Jeff Cable's Blog: April 2022

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

It is that time of year again - Senior portraits

As April comes to a close, we are getting that much closer to the end of another school year, and this is the time of year when many parents are looking for portraits of their future graduates. Over the last couple of months, in between photographing lots of personal and corporate events, I have been capturing senior portraits.

For all of you who are looking to capture portraits of your graduate, I thought I would share some tips with you in order to get the best photos.

If you already have your cap and gown, this is a great chance to give it a trial run. For this portrait, I found a good shady area to avoid any harsh light on my subject, and took the photo at f/2.8 to create a lot of separation between my subject and the background.

My goal when taking any portraits is to show who they are, not who I am. Here, we included this young man's skateboard since this is one of his hobbies.

I took standard portraits of him, using my favorite Canon 70-200mm lens...

...but I also broke out the Canon 15-35mm wide angle lens to try something different.

This young man is really into tennis, so his mother asked me if we could do senior portraits of him in action. For these images, I had the camera in I/O servo focus mode (follow focus) and made sure to have a shutter speed of at least 1/1250 sec to freeze the action. I also positioned myself to get the cleanest background possible (with less distractions).

Whenever I shoot, I try to push the boundaries and go beyond the obvious photos. While I was taking photos of him playing tennis, I noticed the shadows and thought that this would make a cool image as well. For this shot, I waited for him to serve the ball, focused the camera on the shadow as opposed to him, and bursted out a bunch of frames. The key here is to look for something different every time you shoot.

One of the trickiest parts of taking a good portrait is what to do with the hands. If you have ever seen someone stand with their arms straight down, it really does not look very good, so I try to get my subjects to cross their arms, lean against something, or both.

I never stop looking for good shooting locations, and try to place my subjects in places which will add to their photos. This is a tile staircase in San Francisco that has always been a favorite of mine.

Since we were shooting Hannah's senior portraits in San Francisco, we had to make a visit to the Golden Gate Bridge. For this image, I used an off-camera flash (to my left) to light her and keep her from being silhouetted by the bright background.

As I mentioned before, I am always looking for places for my subjects to lean against and to rest their hands.

It is not uncommon for the kids to have different outfits to change into. In these three photos, you can see three different sides of this young man brought out in the images.

Almost all of my senior portraits now are taken with the Canon R3 and Canon RF70-200mm lens, and usually at f/2.8 or f/4. And 90% of the time I am popping a flash (powered down to -1) to add a bit of fill flash to the subject and catch light to their eyes. In the photo above, I also had some late afternoon sunlight shining through the trees, which created beautiful backlighting on her hair.

I am always very aware of my foreground and backgrounds, and love to capture images with many layers of color.

I really like trying a wide variety of poses. This gives the client more variety in their images, but also gives them some very different looks to choose from.

My favorite thing to do when posing subjects is to ask them to sit or stand how they think it is most comfortable. Inevitably, I find that I can get the best photos when they are feeling like themselves and not overly posed. There are many times when I will ask them to make small changes, but it is a good starting point.

I don't know why, but over the years I have made it a habit to ask my subjects to give me two thumbs up. It is a fun pose and most everyone has a good time with it. I never consciously started this,. it just became "my thing". The most important tip is to have fun when you are taking the photos, so that both you and the subject are relaxed, having fun, and getting great shots.

I hope this helps you get great shots of your graduate!

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Friday, April 8, 2022

Want to join me in Costa Rica next month? I have 2 spots open!

On May 16 (next month) I am leading another photo tour to the rain forest of Costa Rica. I had two people postpone their trip to 2023 and so I have room for 2 people on this trip. It is an amazing place to capture photos of monkeys, sloths, tree frogs, birds and so much more.

The good news is...this is your last chance to go at the older price. Since the resort has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, the price is going up $1000 starting in 2023. And, as always, you can borrow almost any cameras and lenses from Canon to use on the trip for free!

If you are interested in taking one or both of these spots, please let me know ASAP. You can get more info from the link here.

Here are just a few images that were taken when we were in Costa Rica four months ago.

If you want to get images like these, join us next month!

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Friday, April 1, 2022

Canon announces new Butt Detection Software (BDS) on the R5, R6 and R3!!!

I am really excited to announce a new feature added today to the Canon mirrorless cameras. For the past year we have been really spoiled by the amazing face detection of the Canon R5, R6 and R3 cameras. I have blogged about this many times. Now Canon has upped their game once more. Introducing butt detection!

For anyone lucky enough to join me on a photo tour, you know that there are lots of times when we are shooting and an animal turns their back side to us. When this happens, I have often hoped for a better focus mode for this situation. Well...last summer when teaching photo tours in Botswana and Tanzania, I was lucky enough to test Canon's new butt detection. I was not able to tell anyone about the special software that had been loaded into my Canon R cameras, but I was secretly using the feature throughout the trip.

After photographing these two elephants for a little while, they walked away from our vehicle. While the rest of our tour guests were discouraged, I was secretly testing the new feature and loving it. The new focus mode locked right into their back sides perfectly!

I wondered if the zebra stripes would throw off the butt detection, but no, the camera locked right onto the back of the animals and stayed super sharp at all times.

These two made it even easier for the new focus mode, providing targets for the cameras to lock onto.

For those of you looking to get this new feature on your cameras, you need to be using the Canon R5, R6, or R3. And you also need to upgrade to firmware 1.4.1. This will give you a new option instead of just "People" and "Animals".

I wondered how the camera would handle this situation, with two animals facing away from me. It appears that the Butt Detection Software (BDS) defaulted to the closest wild dog.

I was concerned that a wagging tail would throw off the BDS, but nope, it locked in just fine.

For those of you wondering if the BDS will work in conjunction with the "people or animal" option, the answer is yes! For this shot, I selected I/O Servo, people detection and switched from eye detection to butt detection. Notice how the camera avoided the people who were sitting and focused on the derriere that was showing.

This subject was a good test to see how the new mode worked with very little contrast in the scene.

This would have been a perfect test of the butt detection on this cheetah but our driver was in a terrible position for that shot. Darn it!

I loved the accuracy of the new focus mode here, with so many subjects to detect. Butts everywhere. I started bursting off a lot of frames with a big smile on my face. When I looked up, I saw all our guests looking at me like I was nuts. Little did they know that I had BDS installed on my cameras.

As you can see from this photo, the new focus mode drifted from the female lions back side to the eyes of the cubs. What a huge disappointment!

The new feature is definitely not bullet-proof. In this case, it failed miserably. I wondered why the focus drifted to the face of the red-headed agama lizard. I called and talked to Drew and Tony (my technical contacts at Canon) to see why this was happening. Their first question was "Are you using the latest firmware 1.4.1?" and I told them "Of course I am!" After a little more pushing on my part, they told me that there was a newer firmware being tested that would be better optimized for red-headed rock agama lizards. I am super excited to get that one.

If you have been waiting for butt detection on your camera, April 1st is your day! Look for this new firmware to be released later today. It will be posted to the following url:

https://www.wereallydontneedthisfeature.com/

Remember, I told you about this first!

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