Digital.Photographer-Beginner.Guide-P2P.pdf

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T

o be honest, it doesn’t matter whether you’re new to photography or even a seasoned professional. In the world of photography p hotography there is always something new to learn or some existing technique than can be honed further fur ther still. Moreover, Moreover, as technology advances, advanc es, the new types of camera and accessories available create a bewildering variety of choice that can be off-putting, especially for those who are taking their first steps into the world of digital photography. Whether you’re you’re interested in taking your photography to a more serious level or just ju st so someo meone ne wh who o tak takes es pi pictu ctures res of fr frie iend nds s and fam famil ily y an and d th the e occ occas asio iona nall ho holi lida day y sn snap ap,, th this is gu guid ide e is here to help. We start with the essentials, outlining outlining different cameras, lenses and accessories. Then we take you through the various aspects of camera craft that are the foundation to creating great photographs. This includes information about shutter speed, camera shake, focusing, metering, aperture and depth of field. Photography is a very accessible and fun skill to develop. We hope that this collection of technical and creative c reative information will help you take your photography to levels you might never have thought possible before. n

Contents DIGITAL DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGR APHY BEGINNERS’ BEGINNERS’ GUIDE

Getting started star ted 8 - 11

Know your camera

12 - 15

The right camera for you

16 - 19

What lenses do I need?

20 - 21

Why do I need a tripod?

22 - 23

Flashes and lighting

24 - 25

Types of light modifiers

26 - 27

Filters and filter systems

28 - 29

Photography software

30 - 31

Digital Storage

Using your camera

4

34 - 39

Basic composition

40 - 41

Focusing

42 - 45

Shutter speed and camera shake

46 - 49

Focal length and zoom

50 - 53

Aperture and depth of field

54 - 57

Exposure and metering

58 - 59

File types and image compression

60 - 61

Shooting modes

62 - 63

White balance

64 - 65

ISO and image noise

66 - 67

Understanding Understanding hyperfocal distance

BDM’s Digital Photography Beginners’ Guide

CONTENTS

Creative projects 70 - 79

Assignment: North Devon autocross autocross

80 - 89

Shooting into the light

90 - 101

Your first home studio

102 - 111

Automotive rig photography

112 - 119

Airshow photography

120 - 125

Pet photography

126 - 131

Still life photography

132 - 139

Landscape Landscap e photography tips

140 - 143

How it’s done

144 - 145

Glossary

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BDM’s Digital Photography Beginners’ Guide ISBN: 978-1-907306-14-3 Published by: Papercut Limited Managing Editor: James Editor: James Gale Editor: Mark Frost Sub Editor: Paul Beard Production & Art Director: Mark Ayshford Production Manager: Karl Linstead Design & Artwork: Mark Frost Digital distribution: Pocketmags.com, Zinio.com, Apple App Store, Google Play For all advertising and promotional opportunities contact: [email protected] Copyright © 2018 Papercut Limited. All rights reserved.

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5

GETTING STARTED Choose the right camera and accessories for you 8 - 11

Know your camera

12 - 15

The right camera for you

16 - 19

What lenses do I need?

20 - 21

Why do I need a tripod?

22 - 23

Flashes and lighting

24 - 25

Types of light modifiers

26 - 27

Filters and filter systems

28 - 29

Photography software

30 - 31

Digital Storage

D

o you want to get into photography photogra phy in much more depth? Are you thinking of upgrading your existing camera? Whether you’re a complete beginner, a hobbyist photographer, or perhaps a more experienced enthusiast, we have some useful information about the various types of camera systems available, as well as guides to lenses, tripods, flashes, filters and software that should help you on your way as you delve deeper into the world of digital photography. The choice of equipment can be somewhat bewildering and there is nothing worse than spending your hard earned cash on something that you will quickly outgrow as you develop your skills as a photographer; hopefully though, over the next few pages, we can give gi ve you a much clearer idea of what is out there. n

6


GETTING STARTED


7

Know your camera A quick guide to all the major dials and buttons butt ons

C

ameras come in many shapes, sizes and prices. At their heart though, they all do the same thing: capture light on a sensor and turn it into a digital image. That’s a gross oversimplification but you get the general idea. Modern cameras also come with many features and functions. Although it would be difficult to list them all, here are the main dials and buttons that you can expect to find on many cameras. cameras. Different Different brands and models vary in their button and dial layouts as well as certain naming conventions but we’ve put together a little guide to the main controls and displays. n

“Cameras come in many shapes, sizes and prices. At their heart though, they all do the same thing: capture light on a sensor and turn it into a digital image.”

8


KNOW YOUR CAMERA

THE FRONT OF THE CAMERA 7 6 8 4

5

3

2

1 9

10

12

1

AF-Assist illuminator

If your subject is poorly lit, the AF-Assist illuminator lights up to help with focusing. 2

Power switch

A simple lever you can rotate to turn the camera on and off. 3

Shutter release button

This is a typical two-stage button. Press halfway to focus, then fully depress to take a photo.

11

5

This button is pressed to begin video recording and pressed again to stop recording. 6

7

Aperture/Exposure Compensation

Pressing this button lets you alter either the aperture or exposure compensation value.

9

Flash modes and flash compensation

This button allows the choice of different flash modes such as Red-eye reduction and control of output power.

Live view switch

Click the live view switch in order to di splay the view through the lens on the camera’s LCD screen.

10

Function button

You can assign a preferred function to this button that activates when you hold it.

Mode dial

Rotate this dial to choose which shooting mode to use such as Aperture, Priority or Manual mode. 8

4

Movie record button

11

Lens release button

Push this button in order to release an attached lens from the camera’s lens mount.

Pop-up flash

A small built in flash that c an be used to help illuminate poorly lit or backlit subjects.

12

Infrared receiver (front)

You can activate your camera remotely by using a controller pointed at t his receiver.


9

THE REAR OF THE CAMERA

1

2

3 5 8

10

9

4

7

11 6

12

13

14

15 17 16

1

Many cameras have a small stereo microphone built in to capture audio whilst shooting video. 2

Eye sensor

When you place your eye to the v iewfinder, the LCD display will automatically turn off. 4

Info button

Press the info button to act ivate the LCD screen and view the current information di splay. 5

Command dial

The command dial lets you alter the values of the main camera settings by rotating it to the left or right.

Menu button

Pressing the menu button will give you access to most of the shooting options on the camera. 7

Accessory shoe

This mounting plate lets you attach optional flashguns to use instead of the built in flash. 3

6

Stereo microphone

Infrared receiver (rear)

You can activate your camera remotely by usi ng a controller pointed at this receiver.

8

Speaker

A small speaker unit to let you listen to any audio that you have captured. 9

Viewfinder eyepiece

Through the viewfinder you will see the main framing grid and the camera settings displayed. 10

Diopter adjustment

Here you can adjust the focus of the viewfinder to suit your eyesight. 11

Play button

Pressing this button will display pictures on the LCD monitor.

10


12

Information button

When you press this but ton you can change settings such as image quality and metering. 13

Multi selector

The multi selector acts like a cursor to let you navigate menu screens. 14

OK button

Used in conjunction with the multi selector, it lets you select highlighted items. 15

Trash button

If you want to delete a currently displayed image, press this button to remove it. 16

Vari-angle monitor

All information about camera settings and image playback can be viewed on the screen. 17

Playback zoom

With an image displayed on the screen, you can zoom in up to 33x magnification.

KNOW YOUR CAMERA

THE LEFT SIDE

1

Accessory terminal

Wireless controllers and GPS units can be plugged in to this terminal. 2

Microphone socket

Optional external stereo microphones can be connected to this port. 3

USB and A/V connector

You can directly connect your camera to a computer or printer from this port.

1

2

3

THE RIGHT SIDE

1

HDMI connector

Allows the camera to be connected to a high-definition HDMI device like a TV. 2

Memory card slot

This is where you insert the digital storage media such as an SD card. 3

Power connector

A terminal allowing a mains electrical source to be plugged in. 4

Battery compartment cover

The battery is inserted here.

1

2

3

4


11

The right camera for for you We highlight highlight the main types t ypes of digital camera

T

he number of camera models available to the budding photographer is vast. All the main manufacturers have a large number of different models and types of camera to suit every taste and also every pocket. A wide variety of choice is fine but it can be somewhat overwhelming when it comes to choosing a camera for yourself. It isn’t helped by the fact that the distinctions between various types of camera system have become quite blurred as the quality and the capabilities of these devices keep expanding. With that in mind, we have put together a little guide to the main types of camera out there. Hopefully it will help point you in the right direction so you get the right camera for the job. n

12


“ A wide variety of choice is fne but it can be somewhat overwhelming when it comes to choosing a camera or yoursel. yoursel.””

THE RIGHT CAMERA FOR YOU

Compact Cameras A large number of entry-level cameras f all into this category. They tend to be fairly small and light, measuring about 100 x 50 x 25mm and weighing around 120-130g. Modern compacts are normally fully automatic, although some may offer basic manual exposure options. They usually have a zoom lens of up to 12x which folds flush with th e camera body and an LCD monitor of about 7cm diagonal size. Unlike larger c amera systems, they don’t have an optical view finder, relying instead on the LCD screen to be used as a live view monitor. Extra features may include HD video recording, image stabilisation and Wi-Fi connectivi ty, and they often come in a range of colours. As sensor technology has improved, it has also given rise to a range of compact cameras for the more advanced photographer. Sporting larger sensors, these offer greater image quality as well as superior versatility, manual controls and better low light capabilit y. As you would imagine, these more advanced compact cameras can be significantly more expensive but they will give you much greater creati ve control than the standard models. These models typically offer 16MP - 24MP sensor sizes.

Superzoom Superzoom cameras are a fixed-lens design of camera that are built to offer both wide angle capability and very large levels of magnification without the need to invest in additional lenses, as you would with a DSLR. In this case, the amount of magnification can be anywhere up to 60x or more. That is equivalent to a 1400mm super telephoto lens. This immense magnification means it can do the job of much more expensive DSLR cameras, that would require the purchase of telephoto lenses that could cost thousands, all in a relatively compact body. The downside to having a model of this kind is that al though you can cover a huge zoom range from medium wide angle to super telephoto, that is all you can do. If you wanted to shoot a very shallow depth of field macro shot, for instance, you would not be abl e to do so; nor could you use a fast prime lens for low light shooting. That said, these superzooms offer image stabilisation, manual control, electronic viewfinders and HD video recording capability too. You can view these types of cameras as a great stepping stone for people w ho want to move up from compact cameras but don’t want the extra expense of DSLRs and multiple lenses to worry about.


13

14

Mirrorless Cameras

Adventure Cameras

This area of the camera system world has seen quite an increase in popularity in recent times. Essentially a mirrorless camera, as the name suggests, does not have the movable mirror seen in larger DSLR formats. Although you get a viewfinder as well as a rear mounted LCD screen, the image that you see is an electronic representation provided by the image sensor. Like the larger DSLR cameras, these devices have an interchangeable lens system, giving you greater creative control over any shooting conditions you might face. A mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (MILC) is smaller, lighter and less complex to build than most DSLRs. MILC systems usually offer around 20MP sensor sizes and although the quality of the images may not be up to full-frame DSLR standards, it is shown to be improving with each new camera that comes out. The price point and compact nature of this MILC system makes it a popular choice but be aware that lens choices are not as varied as those you would get with a standard DSLR. H owever, they do have a growing range of accessories such as flashguns. They have also become increasingly increasingly popular with filmmakers who love them for their good autofocus ability with HD and even Ultra HD video resolutions.

This is another growth area in the camera market. Adventure cameras are compact cameras that are tougher than the average camera. If adventuring is your thing, then perhaps a large, heavy, expensive and relatively brittle DSLR might not be the most apt choice. Although DSLRs are touted as ‘weather sealed’ that won’t protect them from a dunking in a muddy river or being dropped on some granite outcropping. This is where the adventure camera shines. A good adventure camera is fully waterproof and capable of going on a scuba dive down to 50ft. They are also shockproof, being able to shrug off a small drop onto a hard surface. Their sensors usually offer about 16MP resolution and plenty of shooting modes to make them useful as day-to-day cameras too. An offshoot of this area of photography has given rise to mini action cameras such as the GoPro range. They are the darlings of surfers, snowboarders and the like who want to be able to mount very small, very light cameras to their boards, or to themselves. Their ability to shoot 4K video also makes them very useful in the videography arena.


THE RIGHT CAMERA FOR YOU

Camera Phones There is no getting away from it, the smartphone has turned the idea of a point-and-shoot camera on its head. Smartphone imaging technology has come a long way and your average smartphone is now capable of shooting 16 megapixels with impressive low-light capability for such a c ompact device. Moreover, many smartphones now have the main camera backed up with a front-facing, lower resolution, ‘selfie’ cam as well. Typically, the camera built into a mobile phone is around 16MP with a small f/2.0 main lens and an 8MP front camera. They also have LED s built in to act as a small flash unit to light your subjects at n ight as well as electronic image stabilisation. Camera phone s are much simpler in design and use than standard DSLRs. Their smaller sensors and tiny lenses put an upper limit on image quality, although a few current model s now allow the capture of images in Raw format as well as th e more usual Jpeg format. Some models do boast large r 1” sensors that can rival the quality of some compact cameras. The main advantage of the camera phone is that it is built into a mobile phone; wherever you go, the camera goes too.

Digital SLRs Digital SLRs, or DSLRs as they are commonly referred to, are cameras that use a mirror mechanism to reflect light from the lens up into a viewfin der. The viewfinder is optical, meaning that you are actually seeing what the lens sees, not an electronic representation like the LCD screens on compact cameras. When you take a ph oto, the mirror is flipped up out of the way and the light en tering through the lens is allowed to fall onto the camera sensor an d an image is recorded. DSLR’s are generally heavier and more complex than mirrorless and compact cameras. DSLRs have interchangeable lenses and most can use the same lenses as their older film-based predecessors, giving you plenty of creative scope and lens choice. With specialist lenses available for particular tasks, DSLR systems are the choice of most serious ama teur and professional photographers, offering superb image quality. Most DSLRs use a sensor size called APS-C but a few top-end cameras use the larger f ull-frame sensors that are the size of a 35mm film frame. The range of available lenses is vast, particularl y with the main manufacturers. The downside is that DSLR bodies, lenses and accessories ca n be quite expensive.


15

What lenses do I need? We take a look at the main main lens types type s available for your camera

I

t’s no surprise that if you purchase a new camera with an interchangeable lens system, one of the first questions you might ask yourself is ‘which lens should I buy for my camera?’. That is not quite as easy a question to answer as you would would hope. Manufacturer Manufacturers s offer increasingly increasingly varied varied lenses to suit different different photographers’ requirements. To add to the confusion, there is also quite a varied range in price and quality to take into consideration. On top of that there is also the cropped sensor and full-frame issue to consider. Certain lenses will only work with certain camera bodies because of the mounting system used, and so on and on it goes. Everyone shoots differently, with a different style and preference and the type of shot you are trying to capture will also greatly influence the kind of lens you need. If you are a diehard landscape photographer, then lenses with a greater angle of view are what you will want to capture the environment in all its sweeping glory. If however, you are a portrait photographer, then your lens requirements will be quite different. It’s a bit of a minefield but we’ll try to break down the main types of lenses available as you look deeper into your next choice of lens. n

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“ If you are a diehard landscape photographer,, then lenses with a photographer greater angle of view are what you will want to capture the environment in all its sweeping glory.” glory.”

WHAT LENSES DO I NEED?

Prime lens

Zoom lens

A prime lens is a lens that is a fixed foca l length. That mea ns that it cannot zoom in or out, so you have to buy a prime len s with a focal length that suits your needs. Prime lenses are light and usually of better optical quali ty; but you will have to carr y more of them to around cover a range of focal lengths. Althou gh people might prefer the convenience of a zoom lens that c overs a wide focal length range, the main factor in considering getting a couple of prime lenses in your gear bag, is that they offer models tha t have a very wide maximum aperture. Primes can be purchased with apertures of f/2.8 to f/1.4. This allows greater flexibility in l ow light conditions and also allows you to shoot image s with very shallow depth of field for those lovely out of focus backgroun ds.

Zoom lenses have the advanta ge that they are more versatile than prime lenses. So much so th at just a couple of lenses c an cover a very wide range of foca l lengths. You could for instance have a 16-35mm wide angle lens, a 24-105mm lens and a 100-400mm super telephoto and not need anothe r lens for most of your shooting requirements. From a framing and composition stan dpoint, you do not have to physically move, you can simply zoom the lens to achieve the framing you are af ter. There are even certain zoom lenses that cover a focal le ngth range of 18-300mm. For most practical requirements, you could use that one lens for every shoot you do. The main downside is that optical qua lity is often not as good as a prime lens and you will ne ed to be aware of camera shake when using the longer focal lengths as any small amount of unwanted camera movement will be be magnified and potentially ruin your shots.


17

18

Pancake lens

Standard zoom

Typical focal length: Wide, Normal, Telephoto

Typical focal length: 28-80mm (full-frame equivalent)

Simply put, a pancake lens is a very flat prime lens. It is shorter than it is wide and very small and light. Photographers use them primarily when they are after a small, compact camera and lens system and are used with DSLR and Micro Four Thirds cameras. Relative to their diminutive size, they can produce very good images. Despite being a prime lens, they generally have a maximum aperture of no greater than f/2.8, although there are a couple of exceptions.

