Poker Faces II

Poker games are great places to study people. I gathered these images at a local poker tournament that Nancy and I play in twice a month. Most of the photos were illuminated by a single on-camera flash, using ABetterBounceCard.

Texas hold-em poker can do strange things to people. Even at a low stakes table, there's enough tension to cut with a knife.



Emotions are magnified, and personalities are altered. Try as they may to hide it, you can usually see the relief on people's faces when they get dealt a good pair of hole cards...

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... but that's nothing compared to the elation of drawing a winning hand on the final card, which is called "sucking out on the river".

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But for sheer joy, winning a tournament... being the last person standing... can't be beat!

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The game can drive you crazy. Just ask Michael why he went "all in" with a jack-three off-suit, and you'll get a response like this - poker body language for "it was a bad beat".

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Check out Bill... a distinguished and reserved gentleman.

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But put chips in his hand, and watch him go nuts.

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Here's Big Dog game face. You'd never know that he's a nice guy... but then again, maybe he isn't   .

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Eric seems stunned every time he loses a hand...

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... and Ernesto always seems to know what you have in your hand. I think he may be peeking.

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It was a great game on Saturday night. I got knocked out early enough to take pictures, and Nancy, who was the defending champion, made it to the final table again, and finished 3rd. The game ran late, so the last two players split the prizes.

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Thanks for the feedback, Ray. I see your point, but in this series, I am concentrating on poker expressions, and refining my single flash on-camera technique rather than CLS. There are numerous people floating around the tables at this venue, so off-camera work isn't really practical.

 

Glad you liked them, Jake. The exif data for the first shot was 1/50s f/4.0 at 20.0mm iso250. I shot in manual mode, and selected those settings so that the far background would be illuminated by ambient lighting.

 

I'm matrix metering on the room, and then backing down the exposure by a stop by adjusting the aperture setting in manual mode. Then I'm spot metering on the subject, so the flash will expose them properly. There's no CLS involved... just standard flash work.

 

The technique is called "dragging the shutter". For those of you struggling with the concept, this tutorial may help.

http://www.planetneil.com/faq/dragging-the-shutter.html

The key points are made in this section.

The essential difference is that I chose my settings.
I only shoot in manual mode, hence *I* decide on the results I want to get. And I got it.
By shooting in Program Mode, the other photographer allowed the camera to make the decision - and the camera set a shutter speed that is too high. I wanted ambient light to register, and I set the
f-stop and shutter speed to where I could see from my camera's built-in meter that I would get ambient light to register.

Even though the type of flash lighting used in these shots were quite different, the resultant look is nearly entirely dependent on the fact that I took the ambient light into consideration (via my camera's meter) and purposely set my shutter speed accordingly. btw, I used a Quantum Q-flash bounced into an umbrella behind me, and the other photographer used a Speedlight on-camera.

This technique of using a slower shutter speed to allow ambient light to register, is usually called "dragging the shutter." With this, you'd use your camera's light meter like you normally would ... but instead of using it to expose perfectly for just the ambient light, now you use it as a guideline as to how much ambient light you would like to register. And somewhere around 1.5 to 2 stops under-exposure will still give you enough detail in the background - and then you use flash as your main light source, and use the light from your flash to expose correctly for your subject.



To sum up,

1. use matrix metering to determine a shutter/aperture/iso combo that will expose the background properly
2. switch to manual mode, and dial in those settintgs
3. change any one of those settings to underexpose the background by 1 f/stop. It doesn't matter if you do it by increasing shutter speed, using a tighter aperture, or lowering the iso.
4. leave the camera in manual mode, but change the metering method to spot metering
5. shoot with flash in ittl mode. the subject will be properly exposed, but presented against a subdued background, as in this example.