Cropping for more impact

In my last post I mentioned that I took a student who was with me for one-to-one tuition, down to my favourite cove on the seashore near my home - I posted a photograph of him down on the beach. Well, this morning I got a lovely email from Phil Hallam, who has put up some of the pictures he took on a webpage... it's worth taking a look..

www.picasaweb.google.com/hallamphoto

Phil started taking photographs only ten months ago, so I think the results he produced during his day with me are all the more remarkable.

As I am never loathe to print a favourable comment, this is what Phil said about his day here in Galloway...

"Just a quick word to say thank you for an amazing day. I learnt more in one day with you than I have reading books or instruction manuals over the last 10 months."

Anyway, I introduced Phil to the idea of Photoshop and explained that many of the adjustments that can be made to a photograph after it has been taken are perfectly legitimate - cropping and darkening a foreground or sky, for instance. This is not 'cheating' in any way and it's not new. It's just a matter of using the old skills and modern tools that are available - the Victorian photographers were masters of re-touching and adjustment of an image in the darkroom, so Photoshop - or post processing with any imaging programme- is only a modern way of doing what is really very old hat.

When I was working full time using black and white film, I knew exactly what I was going to do to a photograph when I put the negative in the enlarger. I knew this at the time of taking the photograph - when the button was pressed. Now, when I work with digital cameras, I have a fair idea of what I am going to do to a photograph when I get it onto the computer. This 'post processing' is, to me, all part of the normal way of producing the picture as I envisage it in the real world.

Above I have posted one of Phil's super shots he took during his time on the coast with me. This is the way Phil saw it and took it and posted it on his web page. It has not been cropped, or changed it in any way.

Below is the same photograph. However - hope you don't mind, Phil - this time I have cropped it a little and used the burning in tool and dodging tool to emphasize the dark storm clouds and waves. I would have done exactly the same sort of cropping, darkening and lightening if I had had this photograph in the darkroom. The idea is to maximise the impact of the photograph and to attempt to guide the viewer's eye to the most important elements of the composition. Notice that I have cropped a lot off the right hand side of the composition, but very little off the left hand side. This has put the waves more to the right so that the eye follows their movement to the left and brightest side of the picture. I agree that my crop has put the horizon pretty near the centre of the frame, but I think this is a price worth paying to get more visual impact from the movement of the waves.

Maybe you prefer this version, well that's fine, but I think you will have to agree that the cropped version does have more impact.

Hope to see you again soon, Phil.

How to photograph moving water - part 1

I had a great day yesterday with Yvonne and Phil who came all the way up from London for a day’s tuition here in Scotland. We spent most of the morning going through some basics on their cameras – with Yvonne keen to understand more about white balance and how to use the manual exposure mode on her Nikon D40.

The weather was good and after lunch we had the choice of either photographing one of the many coves just along the coast, or another of my favourite locations – a beautiful and delicately intricate waterfall that drops out of the Galloway hills not far from my base here in Kirkcudbright.

As Yvonne was keen to try out her skills with moving water – we donned our wellie boots and headed to the waterfall.

You can hear the roar of the waterfall well before I can see it. It’s very well hidden – a real fairy dell. The water drops about 40 feet down a sheer face, it’s stream splitting into several channels which tumble over blackened, mossy rocks. The fall was once used for industrial purposes, and some cast iron pipes still mar the pristine quality of the scene. These can be used as subjects in their own right, or, with careful framing be cut out altogether.

I suggested a simple shooting plan to give the shoot a sense of purpose. We did not rush in to get shots of the water right away, but stood well back and took a good look at the whole scene before me. There is no need to rush in these situations. Waterfalls do not run away, nothing is going to change except the light, and on an overcast day that is unlikely to change much, so take your time and consider each shot. I prefer an overcast day because it helps reduces contrast between the white water and black rock, and if the sun does shine through the trees it can soon create over-exposed hot spots.