This is the most common focal length, suitable for general photography and useful for everything from landscapes to portraits. Most systems will include a couple of lenses in this focal length range: usually a cheaper, slower version often included as a kit lens with a new camera, with a maximum aperture that is usually around f/3.5-f/4; and a premium quality lens of ten costing a lot more that may offer a maximum aperture of f/2.8-f3.5.

Ultra-wide zoom

Macro lens



Ultra-wide zoom lenses are primarily used for landscape photography. They are more specialised than standard zooms, and consequently are usually more expensive, although some systems include both standard and premium types. A good quality wide-angle zoom can have a maximum aperture of f/2.8 but will be very expensive, whereas a lens with a similar focal length but with a maximum ape rture of f/4 will be much cheaper.

A true macro lens by definition should be able to record an image at 1:1 scale on the sensor or medium it was shot on at its closest focusing distance. This magnification factor means that a macro lens is able to fill the frame and reveal ama zing detail on very sm all objects. Some of the more recent models have image stabilisation built in, to assist with camera shake that can potentially ruin a shot.


WHAT LENSES DO I NEED?

Medium telephoto zoom

Super telephoto



The medium telephoto zoom is useful for amateur wildlife or sports photography and portraits at the shorter end of its focal length range. Telephoto zooms have a smaller effective aperture than standard zooms, usually ranging from f/3.5 to f/5.6.

Specialist lenses are used mainly by professionals and advanced enthusiasts. These include both zoom and prime ultra-fast ultra-fast telephoto telephoto lenses used by sports and wildlife photographers. They are very expensive but essential when it comes to capturing action at some great distance.

Tilt-shift Typical focal length: 17mm 24mm 35mm (full-frame equivalent) A tilt-shift lens is quite a rare breed and no t many of its type are available. It is the modern equivalent of an old bellows film camera. The lens can be rotated relative to the sensor to control the position of the area of sharpest focus, as well as moved parallel to the sensor to move the image area.


19

Why do I need a tripod tripod? ? An essential piece of equipment

C

amera ownership goes through a number of phases. First is the decision about which camera to actually buy, then comes the choice of lenses. Then come the choices with accessories. It may sound like an exaggeration, but one of the best accessories you can get to improve your photography, photography, is to invest in a good tripod. In fact, it might be safer to upgrade it from the status of ’accessory’ to ‘essential purchase’. purchase’. You might wonder why a tripod would be considered among one of the top key factors in taking better photographs. Well, have you ever wanted to take photos in challenging low light conditions and wondered why your images are coming o ut blurry? Have you ever taken photos of some distant subject with your superzoom camera at its maximum magnification and wondered the same thing? This is because one of the pr imary causes of unsatisfactory photos is camera shake. Camera shake is the unwanted movement of camera and lens being caught during the capture of the shot. This translates as blurr y photos, often blurry enough to ruin the shot co mpletely. The tripod is instrumental in eliminating camera shake. It provides a very stabl e platform onto which you can mount your camera, preventing it from moving and spoiling your shots. Tripods come in various makes, models and materials . They are either made from plastic in the cheaper mo dels, to metal alloys in the mid range versions, all the way up to light but rigid carbon fibre in the professional models. As the name suggests, the tripod consists of a three legged arrangement upon which your camera sits in a tripod mount. The leg s come in 2 or three sections and can be telescoped out to different heights. The tripod mount can be tilted, rotated and flipped so you can shoot at a wid e variety of angles as well as in landscape or portrait orientation. Key factors when choosing a tripod are rigidity and carrying weight. The tripod you choose has to be able to sup port the weight of your camera and hold it perfectly still. Some cheaper tripods with plastic heads and thin aluminium legs are too ‘bouncy’ to be use d with anything heavier than a compact or light superzo om. Set the tripod up and press down on the top of it. If it flexes by more than a few millimetres it’s not going to be stiff enough to support the weight of a heavy camera. n

Pocket tripods These are miniature tripods designed for small compact cameras and are ide al for table-top use, or for positioning your camera for a self-timer group shot. They’re small enough to slip into a jacket pocket or into your camera pouch. There are several different types, including ones with telescopi c legs, ball or pan-tilt heads, and even flexible legs. One unique and extremely versatile design is the Gorillapod, which can grip onto almost any object or work a s a tripod. If you want something even small to support your ligh t compact camera, then the Xshot mini travel tripod is the one for you.

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“ Tripods come in various makes, models and materials. They are either made from plastic in the cheaper models, to metal alloys in the mid range versions. versions.””

WHY DO I NEED A TRIPOD?

Entry level tripods

Mid range tripods

There are many cheap tripods on the market, made not only by brand name manufacturers but many third party manuf acturers too. It’s fair to say that the cheap tripods are cheap for a reason. If you are serious about your photography, particularly if you are shooting outdoors with a heavier DSLR, then you may find these a bit of a false economy. If they are made primarily from plastic, then they are not going to be rigid enough for any kind of lon g exposure photography, particularly when telescoped out to their full height. You would be better off spending a little more on a metal frame tripod.

Often referred to as travel tripods, these are designed for general use where low weight and portability is an important fac tor. It It is a good compromise to use a mid range metal tripod when you need to be mobile. They are made of lightweight materials, usually aluminium or carbon fibre and are suitable for most types of camera from compacts up to mid-range DSLRs, although not with large telephoto lenses. If you can, get one with a quick release plate that makes mounting and demounting your camera a much quicker process. The ability to lock the legs at different angles and fold in reverse for greater compactness and portability is important too.

Professional tripods

Monopods

Top quality tripods are made f rom high-tech materials like carbon or basalt fibre, with magnesium alloy fittings and superior workmanship. They offer the best rigidity and suppor t for even the heaviest cameras and lense s. They are going to be heavier than entry level or mid range tripods but they offer quick release plates, different types of mounting platforms, variable angle legs and even the centre column can pivot in a wide arc. Although they are very expensive, you do get a lot of tripod for your money.

If you want support for your camera but don’t want the weight or bulk of a tripod, then a monopod is a good alternative. As the name implies, it is basically a one-legged tripod. Although not as stable as its three-legged cousin, the monopod can dramatically reduce camera shake. They can also be quite handy when shooting from a cramped space where the larger footprint of a normal tripod might inhibit your ability to shoot. Typically made from aluminium or carbon fibre, they provide helpful stability and also a good measure of portabilit y.


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Flashes and lighting lighting Add light and boost your creativity

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nce you get beyond the basics of photography and you find yourself wanting to add a little creativity and take more control of how the light affects your shots, then that is when you nee d to take a look at additional lighting in the form of flashes. Your first experience of flash might be the tiny pop up flash you find on the top of a lot of compact cameras and a number of DSLR models. They are useful to light a subject when all else fails but to be honest, if you want your shots to look more than just selfies, then you need to look further afield. We are referring to the dedicated flashguns that can be mounted in your camera’s hot shoe, or for even greater flexibility, used off-camera and fired remotely by a wireless trigger. They are known by different names such as flash, strobe, speedlight (or speedlite) speedlite) and monobloc. They are usually battery powered, which makes them very portable. They emit a powerful and brief flash of light that can illuminate your scene. Monoblocs, or studio light s as they are know, are larger, more more powerful and less portable li ghts that are usually powered by mains electricity. Some studio lights can be used outdoors with the help of large lithium batteries. n

Pop up flash Most compact cameras and entry level DSLRs will have a small flash built in. Most are designed to pop up when light levels are deemed too low to get a usable exposure. Pop up flashes by their nature are very small and produce a very harsh direc t light that is not flattering for your subjects. Because the little flash tube is front-facing, you don’t have a l ot of scope to get creative. You can use it to fill in dark shadows but beyond that you’re probably going to struggle. Some people will put a small piec e of white card bent at an angle in front of the flash to direct the light upwa rds in order to bounce the light off the ceiling bu t this can be a bit hit and miss. Add to that the fact that they are not particularly powerf ul, then you can see why you need to step up your game a little to the next level.

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FLASHES AND LIGHTING

Continuous light

Third party flash

An alternative to the various forms of flash lighting we’ve mentioned here is to used continuous lighting instead. Sometimes also referred to as hot lights or photofloods. Rather than emitting a powerful but brief flash of light, continuous light s are always on. They are not as powerful as flashes bu t you do have the benefit of always seeing how the light is falling on your subject without need to do a test shot as you would wi th flash. At their simplest, they are either an incandescent bulb housed inside a large reflector, or powerful daylight balanced fluorescent lights that are more energy efficient. For more powerful options, you are going to be looking at arc lights; these were developed for the film industry and are insanely expensive.

Just like cameras, there is a bewildering choice. Not just from the major brands like Canon and Nikon but from 3rd part y manufacturers like Nissin, Yongnuo and Gloxy. With big name brands costing hundreds for top of the range equipme nt, the temptation may be to trawl the pages on eBay lookin g for a bargain flash unit. It is fair to point out that th e phrase ‘you get what you pay for’ has never been more relevant. You may find yourself some unknown brand for a quarter of the price of one of the major brand names that seems too good to be true, and it probably is. Take the advice of those who found out to their cost, stick with a major bra nd or well regarded 3rd party manuf acturer. Check out user reviews wherever you can. Make the best informed choice you are able within your budget.

Brand name flashes

Studio lights

All the manufacturers make a va riety of flash models for their cameras. They range from simple front facing small flashes, right up to their professional-level flashes with wireless control, powerful flash tubes with variable power control, tilt and swivel flash heads and a host of customisable features a nd accessories to create your own portable studio setup. These models are not cheap but they are the choice of professionals for a reason. They also have the added bonus of letting you shoot high-speed photography because when used at lower power settings, the pulse of light from the flash is so brief, that you could use it to illuminate a scene for a fraction of a second and catch a bullet in flight, freezing the action dead in its tracks.

Studio lights can actually be broken down into two categories. First is the flash head kit. Flash heads are just the light emitters. A separate power pack supplies the required voltage and the controls are actually on the power unit itself. The other variety of studio light is the monobloc, or monolight. These are either mains powered or lithium battery powered flash units but all the controls are built into each unit. This limits their power but it does make them more portable and more easily used outdoors. Flash heads tend be more powerful and you have the advantage of being able to control multiple flash head setups directly from the power pack.


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Types ypes of light modifiers Make light yours to command

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hen you use flash lighting, especially if using it to directly light your subject, you will be aware of how harsh the shadows it casts can be. You can’t always be near a large picture window on an overcast day, where the softness of the light coming through that window makes it difficult to take a bad photo. You have to work with what you have, so that means you need to go b ack to your flash. H However owever,, there are some techniques that allow you to modify and shape light to suit your needs. This is where light modifiers come in. A lighting modifier is just what the name sug gests. It is an object, surface, or material that alters the way the light travels from its source to the subject. If you shoot with an unmodified flashgun, the light that is emitted is traveling in a concentrated beam from a very small light source. If this light passes through a modifier, such as a softbox, the light is diffused, scattered and less concentrated. A modifier can also turn a small light source into a large one. A flash, fired from several feet away onto a large translucent material, for instance, creates an illuminated hot spot that is much larger than its source. This is the basis of light modification. Here are a few of the types of light modifier you could be working with. n

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“ A lighting modifer is just just what what the the name name suggests. It is an object, surace, or material that alters the way the light travels rom its source to the subject. ”

TYPES OF LIGHT MODIFIERS

Omni-Bounce

Snoot

In effect, this is a tiny softbox that covers the head of your flash. It enables light not only to emit forwards but also around the sides. This gives a closer approximation of a bare bulb and allows for wider lighting coverage at the expense of reduced flash power because not all the light is thrown forward. Even from a relatively short distance, there would be a visible difference in shadow softness compared to a bare flash.

A snoot is a tube that concen trates the light output of your flash. It gives the resulting beam a searchlight quality that creates a tight pool of light, ideal for highlighting a small part of your scene. Moving the flash further away w ill enable you to define a larger spotlight. Because the bea m of light is so narrow, the rest of your scene would be in relative darkness. Since the light is effectively reduced in size, the shadows it creates will be fairl y sharp.

Dome diffuser

Shoot through umbrella

The dome diffuser takes the idea of the omni-bounce and expands upon it. The larger physical size of the dome allows you to use it like a true, large, bare bulb. With it, you can illumin ate larger areas with a more even light source. Bear in mind that , like the omnibounce, light is spread in all directions so your subject illumination will appear diminished.

Reflector umbrella A reflector umbrella works in the opposite manner to a shoot through. The flash is fired into the umbrella which uses its inner silver lining to reflect the light back out onto the subject. This method allows you light large areas within a 180° radius. The wide, even light pattern it creates is ideal for lighting large groups from a distance of around 6m to 7m.

The shoot through umbrella or ‘brolly’ is regarded as one of the best types of light modifier for those new to flash photography. It is a white translucent material stretched over an umbrella wire frame through which the flash is fired. It is a great way to spread out light from a very small original source. The downside is that shoot through umbrellas can be quite easily broken.

The softbox A softbox is used to soften and diffuse the output of your flash into a visually pleasing even light with no harsh shadows. The closer the softbox is to the subject, or indeed the larger the softbox, the softer the light appears. In fact, many use softboxes to emulate window light when shooting portraits or even product photography. If used as a key light in portraiture, the large rectangular surface creates some lovely catchlights in the subject’s eyes as if they were looking out of a window.


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Filters and filter filt er systems systems Some must have flters or creative photography

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ilters have been an essential part of photography since its very beginnings. Used creatively they can improve a hard-to-capture scene, add an extra artistic element to an image or just provide a bit of fun. Modern digital photo editing has provided an almost too easy method to add filter effects to an image af ter it has been taken; some effects are better when applied by actual physical filters fitted to the camera when the photo is taken and this is particularly true with black and white photography. Let’s take a look at some of the different types of filter and how they can h elp to improve your photos.

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1. UV filter This screw-on filter was used originally to block UV light from hitting the film in old cameras. Modern digital cameras have UV and Infra Red protection on their sensors now, so a UV filter is employed as a method of protection against scratches and dust getting on the front lens element. Optionally you can just use a good quality clear glass filter instead. The higher the quality of glass the bet ter, so as to avoid ghosting and flare in your shots.

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FILTERS AND FILTER SYSTEMS

2. Circular polarizing filter Circular polarizers are ideal for digital cameras. When correctly aligned, the filter can render blue skies darker with brighter, white clouds. They can also increase saturation and reduce reflections on shiny surfaces and water as well as reduce haze. Polarisers work best when the camera is about 90° either side of the sun . The polariser has to be rotated until the maximum effect is achieved, blocking certain light waves. These filters come in both screw-on and filter holder varieties.

3. Neutral density filter

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ND filters limit the am ount of light that is able to fall on the sensor and therefore require much longer shutter duration. They are made from darkened materials that are designed to be optically neutral so as not create a colour cast. The darker the filter the longer your exposures can be. ND filters can range from a 2-stop filter to 10-stops of light reduction. They are excellent for use in daytim e to create motion blur in in moving objects like water and clouds.

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4. Graduated neutral density filter ND grads work similar to standard ND filters but instead of being one solid dark mater ial, the filter fades from dar k to clear. They are useful in high contrast situations such as a bright sky versus a dark foreground where you can use th e filter to darken the sky enough to balance the overall exposure in the scene.

Screw on filter

Rectangular filter

Filter types 1. Circular screw on filters are the most common type that fits directly on your lens filter thread. They come in different thicknesses, the thickest of which can potentially cause vignetting to your shots. Ultra thin filters get around this but can be more expensive. 2. Square filters are popular with landscape photographers. A holder designed to house the filters directly attaches to the lens filter thread and can hold several filters. Generally they range in size from around 75mm to 150mm 3. Rectangular filters are another popular choice among landscape photographers. These are mounted in the same fashion as their square counterparts, the main difference is because they are rectangular; they have more scope to move up and down within the holde r.

Filter holder

4. Filter holders are plastic and metal mounting devices that screw onto the filter thread of your lens. They have several sl ots moulded into them to accommodate several filters at once. The most popular filter system manufacturers are Cokin and Lee and Hitech. n


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Photog Photography raphy software software Bringing Bringing your photos to life

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ack in the days of analog film cameras, the process of taking photographs used to be the key part of the creative workflow. Producing prints or negatives in the darkroom did not allow for much scope when it c ame to maximising the quality of the images that had been taken. These days, in the world of digital photography, it can be argued that the cap ture of the images is only half the workflow. Indeed, some regard the post-process workflow as the overriding factor in producing great images. We have always extolled the virtues of shooting your images in the uncompressed and unprocessed Raw format. Raw files are so named because they only contain the raw data straight from your camera’s sensor. There has been no processing of the image as you would get with a Jpeg file but it does mean that you have to put in a little work to extract the very best from the Raw format. This is where you need some software that can process your photos. Using Raw processing software is the first step in the workflow. Here you can make all the necessary basic edits to your images such as distortion correction, saturation, tonal adjustments, sharpening, noise

“These days, in the world of digital photography, it can be argued that the capture of the images is only hal the workfow. ”

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reduction and so on. Once you have made all the main edits to your photo, you can save it out to your preferred image format such as Jpeg or Ti ff and call it done. However, if you want to do some ad ditional photo manipulation, then you will also need to invest in software that can let you apply extensive photo retouching, layers, masks and effects. When it comes to soft ware, you have a large number of options to choose from. In fact, there is so much choice, it can be nothing short of confusing. If you are new to photography or even an experienced photographer looking for some new applications to take your images to the next level, we’ve produced a small overview of some of the software options currently available. Note, from the list that Adobe products feature quite prominently. That is no accident as their popularity cannot be denied, but there are also more options to dis cover. n

PHOTOGRAPHY SOFTWARE

Adobe Photoshop CC

Adobe Camera Raw

(Windows and Mac) Photoshop is probably one of the best known editing programs out there; so much so that the name of the software has actually become a verb, as in ‘that image has been photoshopped’. The great thing about Photos hop is that it is relatively easy to use, if you only nee d to bring the simplest tools to bear on your images, but it is also hugely sophisticated if you require the most advanced editing tools available. It is the go-to application not only for photographers but digital artists, designers and even videographers and 3D artists. It is probably the most popular layerbased image editing and photo retouching software currently available. Photoshop is now available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service.

