skies over brighton beach
Originally uploaded by adrians_art

Here’s a lovely family/landscape photo by a local photographer that uses a filter creatively to make give dramatic black-and-white film image even more punch. Take a look at the Website of the photographer Adrian Campfield , which he shares with his artist wife, Louize.

[I found it via the Brighton page of the Worldflicks site.]

With the holiday season approaching, you might want to read Dan Chung’s travel photography tips from The Guardian.

Brian is going to a wedding and wants some tips. I’m guessing he’s taking a digital point-and-shoot so this gives me an excuse to give some slightly different advice from my usual as well as to summarise some of my old favourites. Brian’s first commenter is right: you should take lots of photos and hope for some good shots, but if you do so with some simple rules-of-thumb in mind then your hit rate will be significantly higher.

First of all, leave the set-pieces—cake-cutting, stiffs-in-rows—to the pros and the billion monkeys. If you want to come away from the celebrations with something different then do something different.

So sneak away from the centre of the action is and sneak up on some characters.

One advantage of having lots of memory capacity to hand, as Brian plans, is that you can stop chimping and concentrate on what’s going around you. When you are checking your work and deleting dud frames you are not keeping your eye out for interesting action and capturing good frames.

Use your optical zoom (not your digital zoom) to get in close whenever you can. Practically the first piece of advice I gave here was to forget about including legs and background objects when you photograph people. No one is interested in trousers and church spires; they want to see human emotions.

If you are using the long end of your lens to magnify the view then you should remember that this will magnify your own body movements as well, increasing the blurring caused by camera shake so, if your camera has it, use its built-in image stabilization. If it hasn’t then learn to hold it steady and/or get a cheapo tripod

If possible, avoid using your built-in flash. It turns humans into cardboard cut-outs, with red eyes, flat features, and harsh silhouettes and shadows. If you can’t use flash then you’ll need to get where the light is: outdoors, near entrances, by windows. If the light is low and you want to avoid blur then you need shorter exposures so choose higher ISO speeds and, if your camera gives you control over aperture settings, use a bigger aperture—that’s a lower f-number. (The least-bad on-camera flashes are those that are positioned furthest away from the lens so keep this in mind when you buy and, if your camera allows you to, try to get a remote flash.) In fact, opening the aperture up wide, but not too much, is the key to giving portrait shots intimacy and depth—as opposed to depth-of-field.

Try taking some shots where your target isn’t in the centre of the frame. Focus on the eyes of your subject and then recompose to put them exactly where you want them. Here are some things you might want to think about in those milliseconds of reframing: keep background clutter out of the shot, put more space on the side of the frame they are looking towards, remember the rule-of-thirds, and take advantage of dramatic diagonals and other “ambient” framing.

The last piece of advice I have to offer is a bit of a downer for the dilettante: the best photos I have taken have come from my being “on” continuously for hours at an event. I never touch a drop of booze; I eat very little; I only have one ear on any conversation I am taking part in; and I always, always have at least one camera with me. Of course, you don’t have to be a party-pooper if you’re one of a billion: you’re bound to get lucky and create a masterpiece eventually. Stands to reason, dunnit?

I don’t know whether or not the image on the other end of this link has been photoshopped, but it does make an important point well: looking at the world through a long lens can blind you to more interesting things close-up. Always have your camera ready, but use your eyes first.

In The Morning News, Nicole Pasulka interviews photographic artist Marilyn Winter and reproduces some of her extraordinary images.

To demonstrate further that I am not down on Photoshop per se, via Lifehacker, here’s a tutorial that explains how you can make your photos look older with Photoshop.

A commercial photographer friend of mine who rather likes digital photography complained to me a while back that he had no objection to the manipulation of images, digital or otherwise, with Photoshop to improve them; his real problem was with its growing widespread use by the ignorant and incompetent—and he was talking about people who get paid to use the program—to unintentionally make images look worse.

One of my current bugbears is the artificial selective defocusing of the background in close-up photos of, for example, flowers or delicate items of food. Lifestyle magazines are full of this lately. Some news magazines have even started doing it with portraits of interviewees.

