The Ambulatory Photographist

Leave your camera on Auto, and take LOTS of pictures

2012-01-14T19:19:00.000+13:00

If you have bought a DSLR but are new to photography, getting to know it may seem like a daunting task... so many modes and settings and controls - how long will it take to learn what they all do and how to use them to get the best result?

There's a simple answer to this question: Don't worry about it! Leave your camera on Auto

The camera is on Auto mode (the green square setting) and for the most part, it will probably get it right.

Think of it like learning to drive. If you start learning in a car with a manual transmission ("stick shift") then you'll start off spending so much effort trying not to stall that you don't think so much about the actual task, which is driving the car! If you learn on an automatic, you can learn the road rules, how to reverse round corners, how to read traffic and road conditions and so on - in other words, you can be up and running much sooner.
Once you've learned to drive in an automatic, you can then graduate to a manual - if you want to. Some never do, and there's no problem with that either.

Using a camera is the same. If you leave it on Auto mode, nine times out of ten, it'll get it right. After all, a digital camera is just a computer with a lens attached.

There are a few situations which can trick it into making the wrong decisions but thankfully this doesn't happen often. So, leave your camera on auto and concentrate on what's important - making pictures!

Later on we will look into the more creative effects you can achieve with the shooting modes, or, for even more control, the manual settings. But that's for another day.

The other area to discuss today is how many pictures to take. The answer is easy. LOTS! The days of expensive film are over. Take as many as you like!

In fact there's a word for this: Spray and pray

It means - take LOTS of photos in the hope that some of them will be keepers.

Wait, what? What's this "some" business??

That's the unglamourous part... downloading all the pictures into the computer and keeping just the best ones. Yep - you're going to have to use the DELETE key here....

This trap is just too easy to fall into - come back home after the holiday with several hundred photos (or more) and throw them all into the computer, and then never think about them ever again.

Why take a photo if you (or someone else) is not going to see it later?

In this BBC Magazine article, the author says: "I know so many people who take 500 photos on holiday, don't curate them and put them all up on Facebook. In 20 years they'll have 50,000 and won't be able to find the ones they want"

The answer is simple but boring. Get a good photo library management package installed (I recommend Google's Picasa - it's free and very convenient to use, but there are lots of them so take your pick)

Lots of photos of the same thing here... This shoot needs editing

When you've imported all your photos in, try to aim for keeping only two or three of the same thing... after all, who wants to sit through someone else's slideshow where you are looking at the same thing over and over?

Following this rule is probably the most effective way of making your photos become more interesting...

Next time, we will look at zoom lenses, and how you can create some interesting effects with them by zooming in or out.

Understanding Photography 1: Introduction

2012-01-09T17:17:00.001+13:00

For the next few entries I will be providing a bit of guidance for people who want to improve their photographic skill and who don’t mind getting slightly into the technical stuff from time to time.

If you are happy taking pictures on your smartphone and uploading them straight to Facebook, then there’s probably not much for you here. However if you have a “proper” camera and want to get the best from it, then stick around.

In this “Understanding Photography” series, we will be looking at a bit of philosophy in terms of what to shoot and when, understanding flash and what you can and can’t do with it, looking at how using your zoom lens can change perspective, the basics of exposure and the effects you can achieve with adjusting it, as well as some useful tips for travel and landscape photography.

If you have bought a DSLR or even just a pocket digital and want to take photos that will be pleasing to look at - this series is for you.

Next entry: Leave your camera on Auto, and take lots of photos

The shot that almost wasn't

2010-10-23T22:48:00.002+13:00

On the South Coast in Wellington is a replica Moai statue, gifted to New Zealand by the Chilean president on a state visit in 2004.

I decided to get some shots of this to show when I go back to Chile for my next work trip.

So I decided that the strategy for this shot, given that it was a fairly overcast day, would be to use the telephoto lens (70-200), open it right up for minimum DoF (f/4), and then stand far enough back to get the entire statue in shot. I'd planned to add a vignette and take it down to B+W in PP.