(Windows and Mac) Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) actually comes as part of Photoshop when you download it. It is a plug-in that is used to non-destructively process Raw format photographs. It works in harmony with Photoshop and you can even pass the image back and forth between the two applications as you work on your images. Although it is not as feature rich as its big brother Lightroom, it has become a very powerful image editing tool in its own right. For a lot of users, the features available in ACR are more than enough to get the very best out of their photos.

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Elements

(Windows and Mac) Lightroom is an image processing and photo organiser that allows the organising, non-destructive enhancement and retouching of images in large numbers. It is a very powerful program that not only sets the standard for image enhancement but also for its ability to organise, catalog, add keywords and even geotag all the images in your library. It also boasts the capability to create photobooks, print parameters such as layout and orientation and can produce web galleries for websites with a number of display templates provided for easy styling.

(Windows and Mac) Elements a raster graphics editor and photo manipulator much like its big brother Photoshop. It employs many of the features and tools seen in Photoshop but with less options and a simpler approach. It also has many automated features suited to new users, such as red eye removal and changing skin tone in photos.

DxO Optics Pro

Corel Paint Shop Pro

(Windows and Mac) DxO Optics has made a name fo r itself in the world of digital editing and photography with its noise reduction capabilities and its sophisticated handling of lens corrections. It behaves much like Lightroom and ACR but unlike Lightroom it does not have such advanced file management and cataloging functionality. It is compatible with Lightroom though and images can be passed back and forth between the two.

(Windows) Corel Paint Shop Pro pulls off a great trick by being three programs in one package. You are able to use its file management capabilities to tag, rate and keyword your images. Then, you can move to the edit suite and process your images and make all the main enhancements and image adjustments that your image needs; there are also a number of preset art filters, like you would find on apps for your mobile phone. Then you can mo ve to the edit suite and use layer-based editing that makes it a worthy alternative to Photoshop.


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Digital storage Your precious holiday photos in safe hands

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s camera technology develops and the megapixel count increases with every new camera that is released, the file sizes that these cameras create when shooting in Raw format can be substantial. As an example, if you you were to shoot a highly detailed landscape image with lots of tree, grass, clouds and mountains, an uncompressed 12-bit Raw file from something like a Nikon D810 could be as much as 55 MB. Now imagine shooting an action scene of ponies running across the moorlands in burst mode and capturing twenty shots in just one sequence, you can imagine how quickly you would start filling up any digital storage. There’s more to

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it than just the amount of storage you have. A memory card of 64GB will let you store a lot of images, but if that card cannot wri te the data from the camera fast enough, that burst mode sequence of ponies that your camera should be able to shoot at 8 frames per second is going to hit a digital log jam after a couple of shots because the buffer can’t get the image data written to the card and it all grinds to a halt while it finishes the task. Clearly, there is more to memory cards than meets the eye.

Premium or Budget? The popularity of SD cards has led to a large

number of budget brands springing up, and many supermarkets and chain stores sell their own-brand cards at often very low prices. However the best advice is to stick to the premium brands such as SanDisk, Lexar, Pretec, PNY or Kingston, or to camera brands such as Fujifilm or Panasonic. Although they may be more expensive their higher standards of quality control mean that premium cards are usually much more reliable. If you’ve got a high-performance camera it’s also worth spending a bit extra for faster data transfer rates to get the best out of it. n

DIGITAL STORAGE

SPEED RATINGS

MEMORY MEMOR Y CARD USAGE

Premium cards have higher data transfer speeds, which means they can store and retrieve data more quickly, an important factor when shooting video or a rapid sequence of still images. The speed of the memory card can have an effect on the overall performanc e of the camera, especially on high-end models. Unfortunately many manufacturers have their own ways of describing the speed of their cards, which can be ver y confusing for the consumer. Some use the ‘x’ rating, comparing the read/write speed to that of a CD-ROM, approximately 150 kilobytes per second (150 KB/s), so a memory card rated at ‘40x’ speed has a transfer rate of 6 megabytes per second (6MB/s). The more widely accepted speed rating is the Class system, usually denoted by a number inside a letter C. Most budget cards are Class 2, with a minimum read/ write speed of 2MB/s. Most mid-range high-capacity cards are Class 6, wi th a read/write speed of 6MB/s. The fastest class currently available are Class 10 cards, which have a read/write speed of at least 10MB/s. The newer ultra high speed UHS-I cards are rated at speeds of up to 45MB/s 90MB/s and the UDMA 7 Compact Flash c ards can reach 160MB/s. Some cards offer storage capacity up to 256GB in size. All this from a card that is not much bigger than a postage stamp.

Kingston SDHC 8 GB Class 4 £5/$4/€6 Best for: compact camera users and holiday shooters.

SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-3 SDXC 64GB, 95MB/s Class 10 £37/$35/€44 Best for: pros shooting Raw files and 4K movies.

Lexar Multi-use 16GB Class 4 £5/$9/€6 Best for: compact users and amateur DSLR users.

SanDisk Extreme Pro Compact Flash 64GB, 160MB/s £75/$85/€90 Best for: high bit rate DSLR and HD video users.

Lexar Premium SDHC 32GB 200X Class 10 £15/$12/€18 Best for: varied storage intensive DSLRs and devices.

SanDisk Extreme Pro 256GB, 160MB/s. £275/$300/€330 Best for: extreme image and video performance.

Transcend SDXC Flash 128 GB Class 10 £35/$44/€42 Best for: serious DSLR and video enthusiasts.

Lexar Professional 512GB, 525MB/s. £1043/$1200/€1228 Best for: the highest possible performance.

memory card can c an have an effect “The speed of the memory on the overall performance of the camera .”

SO HOW MANY PICTURES CAN I TAKE? The total number of pictures that can be stored on a memory card is a difficult thing to quantify for a couple of reasons. Digital cameras usually store images using the JPEG file format, which compresses image data to save storage space. Most cameras have a menu setting for image quality which varies the rate of compression, with high quality images taking up more space. The

compressed size of the image can also vary depending on the subject being shot, since more detailed images contain more data. For a typical modern 16-megapixel digital camera the file size can vary between about 4.5MB for a good quality jpeg and 30MB for an uncompressed Raw file, which means an average 8GB card will be enough for approximately 1400 jpegs or 260 Raw files.


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USING YOUR CAMERA Learn how to get the most out of your y our camera camera 34 - 39

Basic composition

40 - 41

Focusing

42 - 45

Shutter speed and camera shake

46 - 49

Focal length and zoom

50 - 53

Aperture and depth of field

54 - 57

Exposure and metering

58 - 59

File types and image compression

60 - 61

Shooting modes

62 - 63

White balance

64 - 65

ISO and image noise

66 - 67

Understanding hyperfocal distance

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ne of the keys to good photography is a solid grounding in the main methods and techniques that ensure your photos come out as you want them to. Nothing is more frustrating than taking a photo and the result not be how you hoped; and not being sure how to remedy it or ascertain why it went wrong in the first place. This section should help you understand a little more about the main principles of photography, such as composition, focusing, exposure and metering. A solid understanding of the essential skills and techniques will ultimately free you up and enable you to explore new and more creative projects. A camera is just a tool that, if left to its own devices in fully automatic mode, may not deliver the results you want. We hope to show you that it’s not at all scary and to take full control of your camera’s camera’s settings. There is no dark art to it, just good camera craft. n

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USING YOUR CAMERA


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Basic composition The simple rules that make a good picture great The addition of elements in a scene can make or break a photograph. If you cover up the tree on the left of the shot with your thumb, does the shot seem unbalanced or incomplete without it?

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he main difference between a well taken snapshot and a truly artistic photograph is simply a matter of composition. By changing the focal length, the angle and the position of the camera, the photographer can change the relative positions and sizes of objects in the frame to produce a more visually pleasing effect. Learning to do this is mostly a matter of practice and experimentation, but there are a number of simple tips and rules-of-thumb that can help you to take better pictures. The first and most important thing to remember is to take your time. Look at the scene in the viewfinder or on your monitor and try to see it not as simply a view but instead to imagine it as a finished print. Ask yourself if there’s any way that it can be improved by maybe zooming in a little, or by moving the camera. A tripod is a very useful

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tool for this, since it lets you view a completely static image without the need to hold the camera steady.

The Rule of Thirds The most commonly used compositional technique is called the Rule of Thirds, and it’s really very simple. Let’s take a look at an example landscapepicture [1] [1].. It’s a nice enough shot, correctly exposed, in focus and nicely lit, but now look at the next example[2] example [2].. Doesn’t that look better? It’s obviously the same scene, and taken from roughly the same position, but this composition is much more appealing. The reason it works is because the lighthouse is now positioned off-centre in the frame, in fact it is one third of the distance from the right to the left. This type of composition is known as the Rule of Thirds. The best way to apply the Rule of Thirds is to imagine the frame divided up into thirds both

vertically and horizontally, rather like a Noughts and Crosses (Tic Tac Toe for those in the USA) grid [3] [3].. If you position the main elements of the image on these imaginary lines, or better yet on the intersections where the lines meet, you’ll find that your image will look a lot more pleasing to the eye. The Rule of Thirds works just as well in vertical-format vertical-format shots, and is useful in landscape photography, since features on the horizon makes a natural dividing line [4 [4]]. Portraits can also benefit from Rule of Thirds composition. By positioning a subject’s eye at a point where the imaginary lines intersect[5] intersect[5],, will give your portrait balance and really help to draw the viewer’s attention into the picture. Most digital cameras feature an option to superimpose the Rule of Thirds grid on the monitor screen to make this type of composition easier. Now you know why it is there. n

BASIC COMPOSITION

1

2

3

4

5

“Look at the scene in

the viewfnder or on your monitor and try to see it not as simply a view but instead to imagine it as a fnished print.”


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ZOOM Angle You can use your camera’s zoom lens to improve composition. Below (left) is a photograph of a striking evening scene, taken with a 16mm wide-angle lens. Whilst it does capture a striking skyline with interesting visual content, there’s too much going on in the picture. The jetty in the foreground, the buildings both sides of the river and the bridge are co nfusing, so it

becomes unclear what the subject of the shot is. By moving a short distance and zooming in to exclude the surrounding scenery, we can get a much tighter composition (below right). Now there’s no question about the subject of the photograph. The shape of the building where it intersects the sky and the river now conforms to the rule of thirds.

“By moving a short distance and zooming in, we can get a much tighter composition.”

By far the most common compositional mistake is to take a photo from the wrong angle. If you see something that you think might make a good photo, don’t just point the camera and snap away. Pause for a moment and think about what you actually want to see in the picture, and what would be the best way to capture it. Take this shot for example: This display of fruit and veg outside a greengrocers has some good elements. The light is great, it has plenty of colour, and some interesting

shapes and textures. However shot from this angle it is completely uninteresting, uninteresting, just a random snapshot. However if we get down lower and in closer, we find this view:

FRAMING A less popular technique, but one which can produce good results under the right circumstances, is framing. This is where you use objects in th e foreground to frame and thus emphasise the main subject of the picture. It is difficult to do well, because there is the risk that the foreground objects will distract the viewer from the main subject. However if the framing objects are sufficiently nondescript and contrast f rom an eye-catching main subject then this compositional technique can work very well. In the picture on the left the framing doe sn’t work

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because too much of the foreground is visible and in sharp focus; it distracts from the subject of the picture. However, framing an image by zooming in so that only a few leaves are visible and out of focus, the effect in the right image is a lot more successf ul. Thanks to the conventions reinforced by decades of Hollywood films, framed shots whe re most of the framing object is on the lower edge of the frame tend to look sinister, like you were stalking th e subject, while a frame of overhanging foliage tends to be associated with romance, and is often used by wedding photographers.

It would have been better still to have the strawberries in the shot as well, but here the contrast in shape and colour between the melons and the pineapple stalks makes for a much more striking image, and the slightly blurred price tag in the background adds a nice finishing touch. One of the best uses for this tip is when taking photos of children or animals. If you kneel down and shoot from their height you’ll get much better results than if you stand up and just snap away, because all you get then is photos of the tops of their heads. The best wildlife photographers know that to get a good picture of an animal you have to share its environment, so make a bit of an effort and try to get down closer to you subject’s head height. You may risk getting your clothes dirty, but you’ll get a much better shot.

BASIC COMPOSITION

When shooting children or animals, capture the world from their perspective by crouching down so that the camera is level with their head height.

Perspective Perspective is what gives us our perception of three dimensions, and we can use this to achieve a number of different effects. Most types of perspective shots are achieved using wide-angle lenses, since the exaggerated angle of view emphasises the effect. The most common type of perspective effect is “one-point perspective”. By using a wide-angle lens, groups of lines converging on a vanishing point

“The best wildlife photographers know that to get a good picture of an animal you have to share its it s environment.”

within the boundaries of the frame can add energy to an otherwise fairly dull scene, giving a sense of movement and drama. This effect works best for photographs taken when within or surrounded by buildings, but it can also work on roads, railway lines, even rivers and beaches. Photographs of buildings can be enlivened by using “two point perspective”, photographing the building from a low angle pointing upward so that the parallel sides converge both upward and to the side, creating two vanishing points which are usually outside of the frame of the picture. This is also achieved by using a wide-angle lens to emphasise the effect, however the main danger is that many wide-angle lenses, especially the zoom lenses on compact cameras, produce what is known as barrel distortion, where parallel lines appear to curve. Better quality lenses minimise this distortion. n


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FOREGROUND, SUBJECT AND BACKGROUND Squinting at your subject through the viewfinder of your camera, it’s all too easy to overlook what else is in the frame. You’re concentrating so hard on getting your subject not to blink when the flash goes off that you completely miss that tree in the background that looks like it’s growing out of her head, or the discarded crisp packet lying distractingly in the corner of the frame. Along with your main subject, a photograph will usually have both a background and a foreground, an d these are just as much a part part of the imag image. e. The trick is to compos compose e the photograph in such a way that you strike a balance between these different elements. When done properly this adds life and interest to the picture, as well as making it seem more natural. Take this photo of a famous a nd much-photographed Dartmoor landmark, the ancient clapper bridge at Postbridge in Devon. It’s very easy to simply take a

snapshot of the bridge, but that simply looks the same as the photographs that hundreds of visitors take of it every year. It’s very pretty, but it’s also a little dull. By including some foreground detail, and positioning the camera to capture the background of the moorland and forest, the bridge is now one element of a much more balanced shot, and one which shows the bridge in its surroundings. Similarly this photo of a familiar London landmark is flat and boring, and doesn’t really show the building in the context of the city around it. By choosing a completely different location we can add foreground detail the shot, and instantly it becomes more balanced and dynamic. Of course the improved weather helps too, but that’s another thing to which you should pay attention when you are setting up and composing a photograph.

Balance When your photograph has more than one subject you can achieve a better composition if you give each subject equal weight in the composition, so that the subjects form a harmonious balance within the frame. As with many artistic techniques it’s largely a matter of practice, experience and individual taste. Try to position your subjects so that they are the same distance from the edges of the frame, and also more-or-less more-or-less symmetrically balanced around either the centre of the frame or some visible dividing line. A diagonal composition works in most cases, especially with portraits of couples. Perfectly symmetrical arrangements where the subjects are the same height within the frame tend to look forced and unnatural. In this first example, the two fish are balanced by the stone jar in a diagonal arrangement that makes for a pleasing and harmonious composition. composition. If you can’t see it, try covering up the jar with your hand and see how dull the fish look on their own.

In this second example, the photo was cropped to balance the composition between the two guys talking in the background and the horse in the foreground. In this case the horse is closer to the edge of the frame, but then it is much bigger and closer to the camera, so it looks more natural that way.

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BASIC COMPOSITION

LEADING LINES

EXAMPLE A

Implied movement

EXAMPLE B

EXAMPLE C

EXAMPLE D

A photograph freezes a moment in time, which is great if your subject is a stationary object or person, but what if your subject is moving? How can you capture movement in a still image? There is a technique involving a slow shutter speed and panning the camera to follow the movement, but it’s difficult to master and only works about one time in ten any way. Far easier is freezing the action with a nice fast shutter speed, and using a subtle compositional trick to simulate movement. The trick is very simple. Just position the moving subject within the frame so that it appears that it is moving into the middle of the picture. For example, if you are photographing a boat moving from the left to the right, position it on the left of the frame so that it is moving inward towards the centre, leaving room in the frame into which the boat could move. The best way to illustrate this effect is with a couple of examples. Take a look at this shot:

Here the boat is positioned incorrectly, and appears to be about to exit out of the picture. There is a lot of empty space on the left of the picture, and it looks awkward and unbalanced.

Closely related to perspective is the concept of leading lines. When you look at a photograph for the first time, your eye will naturally be drawn to cer tain areas. It is possible to subtly lead the viewer’s eye around the image to areas of interest using the visual cues of line and perspective. For some reason best known to anthropologists our eyes find broad “S” shapes very appealing, so any feature in a photograph that resembles this shape will naturally tend to attract the viewer’s attention. The eye naturally tends to follow the S-shape into the picture, usually starting at the closest and/or lowest point and moving upward. Many features can be used to create leading lines, but favourites include rivers, streams, footpaths, roads, hedgerows, or the line of surf on a beach. In figure or portrait photography, the line of the limbs, hands, hair or items of clothing can also be used to create leading lines that draw the eye into the photo.

