Emergency tripod? Piece of string!

The main problem of taking photos free-hand is that your hands aren’t particularly sturdy. Myself, I find using a heavier camera makes it a lot easier (the inertia of the camera means it is reluctant to move, so up to a point, a heavy camera is easier to hold still for the duration of a photographic exposure than a very light camera), but what about lighter cameras?

The obvious answer is a tripod or a monopod, but these devices can be terribly heavy, and they are not particularly portable. One solution is to hold the camera against a surface (a tree, a building, or a signpost), but that doesn’t always work either, and none of these items offer an awful lot of flexibility.

How do you stabilise your camera most often?

• Quadrapod
• Tripod
• Monopod
• Mini Tripod or similar
• Gorillapod or similar
• String tripod ('chainpod')
• A rock / table / whatever
• Freehand with a fast lens
• Freehand with an IS lens
• Freehand
• Stabilise my camera? But why?
• I don't take photos

View Results

How?

I often find myself thinking 'Damn, if there was only a way to anchor the camera to the ground…', and I recently found a solution that works: A String Tripod (also known as a Chainpod)!

It is a laughably simple device: You get a wing nut bolt (or anything that screws in) that fits into the tripod hole of your camera (you are looking for a bolt with 3.5×8″ threads), and drill a small hole into the bolt. Then, you attach a length of string to it, with a loop at the end. If you use the shearing lines available for tents, you can vary the length of the loop, and, as such, the height of the camera.

To use one of these string tripods, put your foot (or feet) through the loop, and pull the string taut against your foot. Now, out of nowhere, your camera will be a lot more stable, as it has an axis against which it cannot move (up/down). This means that you can hold the camera a lot calmer – you would be surprised how much of a difference this can make!

But… But…

Sure, it will never replace a proper tripod or monopod, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you gain a couple of stops on your shutter time by using this system. And the best thing? Making one of these is going to cost you less than a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread!

Be careful what you sign!

We’ve talked about how photo licencing works before, but it seems as if people are just not learning their lessons. So, as the newest instalment in our Photography Business article series, an important reminder…

The newest horror story comes from a website called UK Expert. If you sign up to their website, and click ‘ok’ on the terms as conditions (Let’s face it – when did you last read the terms and conditions to anything), they are trying to get you to sign over the copyright to your photos. Yikes!

The lesson today?

Read the terms and conditions
before you upload any photos.
Seriously.

Today, Geir tipped me about the problem with UK Expert, a photo competition website. While they aren’t the only ones doing that out there, they are among the naughtiest I have come across. In their terms and conditions portion of their Registration process, they’ve got the following to say about copyright:

By submitting images and messages and other material to ukexpert.co.uk you warrant that you are the copyright owner and that you grant ukexpert.co.uk permanent copyright ownership equal to your own for all materials uploaded.

I can understand the reasoning for part 1 of this: If you don’t have the right to use a photo, you are committing breach of copyright if you upload the material. (However, there are situations where copyright owners are not allowed to use material — such as when the material is already under exclusive licence — and there are situations where it is perfectly fine to upload material, even if you don’t own the copyright)

It’s the second part that is scary though: “you grant ukexpert.co.uk permanent copyright ownership” is a sneaky, nasty way of trying to steal the copyright to an item from a photographer. They are a competition website, and it’s fair to think that people would upload their best photos, in order to try and win the competitions. Imagine losing the copyright to all your best photographs — how would you feel?

You’re in luck, though, because they also write the following in their terms and conditions: “ukexpert is based in England, and English law applies.” What they are doing is, in fact, unlawful under UK copyright law: It is impossible to re-assign the ownership of copyright without an explisit, written contract. Checking a box on a website doesn’t constitute such a contract, so you haven’t given away anything.

However, if you do have any photos uploaded on UK Expert, I’d remove them as soon as you can. Don’t let them get away with trying to steal your photos from you!

So — yet again — make sure you know what you are signing up for, know your rights, and if you believe the licensed use for the material you upload is too broad, just walk away. Guys like this don’t deserve your photos.

Getting your photos removed

So, what do you do when you’ve already uploaded your photos, and want to take them down?

Over on Pixalo, a poster is lamenting the fact that it’s nearly impossible to remove your own photos from the site. To check this out for myself, I set up an account and uploaded a photo, and was unable to figure out how to remove it. If there is a way, there’s no easy way, which sounds a little bit on the shady side to me.

The best tip I can give you, is to report your own photo for a violation, and write “I revoke the licence for the use of this photo, effective immediately. Please remove it within 24 hours”.

24 hours later, if the photos aren’t gone, write a NTD (Notice and Take Down). This is a legal request in which you are demanding a website to remove the copyrighted material from their site. The fact that you own the copyright means that you can revoke the license for the use of the photos. In fact, you already did (when you warned them 24 hours ago), so now, they are in breach of copyright!

If they still don’t take the photos down within a ‘reasonable time’ (which I would say is about 1 working day, but that’s a bit fluid), you are actually legally entitled to go after the ISP or hosting company of the website in question. Serve them the ‘notice and take down’, and the hosting company will pull the plug on the website.

A lot more information about how this all works is available on the Cambridge University website (scroll down to Copyright and other laws, but make sure to read the rest of the page as well). Examples of NTDs, and more information on how to write one, are available on-line.

Important notice: I not use any information on this web site as actual legal advice. If you do find yourself in a situation where you need to turn to the law to protect your intellectual property rights, get a solicitor involved. And make sure to file a claim against the company involved for any costs incurred (in the small claims court if you have to) — including the cost of your solicitor.

Rediscovering black and white

In our newest instalment of the photo critique series, I’m taking a look at a series of black and white photographs taken by Kevin Bost. In the process, I’ll be exploring why Black and White photography still has a valid place in today’s colourful society… 

Black and white photography...

• I prefer colour
• I convert some of my photos to BW
• I convert most of my photos to BW
• I convert all of my photos to BW
• I shoot in BW on my digital camera
• I shoot in BW on film
• I don't take photos :(

View Results

Black and white photography is very much the cradle of photography: Before colour, there was black and white. Before that, there was paint brushes and paint. Many photographers saw the introduction of colour photography as the death of black and white, but they were wrong: In fact, even today, a lot of photographers work largely — even exclusively — in monochrome. Why?

To me, black and white has an amazing quality to it — Seeing something in monochrome allows you to give it a detachment from reality.

Seen at its very simplest, any photograph has four elements: shape, texture, lighting, and colour. Think about a tennis ball: The basic shape is round. The texture is fuzzy and hairy. The colour will often be yellow, and lighting will determine how you perceive it all. The interesting thing is that of all of these qualities, you can’t strip many of them away: You can ignore the shape by getting in close enough to focus on the texture (using macro to capture the small hairs on the tennis ball, for example). You can ignore the texture by getting far enough away that the texture doesn’t matter, or by adding a motion blur (a spinning tennis-ball photographed with a long enough shutter time will have no texture). Without lighting, you wouldn’t be able to see the ball at all.

Colour falls in a completely different category: By stripping it out of your photography, the other qualities of a photograph — especially textures, which often are drowned out by colours — become more apparent. Stripping away colour, then, abstracts yet familiarises a photograph.

Going to Kevin’s first photograph is a phenomenal way of illustrating how textures suddenly become vastly more important. The reason why this photo appeals to me is the way the asphalt on the road springs out at you. The lovely contrast in the top-right of the image, combined with the relatively lower contrast in the rest of the photo adds a touch of drama.

To me, this appears to be a photograph commenting on aspects of mental health: The deep black of the trees contrasting against the blown-out highlights on the horizon. The way the photographer takes up a significant part of the photo without really being visible. I don’t know the photographer, and I don’t know how accurate my interpretation might be.

While the general principe of the photo is exciting to me (I loved the angled composition), it does have some serious flaws. I wouldn’t have minded the vastly blown-out horizon so much — it’s one of the charms about black and white photography, that strong contrast and even going outside the dynamic range of your film / imaging sensor / printing paper can look damn hot — but the building and the plants along the road on the left side are a bit peculiarly exposed. The old adage of exposing for the highlights and developing for the shadows (as discussed in an earlier photo critique) would have come in handy here, as it would have allowed you more data to work with, so you can either keep the telegraph poles on the horizon, or so you can edit them out successfully in Photoshop.