The aim is to imitate the effect of a macro photograph taken with a film camera and the aperture wide open. The result is as appealing as you get when you smear Vaseline on a portrait lens. It can be faked passably by someone who understands how a film photograph really looks (and the underlying optical reasons for it), but it rarely is. It’s the visual equivalent of ear-scratching digital reverb on badly recorded pop music from the 80s. The irony is that digital can be a wonderful medium for macro work; just as new technology makes it easier to produce and manipulate a superb result, the people wielding it lack the talent or care to produce even a mediocre one.

The images of celebrities on the covers of magazines are another source of irritation to me. In most cases the people responsible for creating them have used the Photoshop “heal” tool—or whatever it’s called; I’m not a Photoshop user—so aggressively to smooth away any inhomogeneity in their subjects’ skin that the women (it’s usually women) they depict might as well have been extruded from a rubber mould.

My objection to this is an aesthetic one, but there are of course very good ethical ones about the effect of such unrealistic images of idealised femininity on women who don’t have their own personal stylists, including women who are in reality more beautiful than those held up as an example to them. But such images sell magazines and sell cosmetics and sell plastic surgery—even to the women depicted in them. In fact it’s hard to persuade women, or indeed men, to buy magazines that publish authentic images of other women. Even those rags that specialise in catching celebrities off-guard or off-duty use Photoshop in reverse to exaggerate their physical imperfections.

There are plenty of before-and-after type sites around the Web these days, where you can see how Photoshop is routinely used to manipulate images in the media, but via Paintalicious [link broken 15:05 04Jan07] I saw for the first time [I don't have a TV] an illustration of the whole process shot in time lapse style with a moving picture camera (and paid for by a cosmetics company!). The result is a short film called Evolution.

UPDATE: This reply video is brilliant too.

Cinema is what you get when you take a lot of still photographs in rapid succession and add sound to them. Even today when films are not only shot digitally but created digitally too—made inside a computer and not taken from the real world—the best movies are the best because of their makers’ attention to still-photography principles of lighting, composition, optics, and social engineering. You can learn a lot about photography by paying attention to what you see on screen when you go to the cinema or watch a DVD. Most DVDs have the added advantage of commentaries explaining how what you see was made, commentaries made by those involved in doing the work itself.

I was recently surprised to learn a lot from the Criterion Edition(!) of Armageddon and even more surprised to find myself recognizing my own photographic traits in the approaches taken by the film’s director Michael Bay. When I saw the film at the cinema I remember thinking it was bad—and I am anything but an art house movie snob. One of the first questions on the commentary track is: “Why is there a Criterion Edition of Armageddon?” In the Criterion essay by one of Bay’s former tutor’s, Jeanine Basinger, she describes how she immediately admired his still photography:

The first time I saw Michael Bay, he was a polite eighteen-year-old who stopped by my office at Wesleyan University to tell me he wanted to major in Film Studies. He also asked me if I would like to see his still photographs. As a teacher, I believe there is only one answer to that question: “Of course.” (It’s my job.) Over the years, I’ve seen a great deal of material from freshmen—short stories, novels, plays, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, prints, fashion designs, videos, computer art, movies in 8mm and 16mm, even recipe collections—but I have yet to see anything like Bay’s high school photos. They were astonishing—revealing an amazing eye for composition, an instinct for capturing movement, and an inherent understanding of implied narrative.

Armageddon was shot on over a million feet of hi-res Kodak film and directed by a former still photographer. It looks like it. It also looks like it was shot by a former director of music videos and advertisements. That’s what Michael Bay is. This is probably one of the many reasons why so many critics hated it. I found the clumsy use of coloured filters to cast skies and landscapes particularly painful to watch, but there are many other striking and powerful visual effects (and I don’t mean that in the sense of “SFX”) in the movie. You might not want to imitate them directly, but listening to the director explain how he obtained them is, er, illuminating.

This still shows William Fichtner who plays a NASA shuttle pilot. In the accompanying part of the commentary, the film’s director Michael Bay describes part of his visual style. He

• offsets subjects in the frame,
• favours extreme brow-to-jaw close-ups,
• uses old lenses for their characteristic flare (halos and spikes around bright lights),
• shoots movement through prominent defocused foregrounds,
• views scenes from low angles
• tries to tell as much of the story as possible without words

All of these are things I like to do, but there are other more general lessons that a still photographer can learn from the way movie images are made.