In example A, the elevated angle allows the long curving line of a harbo ur wall to form a leading line drawing the viewer into the picture. Leading lines are most often used in landscape photography, because so many natural features make those appealing S-shapes. In example B the line of the path leads the eye up past the hikers to the mountains beyond. Leading lines don’t have to be S-shaped curves, straight lines can work as well. In example C, the perspective of the walls, the ceiling decorations and pillars draw you from the front of the shot down the corridor to the exit. Use leading lines to emphasis e a particular point in a photograph, or to highlight a particular subject in a busy environment. In this studio portrait shot (example D), the position of the model’s hand and the line of her hair combine in a leading line directing the viewer’s attention to her eyes.

In this shot, the boat is moving into the picture, giving it better balance and a dynamic feeling of speed and movement. If you look at pictures by professional sports photographers, you’ll see this technique applied to everything from sailing boats to football players. n


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“Autofocus technology has improved immensely, and these days even the most basic modern AF systems are generally fast, accurate and reliable.”

Focusing Getting the best out of your autofocus system sys tem

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ith only one or two exceptions, all current digital cameras have automatic focusing. The first autofocus systems were developed by Leica in the 1970s. The first autofocus compact camera, the Konica C35 AF, was introduced in 1977, and the first autofocus 35mm SLR, the Pentax ME-F ME-F,, was launched in 1981. Since that time autofocus technology has improved immensely, and these days even the most basic modern AF systems are generally fast, accurate and reliable .

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Although we now rely on autofocus for the vast majority of photographs, anyone who has tried taking a photo in low light, with fast-moving subjects or using very long telephoto lenses will have noticed that sometimes even the best AF system can run into proble ms. We’ve all stood there with the lens whirring in and out of focus, trying to get a lock on our subject, and eventually missed the shot. It’s very frustrating when this happens, but with a few simple tips you can help your camera to focus quickly and accurately even

in difficult situations. There are two main types of autofocus system in common use today. All compact cameras and most CSCs use something called contrastdetection AF, which samples the image from the main picture taking sensor and detects sharp high contrast edges in the details of the scene. Meanwhile all dig ital SLRs and Sony’s new SLT cameras use something called phase-detection AF, which uses an array of separate dedi cated sensors usually mounted below and in front of the

FOCUSING

main imaging sensor. Phase detection is a more complex system, but it is usually much faster, more accurate and works better in low light. However both systems require some detail in the scene to ’lock on’ to. Try it for yourself: point your camera at a plain wall or a sheet of white paper and see if it will focus on it. Even if you own a top-of-the-range DSLR it won’t be able to focus on a featureless surface. There are a couple of ways to help your camera to focus quickly on a scene. Most digital cameras have the option to select either single or continuous autofocus. Your camera will normally start to focus on the scene as so on as you halfpress the shutter button. In continuous focus mode it will continue to upd ate the focus if you

then move the camera, but in single AF mode it will hold the same focus setting as long as you hold d own the button, until you actually take the shot. You can use this to focus the camera on low detail targets by finding an object in the scene that’s the same distance away as your chosen subject, focusing on that, and then holding the focus and reframing the shot. Similarly you can use it in reverse to focus on objects that aren’t in the centre of the frame.

Moving targets Different lenses have different minimum focusing distances, but many modern zoom telephoto lenses also have macrofocusing capabilities for close-ups.

By carefully focusing on just one part of the scene, and using limited depth of field, you can draw attention to it.

Compact camera AF systems are usually somewhat slower than those in DSLRs, which means they can have a real problem focusing on moving subjects. The way around this is either to use continuous AF or, if your camera has this option, to use manual focus. If you can tell where your subject is going to be, such as a car going round a tight corner on a race track or a child on a s wing, you can pre-focus the camera on this point and wait to take the picture at the right moment. This method takes some practice and good reflexes, but it can p roduce excellent results.

Close-ups All cameras and lenses have a minimum focusing distance, a closest point beyond which they cannot focus. For many compact cameras this distance can be very small, in some cases as little as 2cm (1in), but for standard DSLR lenses the distances tend to be longer. Most compact cam eras have a ’macro’ setting, usually denoted by the symbol of a flower. To To get closer focusing with a DSLR or CSC, special closefocus macro lenses have to be used. Depth of field is greatly reduced at very close focusing distances, and you may find that your AF system doesn’t focus on the right part of the subjec t, for example if you are tr ying to photograph the centre of a flower, but the AF focuses on the petals, because they’re closer. closer. The best option is to use a tripod, and manually set the focus to the closest distance. Move the tripod until the front of the subject comes into focus, then carefully manually adjust the focus point to get the right part of the flower to look sharp. n


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Shutter speed and camera camera shake shake The shutter of o f your camera is simply a mechanical barrier

“The wider the range of available shutter speeds, the greater the creative versatility versatility of the camera. camera.””

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SHUTTER SPEED AND CAMERA SHAKE

AVOIDING AVOI DING CAMERA SHAKE SHA KE When shooting hand-held and wishing to avoid camera shake, as a rule of thumb you can safely use a shutter speed roughly equivalent to the reciprocal of the focal length you are using. For example if you’re using a 100mm focal length then you can take a sharp hand-held shot at a shutter speed of 1 /100th of a second or fa ster. If you’re using a 35mm focal length then 1/35th of a second is safe, and so on.

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he shutter of your camera is simply a mechanical barrier that prevents light from entering the camera until it is needed, controlling when and for how long light is allowed in to expose the sensor. The latest digital cameras have high-speed electro-mechanical electro-mec hanical shutters capable of timing exposures with an accuracy measured in fractions of a millisecond. Along with the aperture setting and the sensitivity control, shutter speed is one of the three ways that photographic exposure is adjusted. When a picture is taken, the shutter is opened for a precisely measured amount of time allowing light to pass through. The duration of the exposure is set either automatically by the camera’s light meter or manually by the photographer. The wider the range of available shutter speeds, the greater the creative versatility of the camera. Modern digital SLR cameras have a very wide range of shutter speeds available, usually ranging from 30 seconds to as high as 1/8,000th of a second, and most also have a ‘B’ setting, in which the shut ter stays open for as long as th e shutter release is held down. The ‘B’ is from bulb. Very old cameras commonly used an air air-bulb -bulb attachment as a remote shutter release. Shutter speed can be manually adjusted in either full manual exposure mode or in shutter priority mode, the latter usually denoted by an ‘S’ or ‘Tv’ on the exposure mode dial. Shutter priority is a semi-automatic exposure mode in which the photographer sets the desired shutter speed, and the camera’s exposure system adjusts the aperture accordingly to produce the correct exposure. In automatic and program exposure modes the camera will set both the shutter speed and aperture automatically. Under normal daylight conditions, the shutter speed will usually be set to between 1/125th and 1/1000th of a second, since this is fast enough to freeze most movement and to reduce the effects of camera shake. However in low light conditions the camera may set a slower shutter speed, and with this comes an increased risk of movement blur caused by camera shake. Most cameras will display some sort of warning if this occurs. n

Here’s an example shot taken handheld at a focal length of 100mm and a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. As you can see it’s sharp and shake free.

Here’s the same hand-held shot but this time with a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second. At this speed and focal length it’s much more difficult to hold the camera steady. As you can see, the result is quite blurred.

Many modern cameras include technology which can reduce the effects of camera shake at low shutter speeds. Many compact cameras use electronic processing to counteract movement, which does work but produces relatively poor image quality. Among digital SLR and CSC manufacturers there are two types of image stabilisation in common use. Canon, Nikon and Panasonic favour optical stabilisation, where elements within the camera lens are moved to counteract camera shake. Other brands including Pentax and Sony employ a system which moves the camera’s sensor to achieve the same effect. There is no clear advantage between moving-lens and moving-sensor systems. Modern image stabilisation systems of both types can provide around three or four stops of additional stability, however the sensor-shift method has an advantage for SLR users because the non-stabilised lenses are usually considerably lighter and are often also cheaper to buy, since the complex anti-shake system is built into the camera body. It also means that photographers using older predigital lenses can still have the advantage of imagestabilisation.

This example shot was taken with a focal length of 100mm at 1/10th of a second as before, but this time the image stabilisation (in this case a sensor-shift system) is switched on. It has detected the vibration and corrected it by moving the sensor to compensate, resulting in a much sharper shot.


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MOTION BLUR Any movement in the frame during the exposure will be captured in the picture, resulting in motion blur. Anti-shake systems can do nothing to correct this; the only solution is to use a shutter speed fast enough to effectively freeze the action and eliminate any sense of motion. With a fast enough shutter speed

1/50th

you can freeze even very fast-moving objects, as this next sequence of photos will show. They were taken at shutter speeds ranging from a fairly slow 1/50th of a second up to 1/4000th of a second. As you can see, at 1/4000th of a second the blades of a desk fan can almost be frozen in place.

“The solution for motion blur is to use a shutter speed fast enough to t o freeze the action.”

THE MISTY WATER EFFECT 1/200th

One of the most effective uses of long shutter speed is photographing flowing water. It’s a beautiful if slightly over-used effect, but it is very easy to achieve. Any moving body of water, flowing streamor waterfall will do, as long as it has white splashing water. This scene is Pulpit Rock in Weymouth. If you just point the camera and shoot on automatic, you’ll you’ll end up with something something like this (below). (below). It looks nice enough, but it’s a bit dull. This example was shot on at a shutter speed of 1/640th of a second and an aperture of f8.

1/1000th

1/4000th

Fixing the camera on a tripod eliminates camera shake. You now need to get the slowest shutter speed you can. The image at the top of the page was taken from a similar position as the previous shot, but with the addition of a 10stop ND filter to give a shutter speed spee d of 30 secs and an aperture of f9.

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SHUTTER SPEED AND CAMERA SHAKE

CAPTURINGMOVEMENT

CAR LIGHTS AT NIGHT

Freezing the action with a fast shutter speed produces a nice sharp image, but sometimes you might want to allow a controlled amount of movement blur to show that the subject was in motion. There are a n umber of ways to accomplish this.

In this first example, the camera was fixed on a tripod, with a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second, while the subjects cycled past in front of the lens. The tripod ensures that the background is sharp and the fast shutter speed has frozen the movement. The result is sharp but looks slightly unnatural, as though they were somehow balancing there without moving.

Another interesting effect achieved using long shutter speeds is streaking car lights at night. The camera was set up on a tripo d, using manual focus and full manual exposure, wit h a cable shutter release. Starting with an aperture of about f/4, you will need to dial in your settings to get a balanced exposure. If your exposure duration is still too short, stop your aperture down to f/5.6 or smaller until you get a longer exposure duration that renders car lights as long streaks. Generally, a shutter speed of aro und 4 seconds is a good starting point. When shooting near heavy traffic at night it’s obviously important to stay safe. Wear something bright and reflective, and don’t get too close to the road. Also, never use a flash when taking photos of traffic. You could dazzl e a driver and cause an accident.

With the camera still mounted on the tripod, the shutter speed was set to 1/10th of a second, and another subject came past. This time the background is still sharp, but the slow shutter speed has resulted in lots of movement blur, making the subject almost unrecognisable.

FIREWORKS In order to capture the feeling of movement (top image), image), the best technique is to use a slow shutter speed, but to pan the camera (move it side-to-side) side-to-side) to follow the moving subject as you press the shutter. It is a technique that requires practice, since you need to be able to keep the camera moving smoothly as the exposure is taken, and avoid up-and-down movement as you press the shutter. It may take several several tries to get it right, but when it works the results are very effective, with the subject stationary against a movement-blurred movement-blurred background. This shot was taken hand-held at a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second. Some recent cameras have a setting on the image stabilisation system to correct vertical movement but not horizontal, which helps with this kind of shot.

One way to take good fireworks photos is to set yourcamera camera on a tripod tripod somedistance distance fromthe display, with the zoom set to a very wide angle. angl e. Set a shutter speed of 2 seconds and as wide an aperture as you can manage. Getting the framing exactly right is simply a matter of luck, ti ming, and then cropping the photo later.


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Focal length and zoom Understanding how focal length works in composing shots

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early all modern compact cameras have zoom lenses, and most users of digital SLRs or CSCs will also have at least a couple of zooms in their kit. Focal length is one of your primary tools for adjusting composition. Selecting the right focal length for the scene allows the photographer to control perspective, angle

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of view and magnification, and can radically alter the mood and style of the photo. Some focal lengths are more suited to particular types of photo, and the properties of wideangle and telephoto lenses can be used to produce particular effects. Understanding how focal length works and how it affects your photos is a vital photogr photographic aphic skill.

FOCAL LENGTH AND ZOOM

LENSES AND FOCAL LENGTH

“Selecting the right focal length for the scene allows the photographer to control perspective, angle of view

300MM TELEPHOTO

and magnifcation.”

There are basically two types of lens: those with fixed focal lengths, also known as prime lenses; and those with variable focal length, or zoom lenses. They both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Prime lenses are usually smaller and lighter than zooms, and also generally have much faster maximum apertures than a zoom lens at equivalent focal length. The optical quality of prime lenses is also usually a little higher than the equivalent zoom lens. Zoom lenses however are much more convenient, allowing the photographer to cover a wide range of focal lengths with just one or two lenses, rather than carrying around a bulky collection of prime lenses. There are some fast zoom lenses, but they tend to be extremely expensive. The focal length of a lens is an expression of its magnifying power, and is usually stated in millimetres. If you look on the front of your camera, usually inscribed around the front of the lens you’ll find the focal length, or a range of values for zoom lenses. For a typical DSLR kit lens this will usually be around 18-55mm. For digital cameras it is fairly usual to see two figures quoted, both the actual focal length and the ‘equivalent’ length. The reason for quoting both is simply that most people are more familiar with the sizes of 35mm lenses, so they know that 28mm is wide angle and suitable for panoramic shots, or that 200mm is a telephoto lens, suitable for long-range subjects. Real and equivalent focal lengths are different because most digital camera sensors are a lot smaller than a f rame of 35mm film, and are fitted much closer to the lens than the film would b e. Most consumer DSLRs use the APS-C sensor format. Exact sizes vary from one manufacturer to the next, but are

typically around 22.5 x 15 mm. A frame of 35mm film measures 36 x 24mm, which means that the edges are 1.6x longer, so the focal length of the len s would need to be 1.6x greater to produce the same image size and magnification. This is usually referred to as the ‘conversion factor’ or ‘crop factor’. It means that a typical 18-55mm DSLR zoom lens is roughly equivalent to the popular 28-80mm zoom lens often used on 35mm systems. Compact camera sensors are even smaller still. Because there are several different sizes of sensor in common use it is more usual for compact camera zoom lenses to be rated in terms of their magnification power, such as 3x, 4x, 10x etc. This relates to the difference between the minimum and maximum focal lengths. A lens with a range of focal length from 5.8mm to 17.4mm is called a 3x zoom, because 17.4 17.4 = 3 x 5.8. While in older prime lenses a 200mm lens would literally be 20cm long, modern optical systems use multiple lens elements working in combination, which means that the light path can be shortened while still maintaining the same effective magnification. As a result quite powerful telephoto and zoom lenses can be relatively compact. Wide-angle and telephoto are relative terms. On a 35mm film SLR a 50mm lens produces approximately the same perspective and magnification as the human eye, and has traditionally been the standard lens for this type of camera. Anything longer than 50mm is considered a telephoto, while anything shorter is considered wide angle. Digital SLRs tend to follow this rule too, although considering the crop factor the mid-point is approximately 35mm.

50-200MM ZOOM

18-55MM KIT LENS

14MM WIDE-ANGLE


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MAGNIFICATION The most obvious effect of altering focal length is the change in magnification. Anyone who has ever used a zoom lens will be familiar with this effect. If you want to take a photo of something a long way away, you zoom in and the subject appears closer. This series of photos shows the effect of a wideangle zoom equivalent to 25mm, medium zoom of 80mm and a telephoto of 400mm, all taken from the same position. What is happening here is not the subject being

brought closer, but the angle of view being reduced so that a smaller proportion of the scene fills the frame of the sensor. If we look at a cropped-down section of the centre of the wide-angle 25mm view we can see that it looks very similar to the 400mm view, although rather less sharp, because this cropped-down section of the frame obviously has far fewer pixels than the full-frame zoomed-in image. This is the way that digital zoom works on a compact camera, and is why digital zoom should never be used as a substitute for optical zoom.

25mm

50mm

“A cropped-down section of the frame has far fewer pixelsthan the full-frame zoomed-inimage.” image.”

ANGLE OF VIEW Changing the angle of view can be used to produce some interesting effects. If we move closer to the subject while shortening the focal length we can see that although the subject fills roughly the same area of the final image, in a wide angle shot a lot more of the background is included. Take a look at this series of five pictures, each one taken at approximately half the focal length of the previous one. As the focal length is reduced more of the background comes into view behind the subject, while objects in the foreground appear much closer to the camera, increasing the appearance of extreme perspective.

25mm zoom

80mm zoom

400mm zoom

100mm

200mm

As you can see, cropping the wide-angle image produces the same effect as zooming in, but greatly reduces quality.