Sort of like this:

Unfortunately although I experimented with a few angles and waited for the sun to appear, this shot just kept getting away from me. The version above was the best of the sorry bunch, and I'm not overly fond of it.

Then I went fishing in the camera bag. I remembered the wide angle was in there. (10-22mm). Why not try the other end of the focal length scale? On it went. Dialled it right back to 10 mm and then got good and close to the statue. (Anyone watching must have thought I was going to give it a hug!).

Then - Live view mode engaged (Thanks Mr. Canon for that one!) - camera above head looking down - this was the result:

Much as I'd have liked to do this one in B+W, it just didn't work. Colour it is.

And the strange thing is - I am rather pleased with this shot. Completely the opposite to what I had planned in all respects, but it just works!

I'd be even more pleased with it if I'd stepped to the left so as to avoid the car (my car, actually....) in the background!

However. This shot demonstrates the benefits of perseverance and keeping an open mind!

Fun with the 85

2010-10-16T00:31:00.010+13:00

So a work colleague recently bought a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. This isn't the stupid-expensive L-series f/1.2 that you'll see hanging off the front of the poser's 5D Mk. 2... this is the 85mm "for the masses"

f/1.8 is still plenty fast though, I was well impressed with the beautiful bokeh effects this lens can produce, even on the 50D (1.6 crop sensor). A quick lunchtime walk around within a 5-minute radius of the office yielded the following:

Oh all right, if you insist, I'll add some color images as well...

Proves there's some life in the 1.6 FOVCF sensor, you just need a hollow drainpipe hanging in front of it!

Art vs. Technical skill

2010-09-03T23:26:00.001+12:00

Following on from my previous post about pictorialism: I've reached a place where I can admit that I've been unhappy with my photographs for about as long as I've been taking them.

Phew! That wasn't so hard to admit.

There are a variety of reasons for this but I think it comes down to two basic elements which are reflected in every photograph:

Art, and
Technical Skill

I perceive that my work tends towards the technically "interesting" but artistically "bland".
I am an IT person and I guess I've gravitated towards that career because I'm naturally the kind of person who thinks in squares and rectangles. When I conceptualise something it's all about Right-Angles - action and reaction, cause and effect. In other words, I am a logical thinker, rather than an abstract or artistic thinker.

This naturally affects my photography - my images will tend to be somewhat technical concoctions, rather than meaningful works of artistic expression. This is a natural consequence of the way my brain works.

The problem arises from the fact that I enjoy photography from others that reflects the more creative, artistic side of photography, and wish I could emulate it.

But dreaming up a photo and pre-visualising it are extremely challenging. Once I have the idea, it's a different matter - because then it's just a technical exercise in realising it. Give me a theme and tell me to take a captivating photograph of it and I'll be lost. But describe the image to me and I'll do it.

Answers I've sought include:

Giving up altogether on photography
Taking beautiful landscapes that everyone praises me for (I'm not so artistically illiterate as to not recognise a beautiful landscape in front of me!)
Trying to take artistic geometric abstract-type images
Trying to reproduce favourite photographs from others

In the end, these are all doomed to failure, because in pretty much all cases, I still don't like the images that result. However, at the grand old age of very nearly 40, I've decided on a new course of action. Which can be distilled to a very simple principle. Namely:

The heck with it. I'll just take pictures of whatever I want to!

To Hell with whether it's arty or not. If I think it's gonna make a good picture, I'll shoot it. And I don't give a rat's whether anyone likes, or even gets the results.

For example: This is one of my favourite images that I made recently:

(It's OK, you don't have to like it!)

I've had this new approach for a couple of months now and I am pleased to report that everyone thinks I've gone insane. But I've been enjoying photography a lot more for it, and I'm actually starting to like some of the images that result from it.

I'm still going to practice the whole "concept and pre-visualisation" thing, but I've decided that this particular skill isn't strictly necessary in order to call yourself a photographer (as opposed to someone who merely takes photographs)

Office portraits, 1984-vintage

2010-06-28T23:34:00.004+12:00

Under the stairs at my house, I have a box of negatives that I inherited in 2001 which go back to the 1970s.