Film stages are artificially uncluttered. In contrast, when you watch home movies of real settings it’s striking how much irrelevant surrounding junk moves your eyes away from the action, even in videos of locations well known to you. Our visual systems filter irrelevant details from real-world environments, but we find it much harder to see the wood for the trees in two-dimensional projections of reality. Craftspeople and technicians deliberately simplify movie furniture, movie food, movie textiles, even movie street signage. Unless you have complete control over your photographic environment—a studio, assistant(s), stylist(s)—you can’t do all of this, but you can tidy away the “junk” in your own images in other ways, by framing closely on your main subject, by opening up the aperture to defocus less other elements, by choosing carefully the space in which you capture your images.

Film-makers work to a plan. In their minds they will have a vision; on paper they will draw a storyboard—a “comic-strip” of the shots that they hope will make up the final movie. Some people think that one of the most important differences between good professional photographers and good amateurs is that the pros have a picture in mind before they take one and get it because they know how to; the amateurs get a shot more by accident. The better you plan, the fewer images you will delete or dud frames you will find on a roll.

Film-makers must exercise patience. Small-scale still photography jobs rarely last longer than a day or two, but big-budget movies are long projects that require the co-operation of many skilled craftspeople. If you cultivate just a fraction of their patience you are more likely to get the kind of results you are aiming for.

Film directors usually insist on multiple takes of every scene and only print the best. You should do the same. Your camera has continuous shooting and exposure bracketing capabilities for a reason.

If you are taking formal wedding shots then the movie model becomes even more relevant. You do literally direct people into place or, even better, let them move naturally and choose the shots you take and print in order to “edit down” the “cut” of the proceedings that you finally show. Often you do this to emphasise the connections between the participants. Most weddings are, by still portrait photography standards, big productions and involve families and friends. If you want to tell their stories and convey their emotional relationships then it helps to be able to see how they relate to each other physically.

Steve Shill, one of the directors of HBO’s historical TV drama Rome, used to be a painter and an actor. Despite their very different professional backgrounds (and the different media they work in), Shill shares some visual tastes with Bay. In his commentary to Episode 8 of Rome he also talks about how he also likes to shoot his main players close-up with wide lenses, and, like Bay, Shill is careful to choose the aperture and framing in such shots to capture the relationships between the characters. Even when their mouths are closed and their features blurred he wants the arrangement of the other faces in each frame to say something about the narrative and their place in it.

Think about this when you take your own must-have shots: make sure you can identify and include your main players, guide your cast into the best places (“block” them, if you like), and always keep in mind your own overall vision of the event you are recording.

It’s perhaps a little cute of me finally to compare the approach of modern wedding photographers who aim to take more relaxed photographs with that used in the “making of” footage that often comes bundled with DVDs, but it’s true that some of the most pleasing group shots are the ones you snatch during the assembly and disassembly of formal groups. Family photographers should be interested in humans, not roles, and pictures of people at play can say so much more than pictures of people in place.

A reader in Istanbul asks how she can take photographs of black cats that show the texture and not just the outline of their fur. This is the perfect excuse for the first WedPhotBlog post about setting exposure. Like setting the aperture, this is a huge subject, but one that I can introduce briefly and I hope usefully. I’ll do the science bit first and then we’ll have a look at some black fur.

Both film and digital cameras work by collecting light onto a detector. Most of the time this detector—a piece of film or a sensor—is kept in complete darkness. When you press the shutter on your camera, light is allowed into it and onto the sensor. The light comes through the lens, via a precisely controlled size of opening, then, after a precisely controlled period of time, darkness returns. Usually all of this happens before you have released the pressure of your finger from the switch that triggered the process.

John Hedgecoe in his New Manual Of Photography compares exposing a light-sensitive surface to reflections from your subject with filling an empty tumbler. The amount of water in the tumbler depends on the size of the pipe carrying the water—the aperture—and the length of time water is allowed to flow from the pipe into the tumbler—the shutter speed.