25mm cropped

400mm

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FOCAL LENGTH AND ZOOM

DISTORTION

Telephoto lens

Wide angle shot

DEPTH OF FIELD The perspective-flattening of long lenses can also be used in other circumstances, such as drastically reducing depth of field. You can use this to isolate a subje ct by blurring out th e background, as i n the shot above (left). Compare this with the same shot on the right, but taken with a wide angle lens from a much closer range. The relative size of Bailey the dog is the same in both shots, but due to the increased depth of field in the wide angle shot, the background, although apparently more distant, looks sharper. Wide angle shot

Changing the angle of view is important to remember when shooting portraits. If you use a short focal leng th to take a facial portrait at close range the parts that are closest to the camera will appear disproportionately larger, distorting the facial features. The result is a ‘ballooning’ of the face as it appears to bulge outwards, like a reflection in the back of a spoon: not such a flattering look, as illustrated above. Most portrait photographers prefer to step back a little and zoom in. The most popular choice is a focal leng th of about 80-100mm, since this gives a flattering, naturallooking perspective.

Telephoto lens

Wide lens

TELEPHOTO LENS Careful focusing with a long telephoto lens can pick out individual subjects despite busy surroundings, such as focusing on Bailey the dog at the park with lots of visual distractions behind him. The same scene shot from the same position using a wide angle lens presents the subject, and how they relate to their environment, in a completely different way.

Telephoto lens

The examples we’ve used here are extremes intended to emphasise the ef fects we’re demonstrating, but in fact a lot of people only ever use their zoom lenses at either maximum or minimum set tings. Don’t do this out of habit; instead use the full range of the lens to explore all the different possibilities it offers. Focal length is one of your primary creative tools, so make good use of it.


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Using a very wide aperture and precise focusing, emphasis can be given to one subject to effectively isolate it from its surroundings.

Aperture Apertu re and depth of field With aperture you can control how much of your picture is in focus WIDE APERTURE

O

f the three main controls common to nearly all cameras, shutter speed, focus and aperture, it is aperture adjustment that is the least well understood. This is because it not only helps to control exposure, but also affects something called Depth of Field. Understanding the effects of aperture size is a vital skill for any keen photographer. At least there’s nothing mysterious about the name. The aperture is literally a hole through which light passes after it enters the lens. The diameter of this hole can be altered, allowing a greater or smaller amount of light to pass through on its way to the sensor. In the early days of photography, aperture was adjusted by slotting cards with different sized holes cut in them into the body of the camera behind

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the lens. These cards were known as ‘stops’, and this is still part of photographic terminology today. On modern cameras the aperture is controlled by an arrangement of curved shutters inside the body of the lens, which move to produce a continuously variable aperture, however the aperture settings are usually still referred to as ‘F-stops’. Aperture adjustment is used in combination with the shutter speed and ISO sensitivity to control photographic exposure. However it is also the primary means of controlling something called depth of field, a concept that may need a bit of explanation. If you take a photo of a subject at a distance of about 3 metres with standard zoom lens, in good light with the focal length set to about 30mm, as

NARROW APERTURE

APERTURE AND DEPTH OF FIELD

How aperture works

“Understanding the effects of aperture size is a vital skill for any keen photographer.” long as the lens is focused correctly the subject should appear nice and sharp in the image. However you’ll usually find that objects about 1.5m in front of the subject, and for about 4 or 5 metres behind the subject, also appear sharp. This distance, from the closest point of acceptable sharpness to the most distant, is known as the depth of field. By altering the size of the aperture it is possible to control the extent of this depth of field, either reducing it so that only the main subject is in sharp focus, or expanding it so that an entire landscape can appear to be just as sharp. If you have an older camera to hand, take a look at the lens. It will have a ring for controlling the aperture setting, labelled with numbers usually from about F2 to about F22. The focus control ring will have distances usually calibrated in feet and metres, and alongside it you’ll usually find lines marked with the same numbers as the aperture ring, arranged in pairs either side of the focal distance mark with the larger numbers toward the outside. The purpose of this aperture scale is to help estimate the depth of field at a particular distance for any given aperture setting; with the focus set to a particular distance, anything between the two lines for the selected aperture setting should be acceptably sharp. Some older zoom lenses have a series of curved cur ved lines etched into the lens barrel for the same purpose. For some reason this scale is missing from most modern auto-focus, auto-aperture lenses, which is a shame because it makes the whole concept of depth of field much easier to understand.

Explaining exac tly why altering the size of the lens aperture alters the depth of field is a little complicated, but a few simple diagrams should help to shed s ome light on the matter. For a start, let’s clear up some popular misconceptions about the difference between focus and sharpness. This is a highly simplified diagram of the arrangement of lens, aperture and sensor inside a modern digital camera. In this first diagram, three subjects at different distances from the camera lens are represented by the red, green and blue dots. The lens is fo cused on the green spot, so light from it passes through the aperture

and the lens and appears sharply focused on the sensor. Light from the red and blue spots also passes through the aperture and lens, but light from the red spot focuses a short distance in front of the charged coupled device (CCD), while light from the blue spot focuses a short distance behind it. The light from these other spots still hits the CCD, but due to light scattering it is unfocuse d and spread over a wide area. What this means is that the red and blue spots will appear as large blurred spots on the final image, while the green spot will be sharp and in focus. fo cus. The size of the blurred area of the red and blue spots is called the ‘circle of confusion.’

Film or CCD Apparent diameter of blue ‘circle of confusion’

Aperture (wide)

Apparent diameter of red ‘circle of confusion’

Lens

The diagram below shows the same arrangement of camera and subjects, and the coloured spots are the same distance from the lens, but this time the aperture has been reduced to just a small hole. A gain the lens is focused on the green spot, and the red and blue spots are out of focus. However the narrow aperture restricts the light scattering and the relative angle s of the light

paths, and as a result the ‘circles of confusio n’ are much smaller. This makes the red and blue spots in the final image appear much sharp er. They are still out of focus, but the effect is not so noticeab le. To make circles of confusion as large as in the first image, the red and b lue spots would have to be much furthe r away from the green one.

Film or CCD Aperture (narrow)

Apparent diameter of blue ‘circle of confusion’

Apparent diameter of red ‘circle of confusion’ APERTURE RING

Lens BDM’s Digital Photography Beginners’ Guide

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FOCAL LENGTH AND DEPTH OF FIELD The focal length of your lens, in other words how much you zoom in on your subject, also has a large effect on depth of field. Short focal lengths have much greater depth of field than longer focal lengths. This is one reason why, when taking a portrait shot, it’s a good idea to step back a bit and zoom in rather than using a wide angle lens up close. In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions. In some cases, it may be desirable to have the entire image sharp, and a large DOF is appropriate. In other cases, a small DOF may be more effective, emphasizing the subject while de-emphasizing the foreground and background. In cinematography, a large DOF is often called deep focus, and a small DOF is often called shallow focus. In the examples shown here, at f4, the front wooden fence post nearest the camera on the left is the only object in sharpest focus and the post next to it and beyond is totally blurred. At f8 the area of acceptable focus has increased so that the second fence post is starting to come into focus. Shooting at f16 brings the second and third posts into greater focus. Stopping the camera down to its narrowest aperture of f22 has all four posts looking reasonably sharp. If you were able to stop this lens down to f/32, the foliage to the far right would also become sharper too.

ACCEPTABLY SHARP

F4

ACCEPTABLY SHARP

F8

ACCEPTABLY SHARP

“In optics, particularly as it relates to flm and photography, depth o feld (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and arthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. image.””

F16

ACCEPTABLY SHARP

F22

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APERTURE AND DEPTH OF FIELD

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY Practical uses for depth of field There are several situations where controlling depth of field is important. The most common is p ortrait photography. Subjects shot on an automatic camera using a medium aperture usually have a lot of sharp foreground and background detail, which can distract attention away from the main subject.

Another situation in which depth of field is an important issue is landscape photography. photography. Here it is often important to maximise depth of field, so it is usual to use the smallest possible aperture. This shot was

taken using an aperture of f/16, to ensure that both the foreground and distant background are in focus. It also uses something called Hyperfocal Distance, which involves a bit of maths to calculate.

As you can see in this example, which has a large depth of field, the subject is in focus, but so is the background, which draws the viewer’s attention away from the subject. By using a wider aper ture, and moving the subject further from the background, only the subject is now in sharp focus. A blurred background is much less distracting, and concentrates your attention on the subject, making the subject really stand out from the background.


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Exposure xposure and metering Accurate exposure exposure is the key to good photography photography

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nderstanding exposure and how it affects your photographs photographs is probably the single most important technical skill you can learn in photography. It’s certainly the one that most people get wrong, and apart from camera shake, bad exposure probably ruins more photos than any other single cause. The main problem is over reliance on automatic metering. Most modern cameras, even relatively cheap compacts, have sophisticated built-in TTL multizone evaluative exposure meters that measure light levels at dozens, in some cases hundreds , of points within the frame, instantly comparing the results with a built-in library of exposure situations and automatically adjusting the shutter speed and aperture to deal with prob lems such as backlighting, close-ups or moving subjects. In most cases these automatic exposure systems are very good, and can reliably cope with

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most common circumstances. However even the best automatic meter can be fooled, resulting in poorly exposed photos. By overriding the camera’s automatic settings and adjusting exposure manually we can avoid these problems and take much better photos. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples. In this first scene we have a portrait of brightly lit fair skinned model shot against a dark background. This was taken using a typical DSLR camera set on automatic exposure. As you can see the camera has badly over-exposed our model’s face, losing details in the highlight areas. In this second example the same camera has been used to photograph another model, but this time standing in front of a brightly lit background. In this case the camera’s automatic exposure system has seriously under-exposed the shot, leaving the model’s face in deep shadow with little detail visible.

OVER-EXPOSED

UNDER-EXPOSED

The same usually reliable exposure meter took both of these shots, so what went wrong? In order to understand what happened and accurately correct it, it is necessary to know how light meters operate, and the rules by which exposure is calculated.

EXPOSURE AND METERING

FIG 1. ORIGINAL SCENE

FIG 2. THE LIGHT METER WILL AVERAGE THE SCENE

SMALL APERTURE

FIG 3. THE AVERAGE RESULT WILL BE MID-TONE GREY

LARGE APERTURE

“Apart from camera c amera shake, shake, bad exposure probably ruins more photos than any other single cause. The main problem is over reliance on automatic automati c metering.” Fade to grey Take a look at the main picture above. What you see there is a nice scene of a rural area in bright sunlit conditions, with a good tonal range, plenty of colour and some nice crisp sunlight. What your camera’s light meter sees is very different as our example above shows. Try Try it out for yourself. Find any nice, average snapshot scene, properly lit and with good contrast like our example FIG 1. Start up your image editing software and open your picture. Light meters only see in black and white, so reduce the saturation of the shot to zero. Your light meter doesn’t see detail, so set your Gaussian blur filter FIG 2 to maximum diameter and apply it a couple of times. Use the eyedropper tool to measure the RGB colour value of the resulting tone. You should find that it averages out to a mid-tone grey FIG 3 with an RGB value of around 127,127,127. 127,127,127. It’s an interesting and curious fact that any

average scene reflects 18% of the light falling on it. Look out of your window, and unless you live in Antarctica the scene you see is reflecting exactly the same amount of light as the scene out of my window. That 18% reflection is exactly the same as a mid-tone grey, midway between black and white. Light meters are calibrated with this fact in mind. When your camera takes a light reading, the meter averages the scene and adjusts the exposure to produce that mid-tone grey (or 12% luminance, but that’s another discussion altogether). If you point the camera at a black stage curtain, it will try to make the black into a mid-tone grey, so it will over-expose. If you point i t at snow it will try to make the white into grey, so it will under-expose.

Adjusting exposure Let’s take a moment to explain how exposure is controlled, and what is meant by some of the

terminology. If you already know the basics, feel free to skip to the next page. On all cameras, exposure is adjusted by altering two settings; aperture and shutter speed. Between them they control the amount of light that hits the sensor when the shot is taken. Shutter speed is self-explanatory, it is simply the amount of time that the sensor is exposed to light. This is usually controlled by an electrically operated mechanical shutter in front of the sensor that opens and closes very quickly for a precisely measured period of time, usually in the order of a few hundredths of a second. Obviously a shutter speed twice as long lets in twice as much light, one half as long lets in half as much. The aperture is literally just a hole through which light passes on its way to the sensor. The diameter of that hole can be adjusted to precisely calibrated sizes. A smaller hole lets in less li ght, and a larger hole lets in more.


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These calibrated aperture sizes, for largely historical reasons, are called stops, or f-stops. An aperture setting one stop larger lets in twice as much light. For reasons that are both historical and mathematical, the standard full-stop aperture settings that you are most likely to encounter go f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16 and f/22. The smaller numbers refer to larger apertures, and the larger numbers to smaller ones. Many cameras can set apertures in increments of 1/3rd of a stop, but the whole-stop numbers are the one s to remember. Let’s consider an example. With your camera set to automatic exposure point it at a scene and take a light reading. For the sake of argument, say the light meter sets an aperture of f/8 and 1/200th of a second. You can produce the same exposure by increasing the aperture by one stop to f/5.6 and halving the shutter speed to 1/400th of a second, because this lets the same amount of light through to the sensor. Similarly, reducing the aperture to f/11 and setting the shutter speed to 1/100th of a second will also produce the same exposure. However by altering one setting without altering the other you will change the exposure. In our example, changing the aperture to f/5.6 but leaving the shutter speed at 1/200th of a second will

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increase the exposure by one stop, or one exposure value (EV), making the picture brighter. Decreasing the aperture to f/11 will reduce the exposure by one EV, making the picture darker. Similarly, changing the shutter speed while leaving the aperture alone will also change the exposure. Double the shutter speed to 1/400th at f/8 and you reduce the exposure by one stop, halve the speed to 1/100th and you increase the exposure by one stop.

The Zone System In 1939-40 the pioneering photographers Ansel Adams and Fred Archer developed an exposure system based on this fact, a system that is still used today. today. It is called the Zone System, and is quite possibly the most useful piece of photographic knowledge you’ll ever learn. There are several

variations on the original system, but I’ll go with the one that is easiest to understand. Starting with 18% grey as the mid-point, the system divides all the tones between black and white into 11 zones, numbered 0-10. Zone 0 is featureless black with no details visible, which in your image editor would have an RGB value of 0,0,0. Zone 10 is pure white with no details visible, and an RGB value of 255,255,255. 255,25 5,255. The mid-tone 18% grey is zone 5, and should have an RGB value of a bout 127,127,127. 127,127,127. The zones represent exposure values, or E V. The difference between one zone and the next is equivalent to the difference between one exposure setting and another one exactly one stop higher or lower.

“The difference between bet ween one zone and the next is equivalent to the difference between one exposure setting and another one exactly one stop higher or lower. lower.””

EXPOSURE AND METERING

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

If we relate the tone scale of the Zone System scale to real world objects we c an use it to help produce accurately exposed photos. The zones are roughly equivalent to the following scene elements (adapted from Adams’ descriptions).

Let’s go back to the two troublesome portraits from the first page. If we use the spot meter to take a reading from the subject’s face, we know that the light meter will give a reading that would m ake the face mid-tone grey, which is zone 5. However from the zone chart we know that average Caucasian skin should be zone 6, so we need to increase the spot metered exposure by one stop, in this c ase from 1/30th at f/5.6 to 1/3 0th at f/4. In the resulting shot the background details are all burned out, but the subject is correctly exposed.

Zone 0

Pure black, no details or texture visible.

Zone 1

Black tone but no texture. This is normally as black as you want to get in a picture.

Zone 2

First hint of texture and detail, very deep shadow.

Zone 3

Dark materials, details visible.

Zone 4

Dark foliage. Dark stone. Landscape shadow. Shadow on portraits in sunlight.

Zone 5

Clear north sky. Dark skin. Grey stone. Weathered wood. 18% mid grey.

Zone 6

Average Caucasian skin value. Light stone. Shadows in sunlit snow.

Zone 7

Very light skin. Light grey objects. Snow with side lighting.

Zone 8

White with texture. Snow in shade. Highlights on Caucasian skin.

Zone 9

Glaring white surfaces. Snow in flat sunlight. White without texture.

Zone 10

Light sources, reflections of sunlight on metal. Pure white.

For the over-exposed over-exposed portrait a gainst the dark background, we can use a similar app roach. Spot metering the background gives an exposure setting of 1/3rd sec a t f/5.6 to render it as zone 5 mid-grey. By reducing that exposure by four stops to 1/3rd at f/22 we can make the background come out as what it should be, zone 2 de ep shadow, leaving the model’s face also correctly exposed. The zone exposure system can help with difficult exposures, but it is helpf ul in another way. Learning to think of images in terms of tone and dynamic

range will encourage you to approach these concepts in a creative way, and to use them to produce better pictures. Controlling exposure is the primary creative tool of the p hotographer, and learning how to use it will make the difference between mere snapshots and artistic photographs. This system has been used by professional photographers for over 70 years. Used properly, it can help to improve your photography immens ely, probably more than any other single technique.

“The zone system can help with difcult exposures.Learning to think o images in terms terms o tone and dynamic range will encourage you to approach these concepts creatively. creatively.””


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File types File types and image compres compression sion How is it possible to store so many images on such a tiny memory card?

I

f you’ve had a computer or a digital camera for more than a couple of days, days , you’ll have come across JPEG images, usually denoted by the file extension ‘.jpg’, and you may be wondering exactly what it means. The letters themselves themselve s stand for the Joint Photographic Expert Group, a body of scientists, programmers and engineers from the imaging industry who got together several years ago to come up with a new standard for file fil e storage that would allow images from different computer programs to be interchangeable, so that a picture from one computer could be viewed on another without having to use file conversionprograms.

