Tips and Techniques | Photocrati

The Tuesday Composition: Space to Move Into, Space to Look Into

Casual Climber, Buttermilks. — Casual Climbing, Buttermilks.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

We’ve talked a fair bit about symmetry and asymmetry, it’s time now to talk about direction-various meanings and feelings that come along with where in absolute terms we place subjects in an image. There are several concepts “in play” when we talk about direction, so I’ll be devoting two, perhaps three columns of the Tuesday Composition to the topic.

The connection between direction and movement is a significant part of deciding where to best place objects in an image. When we have a moving subject in a scene, we often find it more natural when there’s more room “in front of” the moving object than behind it. That additional space we give the object to “move into” seems to suggest more movement from the object and can be part of telling a story about where the object is going to.

In Casual Climbing, providing the rock climber more space to ‘climb into” contributed to a sense of movement and also provided, along with other cues, a sense of danger and excitement. We’re left with no doubt that the climber is heading up. (more…)

Using Neutral Density Gradient filters

Mt. Oberlin Alpenglow, Glacier National Park. I used 2 ND grads, a 2-stop soft, and a 3-stop soft, to capture the enormous dynamic range of this image in-camera.

One of the great things about the advent of digital photography is that it has greatly reduced the number of filters I need to carry. Many of the functions we used to carry out with filters (warming/cooling, color filtering for B&W, soft-focus effects) are now much more easily and more accurately controlled in post-processing. But a few filters are still impossible for me to replace, particularly my polarizers and my set of neutral density gradient filters (ND grads).

ND grads were designed to address one of the fundamental challenges of photography, the challenge that light has too much dynamic range. We see the world with image sensors of seeing detail in a range of 13-14 stops in the same scene, our cameras tend to top out (even if we nail our exposures perfectly, which we don’t always do) at a few usable stops fewer than that. This means that we often see scenes in the world where we can make out detail and color in the shadows and in the highlights, scenes that our cameras cannot capture entirely. Because we often have the situation where the highlights are on on side of an image (e.g., the sky) and the shadows are on the other (e.g., the land), ND grads are an attempt to address this by darkening the lighter part of the image to bring it closer in exposure to the darker part. They’re grey (neutral) on one side, clear on the other, and there’s usually some sort of transition zone between the transparent grey area and the clear area to possibly make the effect less overt. (more…)

Playing with white balance…

I think what I love most about digital photography is the experimentation and freedom it allows. One quick little nugget that I’d like to share is playing with the white balance. Yes, that lovely feature that makes sure your whites are white and blues are blue is also a useful little tool when you want to add a bit of warmth to your images or change the “expression” of a photo by cooling it down. (more…)

Taking wedding pictures that stand out from the pack

I think it goes without saying that a professional photographer produces unique and creative images at a wedding that the ordinary guest can’t hope to duplicate. I’m saying it anyway because more and more I see people doing their best to do my job.

At a typical wedding there are 2,347 cameras. Everyone has a camera and everyone is taking snapshots. Then, all the snapshots go on Facebook for the world to see … right next to the shots that I have uploaded for my client. Also, the client sometimes uploads a ton of pictures from the CD I provide and they all mingle together in the giant Facebook stew of photography.

It’s easy to tell which pictures are mine. There aren’t many guests at a wedding using off-camera strobes for the formals or bouncing flash. However, there may be plenty of guests with decent, high-end camera’s taking snapshots. Many times these snapshots are good. So, what can I do to distinguish myself from these people? (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Visual Echoes

Backlit Foliage, North Falls — Backlit Foliage. North Falls

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

As we discussed last week, centered compositions often describe or emphasize a relationship between one half of an image and another. “What’s similar between these two?” “What’s different?” These compositions succeed because the image itself provides the answer to this questions. Reflections are a simple example of this, answering “it’s all the same”, making the relationship between the reflection and the reflected object a subject of the photograph.

But simple reflections and symmetries aren’t the only place (by far) where images take on life because of visual relationships we create between parts of an image. I refer to these visual relationships “echoes.” These visual echoes, like reflections, invite us to compare and contrast. But they can take on others forms as well, based on correspondences between line, form, texture and/or color. (more…)

Handholding: Making Sense of the 1/f rule

Polar Bear Walking. Without familiarity with the 1/f rule and how to use it, this 300mm shot would have been a blur. — Polar Bear Walking. Without familiarity with the 1/f rule and how to use it, this dusky 300mm shot would have been a blur.

I got some questions over the weekend about the details of the 1/f rule and I thought I’d share some of my answers with you. It is a simple formula which allows photographers to roughly estimate how fast a shutter speed they’ll need to prevent camera motion from blurring an image.

The “1/f rule” simply says that the longest shutter speed you can handhold a 35mm camera, with careful technique but without a tripod or other support, without getting blur from camera motion is about one second divided by the focal length of the lens (in millimeters). For a 100mm lens, the rule suggests that you’d have a shot at getting a sharp handheld shot at 1/100 of a second (or a 1/1000), but not a 1/10, or 1/50. This is fairly intuitive. Telephoto lenses magnify more, magnify motion more, than wide-angle lenses, and so you need a proportionally faster shutter speed to get a sharp image with the longer lens.

The rule is not particularly precise, though, and it is helpful to keep a few caveats in mind. (more…)

Working for the Man, Part 2

Back in March I posted an article entitled, Working for the Man about what life is like as a corporate shooter. Well I thought it was time for an update. We just survived a corporate-wide rumor that the Hatchet Man cometh, but as with most corporate chatter it was nothing but a rumor. So I live to shoot another day, (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Sometimes Centering Does Work

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

As I’ve said before (and will keep saying), these photographic “rules” we talk about are more like dozens of tools in a large toolbox, and the vast majority of your images will only use a small subset of those tools. In fact, often there are very good reasons to do precisely the opposite of whatever one of these guidelines might seem to suggest, sometimes the rules themselves are contradictory. Today’s column is a case in point. Last week I explored a number of reasons you’d usually be better off not centering things vertically or horizontally in your images. This week, I’m going to mention some exceptions, but those exceptions are no more hard-and-fast as the original “rule” was. As such, I hope that you’ll not only get some ideas about why images might work well centered, but also that you’ll get a little better idea of what I mean by the “toolbox” metaphor. (more…)

Photographing Cacti and Desert Succulents

Saguaro Silhouette. Nce idea, but this particular shot failed because of wind movement. — Saguaro Silhouette. Nice idea, but this particular shot wasn't a "keeper" because of wind movement. Pity!

(In my three-part introduction to photographing Death Valley (part 2, part 3), I noted that I wanted to spend some time talking about techniques for photographing cactus, my apologies for the delay in getting that finished for you. I hope it was worth the wait!)

Cacti astonish me. The desert air can be dessicating, a sponge pulling every drop of water out of everything around it, and yet many of these plants have evolved to survive and even thrive in these harsh environments.

For the photographer, cacti offer interesting forms, patterns and texture from their spines, and color from the occasional desert bloom. (more…)

Rules for Good Photography

I think now, more than ever, it’s hard to tell what makes a “good picture.”

Photography, like all art, is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc, etc. And with Photoshop becoming such an integral part of the work process, it’s getting to the point where the old “rules” for good photography are being tossed out the window. I think that’s just fine, and I’ll tell you why. (more…)