We started by taking pictures that included lots of foreground. The green mosses made a startling foreground, so too did the branches of the dead trees.

A good solid tripod is essential if, like me, you prefer to create that mystical, fairy-like, movement in the falling water. You need very slow shutter speeds to do that, about 1sec for maximum effect with a small waterfall, and here overcast weather helps again. The less daylight there is, the slower the shutter speed you will be able to use.

In my DVd on Light and Composition (available from my website), I showed you how to look at the world in rectangles, and introduced you to an imaginary ‘Rectangle Monkey’ who always helps you think and see in rectangles – that’s the way the camera sees. Photographing a waterfall like this is a good time to adopt that way of thinking, because the actually face of the waterfall as it drops down the cliff is really quite two-dimensional, and it is a simple matter to divide the waterfall up into interesting rectangles – starting with the overall view and then framing different interesting areas in both horizontal and vertical rectangles.

CORRECT EXPOSURE
To find the exposure using Manual (M) exposure mode is simple. Knowing I need a slow shutter speed, I just set a very small aperture, f22 and point the camera at the subject (I prefer centre-weighted metering for this type of subject). Then I slow the shutter speed down until the exposure scale in the viewfinder tells me I have the correct exposure. At ISO 100 this gave me a shutter speed of around 1sec; perfect for the moving water effect I was looking for. You do not need fast ISO settings when the camera is on a tripod and you want to use a slow shutter speed… keep it low for best results and better quality.

The pictures here were taken by me on a previous visit to the waterfall – yesterday, I was far too busy helping Yvonne and Phil to get their photographs.

Lower photograph of the waterfall

I started with a simple wide angle shot of the scene, taking in lots of that wonderful green moss in the foreground with the waterfall away in the distance. One of the less appealing aspects of this view can be seen – the end of an old water pipe, just off centre in the picture. There was no way of avoiding this from this angle. A couple of clicks with the cloning tool in Photoshop will soon sort it.

Top photograph

I used the rushing water in the stream beneath the fall to make a lively, moving foreground that injected a real feeling of depth – the third dimension – to the composition. With the wide-angle lens I was able to stand right in the middle of the stream. Here’s when those wellie boots really come in handy

Also pictured above are Yvonne and Phil, my students for the day - they came up from London for their photography tuition

In part 2 I'll explain more about composition - and white balance

Learning how to print black and white

When I visited the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC in Birmingham last week, I happened to be attracted to the Ilford stand. Now I can say with pride that I have won many awards in what used to be the Ilford Print of The Years Competitions in the past, so naturally, I took a close look at some of the winning prints.

I saw one print that was definitely out of focus in the enlarger and the quality of the print left a bit to be desired. Perhaps it’s because so few photographers are competent with film printing these days. Standards must have fallen.

Now when I was a lad…

I don’t suppose many professional photographers have started their careers on their hands and knees, but that is what happened to me. My first job after leaving school clutching my solitary ‘O’ Level in art – the only examination I ever took - was to print the photo-sales for a local weekly newspaper. For this mammoth task (there were hundreds of black and white prints to do every day) I was given a suitably elephantine piece of equipment – a gigantic, old-fashioned horizontal enlarger.

If you have never seen a horizontal enlarger, and in this day of digital, there is no reason why you should have, you’ll have to imagine a 19th Century lantern slide projector running on rails about 6 feet long. I blame this obstinate colossus - all mahogany, brass, and leather bellows, for my permanent stoop and stunted growth.

The inventive and sadistic chief photographer had mounted this enlarger against the wall, vertically, to save space. A large hole had been sawn in the ceiling above to accommodate the lamp house that housed a light bulb the size of a football. Even so, the brute was still so long that in order to print anything bigger that a whole-plate, the baseboard had to be put on the floor. It needed to of us to heave the lamp house up the rails to print a 10 x 8. That bulb got so mad hot that smoke would filter though the ceiling into the typing pool upstairs.

Oh how I wished that dreadful thing would go up in flames.

Despite the size and power of the bulb, by the time its light had travelled down to the lens through the enormous condensers, it barely had strength to trickle onto the printing paper. Exposures of quite extraordinary duration were called for and these had to be timed by counting the seconds in my head. There was no darkroom clock, and I couldn’t afford a watch on £3 a week. I dreaded orders for multiple prints.

These long exposures and the monster’s instability in its unnaturally upright position, meant that if anybody in the building slammed a door while I was counting, the condensers would get the shakes, the print would blur and I would have to start again and make a fresh one. This terrible state of uncertainly shredded my youthful nerves and, to help me relax after work my older colleagues would sneak me into the local pub, where they taught me to drink pints of strong beer, several years before I was legally entitled.

I was only allowed out of the darkroom for tea breaks, and then I would come out blinking like a bat, to brew-up for an ill-assorted bunch of dissipated press photographers. The tea was so strong that if stripped the glaze off the mugs. During these tea breaks I destroyed my taste buds and learned a great deal about bad language and photography.

Reducing camera shake - simply

Now you can laugh it this is you like, but the embedded video below demonstrates a method of keeping your camera steady - by using a piece of string. I have used this method for many years - and I promise you it can work. The video shows quite a refined version. I just make a loop at one end through which I put my foot, and the other end I simply wrap around the camera a couple of times. The idea of using the tripod screw at on the camera's base is a good one.

The truth is, this really can work - not in all circumstances, I admit, but it costs nothing, weighs nothing and you can stuff it into your pocket. If you lose it, you simply find another piece of string.
Thanks to Jon for this



$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - video powered by Metacafe

Photographing white on white

White walls, white steps, white roofs, white guttering – and even the white pot from which all that white paint comes – so where’s the photographic interest in that lot? Just all white isn’t it? Well, there’s a lot more to a white surface than you might think at first glance.

I’ve long been fascinated by the extraordinary array of textures, tones and hues to be found in plain old white. Photographing white surfaces and objects presents lots of difficulties, but all can be easily overcome with a little attention to basic technique.

The pictures here are the result of a one hour stroll though the narrow alleys of one small village in Menorca. Almost everything there is painted white.

To keep things simple, I set the White Balance (WB) to Auto White Balance (AWB), and this coped extremely well bearing in mind the tremendous range of colour temperatures between deep shade and bright sun..

The most difficult problem, when photographing white objects is exposure – but it is really a lot easier to solve than you might think. If you point your camera, with its built-in light metering system, at a white object it will register an awful lot of reflected light. In effect, your metering system is looking at all that white, saying ‘Gosh, there’s loads of light here, let’s cut down’. It is being fooled into cutting the exposure down. Unless you are aware of this – and do something about it – your picture will be under-exposed. All you have to do is set your Exposure Compensation function to around +1 – that’s plus one value, or one full ‘f’ stop. Then your camera will ‘over-expose’ by plus one ‘f’ stop to compensate for all that reflected light, and your image will be correctly exposed. Experiment until you get the exposure you want.

Setting the Exposure Compensation value to over-expose by about one full ‘f’ stop is one of the simplest ways of getting the right exposure when photographing white. Don’t be afraid to experiment, you might sometimes need to compensate even more if the white is particularly bright

If you are using the Manual ‘M’ settings as I do all the time, there are another way of getting around this under-exposure difficulty when photographing white areas. I might frame my picture approximately and look at the exposure scale in the viewfinder. I then just set my exposure to over-expose by the appropriate amount – in other words, leave the pointer on the ‘plus’ side of centre. I do this either by setting one full ‘f’ stop over, or doubling the exposure time; for example, I’ll use 125sec instead of 250sec.