The JPEG standard also happens to be an ideal format for storing pictures on a digital camera, because it uses something called file compression. This is a technique that allows a large number of images to be s tored in a relatively small amount of memory by squashing the files so they take up less room. For this reason JPEG has become the stand ard image file format for all digital cameras. A full technical explanation of file compression would fill a decent-sized textbook. It uses complex mathematical techniques that you simply don’t need to know unless you’re a software engineer working on a new digital camera. As consumers, all we need

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to know is that it reduces the size of the p icture file by reducing the amount of information stored in it. JPEG compression reduces file size by reducing picture quality, and for this reason it is called ‘lossy’ storage. For most purposes this quality reduction is imperceptibl e and fine for day-to-day use, but for maximum image quality there are other types of image file which are uncompressed and lose no quality, the most common one b eing TIFF, TIFF, which stands for ‘Tagged Image File Format’. Basically, the way JPEG compression works is like this. An average digital photograph contains varying levels of detail. For example, take an average holiday snap of a family on a

File compression uses complex mathematical algorithms to squeeze big image files into small spaces, but quality can suffer.

FILE TYPES AND IMAGE COMPRESSION

COMPRESSION SETTINGS Even shooting at your camera’s lowest quality setting will still produce acceptable results under most circumstances. These three photos were taken using a Canon DSLR using the Maximum, Medium and Minimum quality settings. As you can see the differences are very hard to spot.

“For maximum image quality there are other

MAXIMUM

types o image fle which are uncompressed uncompressed and lose no quality, quali ty, the most common being TIFF. TIFF.” MEDIUM

Large areas of low detail, such as the sky, can be easily compressed, while detailed areas such as the trees and grass contain more information.

MINIMUM

The next picture is the same Minimum quality shot as above, but resaved as a JPEG using Adobe Photoshop using the Medium compression setting. While the quality is a little lower, the image is far from useless.

beach. While the main subject, the people in the foreground, contains a lot of detail, there will also be large areas such as the sk y, the sand and the sea, which contain relatively little detail. In order to reduce the size of the file, some data from the lower detail areas can safely be lost without affecting the qualit y of the picture too much. The way this is do ne is usually by reducing the number of tonal variations between areas of similar colour, so you may notice artefacts that look like squares or stripes in highly compressed images. Whatever make or model of digital camera you have, it will almost certainly have an option in the menu that allows you to select

image quality. What this option is doing is setting the level of file compression. If you select the lowest quality, you will probably find that you can fit about four times as many images onto your memory c ard as you can at the highest setting, because the higher JPEG compression setting makes the files one quarter as big, but reduces the quality of the picture to compensate. Most people will use the highest setting most of the time, but unless you intend to print all your pictures at t he largest size possible, you really c an get away with using a lower quality setting and still have pictures to be proud of, plus you’ll be abl e to take twice as many. n

JPEG MEDIUM QUALITY

For comparison, this next image takes the Minimum quality original and is then resaved in Photoshop using the Minimum quality compression settings. Now more compression artefacts are visible in the image.

JPEG MINIMUM QUALITY


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Shooting modes Choosing the best setting sett ing for the correct shooting conditions

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ll but the most basic budget compact cameras have a selection of shooting modes, usually chosen by a dial on the top or back of the camera. Easy-to-use, mainly automatic cameras in the range will only have a few shooting modes, while the more sophisticated cameras such as the DSLR may have as many as a dozen, including manual exposure options and user-programmable special settings. As newer models appear in the range or older models are updated, the shooting modes available will be revised and possibly expanded. Shown on this spread are some of the most often used modes selected from the mode dial on the top of the camera and in some cases, from the menu screen on the back of the camera. n

Auto The camera will analyse the scene and choose all the best settings.

Auto (flash off) As in full auto mode bu t the flash will not be activated when shooting.

Programmed AE Programmed auto is recommended for shots where there may not be t ime to adjust camera settings.

Shutter Priority Shutter speed is manually sele cted to blur or freeze motion. Aperture is set by camera.

Aperture Priority Aperture is manually selec ted to blur or bring background into focus. Camera chooses shutter speed.

Manual Exposure The user can manually choose shutter speed and aperture.

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A

SHOOTING MODES

Bulb Mode Allows you to take photos for as long as th e shutter but ton is held down for exposures longer than 30 seconds.

Effects Can be used to add filter effects to your images when they have been shot.

Scene - Portrait Background det ails will be blurred to add a sense of depth to the composition.

EFFECTS

Scene - Landscape Landscapes ta ken during the day will have front to back sharpness. Colou rs will be made more vivid.

Scene - Child Skin kept soft and natural whilst clothes and backgrounds are more saturated. Shutter speeds will be faster to capture movement.

Scene - Sports For dynamic sports. Shut ter speeds will be high enough to freeze the action.

Scene - Close Up For close up and macro shots of insects, flowers and other small objects. Backgrounds will be out of focus.

Scene - Night Portrait Creates a natural balance between your foreground subject and low light backgrounds.

Scene - Night Landscape Will reduce noise and strong colours such as street lights and neon.

Scene - Party/Indoor For indoor scenes and other social gatherings. Captures indoor background lighting.

Scene - Beach/Snow More accurately capture the brightness of areas like snow or sand in daylight.

Scene - Sunset Maintains the rich colours and hues of the sunrise or sunset.

Scene - Dusk/Dawn The cooler tones of dusk and dawn are maintained. No flash is used.

Scene - Pet Portrait Faster shutter speed is employed. No AF assist light is used so as not to scare the animal.

Scene - Candlelight The deep orange and red tones of scen es lit by candlelight are enhanced. No flash is used.


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White balance White may not be as white as you think

W

hen you look at, for example, a sheet of white paper, your brain adjusts what you see so that it matches matches what you are expecting to see. However your digital camera doesn’t have any expectations, and the colour that it “sees” is the actual colour present in the scene. ‘White’ light visible to humans can actually vary in colour from reddish orange to greenishblue. This variation is usually described as a temperature range, with warm being the red end and cold at the blue end, and is usually measured in degrees Kelvin using a colour meter. Confusingly, the higher the colour temperature, the cooler the tone and vice versa. We perceive various shades of white light illuminating a scene as neutral, a clever trick performed by our brains to maintain a sense of normality. Digital cameras can perform the same trick using a feature called automatic white balance. The camera evaluates the scene through the lens, analysing areas it guesses should be white (highlights) and black (shadows). More expensive cameras have a more reliable ambient white balance sensor that measures the temperature of general, focused light. However these automatic systems can be fooled, so most cameras give you the option of setting the white balance manually, either from pre-sets that cover most normal lighting conditions or by making an accurate measurement of the prevailing lighting conditions. In the example pictures on this page you’ll see an image with ordinary incandescent light bulbs, also called tungsten lighting. As you can see, when the camera is set to the warm artificial light white balance setting that suits this lighting, the light areas of the scene are neutral. The same scene looks very different when the camera’s white balance is set to normal daylight colour temperature. Now there is a distinct reddishorange cast. Light bulbs can shine with various colour temperatures. Cheap traditional, low wattage light bulbs tend to be the warmest in colour, while low voltage halogen bulbs are cooler in tone. Another example is a typical noon day outdoor scene where the ambient white light temperature is cool. When the camera’s white balance setting matches the cool tone of the brightness of the sun, everything looks quite normal. On the other hand, if the camera has been set for tungsten artificial light, the scene appears to have a very

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INCANDESCENT,, WITH DAYLIG INCANDESCENT DAYLIGHT HT WHITE BALANCE

INCANDESCENT LIGHT, INCANDESCENT WHITE BALANCE

DAYLIGHT, WITH DAYLIGHT WHITE BALANCE

DAYLIGHT, DAYLIG HT, INCANDESCENT WHITE BALANCE

WHITE BALANCE

blue cast. Sunlight, like artificial light, can vary quite considerably in colour temperature. Early morning and late afternoon daylight is warmer as cooler components of the light are filtered out because it has to shine through more atmosphere and its pollutants as the sun is nearer the horizon. Meanwhile,cloudyand overcastconditionsdeliver a cooler light because warmer components are filtered out by the cloud. Our third example is lit with fluorescent lighting, and presents an even harder challenge for your digital camera. The visible spectrum of fluorescent light is not a nice smooth line, it’s full of peaks and troughs. Some fluorescent lights have a green cast and others a pink cast. These differences are visibly evident where strip lights of different tone have been fitted side by side. So-called daylight tone fluorescent lights are not equivalent to real daylight. Better digital cameras will have a number of presets for fluorescent light to help you match the white balance in these conditions more accurately. In our example here, the fluorescent light is a greenish yellow in tone.

Know your camera Nearly all digital cameras offer white balance adjustments accessible either from a settings menu or, typically on higher spec cameras, via an external button in conjunction with an LCD display. display.

Manual white balance Some cameras can let you calibrate the white balance setting manually. You simply hold a white card in front of the camera lens and press a white balance calibration button. The camera adjusts its white balance setting until the card is reproduced neutrally. Beware of this setting remaining on as when you return to normal shooting conditions it may spoil your pictures!

TYPICAL WHITE BALANCE VALUES TUNGSTEN/ARTIFICIAL 2500-3000K

Indoor lighting using traditional non-fluorescent light bulbs.

Preset white balance All digital cameras offer a choice of white balance presets, and some cameras let you choose the setting via colour temperature values. Some really advanced cameras let you bracket white balance settings, or take a series of shots with settings above and below your standard setting. n

FLUORESCENT 3500-5500K

Include strip lighting and modern compact fluorescent lamps

“We perceive various shades of white light illuminating a scene as neutral, a trick performed by our brains to maintain a sense of normality. normality.””

NORMAL DAYLIGHT 5500-6000K

Typical mid-morning to mid-afternoon conditions at sea level. CLOUDY/OVERCAST 6000-8000K

Hazy or overcast conditions.

FLUORESCENT LIGHT, LIGHT, FLUORESCENT WHITE BALANCE

CLEAR BLUE SKY 10,000-15,000K

Exceptionally clear mid-summer or high altitude conditions, especially snow scenes. FLUORESCENT LIGHT, DAYLIGHT WHITE BALANCE


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ISO and image noise Increasing the ISO setting sett ing will give you faster shutter shut ter speeds, but there’s a price price to pay

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nyone who has owned a digital camera for a while will be familiar with the concept of image noise. It’s that grainy distortion that spoils pictures shot in low light conditions with high ISO settings. But what is image noise? Where does it come from, and what can be done to prevent it? All electronic devices generate noise. The background hiss of a radio, the sound of an overamplified electric guitar, or the interference on a badly-tuned television, all of these things are electronic noise, and so is the noise in seen in a digital photograph. This noise comes from a variety of sources. Some of it is generated by imperfections in the

electronic components, or as a by-product of their normal operation. For instance, capacitors generate a small amount of noise as they charge and discharge. Electronic components can also be affected by environmental noise, such as the electrical fields that constantly surround us. Circuit noise can be minimised by superior manufacturing and rigorous quality control. Unfortunately some cheaper camera brands, or even budget models from better-known brands, may use components of lower quality, which is why these types of camera generally produce noisier images than the more expensive models.

Sensor noise

This is the main circuit board from a Canon EOS 5D MkIV digital SLR, showing the powerful DIGIC 6 and DIGIC 6+ image processing chips.

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The other main source of image noise is the sensor itself, and in most cases this is unavoidable. The individual photocells on a digital camera sensor are incredibly small, especially with high-resolution compact camera sensors. Most compact camera sensors have over 10 million individual photocells crammed into an area of less than 30 square millimetres. These photocells are so small that in low light conditions they may only be collecting a few

Approx 1/10th of a millmetre

Actual microscope photograph of the surface of a Nikon CCD, showing the Bayer mask filter and microlenses

thousand photons (individual light ‘particles’) during an exposure, so the level of the electrical signal produced by the cell can be affected by random statistical fluctuations in photon density. This is the main reason that physically larger sensors are much better than smaller ones. The individual photocells are larger and collect proportionately more light during the exposure producing an inherently higher signal to noise ratio. The level of noise produced by the sensor and other components in the camera is usually constant and at a fairly low level. When taking photographs in good light the level of the signal vastly outweighs the level of noise, in other words the signal to noise ratio is very high, and consequently noise isn’t a problem. The

ISO AND IMAGE NOISE

Noise reduction SIGNAL-NOISE

Cameras reduce image noise by using smoothing filters during image processing. The most commonly used is call ed a Median filter. This works by comparing eac h pixel to the ones surrounding it, and if is has a brightness that is different from its neighbour s then it is replaced by a new pixel with the average value of the ne arby pixels. This eliminates noise effects, but also reduces detail and contrast. Compare these next two images. The first is unfiltered, the second has had a median filter applied. The second image is “cleaner”, but as you can see the level of detail has been greatly reduced. Another type of noise reduction is c alled

BRIGHTDAYLIGHT

KEY: IMAGE SIGNAL

CONSTANT NOISE LEVEL AVERAGE INDOOR LIGHT

H T G N E R T S L A N G I S

DIM INDOOR OR NIGHT-TIME

BEFORE MEDIAN

LIGHT LEVEL

AFTER MEDIAN 50 ISO

6400 ISO

“A higher sensitivit sensitivityy increases the amount by which the signals from the sensor are amplifed…

unfortunately the noise gets amplifed as well. well .” problems start when shooting in low light, as the level of the signal drops nearer to the constant noise level, producing a lower signal to noise ratio. At extremely low light levels the signal may be entirely drowned out by the noise. This problem is made worse when shooting at higher ISO settings. When we set a higher sensitivity we are increasing the amount by which the signals from the sensor are amplified, and unfortunately the noise gets amplified as well. If the signal to noise ratio was already ver y low then this

just produces more noise without improving the image. This is why high ISO images are always more noisy than ones taken at lower settings. Another type of sensor noise can also be a problem when using exposures longer than a couple of seconds. Sometimes the photocells that make up the sensor may not all respond to light to an equal degree, causing single pixels to appear very bright or very dark. The charge build-up over a longer exposure makes this problem more noticeable. Since the pattern of these “dead” or “hot” pixels is usually consisten t from one frame to the next this type of noise is remedied by applying a filter during image processing. Most modern cameras do this automatica lly, but it can be a problem on older models. The shot below was taken on a camera from 2005, and shows a large number of “hot” pixels. The exposure time was 1/30 second at ISO 1000.

“pixel binning”, although this is less widely used in recent digital cameras. In this process, the signals from groups of four, nine or even 16 adjacent photocells are grouped together into a “super pixel”. This has the effect of increasing the signal to noise ratio, but of course it also reduces the effective resolution of the image. It increases the signal to noise ratio, but it also reduces the quality of the image. The only effective remedy to image noise is to use larger, more sensitive photocells. Digital SLRs have a major advantage in this area, since they have physically larger sensors. Compact camera sensor technology continues to improve, both in image processing and sensor design. We will undoubtedly see further advance s in the future, but for now image noise is somethin g we just have to accept. n


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Understanding hyper hyperfocal distance distance How to calculate the best depth o feld

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very important part of photography in general and landscape photography in particular is to ensure that your prime point of interest, your main elements are in sharp focus. Nothing ruins a shot more than the image being fuzzy and blurry when you need it to be tack sharp. The problem however, is that in many cases in landscape photography you have a foreground element as well as a distant object that you want to be in as sharp focus as possible at the same time. Shooting with a wide angle lens and settin g a very narrow aper ture of f/22 or even f/32 will yield greater depth of field but you will also run into the optical phenomenon know as diffraction, wh ich is a softening of the image due to the bending of light ray s as is passes through the narrow apertu re of your lens. This means you will normally be operating around the f8 - f/16 mark when setting aperture. You may find that the depth of field provided at these apertures is not enough to render everything you need in sharp focus. This is where the hyperfocal distance comes into play. When you focus on an object, technically speaking, only that point of focus is sha rp. Beyond that focus point, extendin g both in front of and behind, is a plane of focus running parallel to the

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camera sensor. This area is known as the depth of field and it is this region that is deemed to contain an area of acceptable sharpness. They key to hyperfocal dist ance is knowing the closest distance at which a lens can be focuse d while keeping objects at infinity as acceptably sharp as possible. Everything from half the hyperfocal distance out to infinity will be in focus. A very basic rule of thumb is to compose your scene and then focus roughly one th ird of the distance into the scene. Thi s can be quick and reasonably helpful, particularly where your scene has excluded the horizon or near foreground, but rarely is it optimal to get the best out of the depth of field. You could use your came ra’s live view function to visually set focus on the most distant object in your scene and then slowly adjust the focus closer whilst keeping an acceptably sharp background. Finally of course, there is the mathematical way to calculate the exact point. There is a bit of assumed knowledge when using the mathematical formula . You will need to provide the focal lengt h of the lens you are using, the Circle of Confusion value for a given sen sor size, which is the largest blurred spot that th e human eye can detect (usually a value of arou nd 0.03 - 0.02) and the f-stop you are using. If you have a calculator you can do the following:

H = Hyperfocal distance f2 = focal length x focal length N = Apert ure number (f-stop) c = Circle of confusion The result, in millimetres, will be the distance at which you need to focus to attain greatest de pth of field. Thankfully there are plenty of on-line calculators and apps for your phone th at can do all the heavy li fting for you. Just so we can say we understan d the theory, lets try out a couple of examples as shown here. We’re using a full frame camera with a Circle of Confusion valu e of .029 as an average on a 16mm lens and a 50mm lens. Both are set at an aperture of f/16. n

UNDERSTANDING HYPERFOCAL DISTANCE

Example 1 - 16mm lens @ f/16

Not sharp

The near limit of acceptable sharpness is half of the hyperfocal value, stretching out to infinity.

