The flash diffusers such as the Stofen omni-bounce, Gary Fong Lightsphere and the like, are great little gadgets that can help create soft light in a small room, or a room with a low ceiling.

The fact is, these plastic devices that you attach to the end of your flash are not softening the light coming out of your flash.

Light itself is neither hard or soft. It’s photons flying through the air in a straight line. The only way to create softer shadows is to make the apparent size of the light source in relation to your subject larger. This can be done, for example with soft boxes and umbrellas placed near your subject. Another method, if you are indoors, is by bouncing the light up into the ceiling or into a wall, which will bounce back much larger light source than the small size of your on-camera flash.

You can also use these plastic flash diffusers to aid in softening the light indoors. What these attachments do, is send the light spraying out in all directions, which in turn, bounce off everything, causing light to fall upon your subject from many directions to produce the look of softer light.

Now, are you heading outside to shoot with on-camera flash? The first thing you should do is take your plastic diffuser off (if it’s attached), and shove it in your pocket, camera bag, or wherever else you feel like shoving it.

Contrary to popular belief, a piece of translucent plastic that scatters light in all directions without nearby surfaces to reflect the scattered light back into the scene, will not soften the light. A diffuser outdoors — a large majority of the time — simply wastes light, reduces range, slows recycle times and eats batteries.

The light that will hit your subject will be the light that starts at your flash and heads straight at your subject. All the other light spreading out in all other directions will not have anything to bounce back from and will just go to waste. If you think that bouncing off the clouds is worth a try, fahgettaboutit, that’s a lesson in futility.

Outdoors, use your on-camera flash as fill, and shoot direct. Your mileage may vary, but by setting your flash to ETTL mode with a FEC of -1 1/3 to -2, should yield some very nice results.

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If you are anything like me, it seems as when you need something, you can never find it, or the item is always in a location that you are not.  Well, this used to happen to me a lot with me when I wanted to clean my lens.  I either had my lens cloth in another bag, or I left it in the office, or I just couldn’t remember where I put it last.

My solution — a chamois.  Yes, the same type of chamios that you would find in an auto supply store for drying your car.  Purchase a large chamios and cut it up into several 3 to 4-inch squares.  Now you can put them in every bag you own, in the car, in the office, you name it.   They work great.

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Taking photographs of fireworks is fun and relatively simple.

Last night I brought my camera, 70-200 lens and a tripod out to see the fireworks from South Hampton Middle school in Bel Air, with my family. I setup my camera to shoot in “bulb” mode (which means the shutter stays open for as long as my finger is depressing the shutter, and shuts as soon as I let off), ISO 100 and f/11. Set the lens to manual focus and waited for the show to start.

Once the first few projectiles hit the sky, I could then point the camera in the right direction and get my focus set. At that point, it was just a matter of holding down the shutter for as long as one, two, or several explosions appear in the sky. If your camera doesn’t have “bulb” mode, set your exposure time long (4-10 seconds).

I know there are many cities and towns shooting fireworks off tonight, Saturday, July 5th — so there is still time for you to try this out for yourself, rather than having to wait a whole year.

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Go to any high school or recreational league where sports are being played, and you’ll find parents, grandparents, and friends with cameras.

From my observations, I see many folks whip out their pocket camera or digital SLR and just snap away when “Little Johnny” hits the field,  most likely capturing many pictures of his back, or becoming unrecognizable because he is so far away and just shows up as a blip on the picture.

With some planning and keeping in mind some of my tips below, you can transform yourself from a sideline snapshooter into a quality sportsshooter, and create photographs worth looking at over and over again.   Creating better images will not only make you proud of yourself, you will have cherished images to complement your memories.

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I am working on a project for Keith Watson, aka “Watty”, head coach of the John Carroll Wrestling team (a private high school in Bel Air). Watty, who is sometimes referred to the P.T. Barnum of Harford County wrestling – he is always thinking of ways to market and promote his school and the sport — contacted me a couple months ago with an idea of wanting to create a poster that displays their 2008-2009 wrestling schedule along with a picture of the team on it. His first thought was to assemble the team on someone’s front porch and have some slogan referring to porch, big dogs, etc.

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Yesterday I was out on an absolutely beautiful day taking photos of the Hunter Trials put on by the Elkridge-Harford Hunt Club.

If you’ve ever been to an event like this, you would know that horse jumps are spread out over a large area. Typically as a photographer, you can usually find a location to capture two, maybe three jumps at a reasonable distance to produce decent images.

For the first time at an event, I experimented with using a remote camera. It was like being in two places at the same time!

For this shot, I setup my camera about 8 feet away from the side of the jump with my 14mm lens. I used a special cable that connects the camera to one of my Pocket Wizard radio receivers.

I was about 1500 feet away shooting at a different jump, but could see this jump and manually triggered my transmitter as horses made their jumps at this fence. Being 1500 feet away and not having a good angle (horse running away from me) does bring in more challenges — such as knowing exactly when the horse is about to jump. I found myself hitting the trigger button a bit early or late, so I did not always get the “perfect” shot. Now knowing this, I will make sure to setup future remote cameras in locations that I will be able to nail the jump at a higher percentage.

I’m looking forward to my next equestrian event to try this out again.

A client out-of-state needed a photograph of an oil painting of Captain John Webster, which is hanging in the Harford County courthouse, for an article he is writing.

Sounds simple, right? Yes, and No.

The simple part is that your subject is very good at standing very still — for as long as you need (duh, it’s hanging on the wall)

The difficult part is lighting the oil painting without causing hotspots, reflections, etc. Other factors are that the portrait is hanging about seven feet off the ground in a dark paneled hallway with a 18-20 foot ceiling. The courthouse has a very large number of portraits hanging throughout, and I’m not sure if it is because most of these paintings are so old, or if they were originally painted this way, or if the lighting inside the building isn’t optimal for these portraits, but they are appear very dark from the naked eye. I was initially a bit concerned.

I brought my 13 foot lightstands, not knowing before I arrived exactly where and how high this portrait was hanging in the courthouse. I lit the painting with two 580EXs bounced into white umbrellas placed approximately 30 degrees to each side about 5-6 feel away. The strobes where fired wireless with Pocket Wizards.

Another challenge was getting myself high enough to shoot the portrait straight on. I’m sure it was quite a sight to see me standing on 2 reams of paper, which were on top of a step ladder (please don’t attempt this at home). I must have been slightly entertaining for I had my share of on-lookers during all of this.

I was very pleased with the results from my first effort at photographing an oil painting. The lighting I applied really brought out more detail than you can see in when viewing the painting in person. If/when I do this again, I think I will put the lights in a much lower angle, such as 10 degrees with the umbrellas almost shooting back at each other.

I really enjoyed the company of all of the folks I interacted with at the courthouse. Everyone was extremely pleasant and had a great sense of humor.