In the cupboard in my study is a film / slide Scanner.

So I dug out some of the old films, but sadly not all of them were stored particularly carefully and so some of them are a little damaged.

I picked a few interesting candids of people working in an office to scan, mainly wanting to familiarise myself with the correct techniques for scanning B+W negatives. (Fingers crossed this is something I plan to be doing more of in the future)

The results are like a time capsule. Whilst not particularly captivating photographically (most lit with direct flash, and the subjects have that unflattering "deer-in-headlights" look) they are an interesting commentary into how much has changed in the last 26 years.

The photo set is here: http://tinyurl.com/2eo9uaj

Depending on the number of views this set gets, I may add to it. I am sure there are more interesting negatives in that box...

Street Photography

2010-06-25T14:39:00.002+12:00

So I've been trying a bit of Street Photography around Wellington with the compact digi. I mean proper Street Photography, not just urban-landscape-with-distant-people-in-it.

I find it is a lot harder than it looks!

Below are my (self-developed) rules so far:

Underexpose slightly - better to have slightly grainy shadows when you pull it up, then blown highlights
Use Raw. In fact this goes for all photography that you intend to post-process
Be discreet but not covert
Avoid photographing children
If you are male, be very careful about photographing women. Particularly young or attractive ones
Photograph people DOING things, and preferably interacting with others. People walking past buildings is not Street Photography!
You don't need a 35mm rangefinder, but if using a compact digi, plan and compose for the infinite depth-of-field
Cloudy days are better
Slow down, look around. need to feel the vibe of the place not race from point A to point B.
50mm!
Any candid photograph is ten times better if the subject establishes eye contact with the camera. But not if they've established eye contact as a prelude to an angry "don't photograph me!" expression. Grab the shot right at the moment of eye contact!
Shooting from the hip is damned hard.
Street Photography with a (D)SLR is like using a blowtorch to light a cigarette.

That's for starters. I'll add more as I go.

The Search for Meaning, Manners Mall, Wellington 2010

Manners Mall Bus Bypass

2010-06-24T00:11:00.000+12:00

A new Photo Essay on the Manners Mall Bus Bypass in Wellington:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25131197@N02/sets/72157624213854755/detail/

De-programming myself from the Cult of Pictorialism

2010-06-20T21:22:00.002+12:00

As a hobbyist/amateur photographer, I occasionally show others my images, as might be expected. In doing this, I have observed what seems to be a fairly widely-held perception that all photographs taken “for their own sake” (ie. For the photographer’s “art”) have to be pictorially beautiful. A bit like these ones

I find that if I show people photographs like that, I get praise heaped upon me, with comments like "You've definitely got The Eye..." etc. Good for the ego I suppose, but the problem is that I don't find these photographs at all meaningful.

For sure, I used to aspire to having a portfolio full of such images. But now I have shifted completely away from that. The types of photos that inspire me the most now are more like these ones

I am trying to replicate this type of work with my photography but I'm not finding it as easy as it looks, by a long shot. So some of my attempts are a bit hit-and-miss.

I am also acutely aware that these sort of photos could be described as an “acquired taste” – most people I show this sort of work to have a kind of puzzled look and then a polite “that’s nice..... I suppose!” response.

Fact is I have a lot more emotional resonance with these pictures than with the hyper-saturated beautiful landscapes and sunsets.

So - if you see anything beautiful on my Flickr stream - I'm doing it for the praise. Everything else is the real me....

Copyright in commissioned photography

2009-01-05T23:53:00.002+13:00

If you contract the services of a professional photographer, you will find that the copyright in the photos remains with the photographer. There will typically be a set fee for attendance at your wedding, portrait, event or whatever. Then there will be a price list of different size prints you can order.

Typically these prices will be orders of magnitude higher than if you took your own photos to a printing service.