In any given situation, if the camera shutter is left open for a long time, say one minute, then lots of light can flow in. If it is left open for a short time, say one-four-thousandth of a second, then far less light can flow in. If you turn a tap on for tool long a time the tumbler will overflow. Similarly if you expose your film/sensor to too much light your image will be over-exposed. If you turn on a tap for too short a time there won’t be enough water in the tumbler for a decent drink. Similarly, too little light leads to under-exposure. Slow film, say 100ASA, is like a tall tumbler—it takes a lot of light to “fill” it. Fast film , say 800ASA, is like a short tumbler. Helpfully, digital cameras usually use the same ASA system to describe different levels of sensor light sensitivity settings.

Just as they can now autofocus in an “intelligent” way, modern cameras are extremely good at judging exposure times automatically. There are, however, unusual situations that can fool them. If you have ever tried to photograph people, animals, or buildings against a snowy landscape you will understand. The built-in light meters in even the most sophisticated cameras aggregate the overall level of light in clever ways but this means that they can be fooled by the surrounding brightness of the snow into thinking that the subject you are interested in is bouncing more light through the lens than it actually is. As a result, for example, the features of any human face against this background will be obscure because the camera will open the shutter for too short a time to allow enough light to be reflected from that face to define its features.

You can get around this kind of problem in many ways, but the simplest two are as follows:

1. You can make sure your subject fills the frame of your picture, so the background plays less of a part in the camera’s exposure calculations
2. You can force your camera to base its exposure calculations on the part of the image you are interested in, for example the skin of your subject’s face.

(I’ll write about other approaches to setting difficult exposures—using a handheld meter, compensating manually, exposure bracketing—later.)

How do you get your camera to weight its exposure calculation towards your subject? As well as the “focus lock” button that you can use to force your camera to focus on a particular (usually not centred) part of the scene, many cameras have an “exposure lock” button. This is usually labelled “AEL” or “A-EL”. The way you use it is usually the same as the way you would use the focus lock: you centre the target of your interest in the viewfinder of your camera, press the button down, keep it held while you recompose the picture, and then open the shutter with the button still depressed.

Choosing the part of the scene to lock the exposure on is harder than choosing which part of the scene to focus on. You should aim to hit the button when your view is centred on an area whose brightness falls in the middle of the range of tones you are interested in discriminating in the final image.

If you were photographing the dog in this photograph, for example, you would find a part of its fur that was reflecting the sunlight so it wasn’t completely opaque, but not an area that was shining most glossily. You are interested in recording the range of tones on the animal’s body, not the range of tones in the background. Metering on a “greyish” area of the dog’s fur—I mean “grey” by reflection; this dog was the same black colour all over—would probably your best hope of achieving that. (I am deliberately oversimplifying here.)

To be honest, this wasn’t the only technique I applied to capture that the texture of the dog’s coat. I used fast (1600ASA), contrasty (Fujifilm NEOPAN), true black-and-white film. This stock exaggerates mid-range differences in reflected light, but, if correctly exposed, does so pleasingly. What you lose in truth you gain in beauty. I also shot the dog in fairly strong, angled sunlight. The intensity and slight tilt of the sun’s rays helped to throw the surface of the dog’s coat into relief.

Because this film is a little grainy and I wanted sharpness around the dog’s eyes, I chose too large an aperture and left more of the dog out of focus than perhaps was best for capturing the look of the whole animal, but this does have the advantage of “pushing the dog’s head out of the frame” into the viewer’s face. I could have chosen a smaller aperture setting and focused on the end of the dog’s nose.

Yesterday evening, a client told me that her guests had taken lots of pictures of me sprawled on the ground or balanced on walls or generally throwing myself about to get the best shots I could of her wedding, only the second one I had covered exclusively with “prime” lenses—that is fast, fixed focal-length non-zooms. Unlike some other enthusisasts, I think (modern) zooms are excellent tools, but having a zoom lens tempts you to stand still and use the technology to “bring” your subject to you. Taking good photos is not just about filling the frame, it’s also about finding an angle.

Most of the time the best vantage point for a portrait, three-quarter, or full-length shot is roughly level with your subject. At a wedding you will almost certainly be taking photographs of the seated or stooping elderly and of children. This inevitably means getting down low. But you should also vary the way you photograph standing adults. High and low angles can be used to striking effect.