Depth of field where image is acceptably sharp Near limit

0.275m

Far limit

0.551m

Full frame

Hyperfocal point

16mm lens f/16

Note: images are not to scale

Example 2 - 50mm 5 0mm lens @ f/16

The near limit of acceptable sharpness is half of the hyperfocal value, stretching out to infinity.

Depth of field where image is acceptably sharp

Not sharp

Near limit 2.693m

Far limit 5.387m

Hyperfocal point

Full frame 50mm lens f/16

Note: images are not to scale


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CREATIVE PROJECTS Unleash your your creative creative side and learn techniques techniq ues used by by the pros 70 - 79

Assignment: North Devon autocross

80 - 89

Shooting into the light

90 - 101

Your first home studio

102 - 111

Automotive rig photography

112 - 119

Airshow photography

120 - 125

Pet photography

126 - 131

Still life photography

132 - 139

Landscape photography tips

140 - 143

How it’s done

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ow you’re familiar with how your camera works wor ks and how to use its many features, you’re ready to start learning the creative techniques that professional photographers use to achieve great results time after time. By learning and trying tr ying out new ideas and techniques, you can turn your photographs photographs from snapshots into works of art that you can be proud of. Once you are comfortable comfortable with the technical skills and principles of photography that we covered in the previous section, these methods produce well-balanced, attractive photographs photograph s that will really stand out. What really differentiates a talented photographer from one who’s merely a skilled technician comes down to an eye for the creative and a desire to learn and do more. Let us show you some interesting projects that we hope will inspire you to learn more and become passionate about your photography. n

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CREATIVE PROJECTS


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Assign ssignmen ment: t: North Devon autocross Catching the action on the track tr ack and behind the scenes

T

here’s nothing quite like being a photographer at a large outdoor event where you may need to shoot using a number of techniques to get the various shots required. If you’ve never tried it, it is wor th the experience to pick an event, perhaps something that is close to your heart a nd go along and cover it as if you were there in an official capacity. If you are feeling brave, you could choose something something further outside your comfort zone. Something that you you have never photographed before, that will stretch your skills a little more than if you

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were photographing something you’ve shot a dozen times before. Photography is a learning experience and although you can read up on the theory, and that is no bad thing, it’s no replacement for going out and getting in the thick of it, trying things, getting it wrong, trying new things and achieving success. There is no doubt that as a budding photographer, friends and family or people who know people, may ask you if you you would would like like to attend an event and take some photos whilst you’re there. It’s going to be good experience for you, so say “yes”. What is there to lose?

ASSIGNMENT: NORTH DEVON AUTOCROSS

Something new We decided that we wanted to try shooting an event that we’d never done before. Something that would require some good camera skills and a few different techniques to cover a particular event. As it happens, when we reached out to friends and colleagues, we were put in touch with a young lady called Grace Holton. Grace works as a quantity surveyor for a large building firm but in her spare time has taken up motorsport with her dad, Stuart. Never having photographed a motorsport event, we contacted Grace who kindly

arranged to let us come along and cover the event in an unofficial capacity. We were going to cover an autocross event in North Devon. Autocross is a form of motor racing where competitors drive their cars over a course that can be on either sealed or unsealed surfaces and rough terrain. The cars don’t race each other directly, rather they all vie for the best lap time s over a number of race sessions. There are different car classes, so you are always matched with equivalent motor vehicles. The person with the best lap times in each class is deemed the winn er.

“We decided that we wanted to try shooting an event that we’d we’d never done before. Something that would require some good camera skills and a few different techniques... techniques...””


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The techniques Knowing we were covering a motorsport event, we decided there were four aspects of the day that we wanted to capture. Firstly, since there was a paddock where all the c ars are parked and race prepared, we thought some candid and behind-the-scenes shots would be a good starting point. We also wanted to get some more formal posed portrait shots of drivers with their cars and to get the typic al ‘driver by their car holding their crash helmet’ pose using flash lighting as well as ambient daylight. We also knew we were going to get some shots from inside Grace and Stuart’s car, which meant using an action c amera. Finally, we had permission to go out on the track with

Candid shots It was going to be a while before racing commenced. Cars were being race prepared and each one had to go via the scrutineers to be checked, approved and ready to be able to race. This was a good chance to get some candid shots of preparations. The main thing that identifies candid shots, is that the subjects aren’t really aware that they are being photographed. If they are unaware, then they are behaving naturally. It’s not to say that you don’t let them know you’re taking photos. You You could spend some time initially walking around and introducing yourself to the competitors, just so they know who you are and that you’re there to record the day. Our experience was that everyone was happy to have their photos taken and in some cases, would call us over for more shots. Once they were engrossed in their preparations or just chatting with each other, that’s when we started to capture some images.

Long lens Part of the skill of being a candid photographer, photographer, is making sure you are not being intrusive. That is best achieved from the business end of a long lens. A telephoto lens will keep you at a discreet distance and less likely to catch the eye of your intended subject. We were using a Canon 5DMK2 with a n old, but very good, EF70-200mm f/2.8 L zoom lens. The wide maximum aperture gave us two benefits. Since it was a non image stabilised l ens, open it up to f/2.8 and you not only get fast shutter speeds to minimise camera shake when shooting at the 200mm focal length, but also very shallow depth of field. Shallow depth of field in these instances is a very useful tool to help keep background clutter and other visual distractions to a minimum. We had a sunny day, so shutter speeds outside were very fast, ranging from 1/500 to 1/200 0, even at ISO 100. This meant that we didn’t have to use flash. Nothing announces your presence more than a ‘pop’ and flash of light.

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the race marshals to get some close-up shots of the cars in full flight at speeds of up to 80mph. We were going to break these shots down into two types: one set of shots were going to be using extremely fast shutter speeds up around the 1/4000 of a second mark to freeze the action. The second set would be technically more challenging, as there were going to be longer shutter speeds of around 1/80th of a second. As you can imagine, cars screaming by at 80m ph are not going to be frozen in place with a slower shutter speed like that. That’s where the panning technique comes into play. We’ll We’ll break each technique down for you over the following pages.

Race day The event we attended was held at the Sugworthy circuit just outside Winkleigh in North Devon. The Sugworthy circuit is essentially a field with track markers outlining the course. After the first practice session, the cars will have scratched away the grass surface, revealing the mud beneath. This mud surface is what the fastest racing takes place on. As luck would have it, the conditions were perfect, and we were hoping for some fast laps. We arrived at 8.30 am and the first port of call was with the race organisers to get signed in and get suited up with high visibilit y jackets. At events such as this, you must adhere to the safety instructions and not just decide to wander around without permission.

The Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens is one of Canon’s most popular lenses. Although this model is a little long in the tooth and doesn’t have image stabilisation, it is a great piece of glass with amazing image quality.

At 21MP, the Canon EOS 5DMK2 is a relatively old camera but it is still a popular model for enthusiasts and pros alike. It was also particularly sought after for its video capture capabilities as well as its stills qualit y.


Keep your eyes open We spent some time wandering around the paddock, looking out for moments to capture. You never know where and when something might happen so the golden rule is to keep your eyes open and your camera ready. Put your camera in burst mode so you can capture a sequence of shots if there is some action going on. You can always delete the shots in the sequence that aren’t any

good. There was a drivers’ briefing in the main building. This gathering of people was also a good opportunity to take some shots as people chatted and shared some friendly ribbing about the relative speeds and horsepower of each others’ cars. We kept an eye out also for aspects that might not be race related but were there none the less. Some competitors brought their dogs, which made for a couple of nice shots of the animals, completely oblivious

to the preparations going on around them, or snoozing next to a diesel generator. If you see any interesting items, or close-up opportunities of inanimate objects and equipment, capture those too. Experiment with angles and composition and if light levels change and you see your shutter speeds dropping, don’t be afraid to increase your ISO sensitivity. Better a grainy image, than a completely blurry one.


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Time for action One of our goals was to get a camera in the cockpit with Grace and her dad as they drove the circuit. Obviously getting a full size DSLR mounted in a car that was tearing around a rutted track was going to present some problems. Luckily the answer, not surprisingly, came in the form of a GoPro action camera. We had a new GoPro HERO 5 Black that could shoot great quality Raw images, so that was going to be our ‘driver cam’. Attaching any equipment other than the approved in-car equipment meant it had to be approved by the scrutineers. We had brought various GoPro mounting accessories to try but it was going to need som ething strong and robust to hold the camera rock steady. Since Grace and Stuart’s modified Peugeot race car had a roll cage fitted, it meant we had plenty of places to attach the camera. The HERO 5 was mounted to a set of heavy duty spring loaded jaws which could be clamped to the bars of the roll cage. The c amera had a length of thin steel c able looped around it and that was secured to the metal tubing of the roll ca ge, just in case it came loose during the race. That way it wouldn’t fly around the cockpit and potentially hurt the driver. This was approved by the scrutineers an d it was ready to go.

Settings The GoPro was put on its wides t field of view in order to be able to see as wide a view of the cockpit as possible. The camera was first m ounted to the top rear corner of the roll cage opposite the driver and then monitor what the GoPro was seeing by connecting it to the Capture app on our phone an d using the live view to make sure the framing and exposure was ok. We used the Capture app to reduce the exposure compensation by -1 stop to better balance the bright light outside the car versus the darker cockpit. It’s also possible to use the app to

Once correctly mounted in the car, the GoPro provided some great shots. It’s wide field of view setting allowed most of the cabin to be seen in the shot.

alter the mode settings. We put it in time-lapse mode with a shot being taken every 10 seconds in Raw format. The HERO 5 Black is the first GoPro that can shoot in Raw format, which is great news for photographers needing to put action cameras where DSLRs would fear to tread. Grace was suited up and prepared in the car. Once she was ready to go out on the track and practice, we just set the GoPro going. The camera shutter speed was around 1/500 of a second, which was enough to keep the images sharp, even though the car was bouncing around on the track and a lot of vibration was being transmitted through the chassis.

Review the shots Once Grace had done her practice laps, we could review the images captured by he GoPro and amend settings as ne cessary. Luckily, the shots looked good and we knew we had additional post-processing Raw leeway any way. On Stuart’s practice, we were able to try the cam era in a different mounting position near the top left corner of the windscreen to get an alternative angle in the cockpit. The camera, in the two different mounting positions went out with Stuart and Grace during the actual race session to capture some great in-car perspectives to add to the record of the day we were creating.

The small, compact, GoPro HERO 5 Black is an ideal action camera for capturing the action inside the cars. The HERO 5 is also the first GoPro to be able to shoot in Raw format. The quality is very good for such a small device.

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Watch the birdie Next on our list, we wanted a few posed portrait shots using flash photography combined with the ambient daylight. The drivers were very proud of their racing machines and getting them to pose, crash helmet tucked under their arm next to their pride and j oy, was no problem. All the competitors were very easy going and approachable. Since it was sunny, we opted to do some portraits with the sun over their shoulder, partially backlighting them. We had a flash mounted to the hot shoe of a Canon 5DMK3 with a n EF24-105mm f/4 f/4 lens. If you were to meter your subject and take a shot with no flash, your subject would likely be reasonably well exposed but your background sky is equally likely to be blown out with potential l oss of detail. Alternatively, meter for the sky and your subject is now probably going to be quite underexposed. What you can do, is meter for the sky and then dial in -1 stop of exposure compensation to make it slightly underexposed. On a sunny day like we were experiencing, this meant that our desired settings of an aperture of f/4, ISO 100 and that -1 tweak in exposure compensation were giving us a shutter speed of around 1/2000th of a se cond.

settings, particularly your flash power, power, may suddenly be way too powerful, so watch out for changing light. We encountered this as we roamed the paddock. We asked a few drivers for some portrait shots and they happily obliged. We also opted to get a few shots of the drivers seated in their cars, just for a little variety. Just like the altering light levels, be aware that if you suddenly shoot at very close quarters, you’ll need to adjust your flash power again to stop the driver’s faces being blown out with too much light. Dial the flash power down so you are just filling in shadows, rather than being a dominant light source. We did shots with the drivers either wearing the crash helmets in ‘race mode’ or just seated, smiling at the camera.

Much too much Given that most camera’s maximum shutter speed when using flash is 1/160th of a second due to the mechanical limitations of uncovering and recovering the sensor during a n exposure, we were hopelessly adrift of the right shutter speed. This is when you can use high speed sync (HSS) on your flash. Rather than firing a single light pulse in a normal flash photo, with HSS the flash will now begin to fire a rapid series of pulses instead. This works with any shutter speed up to the maximum your camera can support. In our case the flash pulses began to fire just before, during and after the 1/2000 th of a second exposure ensuring even illumination of the subject. The downside is that you have limited power and range but since we were shooting portraits at close range, it wasn’t an issue. We just had to do some test shots to figure out the right amount of flash exposure compensation (FEC) (FEC) needed to light our subjects correctly. As it was, it required +2 stops of FEC on the flash for greater light output.

More portraits Be aware that as the weather and the light changes, you will have to alter your camera settings to accommodate the changing levels. If it was cloudy and then the sun comes out, your

ETTL +2 FEC

Although it might seem counterintuitive, using flash on sunny days can actually benefit your shots by filling in dark shadows. You will probably need to use high speed sync in order to shoot with the higher shutter speeds bright sunlight causes.


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In today’s ever changing camera market, the Canon 1DSMK3 looks like a bit of a dinosaur but not so long ago it was Canon’s flagship model. We bought this one second hand and it still produces perfect images and has a great autofocus system.

Although we had taken the 100-400mm lens (shown above) we were close enough to the track to be able to switch back to the 70-200mm lens (shown right). This lens’ maximum aperture of f/2.8 meant we could both reduce background distractions and use very high shutter speeds.

Full speed After one practice session and one race session, lunch was called. The drivers told us that the afternoon session would produce the fastest laps, so we spoke with the organisers who were willing to let us out with the marshals, thus enabling us to get some trackside shots of the cars in full race mode wi th their supervision. We had originally intended to use a Canon 1DSMK3 with a second hand, but excellent, EF100-400mm f/4-f/5.6 f/4-f/5.6 IS L lens assuming we would be far from the cars on track. As it happened, the marshal points placed us close to the action, so we chose to use the EF70-200mm f/2.8 lens again. It wasn’t image stabilised but the sun was still shining and that f/2.8 aperture ensured that we could get

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some fast shutter speeds if nec essary. Plus, the 200mm end of the zoom range meant we could entirely fill the frame with the c ars if required. So we were set. The first set of cars cam e out for the beginning of the afternoon session an d as predicted, were much faster this time than during morning sessions.

The first technique This aspect of the event was of great interest to us because it meant we were able to explore two aspects of capturing high speed action. The first photographic technique of freezing fast action is arguably the easiest. The combination of a sunny day and opening the lens up to f/2.8 meant we could achieve very fast shutter speeds at ISO

200. The shallow depth of field also meant that background distractions could be minimised when shooting at the longer focal lengths. The camera was set to aperture priority mode and f/2.8 was chosen. The ISO could be around 100-200 and the shutter speeds for the current conditions meant we were shooting in a range between 1/2000th to 1/6400th of a second. These shutter speeds easily stopped the c ars in their tracks and froze the moment. Then it was a case of choosing the focussing method. The camera focus mode was switched to AI Se rvo. This is Canon’s version of predictive autofocus. You press the shutter halfway and whatever object is beneath one of your chosen autofocus points, as seen through the viewfi nder, that is


what the camera will at tempt to track and keep in focus. Then you press the shutter button fully to take the shot. The camera’s drive mode set to high speed continuous means it will keep taking shots until you take your finger off the shutter button.

Capturing the action Ideally, as a car approaches, you track its movement through the view finder, finger depressing the shutter button halfway, smoothly matching its motion and keeping your AI Servo focus point on the car. When you have the car where you want it, you can press the button fully and fire off a seque nce of photos whilst continuing to track the car to

keep it within the frame of your shot. After a few goes, you should begin to get a feel for the motion of the cars and your tracking will improve. You You could start with the cars moving in a straight line from lef t to right, which is easiest for your autofocus to predict. Then, when you feel ready, you can change position to a high speed corner where the cars movement and orientation relative to you is less certain. The f aster cars are often going sideways as they exit the corners. Then they straighten up and plant their foot on the accelerator to power out of the corner, creating impressive plumes of dust and mud, so keep your AI focus point on a part of the c ar closest to you as you track it.


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Track car

Track car and start shooting 2

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Track car and stop shooting 3

Stop tracking 4

Camera is rotated to keep AF point in the same place on the car

The panning technique Your camera is set with a low shutter speed and you have the framing as you want it. As the car enters from the left, you can star t to track the car through the viewfinder [1], getting a sense of i ts motion. Keep your AF point on one spot on the car and rotate your body at the waist to keep that AF

Fast shutter speed

The second technique Once we had some action-stopping shots in the bag, it was time to take it up a notch. The frozen shots were great but upon review, some actually looked a little unnaturally s till. They looked as if they weren’t moving at all. Shots that contained billowing dust and clumps of mud being thrown out from behind the car worked well but other shots looked like they had simply parked on the start/finish line. T his is where you can take your tracking technique from the previous attempt and add a great sense of power and motion to the shots.

