Archive for the ‘photography’ Category
One Little Post, So Much Stuff!
Even as Fuji not only makes a respectable line of digital cameras but even stamps its own distinct brand identity on them and goes ‘high fashion’, it still supports film!
In conjunction with two other entities, Fuji has announced a photo contest for students. Only photographs that have been taken using film may be entered. Though this contest is open only to photography students in the U.K., it is newsworthy worldwide because of the ‘film’ part. Film is not dead!
Our HDR post on our sister site got lots of views so here is a collection of beach HDR photographs. Some are in good taste while others are over the top; some are perfectly realized, others verge on the unnatural. Enjoy the mini-gallery.
Heard about Hurricane Sandy? Look at her from space, courtesy of a NASA satellite. There is sooo much a photographer can learn from this awesome image and it’s so obvious that surely one doesn’t need to belabour the point . . .
From the space to the earth thence from the earth to the sun:– Here’s a staggering collection of photographs of this year’s solar eclipse. Among the many wonderful photographs of the eclipse itself is one that works in the eclipse into an image that is a lovely photograph in its own right.
Caution: do not photograph solar eclipses unless you (a) know how to do so safely and (b) know what you’re doing, otherwise you risk permanent blindness.
In closing, the Canon EOS M just launched in the U.S. at a sub-$1000 price and is worth taking a look at. This APS-C mirrorless has 18 MPs, builtin HDR, Night Scene mode and more sharp features.
This is one of those cameras that make for a very good starter camera for the beginner yet allow him/her to ‘grow’ as a photographer, not only because of the full complement of appropriate Canon lenses but also because of the advanced features and specs of this EOS.
Attention Travellers: Seasonal Photography Tutorials
The holiday season is round the corner and some of you will be travelling to the Mother Country or elsewhere in Europe – or even to America. There, you’ll find radically different conditions for shooting – it’ll be winter! Here, then, are three tutorials for effective winter photography.
Low sun, bare trees, snow and frost – winter scenes are almost nature-made silhouettes. Accentuate the mood and effect by following the tips in How to Photograph Silhouettes This Winter.
The author provides exposure techniques that may be informative for beginners, including ‘exposure locking’ – fooling the camera into exposing (as 18 percent grey) for a very light or very dark area in your composition. The author also assists by identifying what subjects will work best for winter silhouettes.
This article contains a really sharp example of how even a body of water can be treated in silhouette fashion, so to speak – it is in such high contrast that the crests and troughs are in near-whites and near-blacks resulting in a dramatic effect.
Another tutorial provides guidance for exactly the reverse situation: Coping with Contrast in Winter. This how-to is really about retaining shadow detail and highlight detail in high-contrast situations. It combines advice on capturing appealing images alongwith a few hard technical details.
For instance, the photographer is advised to take advantage of the histogram to check that highlight detail won’t be lost. Also, understanding issues of colour temperature will let you control just how snow looks in your photographs – do you want it to look pure white or do you want it to take on and reflect the cast of the sky or sun?
In Brilliant Prints’s Countdown: 7 Rules for Surefire Holiday Snaps we had said, “the mid-day and afternoon sun’s flat hard light makes for dull, lifeless images (try a polarizer). Instead, take outdoor photographs in the morning and evening. Sure, you’ll get shadows but early and late sunlight makes for better colour and finer detail.”
This advice is echoed in Working With Winter Sun: “Regardless of the time of year, the best lighting conditions for landscapes occur when the sun is low in the sky, when the shadow-forming angle of the light creates a strong sense of three-dimensional form in your pictures.” However, they also mention, “when the sun comes out in winter it remains low in the sky for the entire day. So . . . when the sun makes an appearance it is perfect for landscapes.”
As you might guess, this how-to concentrates on getting the best out of natural lighting. It goes beyond that to inform you of photographic conditions you can expect to find when shooting on winter mornings so that you can – like a boy scout – ‘be prepared’.
These three tutorials complement each other very well and will lift your winter photography skills to a new level.
A Child Photography Pro who’s a Child Psychology Amateur
A week back Shutterbug posted a new how-to by Lou Jacobs Jr.’s under their ‘Pro Techniques’ banner and well they might, for the tips and techniques in The Photography Of Laura Cantrell: A Pro In The Child Photography Field are all pro.
Cantrell’s beginnings are unusual for a photographer: like so many small accounting, auditing and brokerage firm bosses, she simply carried on in her father’s footsteps! That doesn’t mean she was not ‘meant’ for this profession; her very sentiments reveal that she’s found her place in life: “It is rewarding to watch a mother’s face as she sees her child’s enlarged portrait for the first time.”
