular shot with the available props and lighting.
Neal…This is great!
I could see you selling this tutorial to a magazine. Better yet….ave you ever thought about an online fly tying magazine? Like Catch magazine but dealing exclusively with fly tying. I used to subscribe many years ago to Fly Tyer magazine….I don’t even know if they are still around. It was a niche magazine….you could probably do the same thing with much less overhead….by using the ‘Net.
Thanks again…..Steve
I still say that you should write a book, “Photography for the Fly Fisherman”…
I get the first copy…
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