Top photograph

Looking out from a shaded alleyway at the brightly lit church tower caused fewer exposure problems than you might think. I just framed the picture and set the exposure using the centre-weighted mode. This has taken the reading from the very bright white tower, but also taken into consideration the large areas of shaded white. Notice how the light is slanting across the right hand surface of the church tower has created texture, while the light hitting the left side is straight on, and this has shown a flat, pure white surface

Bottom photograph

All the time I am looking for patterns and shapes created by shadows. These can be used as compositional devices in the same way that any other subject can. So place these shadows carefully and move around to adjust the composition. Shadows can create really interesting designs on white

Next, in part 2 – more exposure options

Photographing people - TEN TIPS

Questions, questions
My students ask all these questions when I suggest we go out and take pictures of people in the street. Some have to make a great effort to pluck up enough courage just to take the camera of the bag. Usually it does not take them long to see how much fun it is and how good the rapport can be with total strangers.

Here are five questions I am asked most often...

Q
Will people object to being photographed?
A
Well, I suppose you can make a friend or a foe in 1/500sec, but mostly people will either ignore you altogether, or ask why you are taking their picture. A perfectly reasonable question that deserves an answer. The amateur photographer has got the ideal reply – “I’m just a keen photographer who enjoys photographing people, I hope you don’t mind.”

Q
Will they become aggressive?
A
Very, very rarely. Common sense and basic street craft comes into play here and you will soon learn when to leave the camera in the bag. If someone tells you to ‘go away’, just smile and go, don’t argue, there are plenty of other subjects to choose from.

Q
Should you ask permission first?
A
I nearly always prefer to get something in the can and ask permission afterwards. Again, much depends on the circumstances, but remember, when someone says they don’t mind being photographed, you might have a ‘tame’ subject and you should ask to take more pictures.

Q
What should you do if they spot you taking their picture?
A
Take another picture – often the reaction to being photographed can create a very special photograph. Then smile broadly, hold both hands up and tell them what you are doing and why.

Q

May I publish a photograph I've taken of someone in the street?

A

Yes. Provided the photograph is not detrimental in any way to the person's character of good name. If you use the photograph for advertising purposes, that person may have a legitimate complaint.

TEN TIPS
Use fast shutter speeds to freeze people’s movements. 1/250sec minimum if possible. This may require a faster ISO such as 400 or 800 in poor light conditions.

Keep your camera set for instant use either with the correct exposure on Manual mode, or use TV (shutter priority mode). And keep your camera accessible – preferably around your neck and perhaps tucked into your jacket.

Be patient. Be observant and watch people closely.

Be aware of everything going on around you.

Anticipate where people are likely to go – you will learn to predict their movements quite well with practise.

Find good viewpoints and wait for people to move into them.

Start with ‘back view’ shots of people.

Take lots of pictures. That ‘decisive moment’ can be elusive.

Travel light – big, heavy camera bags are a nuisance and will attract attention.

Keep your camera bag zipped up when working in a crowded street. It would be a shame to lose equipment to light fingers while you are concentrating on taking pictures.

Top photograph
Once you have got more used to being seen about in the street with your cameras you can really start to enjoy yourself. You will find subjects everywhere. You must always be aware of what is going on around you all the time. Keep your eyes open and be prepared to move quickly into the best position when you see an interesting situation developing. Sometimes the subjects come right up to you. In this case, the two butchers were carrying their wares down a Dublin street. With the exposure already set and using a wide angle lens, all I had to do was wait until they filled the frame and press the button

Middle photograph
Towns like Cambridge are well used to people taking pictures, and chances are that you will be totally ignored when you raise the camera to your eye in a town like this. Don’t be in too much of a rush to take dramatic ‘candid’ shots of people straight away. Take it easy and slowly and concentrate on taking pictures of people who are absorbed in something else

Bottom photograph
No photographer worth his salt is going to walk away from an opportunity like this. Just keep pressing the button. With lively subjects it is always best to take lots of pictures. There is no need to interfere with what is going on – the kids are having a ball. The most important thing was to avoid a soaking from the little beggars