If I personally had taken this photo, I would have gone back with a tripod and had a shot at turning it into a High Dynamic Range photograph, just to have some more data to work with to help it along.

Kevin’s second photo had me a little bit baffled. Mostly, I just can’t figure out what’s going on here. Sure, it’s some guy driving a car in the rain, but what intrigues me is the hand. The thing around the wrist — is that a hospital tag? What is the liquid on the driver’s hand? That looks a lit like it could be blood. Is it a doctor, on their way to an emergency? Is the heart-shaped item on the dashboard a radiogram? Is the guy about to be a father?

It is a really simple photo, which interestingly enough draws its focus, yet again, from its wild and varied contrast. The sky is completely blown out. The dashboard is pure darkness. And the hand is the only part of the photo that stands out as being ‘correctly’ exposed. A very fascinating photo that raises a ton of questions.

The real question, though: If I hadn’t done a critique of this photo, would I even have looked at it a second time? Probably not: it’s a guy in a car. I would never have noticed the heart, the armband or the blood(?) on his hand. Personally, I think this would have been a better photo if the background had been a lot calmer. A long, open motorway, perhaps, or a forest, or even a hospital in the background… Anything to stop you from looking out of the wind shield, wondering what you’re supposed to be looking at.

Of all the photos Kevin sent to me, this is by far my favourite, and it also rather clearly embodies what I feel black and white photography is about. The photo comes across as an impressionistic piece, in that his toes are in a blur (is it because he’s in a river, and the refractions work as a motion blur? Maybe…). The torn trousers and the fluid motion of the water bring holiday-type-thoughts to my mind. While this photo might have a lot less of a message than, say, the previous photograph, it is a much more appealing photo to me, visually. This photograph wouldn’t be out of place in a trendy restaurant or an edgy art gallery: It’s obviously not a snapshot of someone’s feet: Deliberation, planning, and exquisite exposure comes together to create a powerful visual image.

In addition, it’s worth noting that this photo doesn’t look as if colour would have added much to it: It’s all about the motion and texture.

On a personal level, I would probably have treated the photograph to a slight re-crop. It’s a personal preference thing, which doesn’t necessarily add much to the photo the way the photographer intended, but I’m very much a ‘get into the action’ kind of guy: In artistic photos, I find you often don’t need the context that is added to a photo. As such, with a bit of re-cropping, I landed at this:

So, why should people still bother with black and white in the digital age? Well, in many ways, black and white photography has become easier than ever. By using the digital darkroom (and especially by using the channel mixer to turn a colour photo into monochrome), you get a lot more influence and control over how your photograph is rendered.

That, and what is there not to love about monochromatic art? If it was good enough for Ansel Adams, it’s good enough for me…

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Clean your imaging sensor!

DSLR sensor chips collect dust. That is a Photoshop-time-consuming fact of digital life. At The Sun, whenever we send in our DSLRs to be otherwise repaired, one nice little bonus is that (along with the obscene repair bill) they come back with a freshly cleaned CCD.

Which, of course, lasts for about a week. Two if you are lucky. 

You may not even notice that you have dust at all, until you stop down and shoot with a wide lens or macro. Then, all of a sudden it looks like you are looking through an electron microscope or something. Eww.

Heck, I used to even keep a little sticker on one of my bodies to denote which one had the “cleaner” (and I use the term in the relative sense) CCD. That was so I would know which one to use if I needed to shoot something at f/11 or higher.

Read the rest of David’s article over on the Strobist blog!

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Don't buy camera gear via Froogle etc

It’s old advice, but it certainly hits the spot…

Since the dawn of the commercial web we have been warned to not be suckered by “too good to be true” online deals. Keep your friends close and your credit card closer. Over and over scummy retailers are exposed but a quick name-change are back online trading their crap, fake or purely imaginary goods. 

Still forum posters continue to be burned by dodgy online traders. The problem comes down to customers shopping on price alone. Like the apocryphal lemmings over a cliff they are drawn to the low bidding merchants in shopping search engines. When the item doesn’t turn up, or unexpected (and unexplained) costs appear on the credit card statement or when they get zero (or abusive) customer service they look around for help and sympathy. But there is only one person to blame in the end; the customer. Emptors and caveats, etc.

When you understand how these businesses operate you can see why there are so many problems and how little is in your power to avoid being taken. When I started this blog one of the ex-members here had his own online camera store. I learned a lot about how the business worked and the more I learned the more sure I was my policy of sticking to the high street was the right one, even though it meant paying a premium.

… Thus begins the fantastic article by Chris over on the dSLR blog. He explains how some of the scams work, and also tells you how to avoid them.

I’ve been bitten by one of these scams myself, ages ago when I was buying my first article, so take heed, folks, there’s nothing quite as horrible as the feeling of being parted with your hard-earned cash, and seeing none

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Think of photos as paintings

There’s a lot to be said for how the accessibility of affordable digital cameras has improved the level of photography overall, and I’m strongly in favour of the idea that digital photography is a good thing.

The downside of digital photography is that we are seeing a whole generation of people who never saw a frame of film as something precious. There are thousands upon thousands of photographers out there who only started thinking about photography when they weren’t limited to 24 or 36 frames before bringing the film to the local shop, and then wait for hours for the results. 

Waiting for 2 days for a letter to arrive? Rubbish — Use e-mail! Looking up something in an encyclopedia? Bollocks to that — throw yourself at Google, and you’ll have an answer in seconds. You don’t even have to know the alphabet or be able to spell the word you’re looking for anymore.

The same thing is happening to photography, and it’s happening fast. In a way, it is sad. I remember when I started out taking photos. I was given a 24 exposure film, and it had to last me a month, because I couldn’t afford to buy, develop, and print more than a single roll of film per month. Digital cameras didn’t exist, computers weren’t powerful enough to do even the simplest image editing, and learning of your own mistakes was a terribly long-winded process.

Everything is different now, and it is difficult to say if it is better or worse. I’m guilty of it myself: Instead of planning carefully, measuring light properly, framing everything perfectly, I snap 20 photos to get the light right, 15 more to get the framing right, and a few test shots for good measure.

All in all, it took a painter with a photo camera to remind me what I am doing wrong with photography.

As part of my Photo Critique sessions, I received an e-mail from Kate Ferris, who lives in Scotland. She’s special in the fact that she doesn’t classify herself as a photographer. In fact, she’s an artist first and foremost, and uses photography almost as a tool to help her along. I don’t know if her workflow is meticulous and slow or quick, measured, and precise, but whatever she is doing, it’s showing in the her photographs.

As she says: “I take photos as paintings”, and I think it is a philosophy that is worth exploring further…

Photographic impressionism

Kate submitted 4 photos for critique, and for the first time in Photocritic history, I’m going to use them all in the critique. The first photo is by far the least good of the lot, but it is being let down on technical grounds rather than on the idea. Titled “Inside looking Out”, it is a photo of an urban scene photographed through a window. The neon yellow near the bottom of the photo looks as if it could be a police officer. The yellow reflections in the window make me think that perhaps the photograph was taken from a bus, and the absolutely ridiculous amount of grain evident in the photo tells me that she was really pushing her camera to the max. It’s probably the only way to capture this photo — especially if it was taken on a moving bus — but the neon, combined with the red light towards the right side of the photograph (a brake light? A stop light) and the more yellow light above it appeals to me.

The great thing about this photo is that it would be easy to re-create, and easy to get it right. The effect is created by streams upon streams of water cascading down the window, and the tasty bits of the image are due to the reflected light. So — grab some lanterns, and re-create the photo in your front garden. Different color lights in the lanterns. Camera on a tripod at a low ISO (100 would be great). Get the water hose out to get the window properly streaming with water. And start experimenting. This photograph is impressionism at its finest.

You can’t see anything of what is going on, and yet it is appealing on a level I can’t quite grasp myself. This photo is rubbish — but the idea behind it is fantastic, and all it needs is some more experimentation, a little more planning and a bit less grain.

Photographic realism

The next step on the arts ladder in our adventure in photography is realism. You know those paintings you see in museums where the scene looks as if it could be real, but then doesn’t quite work out? I recently went to Edward Hopper’s exhibition at the Tate in London, and found his works to be downright unsettling. With every photo, there would be something subtly wrong, which upset my photographer’s eye for a picture. Eventually, I worked it out: It’s the lighting. Shadows are missing. Shades are going the wrong way. The most important parts of the images don’t have any highlights on them.

The second photo in this critique invokes that very same feeling on me. I have no idea what I am looking at here — it looks like copper nailed to a wall, perhaps in an old museum or a theatre — but that is not important. The strong, but interrupted vertical lines, along with the unidentifiable object to the left, and the strongly contrasting colours on the right really appeal to me, somehow. It is quite obviously the case of spotting something which appealed to Kate, which she set out to capture. Again, the grain is rampant in this photo (and the particular way the grain manifests itself indicates that this photo is a victim of heavy increases in contrast in Photoshop), and the photograph would have been far better if it had been a more pure representation of the scene, but the idea behind the photo is great. Kate, if you can, go back to the same place, bring a tripod, and try again. I love how you’re thinking, it’s just the execution that’s letting you down.

Photographic Expressionism

Taking a leap of faith into yet another photographic period. The third of Kate’s photos is a bound into expressionism. Moving away from the documentary sphere and into the realm of emotions, the expressionists bend reality to illustrate a frame of mind. To me, this photograph, obviously taken on a beach somewhere, very strongly invokes the feeling of just that. The only frame of reference is a very small speck of sand that isn’t blurry. The rest of the image is a wild mixture of motion, turmoil, and very strong contrast.

Is it a technically perfect photo? Far from it — the foam on the wave is over-exposed, the darker areas of the foam have a very odd blue tinge to them, and I wish a little more of the sand had been stationary and in sharp focus. Having said that, this photo succeeds where many other entries to my photo critique completely fail: It’s illustrating an emotion and has a message. More than that, the photographer saw something that nobody else saw, and decided to try to express it in a way that would show it to casual observers: By capturing it as a photograph.

De Stijl

The last photo from Kate is a lot more conventional than the others, but is also the most technically accomplished. The sharpness is spot-on, the exposure is fine, and the colours have a subtle vibrancy in their own right. The-unhurried simplicity of the ropes hanging in the water is an image of deep, heart-felt tranquility.

I know I’m probably pushing the comparison a bit far, but if I were to compare this photograph to a photographic style, it would have to be De Stijl. The most famous Stijlist — Piet Mondrian — became famous for the forced simplicity in his art works as he introduced a strict minimalism and what he saw as a level of order and harmony beyond what common humans could achieve normally. This photograph is rather close to that ideal: Dark colours, prime colours, simplicity and tranquility united in a photograph that would have looked marvellous on my living room wall. Why? Because anybody could have taken it, but one person took the time to capture it for all to see.

Have you completely lost your mind?

Well, probably. The thing is, I’m a little surprised myself at how moved I am by these photographs. Normally, I’m the first to point out the technical flaws in a photo.

There’s a moral to this story, though, and that is that there is a name for people who take perfectly exposed, impeccably focused and faultlessly framed photos every single time: Technicians.

If I were a photography teacher, I’d take on a visionary student without the technical skills over a technically perfect photographer who lacks the imagination. Every time.

So, if you learn one thing from this critique, let it be this: Take a closer look at painters, illustrators, and other artists of times gone by — visit a gallery or two, and stop to think why their art works. Then take as much time as you need to re-create some of it as photography. Trust me, there’s greatness on that path.

Let’s all try it: The 5 shot challenge.

Finally, I have a challenge for you. Take out your digital camera, and go for a walk outside. On your entire walk, you are only allowed to take 5 photographs, and they have to be of 5 different scenes. If you screw up a photo for any reason, you have lost that scene, and are not allowed to try again.

Think of photography as painting. Be meticulous. Be precise. Spend a lot of time looking through the viewfinder. When you’re sure everything is perfect, pull the trigger.

If you try this, I’d love to see the results — post them in a Flickr gallery or on your blog or something, and post a link to it in the comments to this post.

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Your pet peeves...

I spend a lot of time looking at people’s photos, both for work, and for this website. It helps me identify where I go wrong myself. I’ve grown to realise that my biggest downfall is that I tend to use odd crops on photos, and I’m obsessive about certain aspects about my photography.

I’m curious though… Are my hang-ups and failures the same as other photographers’?

Go on, vote below or — even better — go into some detail about the faults that gets you again and again, in the comments.

(you can vote on an existing option, or add your own)

When taking pictures, what's your biggest weakness?

• Inspiration
• Getting the exposure right
• Focus
• Framing
• Over-sharpening
• Rushing the process
• Get good-looking light
• Tiny details
• The Subject
• Blurry pics
• Waiting too long to get it, "just so"
• Dicks
• Add an Answer

View Results

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Time-lapse photography

dawntodusk.jpg

dawntodusk.jpg

There’s a lot to be said for the persistency of time-lapse photography – it makes life rather interesting. Reducing a period of a few hours (like a flower opening to the sun), a few months (like a flower growing or a baby growing inside a mother’s belly) or a year (seasonal timelapses, construction work) is amazing stuff.

Have you ever tried time-lapse photography?

• Yes, I do it all the time
• Yes, a few times
• Yes, once
• No, but I'll give it a shot
• No, and I don't want to

View Results

To learn more about time-lapse photography, why not try the Wikipedia article. For tutorials, check out the Haworth Village tutorial – it serves as a good introduction as well as a tutorial.

Time-lapse software

Taking the photos is all good and well, but you’ve got two hurdles: Taking a sequence of photographs, and going from photos to stop-animation. Some cameras actually have timelapse photography built in (although I can’t remember seeing it in any cameras since the Casio QV-8000 in the late 1990s – why? It’s easy to implement, and all digital cameras have built-in clocks! Come on, manufacturers, you can do better!), but if you aren’t that lucky, you have to either take the pictures manually, connect a time-lapse device to your camera (Such as the TC80N3), or use your computer to control the camera. The software that came with your camera often has a ‘control your camera from your computer’ type piece of software, which normally has a time-lapse function built in.

On the software side, there are loads of good programmes out there. For the Mac, the old classic is iStopMotion, which I’ve used briefly when it was in Beta, and I found it to be very interesting. It has since ‘grown up’ into a fully-fledged high-quality piece of software which is easy to use.

Granite Bay software make an application especially for Canon cameras, designed to take and merge the photos into videos.

Of course, you don’t have to take the video approach – you can also take very powerful still frame time lapse photos… Like the photo used at the top of this article!

Some inspiration

Check out time lapse photography on YouTube, Google Video.

Highlights: Rebuilding Ground Zero in NYC, Picasso painting, Walking around the Giza Pyramids, Repainting the ice on a hockey rink, a year of seasonal change in Norway, and finally, a time-lapse of a cross-country drive from LA to New York in 5 days.

Portraiture: Loosen up!

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at portraits over the last couple of days for various reasons I shan’t get into in details, but there’s one pet peeve I’m afraid I’m going to have to share with you…

Why are people always so damn serious when they are being taken photos of? Does nobody understand the art of portraiture anymore? 

To me, a portrait doesn’t have to be a flat-on head-and-shoulders photo. Hell, I’ve seen excellent portraits that don’t even have faces in them. The point I’m trying to make is that there are too many people why are just straight-up trying too hard with their portraiture.

It all depends on what you are trying to do with your photos of course, but are you really the dude who wants to get known for taking plain, boring heads-and-shoulders shots? Granted, I do believe that all good photographers should have a go at classic portraiture, but ultimately, what is portraiture all about?

To me, portraiture is about capturing something that is typical about somebody, in such a way that people who know the subject instantly recognise them, and in a way that people who don’t know them get enough data to make up some sort of opinion about them.

This style of portraiture presupposes that you aren’t taking photos in a lame-ass conveyor-belt-style (yes, Venture, I’m looking at you), but actually have the time to get to know your subjects, and it might just work best with people you know quite well to begin with.

But… Isn’t experimentation and an attempt at capturing the unique what photography is all about? So why aren’t people playing around more?

If you’ve got some stunning portraits that break the rules – why not post a link in the comments? I’d love to see some photos that defy the monotony, before I go spare and lose all faith in the photographers of the world…

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Cross polarization

Geekery and science meets photography: Cross-polarization is a fantastic little technique that exploits a quirk in the way polarizers work.

Think of light as wooden ice-cream sticks that are flying towards a set of bars. The bars will only let the sticks that happen to be aligned with the bars through, and absorbs all the other sticks. Before the filter, the light is moving in lots of different polarizations. After it has passed through the filter, all the light is moving in the same linear polarization.  

Imagine now, if you will, what would happen if you were to put another set of bars, rotated 90 degrees in relation to the first set of bars. In theory, none of the ice-cream sticks would get through, right? Well, that’s how Polarizer filters work, too. Of course, no polarizer filter is perfect, so some light will always get through, but the vast bulk of light is filtered out.

Cross-polarization exploits this by placing objects made of some types of plastic between the first and the second polarizer. For this particular set-up, you’ll want to put your first polarizer in front of the light source, then your plastic object, and then use the second polarizer in front of your lens.

The effect that can be seen when cross-polarizing light is startling. Chances are that you’ve seen cross-polarized images before, and thought that they were digital image manipulations or done with really advanced lighting. The opposite is true: Due to the manufacturing process used in creating injection-moulded clear plastics, the plastic takes on some ability to polarize light itself. When the polarized light passes through these plastics, then, their phase gets altered. By filtering out all other light with the second polarizer, you get the colorful, acid-flashback-style images.

You can buy sheets of polarization film from most photographic outlet – all you need to do is to cut off a piece that is big enough to cover your light source, and another piece that is of a size of the right size to stick in front of your camera lens. Then, the hunt starts for finding the most interesting types of plastic to start playing with…

Photos in this post were found by searching for Cross Polarization (or Cross Polarisation) on Flickr. The cutlery image is by Elyssa, the mad colours image is by Geartron, and the CD cover insert is by _maverick_.

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Using Shallow depth of field

So, you’ve got your exposures down pat, and your framing is getting better by the day. Excellent. What is next? Well, the lovely Andrew Ferguson, who I know via LiveJournal, submitted a couple of photos for critique that illustrate the next logical step forward: Using shallow depth of field in a creative context. 

The first hurdle for many photographers is to get stuff in focus in the first place. The next hurdle is to get the things you want to be out of focus, err, out of focus. Awesome. So how do you go about doing that? Well, let’s learn from Andrew:

This photo, which he asked me to take from his overall rather nifty Flickr stream, serves as an excellent example of how you can use DOF to create a multi-layered image.

The eye is automatically drawn to the parts of the photo that are correctly exposed and in focus, whereas the over-exposed background, which is blurry to boot, gets less attention. If this image had been pin-prick sharp all the way, it would not have had any impact whatsoever: The messyness of the people in the background would have seriously detracted from the overall impression of the photograph.

As it stands, I have no idea what the item of jewelry is, or if it means anything. Quite apart from that, the choker the person in the foreground is wearing is vicious-looking, and her black dreaded hair strengthens the impression of a person who has embraced the ‘goth’ lifestyle.

The foreground is rather strongly contrasted with the background, in that it is a very unusual portrait, which can in fact be interpreted in several ways. The two that sprang to mind:

1) The phrase ‘show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are’ springs to mind with this photo: Instead of showing a full-on portrait of the person who is in focus, the photographer chooses to express her personality through that of her friends, despite the fact that the friends are out of focus.

2) This person is ostracised from her group, and her alternative clothing style, her going-against-the-grain type personality and what comes across as a strong personality is rebelling, but she is paying the prize in the form of loneliness.

If the people in the background had been in school uniforms, or otherwise ‘conformist’ clothing, I would have leaned towards option 2. I believe that this would have made a stronger photograph on an emotional level, too. However, one of the people in the background has blue hair, and the guy standing up seems to have blond dread-locks, which leads me to conclude the 1st explanation.

Obviously, this photograph has a lot going for it in terms of ‘showing a little, hiding a lot’, with multiple possible explanations. It is one of the things I quite like about it, but what really makes this image is how it goes about creating this illusion: By using a very large aperture (f/5.6 at ISO 200 and 24mm focal length, in the case of this photograph), there is only very little of the image that is actually in focus: The foreground model’s jewelry and the far-most locks of hair.

In the beginning of this critique, I explained how this image could easily have been completely rubbish, but I hope that the long-ish monologue (which really wasn’t meant to be quite that long, honest) serves to illustrate how the limited DOF has helped pull this image up. It isn’t perfect — If it were, I would have been able to come up with a more consistent story as to what is going on in this image, and why the people in the background are relevant — but it’s a very fine photograph because it allows the viewer to spend some time thinking, making up his/her mind.

If I were to come up with any ways to improve this image, it would be to use different people in the background, perhaps dressed as jocks, nazis, or even as circus clowns. The point is that they need to serve as either a connection or a contrast, and at present they are too similar, yet too different to offer an unified message in the photo.

Bokeh

Shallow DOF and bokeh go hand-in-hand as two rather important concepts in photography, and it is something that is worth keeping in mind when you are working with limited depth of field: The type and quality of the lens you are working with has impact on how the out-of-focus parts of your image look. In Andrew’s photo above, the out-of-focus elements of the image are works of impressionistic art in themselves (See the crop to the left, for example).

Because of the beautiful out-of-focus qualities, this image works well. If you experiment with the same, but discover that your out-of-focus backgrounds don’t look as expected, try it with one of your other lenses. If you have any cheap lenses, try with them as well – I have a couple of no-brand, cheap-as-chips lenses that are nigh-on useless for any quality photography, but I keep them around beccause they have tremendous qualities for shallow depth of field photography.

The only real way to find out which lenses work and which ones don’t is to experiment, so have a go!

Andrew’s second photograph is this one, of an old motorbike:

… Which I’m not going to say a lot about, other than the fact that it is – yet again – an excellent example of careful use of depth of field.

The photo was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT and a moody old 24-105 EF lens at 50mm, 1/250 sec, f/4.0 at ISO 400, and I really enjoy what the increased grain at ISO 400 brings to the photograph. With these kind of lighting conditions, you could easily have shot it at 1/125 ISO 200, or 1/60 ISO 100, but the trade-off of faster shutter time and increased grain works very well, perhaps especially because it’s such a gritty topic of photography.

As a personal preference type thing (i.e lots of people would disagree with me), I think the photograph is too bottom-heavy. The sticker on the fork of the bike is disturbing, and while the dirty, oily rag over the bike, combined with the indicator and the reflector of similar, yet different shades of orange really lift the photo, I think there’s too much going on, and too little of a focal point. I like how you’ve used the rule of thirds in the composition of this photo, and it is fine just the way it is.

Because this is my photo critique, however, and because I can’t let a photo stand without a few suggestions for improvement, I’ll go in line with my usual demands: I would have loved this photo to be a lot tighter, and higher impact.

A humble re-crop suggests the following, for example:

This version uses a different approach to the rule of thirds: it breaks the image by using diagonals. The rain-cover is the only things that stands out in the image because it is teh only thing that is straight down. Everything else is at a diagonal: The rain grid in the background, the boke itself, the outline of the rain cover on the left side, etc. As I say, it’s very much a taste thing, and I would most certainly not insist on an approach such as this one, but I feel that the re-crop also highlights the strength of the original photo – the tack-sharp focus on the bike itself, and the out-of focus-ness of the background.

Finally, the out-of-focus areas on the last photo here shows how much of a difference a different lens can have: The small stones in the asphalt and the slats in the rain grid in the background are not particularly aesthetically pleasing in their own right. Everything else being equal, this photo would have looked rather differently if you had taken it with the same lens as the one you used for the first image.

So, what’s the lesson to take home from this critique? Use a limited DOF to offset your foregrounds effectively, but beware of how different lenses can make the background highlights (‘Bokeh’) look very different from each other. Finally, remember that expensive lenses don’t necessarily have a more pleasing out-of-focus experience.

Andrew, thanks for sharing your photos, and good luck with your future photography!

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First steps in Portraiture

My entry into Photography was a very gentle and gradual one. As such, I don’t actually remember much of how it all came about, nor do I remember the specific steps I took, nor in what order I learned the lessons, or why.

Handy, then, that there are people out there who are just coming to terms with their disease, errr, affliction, errr, passion that is photography. In this case, my dear friend Anna went on a rant-a-licious rampage, which might help some budding photographers gain some self-esteem and follow a new-ish photographer in her first footsteps towards what’s promising to become a life-long obsession: Taking good portrait photos.

Without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Anna! 

This last year I’ve become very interested in taking photos of people. There are several reasons for this; firstly I actually have some friends now and want to take photos of them that they genuinely like and secondly, because it’s a damn difficult thing to do and I like a proper challenge. I don’t do conventional portraits (you know the ones; sit up straight, smile for the camera etc.). You can look at those once, put them in a drawer or on your grandma’s wall and they don’t tell you anything at all about the person. When I take a photo of someone, I want it to convey something about their character and in some cases, when it’s someone I know and care about, I want it to reflect that as well.

Photo by Anna Badley

The first proper portrait I did was April this year. The friend in question was highly suspicious of my abilities, hugely hungover and rather lined and crumpled (he used to smoke 20 a day and had recently given up). I only had a compact digital camera with me at the time and the light was fading rapidly. I put it into sepia and made it look old fashioned because he’d insisted he didn’t want to look ginger on it, the awkward bastard. He was actually quite chuffed with his portrait and has merrily posted it on websites to show people. More importantly though, it stands as a record of how crumpled he actually was, and now, 9 months on, I’ve taken some more photos where he looks a lot less crumpled and he’s pretty pleased about this. This is what giving up smoking does for you.

Since then I’ve taken a lot of photos of people. Most of them have been fairly reluctant to let me point a camera at them but glad they did when I show them the results. I’ve found that women are more difficult to photograph than men because they are more worried they will look awful which is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy really. If you are anxious about being photoed, the photo will inevitably look crap. This has proved to be the case with my mother. She has the ability to grin inanely in an alarming way that she only ever does when someone points a camera at her. I even managed to capture the stages of facial contortion that lead to the inane grin by taking four photos over the course of a second – normal, anxious having noticed the camera, attempting to form grin, GRINNING ANXIOUSLY.

Photo by Anna Badley

I suspect this anxiety people instantly develop when a camera is pointed at them is because of too many bad pictures taken in the past – rabbit-in-headlights, blinded by flash, cheesy grinning forced posing type shots that never see the light of day again. Let’s face it, there’s nothing like a crap portrait to knock your confidence about how attractive you are and photos can be horribly unkind because they catch you for the tiniest split second where you might be laughing and thus showing off your crooked teeth.

There was a point to this post (I’ll get there in the end, honestly) and it was that as Christmas has just been and gone there are a lot of people out there who have been let loose with new cameras, or new lenses for old cameras. Basically, the world is not a safe place right now if you’re nervous about having your photo taken. However, for all those new camera owners, you might get a photo worth sticking on your wall if you try out these five things:

1. Try and shoot in daylight rather than indoors. This will stop the flash going off and giving people red eye. Red eye makes people look mental. Of course, if this is the aspect of their character you are trying to capture, then that’s fine.

2. Photograph one or two people at a time instead of trying to get large groups together; you’ll never get everyone smiling nicely at once and also big group photos rarely look good when printed because you have to stand further back to take them so everyone looks smaller and blurrier.

Photo by Haje Jan Kamps

3. Never ask anyone to smile. It never works because it makes them think about what their mouth is doing – disastrous. Tell them a joke or pull faces at them if you must, or take a non-smiling photo for a change. In fact, if you can catch them when they’re not aware you’re taking a photo that’s even better; for example if they are engrossed in doing something they enjoy doing. You could even take a photo of them from an unusual angle – from the back, perhaps? For the truly camera-shy, there is always the option of snapping them whilst they sleep. This is probably a bit ethically dubious, however, and you might want to show them the photos when they wake up and check they’re okay about it.

4. Timing. With a digital camera you can afford to get a bit carried away and blast off fifteen or so shots of one person on the off-chance one will come out right – a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t. There is no shame in this; even the professionals get a bit trigger-happy sometimes. You can also check the photos you’ve just taken to see if people have their eyes closed etc. which is a major bonus. However, whether you’re working with digital or film, it’s still worth watching and waiting for a potentially good shot and not just panicking and pressing the shutter button the moment you’ve got your victim (er…I mean model) where you want them. Talk to them a bit. Give them time to relax. Ply them with drink. Chloroform them if needs be (only kidding).

5. Failing all else, you can hide all sorts of atrocious things by changing your photos to black and white or sepia. This is very easy in digital – quite a lot of digital cameras actually have these options on the camera itself – sometimes under the manual settings. This means you can actually go all arty and shoot in black and white or sepia if the mood takes you. Not so easy in film of course – you have the options of starting off with a black and white film in the first place, or scanning your photos and adjusting them in an art package. Black and white is a wonderful way of hiding spots, disguising drink-related red faces…and getting rid of purple and pink anoraks.

Good lord I went on a bit there. Sorry about that. I’ll shut up now.

Some of the pictures in this article were taken by Haje, because Anna didn’t send me any before she vanished for her Christmas break. If you like her photos, why not check out Anna’s DeviantArt page or her Flickr stream?

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Contrast, colours, and curves, oh my!

Curves is one of the most powerful tools a photographer has in his or her arsenal. You can do a lot more with curves than you can do with the Levels tool. In fact, most photographers who embrace curves stop using the Levels tool altogether – although until you fully understand what Levels is, what it does, and how to use it, you’ll never be able to get the full potential out of the Curves tool either.  

So I figured it was time that we had a very close look at Curves, what they do, and how to use them. Just when I started researching the topic, I discovered that my new friend Matt Greer has an amazing write-up on curves over on his web-site, creatively titled Photoshop Adjustment Layers – Curves.

In fact, his whole blog is worth reading, because he has a series of good Photoshop tips, tricks, and in-depth tutorials that – without being a patronizing git – gives you a gentle introduction along with more in-depth power tips.

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Image aspect ratios

In a recent photo critique, I went off on one about the aspect ratios I prefer, when I look at photos. But have you ever thought about why you would prefer a particular image ratio? Is there a rule about what size photos should be, and if so – who decides the rules?

I’m just sharing my own thoughts here, but I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter as well!

There are a lot of ideas around regarding what size things should be. ISO 7810, for example, specifies the size and shape of a credit card, the aspect ratio of which many people find is a comfortable, conceivably because its official size (85.60 × 53.98 mm) is pretty close to the aspect ratio of a golden rectangle (related, of course, to the golden ratio. See also the silver ratio, which is used, among other things, to determine the shape of an A4 sheet of paper).

So why do most photographers operate with 3:2, 4:3 or 1:1? Well, truth be told, it’s a historical thing: The modern 135 film (also known as 35mm – referring to the width of the film – or 36mm – referring to the width of a negative frame – film) was 36mm by 24mm in size. The past 80 years or so, we have become so accustomed to the 36×24 (that is to say, 3:2 aspect ratio) photos, that it just looks… right.

4:3 is the aspect ratio of a normal television, which is of course another size we have become used to over time, and it is the aspect ratio used by most computer monitors. Some digital camera manufacturers took to – including Canon: my Digital Ixus / Elph takes photos in the 4:3 aspect ratio. Some cameras – including the Canon Powershot G7 – even support both image ratios, selectable in the menu system. If you are curious which cameras use which aspect ratio, check out Digital Photo Review. Since the dawn of time (well, since Phil Askey has had the the stats on his site), they’ve kept track of which camera uses which.

The last aspect ratio that is popular is 16:9, because it is used in cinemas as ‘wide screen’, but there are dozens of others in use, too.

So, err, do you use a calculator when you crop your photos?

Oh, not at all! The marquee tool in Photoshop has a powerful function which is called ‘fixed aspect ratio’. As you probably know, if you use the marquee tool and hold the shift key, the selected area is forced to be a perfect square. You can also select your own aspect ratio, however, in the tool menu that shows up when you select the marquee tool:

Here, you can type in whatever aspect ratio you prefer, and the select tool will lock on to it. If you want to switch between 3:2 and 2:3 (for example, if you want to crop portrait instead of landscape photos), you can just click the button with the two little arrows: It swaps the numbers over for you.

Nifty, yes?

What makes you choose an aspect ratio over another?

So, why do I refuse to crop images to anything other than either 3:2? It’s an odd one, I’m fully aware of that, but to me, there’s something almost holy about 3:2. I like my photos to be photo-shaped, and to me, the 3:2 shape just looks the most right. I find it peaceful to look at, and there is something exciting about working to the arbitrary and dated restraint of 3:2.

At the same time, I did a photo shoot about 4 years ago which opened my eyes to shooting square photos. I had a few photographs that were very successful, but that just didn’t quite want to work out as photos. In the end, I spotted that perhaps it would work if it was square, and this was the result:

Ultimately, I can’t tell why I decided to stick to those two formats. Perhaps it looks tidier. Perhaps it saves time if and when I decide to have the photos printed. Or perhaps I’m just an old-fashioned has-been, who refuses to let the fact that you can crop your image to whatever the hell you want to break on through.

So… What about you? Do you have hang-ups about aspect ratios of your images? Leave a comment!

(can you spot what all the aspect ratios in this post were? The girl is 1:1, the glasses and sleepy person is 3:2, the flower is 4:3, and the brown stuff, which actually is tobacco from a cigarette, magnified 6x, is 16:9)

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Framing and cropping your images

For this issue of the Photocritic Photo Critique, we’re going far afield! Joel Legassie is a Canadian who is currently living in Japan, and is an avid photographer. His photos are sharp, stylish, and striking… So can we offer him any advice? 

Joel uses a I use a 6.3 megapixel Canon Kiss Digital (that’s the Digital Rebel / Canon EOS 300D to the rest of us), with the standard 18-55mm lens.

Photo 1:

Water flowers always make for amazing photography, and these Lillies are no different. Initially, the slightly damaged leaves to the left and top of the photo bothered me, but they actually grew on me – the autumnal colours combined with the deel greens and browns of the leaves make a very nice contrast to the strong reds and pinks offered up by the flowers.

The photo seems ever-so-slightly over-exposed: some of the leaves of the flower are a bit whiter than I woul dhave expected. This could be reflected sunshine (i.e the same problem as in our last critique), but I do expect this is a plain overexposure problem. It isn’t overly disturbing in this photo, but nevertheless it would be worth keeping an eye out for in the future.

From the EXIF information embedded in the file, I can see you shot the image at f/8 (a good idea, this is the aperture whee your lens is sharpest) and 1/50 sec shutter time. Personally, I think I would have liked that same photo seen shot with a 50mm prime lens, wide open. If you manage to get close enough to the flowers, that should actually blur out the background ever so slightly, bringing more of the focus on the flowers themselves.

The main beef I have with this photo is that it is a little haphazardly framed. I can’t work out why you decided to put the flowers in the middle of the frame, with the ‘broken’ leaves towards the side. Personally, I have a dirty, dirty fetish, which is (I can tell you all can’t wait to find out…) to crop in tighter. Always closer in to the action. It’s a matter of taste, of course, and I fully respect if you decide to make a different choice, but if I had taken this photo, I would have gone in a lot closer, much like the mock-up crop shown to the right.

The only thing I have done here is to crop a rectangle constrained to an aspect ratio of 3:2 around the three flowers and whatever else came into the frame at that aspect ratio on the left.

Why? Well, for one thing, it gives the image a purpose, a direction, perhaps even a message. The contrast between the wilting leaves on the left, with their dark, decaying colours, against the hope of the pink flowers on the right appeals to me.

The final suggestion I would have made: If there was anyone around, you could have asked them to hold out an arm, a bag, or an umbrella to cast a shadow on the right side of the image. You want the flowers basking in the sun, but anything you can do to help the background be a little less conspicuous would probably be a good idea in this case.

Photo 2:

Joel sent me 4 photos, but I decided to choose another of his photos with flowers in it for the second part of this critique.

This photo is called RishiriFuji. My Japanese is non-existent, but I assume it means ‘mount fuji, and I totally live the idea behind this photo.

What you did wrong in terms of framing in the previous shot, you definitely did right here. The dimmed hazy colours of the mountain covered in gray clouds in the background is balanced out with the oranges, browns and multicoloured bouquet in the bottom right of the frame.

If I were to nitpick, I think there is too little going on to the right of this image, but it isn’t something that is easily fixed with cropping. Personally, I prefer either a 3:2 or a 1:1 (perfect square) aspect ratio for aestetic reasons, but there is no way you can crop this image using either of those without losing too much on the right, or cutting the top of the mountain off. This could have been addressed on location by taking a step back (making the flowers smaller in the image), moving the camera down (which would put the flowers just beneath the foot of the mountains), and then zooming in slightly (to re-establish the frame).

The other niggle I have about this photo is that I feel it is lacking in contrast, and a little bit too dark. The problem is that the lighting is very soft and even, and that upping the brightness by increasing the shutter time or opening up the aperture would have lost the moody feel of the image. You would have ended up with something like this:

… Which completely ruins the beauty and subtlety of the original photo.

If you have a tripod, a flashgun and an off-camera flash lad, you could have tried to frame the image properly, expose the photo for the mountain, and then add a tiny dash of flash light on the flowers, just to really make them stand out in the image. Once again, you have to be really careful, as it is very easy to over-do the effect, but just the tiniest change would really draw more attention to the photo. I’ve simulated it here, but fill-flash is rather difficult in Photoshop, so do forgive me for not getting it quite right:

I hope I got close enough to illustrate what I was trying to say, however!

Anyway, both these two pictures discussed here, and the ones you sent to me separately show a lot of care and interest in photography – I hope this critique serves as a push in the right direction!

The main message to take home, is that after each photo you take, think ‘what is my message’, and ‘what am I trying to achieve’. If the photo you just took doesn’t convey that message, or doesn’t achieve what you would have liked, try to identify why, and to take another photo which may address the issue at hand.

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Expose for the highlights...

Today’s topic came about after I was sent some fabulous images from Ben Darfler, as part of our photo critique series. He sent me four excellent photos, and I picked two that illustrate a common theme: How to expose a photo correctly.

You would think that exposing a photograph correctly would be easy – you just point the camera at what you want to take a picture of, and let the machinery take over from there, right? Well, most of the time, that will give pretty good results, but if you have ambitions of developing as a photographer, manual exposure is where it’s at.

The way you choose your exposure is one of the biggest differences between film and digital photography. When photographing with film, you want your shadows to be drawn as well as possible; because of this, my high-school photography teacher would drone on about “Expose for the shadows; develop for the highlights.” Well, digital changed all that… 

Perhaps surprisingly, a digital imaging chip works much like slide film does: The more an area is exposed, the brighter it gets. Up to a point. Beyond this point, you get ‘burnt out’ images, where a larger area of the image is pure white. This is because your film is beyond its dynamic range. If you think of a film as a continuous light-meter gauge, (which it is, essentially), ‘burn out’ is where the light meter has gone off the scale: If you are putting water into a 1 litre measuring jug, and the jug is full, it will still read ’1 litre’, even if your entire kitchen floor is full of water.

Which brings us to the first picture:

Thanks for submitting it, Ben! Right, in this photo, we have an awful lot of interesting things going on. The unusual shape of that rock, combined with the gnarly trees, the interesting sunlight, and the stream at the bottom are all competing for attention. My first advice, then, would be to tighten up the focus of your image. What was it that intrigued you about this particular scene? Why did you decide to take the photo? That is what you need to decide on, and that’s where your focus needs to be.

Composition

Personally, the barren-ness and the alien landscape appeals to me, while the evergreen(?) trees in the background draw my attention away from these particular aspects. Perhaps you could take about five steps to the left of where you were standing, and eliminate the green from the image that way?

The second thing you could consider is if your cropping makes sense. There’s an awful lot of space at the top and bottom of this image that doesn’t tell a story. Why is it there? Walk, or zoom, in closer to get rid of it, or just chop it off in Photoshop. I’m all for negative space, so in this particular photo, I’d probably go for a square frame – like the crop shown to the right.

Sharpening

A little side note: When taking a closer look at your photo, I see that it’s sharpened quite a lot – either in-camera or with image editing software – to the point that it is actually quite disturbing to the overall image. You can see this has been done by the white ‘halo’ around the barren trees in the background.

Exposure / burned out highlights

The biggest problem in the photo is that you are plagued with serious burn-out on the rock, which detracts from the overall photo. This is a technical issue, not necessarily a creative one. If this image was in the beginning of your portfolio, and I were an art director or a gallery director, I’d close the portfolio right there and then, and send you on your way, instantly losing interest.

It’s a typical beginner’s mistake, and that’s why I’m happy you decided to submit this photo, because now I have an excuse to explain how you can avoid it!

What you are looking at in the white areas, is the ‘burn out’ I started talking about in the beginning of this post. You can actually see it digitally too: Open up your photo in Photoshop, and choose “Levels” from the Image – Adjustments menu. You should see a curve which looks a lot like the one seen to the right of this paragraph.

Discovering overexposure

The Levels tool shows a graph of the presence of the brightness of the pixels in your photo. Left is perfect, pitch black, and right is complete, perfect white. As you can see from the graph, you haven’t got a single perfect black pixel, and a sharp spike to the far right of the graph. This indicates that quite a few pixels are ‘off the chart’ – which is why you can see the white stuff in your final image.

Many cameras have built-in histograms (that’s what that graph is called – on Canon cameras, click the ‘info’ button a few times, I’m sure Nikons have the same function), so you can inspect the tonal values of your photos in the field.

Avoiding overexposure

So, now that you know what the problem is and how to spot that something has gone wrong, how do you avoid it? The answer is in the title of this post: Expose for the highlights. In your case, I can’t tell from the photo what shutter time and aperture you used. The solution is simple: You should have used a faster shutter time, or a smaller aperture (ie. a larger aperture number). This makes the whole photo darker, which means that you capture more detail in the highlights. As you can see from your graph, however, you have no ‘black’ pixels, so no harm would have come from exposing the image a little less.

If you prefer to shoot fully automatic, you can force the camera to take a light metering from the lighter areas of the frame by aiming your camera at the lighter area, pressing the Exposure Lock button (marked with a star on Canon cameras, with EL or AE on some other cameras), then framing your image, and finally clicking the shutter to take the photo.

If you don’t wish to do that, you can use EV compensation to force your camera to underexpose, you can use AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) to hedge your bets on getting the right exposure, or – the most recommended option – you can just use manual exposure settings, check the result, and adjust accordingly.

Now that you have exposed for the highlights, you can use the Levels tool discussed earlier to bring out the detail in the shadow parties of your photos. You’ll be amazed how much detail is hidden there: Just open a few of your photos and play with all three of the sliders. The leftmost black point slider discards dark tone information from an image, the rightmost white point slider discards light tone information, and the middle mid point slider can be used to induce a bias towards bright or dark photos. For an excellent tutorial on what the Levels tool is and what it does, check out this tutorial over on the Cambridge in Colour site.

Can the photo be saved?

For your particular photo, I don’t think there is a lot of hope of ‘saving’ it… Or is there? I had a play around with it. I turned it into Black and White (using the channel mixer), and increased the contrast ridiculously (by pulling the black point and white point sliders towards the middle of the histogram) – as seen to the right. It isn’t a great solution, but the result is striking, if nothing else.

Try a polarizer

Finally, in this photo, it appears that the highlights are, in fact, sunlight reflected of a moist surface. If I were you, I would have tried using a polarizer filter (more about those on the Luminous Landscape website) to see if you can filter out the reflections. If this would have been possible, you could have gotten away with this photo with similar brightness levels, whilst avoiding much of the reflected sunlight.

Learn more…

If you want to learn more about exposure, you’ll want to have a look at the Zone System (try Norman Koren’s website, or Wikipedia) – it is a tried and tested system explaining all of this in great detail.

Ben’s 2nd picture:

Ben, your second picture is – rather obviously – a drastic departure from your first shot. It has a limited depth of field, which leads the leaves and the branches in the background to be out of focus. This helps the foreground leaves get pulled in as the natural biewing points in the image – a very cool effect indeed.

I love the near-perfect chronographic opposition between the blue background and the orange leaves (open your image in photoshop, then invert the colours of the photo to see what I am talking about), and the lighting is perfect. As is the exposure, the framing is interesting, and there isn’t a lot to detract from the photo itself.

There isn’t much of a message in this photo – it isn’t a love note, an emotive photo, or anything like that, which means it won’t appeal to all people. It isn’t even very original: Sure, I could go out and photograph an image exactly like this on a late summer’s day, as could any other competent photographer out there, but – and here comes the important bit – that is not the point of this photo. It is a technically perfect photo with vibrant colours. If I had taken this photo, I’d have it printed out, and hung it on my wall. It’s one to be proud of.

Respectless photographers?

I seem to be months behind on this item of “news”. I actually spotted it a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think it was that interesting. It seems as if people didn’t agree, as the topic is getting some serious discussion. Basically – a picture of a photographer in the middle of a marathon race is pissing off a lot of people.

On one hand, I can kind of see what is going on here. As Robert Capa said: “If the picture isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough”, and getting in the middle of a race is one way to get closer, I suppose… 

On the other hand, you are guest on somebody else’s path, and getting in the way of runners who are at the limit of their tiredness, and only want to make it to the finish line, is at best rude.

Now, I don’t know the circumstances around this photo, but would like to talk about it a little bit anyway. My reaction is different, based on if she is a commissioned photographer or an amateur. If the latter, she’s in the wrong place, and someone should have told her to shove off. I’m not sure about the outraged calls of “getting ticketed… or worse” in the Flickr discussion, though – a bit harsh, I feel. If there were so many people who were outraged about this behaviour, why didn’t they just tell her to move out of the way?

One commenter mentions:

To all of you taht seem to think that she has the right to do somehting like this…… WAKE UP!!

I mean really now, I don’t recall having ever seen a race of ANY sort that is INTENDED for photographers. If there were, I’m sure that it would be around the block and not 24k (or whatever). If you had the right as a photographer to do this, the nice telephotos would be cheaper, the sporting events would be shorter, and a good photo would be a dime a dozen. It’s just not a good shot if you ruin the event that would in fact MAKE it a good shot.

I agree to a large degree, but if she was, in fact, a press photographer, things could have been slightly different: This was in New York City, and if this was a photographer for the New York Times, I believe she had a bigger ‘right’ to be in the way, than Joanna Q Random, amateur photographer. Why? Well, photographers should never be part of the story, so those two photos in the Flickr stream shows she’s in the wrong, but perhaps she was photographing the event all day long, and that was the only time she was in the way?

Or maybe not: This is what the original poster said:

The whole thing took around 3 – 4 minutes and around 30 runners were inconvenienced (or that is how I saw it).

Having said that, though, Magnum agency sent a photographer along as well, and their photos look as if their photographer was on the road as well…

Obviously, the Flickr comment stream turned into a random slagging-off match, as one of the commenters notes:

All of these message boards and websites for photographers…and it seems like there’s a direct correlation between the level of professionalism exhibited in the comments and the actual professional status of the “photographer” posting. The cattier the comments, the less likely the poster is really a professional photographer.

Ultimately, I believe it all boils down to why you are there. If you are shooting for an important newspaper or magazine, your job is to represent the publication honourably (because you are their face to the world. If she was wearing a huge National Geographic jacket, people would have been more careful with their comments, but that doesn’t mean what she is doing is any better, from the runner’s viewpoint), but also to get the best photos possible.

If a wartime photographer has to risk his life for the best photo, that’s what he has to do. If a sports photographer has to inconvenience a runner or two in the course of her job, well then so be it.

Personally, I hate pissing people off, but there have been situations where the only way I could get the best shot was to elbow another photographer, push a policeman out of the way (!), and block off a road with my car. Granted, that was a one-off, and I seriously angered about 30 people that day, but I was the one who came home with the best photo, and nobody else’s pictures got used. Some times, being rude is a business decision…

What do you guys think? Good behaviour or bad behaviour, on her part? Vote in the poll, and leave a comment here or in the Flickr stream.

n

The NYC marathon photographer... Is she in the wrong or not?

• Yes, she should never have been there.
• Yes, but only if she is an amateur
• No, but only if she is a professional
• No, she's not doing anything wrong
• Uhmm, I don't know, actually...

View Results

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Better pictures with a compact

A compact camera is an “all in one” camera. This type of camera is (as the name implies) small and compact. There are many different types and qualities of compact cameras, from your average run-of-the-mill camera that you might get for free when you subscribe to a magazine, to highly expensive and advanced varieties.

We’ve done a lot of writing about compacts before here on Photocritic, including choosing the right digital compact for your needs, about Macro Photography with a compact camera, getting the most out of a compact, and adding threading to a digi compact. To my great surprise, I haven’t written anything in general about compacts, though, so I thought it was high time I changed that… 

The compact cameras is today, mainly split into three different categories, namely by their form of storing the pictures. The three varieties are APS, 35mm or digital. All three kinds have their pros and cons, but for most purposes, APS is dead, and the 35mm compact is going the way of the dodo – Digital is definitely the way forward!

It can be argued that disposable cameras are compacts, but for the sake of simplicity, we can just say that disposables are very simple compact cameras who use 35mm film (or in some rare occasions, APS), and concentrate on the more interesting features of compact cameras:

Short history of the compact camera

The history of compact cameras is indeed a bit vague. To be honest, one of the very first cameras that was sold in volume, the Kodak Brownie, was a compact camera. The real distinction for the compact cameras didn’t begin until 1936, when Germany’s E.H.G introduced the world’s first 35mm SLR. When the big companies, like Nikon, Canon and Leica started introducing SLR’s in the end of the 1950s, beginning of the 1960s, the difference between compact and SLR became more important.

By the mid-1970s, fully automatic compact cameras started appearing, a type of camera that would now be referred to as point and shoot.

Historically, the compact camera has always been the tool of the person who “just wanted to snap pictures” while photographers use SLR, Medium Format or a variety of other types of cameras.

Lately, the digital cameras have made an introduction. Ironically, history repeated itself: The first true digital cameras* were compacts, and it wasn’t until recently (mid-1999) that there was a digital camera that was good enough to be used by the press and other serious photographers

*) I am happily ignoring the fact that there were digital backs to medium format cameras available. These first digital cameras would cost the same as a medium-class sports car, and have nothing to do in this write-up about compact cameras :)

Characteristics of a compact camera

Currently, most compact cameras are electric, meaning electronic light meters, electrical film advance (winding the film to the next frame, and rewinding the film when all the frames have been filled) and everything. Usually you have not many choices when it comes to taking pictures, except from turning the flash off and on. There are a few of the top-range models that can have more advanced things, like shutter time, aperture settings etc, but in general, these cameras are for the “specially interested”, as the price of these cameras usually supersedes that of an entry-level SLR, and most users in that price class will probably chip in a few extra dollars (or pounds, kroner, kronor, gulden, drakmer, whatever your unit of currency might be) to get a full fledged SLR system.

Tips on using a compact camera (or: how to get more out of your camera)

Using a compact is not hard – and you can’t really do anything wrong. However, here are a few tips on how to improve your picture-taking with a compact camera:

Take many pictures – Obvious as this might sound, if you take many pictures, you will get used to your camera, and you will know its strengths and weaknesses after a while. Besides, the more pictures you take, the bigger is the chance of one of them being really good.

Don’t zoom in – walk closer – Due to physics, zooming in and walking closer are two quite different things. Just try it – look through your viewfinder, and zoom in on, say, a coca-cola bottle. Then, zoom out, and frame the picture just as you did. In about 90% of the cases, the second picture will just look better. Without explaining why (look for some of my later photography articles :), this is a general rule – it’s just the way it is. Besides, most compacts are constructed in such a way that if you zoom out, the lens has a bigger aperture. This means that it lets more light through, and that you get less depth of field – usually this is a good thing.

Zoom in on portraits – Flatly contradicting myself, I know. However: when shooting 35mm film, it is generally recommended to take portrait pictures on between 100-200mm length. If you take a look at the front of your compact, it will probably say something like “35-105mm” or “28-70mm” or something like that. Most compacts (with a few exceptions, just to make things more complicated) only have a limited maximum range – but zooming in all the way usually makes for better portraits. (this has the same reasons as above, but don’t take my word for it – just try it yourself)

Finally, Make sure you manage to avoid the Red Eye phenomenon.

Well.. That should get you going. Enjoy, and good luck!

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Marketing your stock photos

When we first wrote about Photostockplus, a discussion was sparked as to whether there is any point in spending money to make money. I realise this whole thing is turning into a bit of a saga, but you guys keep asking such great questions that I can’t let it lie.

Long-term reader Andy asked:

After reading the original post I was immediately interested in signing up for photostock plus. It sounds like a great idea. My only question is how effective are their marketers? Does the site get enough traffic that it wouldn’t be difficult to make a profit with a modest sized portfolio?

Of course, they were all excellent questions, and I didn’t have any of the answers. But hey, that’s why I’m a journalist, right? So I decided to call up the company and interview them, to see if I can help find you guys some answers… 

I spoke to a guy named John Vincelli at Photostockplus. He works in their Business Development department, and came up with some of the answers…

What’s your marketing like?

“About a month ago a push began which has become a promotional campaign aimed at creative directors, editors and publishers, as well as other buyers.”, Vincelli told me. “We also have ongoing relationships with web advertisers all over the world. I’ve seen some of the promotional material, by the way, and it’s really innovative and eye catching. So yes, our marketers are very good.”

In addition, keep in mind that these guys are making more money the more photos they sell. Sure they earn money through the membership fees they charge, but in the grand scheme of selling photography, it’s peanuts: Photography stock sales is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

From the stock agency’s point of view, it is in their best interest to sell as many images as they can. While they only take a 15% commission (which is very generous – Alamy, one of their biggest competitors, takes 35% commission, or 55% if the image is sold through their distribution network), it is enough of an incentive for them to make sure they sell lots of photos.

Do the math yourself: If they sell one of your photos at $100, you get $85, and they get $25. To you and me, that $85 is a nice bonus, but for a big company such as Photo Stock Plus, it’s hardly worth celebrating. But what if they manage to sell 100 photos instead? That’s actually quite a realistic figure for a good photographer with an extensive portfolio over the course of a year. Suddenly you earn $8,500, and they pocket $2,500. I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly happy to pay a company two and a half grand in order to make eight and a half myself…

Selecting photos carefully

Of course, when you try to sell your photos as stock, there’s no point in trying to take photos of things that have been photographed a million times already. In fact, the search function^al on Photostockpro is your best friend – Before you go out and take photos for sale, or before you upload them, do a quick search.

Vincelli explains: “What many photogs don’t realise is the fact that with the advent of the web and digital photography came an over-abundance of wannabe photographers, as well as actual photographers. Now they can all market their images to everyone on the planet. So the first thing I tell my stock clients is, whenever shooting for stock, the word that should be at the forefront of their thoughts is “UNIQUE”, because the competition is fierce. I also tell them to stay away from famous landmarks and sunsets.”

Keywording your photos

There is no point in fooling yourself: You may be the best photographer in the world, but unfortunately, searching for images is impossible: Potential clients search for words associated with an image. As such, you need to make damn sure that your keywords are in sync with what the actual photo, and that enough relevant keywords are added to allow a potential buyer to find the perfect photo.

This is true for any photographer-driven stock photography site, of course. “If a photographer takes the time to apply the right key words to their photos, checks out what’s on the first few pages in each of our categories, doesn’t post 8 different angles of the same subject, and follows the rest of our guidelines, buyers will find the client’s images.”, explains Vincelli, “We even have a few editors who contact our photographers and give them an honest appraisal of their work, and advise them on what they need to do to make their shooting profitable.”

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How to spot faked images

If you’ve ever worked with Adobe Photoshop – or indeed any image manipulation package, you’ll know how easy it is to make small and big changes to a photograph. But do you know how you can spot if an image has been doctored or not? Do you know the difference between a doctored photograph and the genuine thing? 

There’s a knack to spotting if an image has been edited or not. Shadows are usually the first give-away, as is inconsistant lighting. If you suspect a person’s head may have been added to another body, look extremely closely at the skin tones, and gradations. Look at the fringe, and see if the background looks consistent, colour-wise, with the original. Finally, use common sense and don’t believe your own eyes – if something looks unnatural, take a closer look, and see if you can find out why it doesn’t look kosher.

These are but some of the suggestions made in oe magazine’s excellent article on photofakery. Not only does it help you spot edited photos, but if you know what to look for, you will also become a better photo editor and photographer yourself: Concentrate on the pitfalls, and you can eradicate many of them!

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