Cantrell keeps costumes, backgrounds and props in her studio to the extent that parents can choose one of different sets. The article is also helpful in providing details about the gear Cantrell, a ‘Canonite’, possesses and uses.
Though Cantrell does not say so expressly, what comes through loud and clear is that a child photography professional also has to be a Child Psychology amateur. For example, she says: “Teenagers . . . require . . . a lot more flattery for natural expressions” and “A 6-month-old baby will laugh at a puppet . . . .” These are a few of the many skills one needs to be a top-class child photographer.
I did find one omission in this how-to. Like adults, children can have pronounced personalities so what works for one child may not work for another. Also, some children are quite moody; their moods vary from day to day. For a child photographer, reading a kid’s personality and his/her mood of the hour, and then adapting to it, is key. Pros at the level of Cantrell certainly do so instinctively; for those who aspire to get to that same level, this reading and adaptation would require a more conscious effort.
Cantrell clearly has a fairly well-developed ‘Style’ – consider this opinion: “I prefer soft smiles because big grins distort features.” Indeed, her images are on the gentle, pensive, sensitive side rather than exuberant or boisterous. That said, even though you and your clients may prefer exuberant and boisterous, there’s something to gain from reading this article (and seeing the photos).
Weekly Weird and Whimsical Photography News
See the Earth from the Sky . . .
PETA and the SPCA ain’t gonna like this but if you want some nifty ‘birds eye view’ photographs, all you need to do is tie cameras to pigeons! That’s what was done back in 1907, reports Jamie Condliffe.
You see, back in those days they didn’t exactly have recon jets, let alone satellites, so a clever German named Neubronner devised this system for aerial military-related photography. The pigeons were trained for their task and the cameras had a time-based system by which the shutters were released. A little hit-and-miss, don’t you think?
Check out the article – there’s even a photo of a pigeon with a little camera dangling from its breast!
. . . Now to WW II . . .
Steve Meltzer takes us to the first half of the 1940s in Vintage color photographs from World War II era provoke technical mystery. These photos are available on a Flickr album.
Anyone who’s interested in Americana will want to view this album – over three million people have already done so.
Meltzer is quite thrilled with his discovery but also voices his bemusement, given the quality of the photographs, the era they were taken in, and the novice/amateur shooting crews.
He observes that “action is frozen, the subjects aren’t blurry” and asks “how did the photographers achieve such great color balance?” My sentiments precisely! He closes with an invitation: “let me know if you have any insights about them so we can unravel this decades-old photographic mystery together.”
. . . And see the Sky from the Earth
We opened with a story about photographing the earth from the sky and we’ll close with a story about the reverse – photographing the sky from the earth.
Only a few days back someone took a photograph of . . . a UFO! Looking at the photo, it looks more like the ghost of or an apparition of a UFO.(!) What seems to make it authentic is the fact that the area was littered with a dozen or so dead birds and affected by “unusual noise.”
However, the most believable line in the article is also the most party-pooping one: “some observers have dismissed the above photo as a hoax: This is a photo shop job. Completely fake.”
What do you say?
Craig Semetko: Where Leica, America, and Street-Shooting Come Together
Here’s the second part of our exhibition double-header, following up from yesterday’s post about the exhibition of The Hyland Collection. I had mentioned that we’d look at “a virtual” exhibition “about street photography” “on a ‘name’ website.”
That ‘name’ website happens to be the Leica Blog. In their interview with Craig Semetko published a few days back, they feature a one-man virtual exhibition of a kind, America: E Pluribus Unum. The writer nails just who and what Semetko is in the very first sentence: “A classic street shooter in the great tradition . . . .” In addition to the images (click on the thumbnails for bigger images), the text is instructive as well.
Semetko is a first-rate “street shooter” – and more. Witness the arresting underwater set-up. The quasi-symmetry, the uncorrected blue cast of the water, the American flag – it all makes for a riveting photograph. What, though, could be the inspiration or impetus for this set-up? I believe it is an expression in which Semetko takes an observation to its (il)logical extreme: “[I]t’s amazing how many American flags you see driving through the country. If you’re looking you see them everywhere.”
For the most part the series of images and the interview surround the function and skill of documenting ‘stuff as it happened’ – that’s classic Leica style; classic Magnum style.
Reading the interview and viewing the images provides an insight into how well Semetko’s mindset on the one hand, and his street photography on the other, converge. For instance, he says: “A sense of humor is fundamental to me, as I believe it is for most people.” Now see this!