In the old days when photography was all done on film, the photographer retained the negatives, and would sometimes make you sign something to the effect that you wouldn't try to reproduce the photographs yourself, and if you ever wanted additional prints you had to go back to the photographer.

All the advantages in this arrangement are with the photographer. But there are also significant problems with it: If the photographer went out of business, the negatives were effectively lost. Some photographers will make half-hearted efforts to contact previous clients to return their negatives at the cessation of their business, others may stipulate a retention period (Say 10 years) with a "come and get them if you still want them, else I'll throw them away" attitude at the expiry of it. But the majority of these negatives would be lost or forgotten about.

Most enlightened photographers have moved on to digital now, but there is still a strong undercurrent of opinion that you are not a "real" photographer unless you are using film, preferably with a Leica rangefinder. But I digress. The point is that digital photography creates a new opportunity for redistribution of work back to clients.

But photographers are tricksy little hobbitses. If you need a demonstration of this, try having a baby. You will be given a gift pack with all sorts of goodies, usually including a voucher for a family portrait and a discount on 3 prints. So you go along to the studio and have your sitting, then you go back when the prints are ready and there on the desk in front of you are 10 lovely enlargements of your new baby. You can have 3 of these for the initial low price you paid, but the bad news is that the other 7 are exorbitantly expensive. This fact is usually an unpleasant surprise, it wouldn't have been made clear on the initial offer.
If you decided that you didn't want the other 7 photos, the photographer will destroy them in front of you. What new parent wants to see photos of their new baby destroyed?! So the pressure is on to bribe the photographer to stop destroying your pictures.

How this practice could be considered remotely ethical is completely beyond me.

I suggest an alternative: The concept of selling photography as a service, and the images either being free of copyright, or else the copyright resting with the client. Call it the "photographer-as-a-tradesman" model.

Effectively this would mean the photographer charges an hourly rate to do the work including setup, camera time, travel, post-processing, etc. Then charges for prints on a strictly time-and-materials basis, but also giving the client full-size, printable files on DVD.

This way, the client owns the images, and can do with them whatever they please. If they want to use the original photographer to get prints done, fine. Charge for them on a time-and-materials basis. Or if they want to take them to a print lab - also fine. The photos are theirs, as if they'd taken them.

In the traditional model, as a photographer improves and gets a reputation for quality, the prices would increase. In the same way, as the reputation grew, so could the hourly rate charged.

There is only one disadvantage I can see to this, from my own experience as an amateur photographer. You would lose some control of the presentation of your work, upon which your reputation depends. Case in point: I did a photo-shoot of a child who was terminally ill and gave the prints and the digital files to the family. The child passed away a month later; my photos were the last ones taken before the illness took hold, and were used at the funeral. The only problem was, they were shown on a projector which was distorting the image badly, and ruining the colours. You couldn't say the photos looked good. Ultimately in this case, it was about content, not presentation. But you wouldn't always be able to rely on that.

A child's funeral shouldn't be the place to try to make money, but it can be a place where reputations are gained or lost.

I would be particularly interested to hear the opinion from any professional photographers reading this.

Note that I am only talking about commissioned work. You can still sell framed editioned prints of your beautiful landscapes at a profit.

Photographs with diagonal composition

2008-12-08T00:27:00.003+13:00

When composing photographs, one of the more common techniques used is the diagonal composition. Done properly, a diagonal composition can lend a particular dynamic to the experience of viewing the picture - drawing the viewers eye into the photo.

However, there's a right way and a wrong way of doing this, according to an article I read somwhere. Apparently the eye likes to appreciate a photograph the same way as text on a page: Left to Right. The idea here is to have a diagonal that runs bottom-left to top-right in the picture.

If the diagonal runs the other way, it forms a "barrier" to the appreciation of the picture, as the eye's motion is disrupted.

This seems to have an element of truth. Consider the following two photographs.

Which one looks "right" and is easier to look at. Chances are you chose the top one.

... unless you are a native speaker of a language that writes left-to-right, like Hebrew, or Arabic!