Every couple wants a picture of their cutting the wedding cake, but cake-cutting pictures are boring as hell. While the guests were upright, gathered around these two with their own cameras, I lay on the floor at their feet, waving a remote flash over my head. My rolling around their ankles made them laugh naturally and the flash filled in their faces so their features weren’t blotted out by the light from the window behind them.

Of course, climbing on walls for mass group shots or lying on the ground for an interesting view or to get level with children will mess up your clothes (and somebody will spill food or drink on you at some point), so wear something that won’t show the dirt too badly for the rest of the day and that you can wash easily at the end of the job.

Remember:

• If you don’t have the angle you want then move until you do.
• If you are using a good fixed lens (a so-called “prime”) then don’t worry too much if you are a little further away from your target than you want. If you see the shot, take the shot. A good sharp negative will survive judicious cropping.
• If you are attending a wedding as photographer then don’t wear a suit. I once made this mistake at painful expense. If you must dress smart, dress cheap.
  

Whether you are shooting on film or digitally, you can take advantage of the physics of light to keep one “layer” of what you see through your viewfinder in focus and throw other parts of a view into a blur.

(But one of the joys of film photography is that, because a piece of 35mm or medium format film is larger than that of all but the most expensive digital sensors, it’s so much easier to dissect the world with your camera in this way. This is just a consequence of the laws of optics. Film camera bores like me also benefit from there being no computational sharpening of their images by default.)

The way to control the depth of the “slice” you take is with the aperture setting on your camera. This determines how wide the lens opens to let in light when you take a photograph. Usually an SLR camera can be put in “Aperture Priority Mode” (or some similarly named state). To do so you turn a dial on the camera to the “A” position. When I am taking candids, portraits, and most group shots this is my default setting.

I use Minolta bodies and lenses almost exclusively. They are extraordinarily good at focusing and setting exposure levels automatically so, while I will almost always adjust the aperture settings manually, I will alter the other settings by hand less often.

Because it is such an important aspect of making a picture and because it is also a subtle and counter-intuitive one I am going to have to explain setting the aperture over the course of multiple posts. I’ll come back to this subject repeatedly.

In the meantime, it’s good to know that most modern cameras also have a number of other, fully automatic, modes that will choose reasonable aperture settings for you. There’s more to these modes than apertures, but for simplicity’s sake it’s best to think of, for example, the Landscape mode as setting a small aperture to keep as much of a picturesque view in acceptable focus as possible, and the Portrait mode as setting a big aperture to lift the face of your subject out of the frame. Here are two illustrations from the Wikipedia “aperture” article to show you what I mean:

small aperture

big aperture

Remember:

• You can use the aperture setting on your camera to choose the depth of the slice you take out of the world when you take a photograph.
• You can use the “Aperture Priority” mode on your camera to give you the freedom to set the aperture manually while your camera handles everything else automatically.
• You can use the other automatic modes on your camera (typically called “Portrait”, “Landscape”, and “Action” for example) to obtain some of the control of Aperture Priority mode without having to worry about finding the best aperture setting (or f-stop) for each photo you take.

Most modern cameras have a fast and accurate autofocus facility. Usually all you have to do is push the shutter button half way and wait for an audible (beep) and/or visible (red square) confirmation before pushing the release the rest of the way and taking your picture. Many cameras let you lock the focus this way and recompose the whole shot before you commit it to film (or sensor). To stay focused on the same target you started with before you moved the camera, keep the shutter half pressed as you reframe your view.

If a human or animal is the most important element in your photograph then you should choose whichever of its eyes are closer/closest to you and lock the focus on that. People are surprisingly tolerant of blurriness when they look at photos, but just as eyes bisected by picture frames are distracting so are eyes that are out of focus. They make a photograph seem much worse technically than it is.

I’ll explain why you should prefer the nearer of two eyes later, but for now remember:

• Try to focus on the closer eye of the most important subject (and then recompose).
• Try to focus on eyes when they are wide open.
• Try to photograph eyes when light is glinting in them—these glints are called “catch lights”.

My photo above is a doozy (the woman whose hand is reaching back is the child’s mother) and I really can’t think of a way it could have been made better , but you are welcome to make suggestions.