Semetko uses the word ‘story’ in relation to his photography a few times in the interview. Even when he tells the what-happened-next story of a horse in trouble on a snow-swept plain, the composition is just perfect.
Or take the ‘Slice of Life’ shot of three strangers at a train station. Profile, front, profile; each stranger disconnected from the other, and each in his or her private world. Each one of a different ethnicity too. I had never realized train platforms were such unutterably lonely places!
Semetko is one of the very finest photographers in his field. Any photographer aspiring to the Leica-Magnum ethos would do well to spend some time reading what Semetko has to say and – of course – learning the craft from a master’s images.
Ten-Hut! Photography Boot Camp for Beginners
Brilliant Prints is pleased to announce a new weekly series for beginners, ‘Photography Boot Camp’. Anyone who has been taking point-and-shoot snapshots but has been put off by some of the mystery or complexity surrounding serious photography and who has been content to ‘Instagram’, is sure to benefit from our ‘Boot Camp’.
Using simple language with a minimum of fancy words and a step-by-step approach we’ll present key photography concepts so you get to understand the principles without having to learn the science and optics.
Also, each boot camp blog post will be a standalone lesson so that you learn a single concept or technique at a time without having to understand or follow anything else at the same time.
Most importantly, a Boot Camp lesson will guide you through a 1-2-3 ‘practical’ in which you’ll see and experience exactly what a given setting, usage or technique is supposed to achieve.
We’ll start off with composition – making a conscious selection as to what should be in your picture, and what shouldn’t be in it. You may not want to cut people off at the knees without realizing it, nor may you want all that empty space above your subjects’ heads that you often see in your photos.
We’ll move on to aperture and shutter speed in the next lessons but we’ll work ‘backwards’: we’ll show and explain the effect and outcome first, because the effect and outcome are your ends; things like aperture and shutter speed are only the means to that end. Ever admired an out-of-focus, blurry background? Or do you like motion-blur in action photos, say of a galloping horse? These lessons will explain just how to nail those types of shots.
Likewise, if words like bracketing and polarizers seem off-putting to you now, worry not: they’ll be demystified in such a way that bracketing and polarizers will become second nature to you.
That said, the ultimate end in our Boot Camp series is to master the basic skills so that a beginner or novice takes that all-important step toward becoming a hobbyist photographer.
Attend our Photography Boot Camp and say ‘goodbye’ to ‘Always Auto Mode’!
Taking It Easy: Sure Fire Tips For Every Kind Of Travel Photography
You are in the idyllic location for photography. An exotic paradise, a place you have dreamed of for years. Now you are there and you are wondering, what can I shoot, and more importantly, what are the best settings to capture the feel of the place.
There are a number of themes to travel photography; among them are the people, the architecture, the wildlife and the landscape, be it rural or urban. In this article I will try to give you an idea of the best settings for your camera to create great travel images.
People
Perhaps more than anything else, the locals capture the flavor of a destination. A fisherman landing his catch, local women in a market, there are a multitude of images to be shot. The worst thing you can do is blatantly stick a camera in someone’s face and start shooting. I find the best policy is a smile and to point to the camera, 90% of people will be happy for you to take the shot. So what are you looking for? Well, you are trying to show the person in their environment, but you don’t want that environment to be intrusive. Look at using a relatively wide aperture, around f2.8-f5.6 on a normal zoom. Shooting at a focal length of between 24-70mm means that you can compose your subject somewhere in one third of the frame and use the other two thirds to show the destination. Aperture priority is the best mode for people photography. Because you need to work quickly, you can set your aperture and let the camera do the rest. In the example below, I have used a wide aperture of f2.8 to throw the background and foreground, out of focus to concentrate on the natural beauty of this Indian street woman.
Architecture.
Take a look at a city’s buildings are you will know more or less what country you are in. Capturing good architectural travel photos can be difficult. If you are in a well-travelled destination, the chances are there will be tourists and locals alike in front of your intended subject. Here your most important piece of equipment is an alarm clock. Get up early, as the sun rises it will create soft shadows and add definition to the building and of course, you will more than likely be alone. If possible, scout your location. It may be that the sun does not fall in the right place at that time of day and you will need to rethink your shoot. Try to get back from the building, and again use a standard zoom lens. If you are too close, you will have to point the camera up to capture the whole building, this creates converging parallels. These can be fine if you intend them, but in general, for architectural shots you want your parallels parallel. Try to use a small aperture, to capture as much detail in front and behind the building, f8 to f16 is ideal. This however can introduce other problems, as you are up early, the light levels may be quite low and as such your shutter speed may be a little to slow to get good images. There are two solutions to this conundrum; the first is to increase your ISO setting (film speed). This will drop the image quality but hopefully not significantly. The second option is to maintain the shutter speed but put your camera on a tripod. This will give you the sharpest possible image. The two best modes for architectural photography are aperture priority and manual. As your subject does not move, you have time to work on the settings
Wildlife.