Intrigued by this piece of wisdom, I sent these two photos to a friend in Israel, with the request that he indicate which one seems more "natural" and easier to view. Not surprisingly, he preferred the bottom one.

As photographers we see according to our conditioning. It may not surprise you to know that the top one is the original, the bottom one a mirror image for the purposes of experiment.

I probably wouldn't have taken the bottom one had I seen it.

Perhaps another experiment from this might be to find some other photos with diagonal compositions and mirror them, see how it alters the dynamic.

Comparison photos

2008-11-01T11:21:00.005+13:00

2 pairs of photos, showing the opposites of tide and season, taken from the same location:

First: Tides. I looked at the tide timetables to work out which two days would have the harbour at high tide and then low tide at the same time of day (for direction of light to be constant!).

Turned out the two days were about 3 weeks apart. So this is Wellington Harbour at High tide and low tide, taken from the same location:

Next: Seasons. From mid winter to mid summer, the sun's altitude changes by almost 47 degrees. This has a significant effect on the length of the shadows!

So these two images were taken from the same spot, at noon (summertime shot allowing for Daylight Saving) to show the difference in shadow length...

Click the images to enlarge.

Black and white conversion process

2008-03-31T12:00:00.004+13:00

I occasionally get asked to share my black and white conversion process for shots like these...

For a convenient reference this is the process I normally use:

Shoot Raw
Shooting RAW gives a much better range of tonality to work with

Import as 16 bit image
Import using Camera Raw. The default is 8 bit, have to change the option. This will give a Big (~50mb) PSD file!

Adjustment layers
Make adjustment layers for levels and curves. I use an "S" shape curve to increase the contrast without blowing the highlights

Channel Mixer (B+W conversion)
Make another adjustment layer for the Channel Mixer, and fiddle around with the sliders (RGB values) until it looks "kind-of" right. This is the Mystery in the Craft!! So long as the sliders add to 100, feel free to experiment. To darken the sky, try starting with Blue at -50, Red at 100 and Green at 50.

Tweaks
Go back to the original Levels and Curves layers and tweak them to taste!
Also, some selective dodging and burning may occasionally need to be done to the background layer. Go very carefully with this, it's easy to overcook it and get something that looks false and obviously "photoshopped"

Vignette layer
This adds a little more mood to the photo. Create a levels adjustment layer and accept the default level presets. then using the elliptical marquee, select from one corner to the diagonal opposite. Then, Feather the selection by 150 pixels and press delete. After that, you can go back into the levels and play with the black and whitepoint to get the vignette effect. Don't overcook it!

Fun with anagrams

2007-10-24T15:47:00.001+13:00

Anagrams are fun - all sorts of far-fetched coincidences occur when you start mixing letters up.

Consider these for amusement:

The "Bakers Dozen" anagram: "Twelve plus one" anagrams to "Eleven plus two"

"Mother in law" anagrams to "Woman Hitler"

The best one I've seen in ages:

"President Clinton of the USA" anagrams to "To copulate he finds interns"

You can generate your own anagrams from any word, phrase or name, using the internet anagram server

I gave it my name (I will not disclose that here!!) and these are some of the results (with my comments added):

Random Ears - this is a natural consequence of my office being too close to the boardroom
Dream Sonar - If I start a psychadelic rock band, this is what I'll call it
Ramrod Sean - My Porn Actor name (-:
Sandra Rome - my pen name for when I start writing romance novels
Aroma Nerds - Must remember to burn some incense at my desk
Armed Arson - so watch out!
A Mad Snorer - Sleeping in a Rage

Try your name, post your results...

Ego inflation

2007-09-09T22:45:00.000+12:00

This may well be the closest I get to my 15 minutes of fame... I've had one of my photographs used by a local body election campaign, to promote one of the mayoral candidates. It's been blown up to 6 metres and is currently on a billboard on the Lower Hutt to Wellington motorway.

Back story: Rewind to 2005 when I lived at the top of a hill with panoramic views. Keen to experiment with the photo panorama feature in Photoshop, I dropped the camera on the tripod and banged off a few shots of my view, to make a panorama from.