Slow it down The camera settings need to be altered for the next technique, with the aper ture stopped down from f/2.8 to f/7.1 and the ISO dropped to 50. This results in shutter speeds between 1/50th and 1/1 25th of a second. Even with a normal lens you are risking camera shake at the slower shutter speeds. How does this mean

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point in the same place on the car as it continues to travel left to right. When you are ready, begin to shoot a burst of images [2]; as you do so, keep monitoring the position of the AF point. Keep the camera’s rotation steady so the AF point doesn’t wander too far off the target point on the car throughout the shot sequence [3]. Even after you

Slow shutter speed

you can get acceptable photos of high speed vehicles? This is a panning technique you should practice, as the results can be amazing. It is just like the previous attempts but without the safety net of fast shutter speeds to freeze everything. You track the car as before and have it framed in your composition as you want it. As the car moves, you smoothly rotate your body at the waist to keep your AI focus point on the same spot on the car at all times. A s you do, you fire off a sequence of shots whilst still smoothly panning the camera. What you are effectively trying to do, is continuously keep the car in the same position within the viewfinder and cancel out any relative motion between you and it. This means the slower shutter speeds can still capture what appears to be a stationary, or at least very slow moving, object with e nough sharpness to be usable. As a result though, the background has continued to move through the frame as you panned, the wheels h ave been spinning and dirt and dust clouds have been

have stopped shooting, continue to track the car for a moment [4]. This is just to help keep a fluid tracking motion; otherwise you might loose the key shot because your tracking started to waver at the end, knowing you were going to take your finger off the shutter button and en d the sequence of shots.


“Suddenly Suddenly,, rather than a completely still shot, you have the car nice and sharp but the background is just a blur of motion, as are the wheels and the dust. ”

flying around. Suddenly, rather than a completely still shot, you have the car nice and sharp but the background is just a blur of motion, as are the wheels and the dust. Now the sense of motion is much more powerful and apparent. Many motorsport photographers use this particular technique and it’s not hard to see why. Yes, it can take a little practice, and not every shot you take may be sharp enough, but once you get a feel for it you’ll be capturing amazing action shots with ‘wow’ factor.

A good day’s photography We came away from the race day with memory cards brimming with photos. More than that, we had captured a great variety of images that really summed up the flavour of the day, and we’d explored a variety of different techniques and ideas. We would like to thank all the participants at the Sugworthy Autocross event who gave us permission to use all the shots in this article. n


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Shooting into Shooting into the light An introduction to the t he contre-jour technique

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f you’ve ever been given any photography advice and had some pearls of wisdom passed down to you, chances are that one of the main ones would have been that you should not shoot shoot into your scene’s main light source or the sun. This advice goes on to say that you should always have the sun at your back or at least over one shoulder. shoulder. While this is one aspect of working with light that works well enough for a variety of situations, it doesn’t always have to be the case. Yes, you should never ‘look’ directly into the sun or very bright sources of illumination of course,

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but why should you not let your camera do it for you? Conventional wisdom states that you should not shoot shoot into the sun sun as you are only going to end up with badly overexposed photos or conversely, subjects in such dark shadow as to make them unidentifiable. Then there is the issue of lens flare. Lens flare occurs when a very bright light source, much brighter than the rest of your scene, hits the front element of your camera’s lens. The light causes internal reflections amongst all the lens elements, producing ghosting, haze, lack of contrast and orbs.

SHOOTING INTO THE LIGHT

Think again Although many would consider lens flare and ghosting unacceptable in their photos, there may be times when it becomes a useful a nd creative addition to your shots. The trick comes down to when you should allow lens flare to be present in your shot and when to eliminate it completely. We’re We’re going to explore a couple of ideas and hopefully give you some pointers to become more confident about shooting into the light and when lens flare is your friend, and your enemy.

“Yes, you should never ‘look’ directly into the sun or very bright sources of illumination of course, but why should you not let your camera do it for you? ”


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Whilst the sun is below the horizon, the light is softer, with lesscontrast. If you need to, you can always use an ND grad to balance out the difference in brightness between the foreground and the sky.

The sun is still below the horizon

Even when the sun appears there should be no real issues; you can keep shooting into the light for a while. However, as the sun climbs, it will increase in intensity and then you will start to encounter flare and ghosting.

The sun is a few degrees above the horizon

Landscapes and light The greatest argument for eliminating lens flare from your shots becomes apparent when shooting landscape images. Landscapes are all about detail and composition. Nasty ghosting and flare is not considered a good addition to your shot. Straight away, you are going to hit something of a roadblock because adhering to the old rule and having the sun behind you can be great for a lot of shots, but to really bring out texture and character, you’ve got to try your hand at contre-jour photography. Contre-jour basically means ‘against the daylight’. This means putting the sun, or the main source of light in the scene, prominently within your shot. Now you need to

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be aware of the sun, general light levels, lens flare etc. and how to control its impact on your shot as well as all the other factors such as metering, focus and composition. Capturing a landscape at dawn is a good example of how the character of the light changes as the sun finally appears above the horizon, and the problems it starts to c ause in your shots when it is glaring right down the barrel of your lens.

Pre-dawn and sunrise While the sun is below the horizon, everything is rosy. Be aware that this is still contre-jour photography since you are still shooting towards your main source of light. The lighting is more

even and lower in contrast, and although the sky is generally going to be brighter than your foreground, a graduated neutral density filter can even out the exposure difference between ground and sky. You can happily snap away and capture great contre-jour images. When the sun’s disc does finally a ppear, you still have no real issues. On a typical sunny morning, while the sun is on the horizon, there is an aw ful lot of earth’s atmosphere between you and it. Any moisture and dust in the air will soften and diffuse the sun’s light. Often, it will a ppear as a red disk and have very little impact on the landscape or your camera and l ens. The reprieve lasts only until the sun clea rs the horizon, then


The use of short focal lengths found in wide-angle or fisheye lenses places the sun very small in the frame. With a clean lens ghosting will be at a minimum and exposure will be easier to control tha n if it were dominating the shot.

it will gradually increase in intensity a nd make its presence felt on the land. Now you will start to encounter ghosting issues a s the sun’s brightness increases.

Control ghosting The best you can hope for is that the impact of the ghosting is minimal and it would be something you could remove with a small amount of cloning in Photoshop. If the ghosting is much more pronounced then you need to take control of it by trying a few techniques. The first one is probably the simplest. Al ter the sun’s position in the composition by moving your camera a little to the lef t or right, or up

and down, keep your eye to the viewfinder and rotate the camera slowly. You may be pleasantly surprised to see the ghosting reduce to the point its impact is negligible on your shot as the path taken by the light bouncing around in your lens elements alters because of the change in angle.

Focal length Another method to help subdue ghosting comes down to the choice of focal leng th you are using. This is a key factor because the longer the focal length you use, the greater the impact the sun will have in the shot. The more you zoom in, increasing the focal length, the larger and more impactful the sun becomes relative to the rest

of the composition. Conversely, if you use a short focal length to get a much wider angle of view, the sun will now occupy a much smaller area in the overall composition and its impact is reduced considerably. Another alternative is to place the sun at the very edge of your composition or actually just out of frame. This is a great way to create warm, dreamy lighting. Although the sun is not directly in the shot, its brightness creates intense halos that light up that area of the composition. It ’s a very popular technique used for portraits and wedding photography. Since the sun is not dominating the shot, exposures are easier to control using this method.


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When it comes to shooting portraits, a lens like the EF70-200mm f/2.8 is perfect. There is no barrel distortion like you would find in wider angle lenses; and the maximum aperture of f/2.8 means you can drop the background out of focus to remove any distractions.

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Portraits in the sun These shots of Ursula were taken on a lovely sunny evening about 2 hours before sunset whilst the sun was still a way off th e horizon. We used a Canon 5DMK3 and the excellent EF70-200mm f/2.8 lens to capture some simple backlit portraits. Because Ursula has blonde hair, we were able to arrange the composition so that the light was illuminating her hair to make it glow and add to the dreamy qualit y of the photos. Although the sun’s disk is not present in the shots, its presence is felt due to the strong rim light and the soft halo effect it creates by just being out of shot. A bonus of not having the sun in the shot is that you won’t have to dial in so much exposure compensation to get a balanced exposure. The most we had to use was +1 stop whilst shooting in a heavily shaded area where the sun was filtering through the leaves. However, most of the shots were taken with no compensation. You will most likely find that shooting into the sun in this manner results in som e images that are a bit lower in contrast but you have the option at the processing stage to add some contrast if you feel the images needed it.


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Cover it up A simple technique that can reduce the sun’s impact and the resulting ghosting is to frame your shots in such a way as to put an object i n its way. This can be as simple as moving your ca mera, altering the composition, and putting the branch of a tree in the path of the sun for example. You could also partially obscure it with a building, rock, or even a person. If you use a small aper ture such as f/16, you can turn the point light of the sun into a starburst. Using wider apertures will soften the startburst, making it look more like a very bright glowing spot instead.

Notice the difference in the sun between the shot above and the one below. The first one was taken with an aperture of f/4 and the sun just looks like an intense soft glow. The shot below was taken with an apertur e of f/22. Now the sun looks like a starburst and adds a little more interest to the sky.

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To keep the glare of the sun under control, there is a technique often used to place the sun’s disc behind an object in the shot; this reduces its impact from an exposure point of view, whilst still making a very dramatic image.


Helping hands Rather than using your finger, you can make it a bit more user friendly by purchasing a helping hand or magic arm. It is essentially a hinged metal arm with a hot shoe attachment at one end and a clamp at the other. You You can attach it to the camera’s hot shoe mount and place your sun blocker in the jaws of the clamp. The sun blocker itself can be nothing more complicated than a small cardboard disk glued to a length of wire. You can use the arm and blocker and angle it so the blocker covers the sun, take the shot and then just swivel it out of the way. This arrangement is great when doing HDR sequences of 3 or more shots. You can put your blocker in place, shoot one sequence, then move the blocker out of the way and shoot the second sequence. You can process the two HDR images as you normally would, then combine them in Photoshop as mentioned previously.

When all else fails If the previous tips haven’t been successful, and you have nothing in the composition to obscure the sun, then there is a neat lit tle trick you can try that can work well. It takes the idea of obscuring the sun with an object one step fur ther and puts it in your own hands - literally. Set up your shot, frame it and set your focus to manual and lock it to a point about a third of the way into your scene to quickly maximise the amount of depth of field in your shot. Use manual settings and get the exposure dialled in to suit your taste. Then you need to place a small object in front of your camera’s lens that blocks the sun. You could actually just use your fingertip and move it into the frame and place it over the sun’s disk.

You’ll You’ll need to be looking through your view finder so you can accurately place your finger. Bring it in from the top of frame and position it over the sun, you should see any flare and ghosting in the image vanish. Take a couple of reference shots then remove your finger and take another shot without it. You now have your main image with the sun intact but with ghosting, and you also have your ‘blocked’ image with no ghosting that you can use to remove any unwanted glare from the first one using the two images layered together in Photoshop and a little bit of masking. This method saves on having to try and clone out unwanted ghosting artefacts from a single image in an image editing program and is a much more efficient way of doing things.


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Here are a few examples of how alterations to your exposure impact upon scenes with the sun present in the shot. Image 1 used exposure lock to get a balanced reading of the brightest area of the shot. The sun and leaves around it are reasonably well exposed but the foreground is quite underexposed, almost to the point of being a silhouette. Image 2 probably represents the best average exposure but some might feel the foreground is still too dark. Image 3 uses a slower shutter to begin to overexpose the brightest areas, but now the foreground tree and foliage look correct. Some might take things further in image 4, blowing out detail in the highlights to make the sun feel even more intense than it actually was.

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4



Metering your scene Metering can be a tricky business when shooting into the light. In a leaf y wood, for instance, you might be better off m etering the scene with the sun out of the frame. You can simply angle the camera off to one side until the sun is not seen and use manual settings to arrive at a balanced exposure, then recompose with the sun back in the composition and shoot. If the sun is at least partially blocked, you can usually get an average meter reading of the scene without having to recompose the shot and dial in exposure compensation if needed or fine tune your aperture or shutter speed settings. If you want the foreground to be a darker silhouette, then you would need to meter the light source itself or use much faster shutter speeds. To turn the sun into a sharp starburst effect, remember to use ver y narrow apertures of f/16 or more. Just be aware that the narrower the aperture, the more likely you are to encounter diffraction, which is a softening of the image due to the phenomenon of lig ht passing through a very narrow opening. You’ll no doubt find that metering will require a little trial and error, but remember above all else, do not look directly into the sun.

See the light Contre-Jour is a great technique to use for creating drama and breathing new life into your landscapes. It doesn’t require any specialist cameras or lenses, although we would always recommend a good tripod as an essential accessory to use when shooting landscapes. All you need is to practice your metering skills and because you are shooting into bright lights and sun, develop an eye for flai r, and of course, flare. n and of course, flare.


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Your first home studio Setting Set ting up a little studio s tudio is not as tricky as you might think think

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e’re sure every aspiring photographer would love to have a studio. A space of their own where they could experiment with new techniques, shoot portraits and objects an d tinker with lighting and different setups to get the most out of the equipment to hand. Th ose new to the subject who have never experienced a studio shoot are missing out on an import ant aspect of photography. Many are often put off by the perceived complexity of setting up and shooting in an environment whe re they have to be in complete control of the lighting, the studio backgrounds, cameras, lenses and if shooting portraits, the models themselves. Don’t be put off by images you may see of large warehouse spaces filled with exotic camera equipment, even more exotic models and a gaggle of fl unkeys who pander to the professional fashion photographers’ every whim. That is a world apart from the enthusiast photographer who would just like to dabble in a small studio space. Your first studio doesn’t have be in a warehouse full of exotica, you don’t need wallet-emptying professional equipment. You just need to design your studio around the space you have available. For most of us, that is going to be a room in your own home. Although it may all sound a bit amateurish, believe us when we say, you can get amazing results from the most basic setups.

“Your frst studio doesn’t have be in a warehouse ull o exotica, you don’t need wallet-emptying proessional equipment. ” 90


YOUR FIRST HOME STUDIO

Your first studio may not be the most glamorous, and you will probably have to pack it away after the shoot so your family can eat at the dining room table; but you will be surprised what you can achieve with a setup such as this. A backdrop, a couple of lights and you are on your way.


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Keep it simple As mentioned, the path of least resistance, when it comes to setting up a small home studio, is to shoot in a room in your own house. This will usually be the dining room or a spare room where you can move furniture out of the way to create the space you need. If you have a room with neutral coloured walls, you already have a usable backdrop for some simple head and shoulders portrait work. Even if the walls are coloured, you can alter it and make it neutral or just change it to a new colour in Photoshop. One thing we would say straight away is not to use a bed sheet as

a backdrop. Nothing screams ‘amateur’ more than to see a crumpled piece of sheeting behind your model. It doesn’t matter how well lit or how beautiful your model is, that nasty sheet is going to ruin the shot. To begin with you could always just wait until it gets dark, draw the cur tains, and shoot some moody rim-lit portraits that have completely black backgrounds and therefore no distractions. You just need to be aware of a ny light spill from your flash lighting up parts of the room you don’t want to be seen. Not all of us have the benefit of having a spare room that is never going to be used for anything other than being a home s tudio. It

Your home studio can start with something as simple as a flat wall, that becomes a blank canvas upon w hich you can create textures, colours and even new backgrounds. The original portrait of Bailey the dog was shot against a dining room wall that was painted mauve. Because the dog’s outline is strong against the featureless background, it was quite easy to select the colour of the wall and turn into a neutr al grey. This meant there were now possibilities in adding totally new backgrounds to the shot during the post process stage.

is more likely that you will need to set up your equipment for the shoot in your chosen room and then have to break it down again so the room can be used for its original function once more.

In a darkened room with a single light so urce, you can create some very striking portraits. This is probably one of the easiest types o f shot to achieve at home if you are struggling to find a suitable background. The shot on the far left was done in someone’s lounge with a single flashgun, whilst the other was done in a studio setup with a studio light. The horse above was photographed in a stable. As long as sp ill light is eliminated so it isn’t illuminating and revealing unwanted areas of your set, you would never know the difference.

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Making a stand The main basic items recommended for a home studio are going to mean the difference between an amateurish photo and a professional looking one. The backdrop and its stand are the first port of call. You can purchase a simple 2m x 3m adjustable backdrop stand [1] for £20. The backdrop itself will come down to personal preference and your shooting style but you can get fabric, thin vinyl or paper rolls of seamless backdrop material in different widths and lengths for very little outlay [2]. [2]. You can purchase either flat colours or printed texture backdrops. Just make sure they have a matt finish or you might suffer unwanted reflections and highlights appearing in your background. You can either purchase a length of backdrop that you can hang down to the floor and photograph your model from the waist up, or you can use longer lengths to create a ver y simple infinity curve. An infinity curve is basically a length of backdrop that is long enough to roll out from the top of the stand and onto the floor [3]. [3]. A small amount of curvature in the material where it touches the floor and rolls out mea ns you have no hard creases or corners to worry about. On these, you can shoot full body im ages of your subject.

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Studio lighting Your studio shots will stand or fall based on the quality of your lighting, so it is recommended you get a decent quality flash kit. For a modest outlay of around £180 you can purchase a basic 3 -light studio kit that comprises 3x 250w flash units, soft boxes, a shoot-through umbrella and barn door lighting modifiers [4] [4]. It also comes with some coloured gels, a wireless trigger and a large


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If you are shooting in confined places, try to avoid using a wide angle lens at close range to your subject and a very short foc al length such as 14-24mm. This will result in extreme distortion of your subject’s features and they will look like a reflection in a fun-house mirror.

Wherever possible, use a medium zoom lens, where you can get a focal length of at least 35-50mm or greater, to avoid the distortion. