Chinese New Year Dinner

If I ask you what you think about these two photos, you might say that is just normal. That's right. I just wanted it to be normal.

The North West Chinese Centre holds a banquet every Chinese New Year. I had worked as a volunteer at this school and they know I do photography so I usually help the school to document different events. This year, I was still their photographer in the banquet. My role was mainly to take pictures of those guests.

In two years ago, I really hated to take this type of photos of a groups of people because I thought that was not artistic and very dull. Since I realized that what many professional wedding photographers do in their job is this kind of photography, I don't hate to do this kind of photography anymore.

Photography can be separated to artistic photography and documenting photography. In artistic photography, you can do whatever you want to express yourself. In documenting photography, what you have to do is to capture clear images, at least clear. A clear image is easy to be capture under the sun light, no matter what cameras you use. However, if in a low light situation, that will be a real challenge for people to get a clear image.

To get a clear image of a group of people is not that easy as many people think. Lighting is so important so a powerful flashgun is necessary. In indoor and light photography, a powerful flashgun is the basic equipment. Therefore, I used my Canon Speedlite 580EX II on the Canon 5DII with the 17-40mm lens for the event.

Except capturing their faces, I would also like to capturing the background. The flash is always stronger than the background lights so a right setting of the camera and the flashgun would help you to capture the portraits with the background.

This one is a failed example. The background is too dark.

When the background is too dark, there are a couple of ways to sort this problem. For example, you can slow down the shutter speed. However, when the shutter speed is too slow, you might be more difficult to keep your arms steady that can be sorted by using a tripod. If you don't like to use a tripod, you can used a larger aperture to take the shot but this way is not good for a group of people because too shallow depth of view is not able to cover all people in the photo. In this situation, you need to use higher ISO that lets more lights get into the camera but that makes more noise to the image. There is a relationship between ISO, shutter speed and aperture. When you get used to use them, you know how to set your camera for different situation.

Many people don't like to use flash when taking pictures, especially high ISO is more usable now. The reason is the reflection on the face makes the photo so bad. Moreover, the colour of the flash is white which creates cold colour temperature but the background lights are yellow which is warm colour temperature. That makes the photo looks werid too. Therefore, I would put a soft box diffuser on the flashgun to change the colour of the flash. In those photos, I used a yellow box diffuser that matched the colour of the environment.

I also used a flash bracket as well. That let me change the position of the flashgun to flash the objects in different directions rather than just on the top of the camera.

Finally, editing is a important part in digital photography. I only did a little adjustment to those photos, such as tuning brightness, contrast and colour. After the editing, the all the work have been done.

I like documenting events because that is a good practice for me. During documenting, I learn more about my cameras and improve my photographic skills that would help for my future.