This was only a cheap 3MP camera, nothing special. But with 7 overlapping shots, it becomes a 20 megapixel (approximately) image. This is big enough to do something serious with.

In a fit of philanthropic fervour, I uploaded a reduced-size version of this image to Wikipedia's article on Lower Hutt. You can also see the image here.

Fast forward to Sep 2007. Local election campaign time. Ray Wallace, one of the mayoral candidates, used the image from Wikipedia on his website, and asked for a full-size version to make into a billboard. An agreement was reached and a CD provided.

For my local readers (of which I know there is at least one) - look to the left side of the road, just past Bowl-land as you drive into Wellington.

There's another one by the Petone Railway station, and another by the side of the motorway into Wellington... snapshots below

Gratifying.

I promise not to indulge in too much egostroking in future postings...

It's OK, my binoculars are not Radioactive

2007-09-08T19:01:00.001+12:00

An old story this, but one I've told so many times it would be a sin of omission not to record it here.

I own a pair of binoculars, fairly good quality and high magnification. They were very useful in viewing last week's eclipse (-:

These binoculars are Russian, and I bought them in a street market in Warsaw (Poland) in 1997.

The street markets in Warsaw are incredible. They are of a scale that I've not seen anywhere else. Both in size and range of items available.

A lot of vendors come across the Ukranian border in trucks loaded with goods of every description, some undoubtedly illicit. It was from such a vendor that I bought these binoculars.

In the Ukraine there's a little place called Chernobyl.... this is the site of one of the most memorable events in modern history. However there are some interesting and not-so-well-known consequences of the nuclear accident. One of which involves a town called Pripyat, which was near to the reactor. This town was evacuated after the accident and an exclusion zone built around it, due to the radioactive dust contaminating the environment.

This didn't stop the looters though, who systematically stripped the place of anything of value. Some of these items made their way across the border in trucks to be sold to unsuspecting customers at street markets.

In Poland in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident it became quite common for people to carry portable Geiger-counters. These were often employed at street markets, much to the ire of the vendors.

This peculiar state of affairs lasted for much longer than would be expected. So this is how I came to be at a street market in Warsaw haggling over the price for a pair of binoculars with a Russian vendor in 1997.

I had borrowed a geiger counter for the day and had already determined the binoculars were "clean" before deciding to buy them. However when I casually started checking the radioactivity level of some of the vendor's other items, he angrily grabbed my hand in an unmistakable gesture of denial.

Doubtless he was counting on people buying in good faith without checking first, so the sound of a screaming geiger counter wouldn't exactly be the sort of advertisement he wanted!

So, ten years later I still have the binoculars. Whenever the occasion arises for me to pass them to someone, I always tell them that they're perfectly safe and not at all radioactive. This assurance is usully closely followed by the retelling of this story...

Footnote: Check out Elena Filatova's site - she has a travelogue with photos of a motorcycle tour through the Exclusion Zone. It's fascinating reading

Lunar colour sequence

2007-08-29T12:50:00.001+12:00

Last night (28 Aug) was a total lunar eclipse. We were lucky in NZ because it started in the evening so we had a good view.

So far as lunar eclipses go it was pretty typical, most adults would have seen one or two in their lives. It was under constant threat by cloud, and at times not visible, but it was quite a spectacle regardless.

The photo is from the last stages of the moon entering the Umbra, or darkest part of Earth's shadow.

Being stuck on a phone conference at the time was no obstacle, I sat outside and set my laptop on a garden table and did my conference and demo from the backyard.

However what makes this eclipse noteworthy over others is the timing...

Last month (July 2007) we had a "Blue moon". A Blue moon can have several definitions, but one of the more accepted ones is where there are two full moons in the same calendar month.

Given that the lunar cycle is only just shorter than a calendar month, it can happen. Just not very often. Hence "Once in a Blue Moon".

So in this case, we have a Blue moon followed by a Red moon.

How often will that happen in your lifetime?