Yes, it's the Total Newbie again...technique Q's

[Damian]

Hey everyone ~ ^ ^ ~ Yep it' s the Big Noob again, hope you don't find the question too stupid:

When composing a photo, how to make the background all black (exepct for the subject, obviously...) to make viewers focus on the subject? I've seen many photos that have clear objects with pitch black bgs but I know they didn't cover the bg with black clothing or card board or whatever. Is there any trick to play with the lights?

Also, in complete darkness outdoors (execpt maybe for the moon and coupla street lights etc ) , when taking a photo of a unlightened object (such as photographing a person's face without flash), will the result be all blackness and nothing shown on the photo? (scuse me grammer) I once saw this guy taking pictures of Christmas lights at night, and it turnout that the people walking by wasnt shown in his photo but only the dimly light snowmans etc, which was exactly what he wanted. How do I do that? simply turn off the flash?? If so, how long should be the exposure?


Thanks very much and sorry for the trouble ^ ^


Luv Dami

 

[DocFrankenstein]

Stop posting noob alerts all the time and especially apologizing for asking questions. We were all noobs at some point or another. If you don't get your answers on this forum, find another one. There's no reason to degrade yourself like that.

Black background... There's only one way people usually do this. With an off camera flash and a high sync speed. The flash lights up your subject, but doesn't reach the background, exposing it properly. The shutter speed is also high enough not to let enough background light in your camera to keep it black.

Also... if the shutter speed is long... like 2-3 seconds... the person walking through the frame will be just a smudge and you won't see him. But you lose a lot of contrast that way and you proably won't get the black background.

Cheers

 

[Hertz van Rental]

Listen to the Doc.
If you look at your title it says 'no longer a newbie.' ;-)

 

[motcon]

actually, there are plenty of ways to do this.

if the camera sees 4 1/3 stop less light (reflective meter) coming from the background than is set on the camera, it's going to record as black. no matter what color, surface, reflectivity it actually is.