Taking pictures of local wildlife presents its own set of problems. Firstly by its very nature, it won’t want to be to close to you and secondly it will probably be moving fast. Here you will need a long lens, a good budget, telephoto lens would be in the range of 70-300mm, however, generally these lenses will not be fast i.e. they will not have a wide maximum aperture. Because of this, and because you may require a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, its possible you will have to increase the ISO to get good images. Mostly, you will find yourself using the 300mm end of your lens and the best mode will be shutter priority. This will allow you to define the shutter speed depending on the subject. If your wildlife is relatively slow moving, aim for a shutter speed of around 1/250th of a second. If it is moving quickly and you want to freeze the action, look for 1/1000th of a second or even faster. Panning the camera with the motion of the animal will allow you to stop the motion and use a slower shutter speed. It also has the advantage of blurring the background, giving extra definition to your subject.
Most DSLR cameras have what’s called a continuous shooting mode. In this mode, if you keep your finger on the shutter it will keep taking photographs. As most wildlife is unpredictable, it can be very useful if you have your camera set to this.
Landscape.
As mentioned earlier, landscapes can be rural, or urban. An urban landscape will concentrate more the general environment rather than a specific building. A rural landscape will capture the natural beauty of the location. The best time to shoot landscapes are the hours just after sunrise and just before and after sunset. This is commonly known as the “Golden Hour” due to the rich, soft, golden light the sun produces. In general, in landscape photography, you will use aperture priority and a small aperture of around f8 to f16 to capture the greatest depth of field. A wide angle lens of around 14-24mm will allow you to capture those grand sweeping vista’s, whilst the use of a telephoto lens will allow you to pick off the intricate details in your scene. A tripod is also a very useful tool, allowing you to keep the aperture small whilst keeping the ISO down for the very best quality. Focus manually if you are confident, this allows you to control exactly which point of your landscape you want to be in perfect focus.
These are just a few suggestions for travel photography. In reality there are an infinite number of possible photos out there. Let loose with your imagination and try capture the real atmosphere of your destination.
Conclusion: Shoot From the Hip Photography Part 9
I have not explained one technique that can be employed to ‘shoot from the hip’. That is to keep your camera trained at the general area of interest and use a focal length sufficiently low so as to cover a wide area, thereby guaranteeing capture of the subject, and then literally shoot from the hip and shoot at sight, secure that you will capture the subject somewhere within the frame. I have not detailed this method because I do not recommend it: it brings about loss of the film’s frame area, and consequent graininess when the subject is cropped; in this digital camera age, it still means loss of resolution by way of ‘pixellation’. One of the manthras of photography is, given the focal length you are working with, to get in tight with the subject or to eliminate extraneous and useless content, i.e. you are to compose in-frame in real-time so that your photographs will require the least amount of cropping, and this is a rule I like and respect because it is a very sensible one, and I think that it holds good even for the kind of photography covered in this article.
Digital cameras, be they conventional or DSLR, make the skill-art of Instantaneous Shoot-from-the-Hip Photography much easier to learn and practice. Excluding Hasselblad and Rolleiflex models which provided an image-viewer at the top surface of the camera, SLRs and other cameras required you to look through the viewfinder (unless you bought and attached a special accessory), and that meant holding the camera up to your face. Not exactly subtle; that meant anyone and everyone could tell exactly what you were up to! Even city birds would be (and usually are) disturbed at seeing you raise and point a lens at them.
But not anymore. Now, using LCD panels, you can compose a photograph holding the camera in a casual and offhand way (but do not compromise on a steady grip and end up with camera shake; that said, high-end DSLRs or their lenses now contain stabilizers!). You can compose a photograph and get it off while pretending to be looking somewhere else; a huge advantage in capturing natural candids and an even bigger plus in terms of snapping off a shot at precisely the right instant and not wasting an all-too-precious half-second (getting your camera in position). This is because you can monitor any situation with your camera actually near your hip, allowing you to be more relaxed and natural, and can literally ‘shoot from the hip’.
With the benefit of digital cameras, LCD panels, autofocus, stabilizers, and such, you can leverage the information presented in this article to become a photographic ‘Shoot from the Hip’ top-gun. Ready, aim, fire!
