Photography student's success

Photograph by Margaret Laurie

It’s always a huge pleasure for me when I hear that I have been able to inspire someone and set them on the right track.

Margaret came to one of my weekend workshops here in Kirkcudbright in SW Scotland earlier this year. The other day she emailed me hardly able to contain here excitement because one of her photographs had been accepted for publication in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper. This is what Margaret said:

“You helped a lot to inspire me to take more photos, and give me some confidence to send my photos into the paper.

“This photo was taken a couple of Fridays ago at the beginning of May. We live in Ferryhill, Aberdeen and I'd woken early with the sun streaming in through the window, and out of the window saw this fantastic sunrise. I went across the road and that was the view from our street at 5.30am! I took loads of photos while my husband, and daughters were tucked up snugly in bed. The view looks over the rooftops towards the River Dee as it flows under Victoria Road bridge to the harbour then out to sea. The smoke on the right is from an offshore supply vessel. The cranes are all at the docks and the tiny dots are notorious Aberdeen seagulls! I loved the way the cranes and the aerials were leaning towards each other.

“My camera is a Nikon D80, exposure set on manual at 1/1600sec, f7.1, ISO 200, WB set on ‘Cloudy’. The focal length was 112mm.

“The weekend workshop in Kirkcudbright with yourself gave me the oomph to do something with my photos. As you can see I now use my camera in manual, and that's pretty much 99% of the time, and experiment with the white balance, and still take B & W.”

Very well done, Margaret. You have every right to be very proud of yourself. I can still remember the buzz I got from my first publication – and that’s a very long time ago.

Might I have done things differently? Well, perhaps I might have used a slightly different exposure setting, but Margaret has achieved such a beautiful result that any alterations would only amount to fine tweaking.

By using the ‘Cloudy’ White Balance (WB) setting, Margaret has added to the yellow/orange glow from the early morning sun. Great idea. With so much light available, I might have used a ISO 100 for maximum image quality, stopped the aperture down for extra depth of field (this part depends on what Margaret was wanting to capture; maybe she wanted limited depth of field), and used a slower shutter speed. This would have given an exposure of roughly 1/500sec at f11. 1/500sec should be quite fast enough to eliminate camera shake when using a lens with a focal length of 112mm – which on the Nikon D80 is equivalent to about 180mm.

Keep ‘em coming, Margaret. Very well done!

Photographing aerial perspective

I came across these photographs of mine this morning as I was sorting and cataloguing some of my old travel images. The top photograph shows two people strolling along the Roman wall at Antalya on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey. The bottom photograph is of a fishing boat with the mountains in the distance behind. They seemed such good examples of ‘Aerial Perspective’ I though it might be worth explaining something about it.

There are two very different types of perspective, and an understanding of both can be of fundamental importance to the photographer when creating a sense of depth - the third dimension - in our two-dimensional photographs.

Firstly, of course, there is linear perspective – that’s when objects nearer the camera appear larger than those further away. Photographers can exaggerate the effects of linear perspective by using different focal length lenses, painters and artists simple move their ‘disappearing point’ to create similar effects or distortions. More about all that some other time.

Aerial perspective has nothing to do with flying and looking down on your subject, in fact it would be more accurately described as ‘atmospheric’ perspective. It is the phenomenon that creates a sense of depth in a photograph by capturing the way the atmosphere makes distant objects appear less distinct and more bluish than those nearer the camera.

Aerial perspective is particularly noticeable with backlight (what nice photographers often refer to as contre-jour or ‘against the light’) in a slightly hazy atmosphere, and you can see its effect very clearly in the photograph above. The figures on the wall are in strong, black silhouette. The mountains behind get gradually lighter the further away they are. This gives a very powerful sense of distance and depth.

Painters and artists have been using this effect for many centuries. In particular, Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by it and I believe he was the first to use the term. I can bring to mind at least one of his paintings – Virgin of the Rocks, in which he has used it to great effect to give the illusion of tremendous depth within his picture.

I found this interesting techy page about aerial perspective and I suggest you give it a click and learn more…

http://psych.hanover.edu/krantz/art/aerial.html

How to use Manual Mode - part 2

There is nothing mysterious about the Manual (M) mode on your camera. I said last time that ‘M’ also stands for ‘magic’, well it’s true – the magic comes from you being in control and not the camera.

For those who have not used their camera on ‘M’ before, let’s take away some of the confusion and myth by saying that you do not need to juggle BOTH the shutter speed settings AND the aperture settings straight away and at the same time. You simply start with one or the other, set it – then look at the exposure scale (see pictures in last post) and move the other setting until the pointer is in the centre of the scale.

So how do you know whether to set the aperture or the shutter speed first?

Well, there are many subtleties, but basically it is very simple - let’s say you know that your subject is moving quickly so you need to set a fast shutter speed. Do it – set maybe 1/250sec. You can do that even before the camera comes up to your eye. Now, look through the viewfinder at your subject and change the aperture setting until the pointer on the exposure scale is in the centre.

If you know you need a small aperture in order to get the maximum depth of field for a landscape shot, for instance, set the aperture first – say f16. Then look at the exposure scale through the viewfinder and change the shutter speed (slow it down or speed it up) until the pointer is in the centre of the exposure scale.

Of course, as a rough guide, the smaller the aperture (higher the f number) the slower the shutter speed will have to be. The faster the shutter speed, the wider (lower f number) the aperture must be.

All this needs practice – but so does anything worth doing. Eventually you will get to the stage where you can take pride in the fact that your camera craft has become intuitive. You will make mistakes – don’t worry. We all do.

Never let setting the exposure get in the way of capturing the moment. You will be surprised how quickly you will be able to set your exposures manually. Do bear in mind that once your exposure has been set roughly for the light in a particular situation, chances are that only minor adjustment, if any, will be necessary for each different picture. If you think you are going to miss a picture – revert to Auto Exposure mode. It’s the picture that matters, not the way it’s exposed.

For photograph of the cows on the beach, I set a small aperture first – f16. That was because I needed all the depth of field I could get. The shutter speed was then set to match that aperture. The photograph is not just about cows, it is about cows out of context in an unusual setting. That setting had to be sharp and clear – hence lots of depth of field.

Depth of Field 2

In my last post I showed you a landscape photograph I took with a very wide aperture in order to limit the depth of field. Also contributing to this limited depth of field was the use of an 85mm lens. Normally, the longer the focal length of a lens the less depth of field it will give. So using a wide aperture with an 85mm lens is guaranteed to limit it and throw much of the scene out of focus. It is a technique that must be used with great care in landscapes. It can look dreadful. Usually it is used to isolate a particular part of the scene. In the case of that picture taken in Thassos, it was used to give an abstract feel to the shot.

It is far more common to aim for the maximum depth of field when taking landscape photographs. That means smaller apertures – f16 or less.

A wide angle lens is a favourite for landscape photographers because it has inherently tremendous depth of field. It also has and the ability to exaggerate the perceived perspective, which has the effect of creating the illusion of depth within a two dimensional image.

In the picture of the old wooden wreck above, I wanted the absolute maximum depth of field, so I have used a wide-angle lens, stopped the aperture right down to f22 and used a shutter speed of 1/4sec. The camera was, of course, put on a tripod, so I was able to use ISO 100 in order to get maximum quality.

Depth of Field

I'm looking out of the window and the rain is pouring down and washing away the frost. It is still nearly dark at midday. So I thought I would cheer up by looking at a picture taken on the beautiful island of Thassos.

I am always stressing to my students that they should not get too hung up and obsessed by the importance of depth of field. Well, here is a shot that gets much of its visual interest from the fact that I have deliberately limited the depth of field.

I used a very wide aperture in order to throw much of the picture slightly out of focus . Why?

Well, when I looked at this scene I was reminded of a painting by one of the French Impressionists, Claude Monet. I was trying to achieve a sort of 'mystical', soft feel to the image. Of course I did take other pictures with smaller apertures to get the whole scene sharp. But this is the picture I am most pleased with.

An 85mm lens was used at f2.8

Beside, it's an excuse for me to use a sunny picture on a gloomy winter's day.

The nights get shorter and the days get longer now!!!

Wide angle lens - Part 1

Do you have a wide angle lens but rarely take it out of your camera bag? I reckon a wide angle is one of the most useful lenses you can own for everything from landscapes to portraits… it just needs treating with a bit of respect and understanding.

A wide angle lens is not just to get ‘more in’. There, I’ve said it again - something I bang on about to my students every time we talk about short focal length lenses. A lens with a focal length equivalent to about 24mm is perhaps the most useful because it has the effect of accentuating the perspective of your pictures without distorting things too much. Yes, I know there are people who would argue that it does nothing of the sort, but I was careful to say ‘has the effect of’. It has the effect of making the foreground appear nearer and the background further away because it captures more in the frame, and yes, I suppose it is useful for getting ‘more in’ when you are taking pictures in confined spaces.

The most obvious effect of this accentuated perspective is to add a greater illusion of depth, or the third dimension, to your two dimensional photographs.


The perspective of the bridge and the boats has been exaggerated with a 24mm lens to ensure that the eye is led right into the picture. The swans, of course, are the focal point, but the overall effect makes the viewer feel as though he could clamber out over the boats

Lenses equivalent to a focal length of less than 24mm start to have considerable distorting effect. I rarely use them for this reason. The shorter the focal length, the wider the angle of the lens, and the greater the distortion. Pictures taken purely for the effect of a super wide, or fish-eye lens have become a cliché and unless you have specific purpose for such a lens you are unlikely to get much use from it. However, a 24mm or perhaps 28mm equivalent can be extremely well employed for a great range of subjects. For landscape, townscape and interior shots in particular the 24-28mm equivalent lens is indispensable. I say ‘equivalent’ because you have to remember that unless your digital SLR has a full-frame sensor – and most digital SLRs do not – there is a magnification factor of around 1.6. So you need a lens with an actual focal length of around 15mm to get the ‘equivalent’ of a 24mm.




This time a 21mm wide angle lens has been used to gather extra information into the picture. This man is a saddler and I wanted to show what he was doing and the sort of tools he used to do it. The tools were carefully arranged in the near foreground and he was asked to stand back just a little and reach forward. This has added to the effect of extra depth by making his hands look slightly bigger so that he seems to be coming further out of the picture

Yes, a wide angle lens can be used to ‘get more in’ and it really come in handy with interior shots. I would have been unable to include the entire room in this photograph without a 24mm lens. This lens has already started to distort the settee a little. Had I used an even shorter focal length lens, I would have got ‘even more in’, but the distortion would have been unacceptable. Notice how I have been able to include the flowers in the foreground to create a pleasant atmosphere. By stopping down to a small aperture, the already considerable depth of field of the wide angle lens has been boosted even more. Those flowers are just three feet away from the camera, yet they and the background are perfectly in focus

Next, in Part 2 - wide angles and converging verticals