Ready, Prepare, Anticipate: Shoot from the Hip Photography Part 8
Notice that readiness, preparedness, and anticipation are like a dependent chain. When ‘it all comes together’ you can 
get a natural, candid image of real-life that can seem like a professionally set-up picture.
Some years ago I was lodging in the guest-house at Tsinghua University in Beijing. One evening I took a stroll outside the rear boundary of the campus and came upon a little street carnival being enjoyed by, apparently, the lower-middle class locals. From a distance, I saw a tea vendor pouring tea from the most enormous teapot I had ever seen; it made for a good photograph. How, though, to get close enough for a candid without his becoming aware of me, clearly a non-local?
In my experience, persons can often be flattered or surprised when they see a camera pointed at them and their expression either becomes self-conscious and artificial, or they may suddenly wear a foolish grin, or stare straight into the camera with a surprised expression. I wanted to catch a natural photograph of this man pouring tea for a customer. I had no friend with me whom I could ask to buy some tea after I set myself up. I got to the desired distance from the vendor but stayed within the milling crowd on the footpath and surreptitiously readied my camera and flash so that all I would have to do would be to point and shoot. I kept myself concealed in the throng until I saw someone go up to the vendor to buy some tea.
There was no guesswork in this shot, I knew what the vendor would do sooner or later, all I had to do was wait. At the right moment, I stepped away from the cluster of persons and into the street, raised my camera and composed the shot in a moment and snapped the shutter. Neither the vendor nor his assistants knew a photographer had been watching him until the flash went off. Because I was fully ready, prepared, and anticipating the shot and had the time to do so, I got just about the right camera angle, shooting distance, and composition (note the white edges of this uncropped image) that one could want.
When you encounter a situation in which you know that a particular scene is going to be played out, you’re lucky right there! Don’t rush it. Smoothly and quietly prepare yourself to the full Ð choose your EV, shooting distance, focal length, angle; whatever, while realizing and respecting the time limitations you are working with. Above all; as for every instantaneous shoot-from-the-hip situation; do not lose yourself in the technicalities and end up missing the moment.
Checklist: Shoot from the Hip Photography Part 7
On your own time, become one with your camera; know how it operates, specially the shutter release delay. Practice the exercise described earlier. And become knowledgeable about how events may unfold for the subjects you are interested in, i.e. be able to predict the unfolding of the subject’s actions or events.
If you sense or feel that a shooting opportunity will be at hand:
1. Keep your camera on and ensure it has plenty of juice (unless you’re using an all-mechanical camera). And make certain that it is not set for automatic, preprogrammed shut-off after a certain number of minutes, otherwise you may think you have a ready camera when, in fact, it is off.
2. Keep your flash on. If it is a separate attachment, ensure that the batteries are not weak.
3. Ensure that your magnetic card (or film roll) has ample space. You will probably not find enough time to erase images from the card or to reload film.
4. As your camera hangs off your neck, keep your right hand on or around it in your usual grip position so that you can bring it into position immediately.
5. Keep the mode on one or another autoexposure setting; you have enough things to worry about. If you have the time, you can adjust it later.
6. Given the kind of time interval you are working with, take care of as much of the following as you can: Distance from subject or event, focus, and focal length: these three factors are interdependent. Given the focal length of your lens, get to the optimal distance, which is as near as possible as the subject will allow without being affected or disturbed so as to maximize frame coverage area, and try to pre-focus. If your camera gives consistently good results on autofocus in extremely rapid point-and-shoot situations, use autofocus.
7. If the subject could lose its naturalness or change behaviour entirely if it notices you with a camera, conceal yourself or at least conceal your intentions. If you conceal yourself, it should be in such a way that you have a clear sight to the subject within a step or two. Be unobtrusive. And be on your toes.
8. Begin the process of anticipation, be it milliseconds or minutes, and ‘prep’ yourself to ‘point and shoot’ or, using the LCD panel, literally ‘shoot from the hip’ at the precise instant; and when you think that special fleeting moment is nearly there, fire!
Being ready is a matter of having a camera habit, good judgement, and, perhaps, good luck too. Being prepared is a matter of realizing that a shooting opportunity may be afoot and maximizing your chances of capturing it, should it arise, by arranging your equipment to fit an opportunity. Possessing synchronization is a combination of acquiring a technical skill and subject-area knowledge. And anticipation is an all-senses-alert waiting game; it is a continuum lasting from a few seconds to several hours (for big-game photographers sitting up in bomas) and it ends each time the shutter is released.
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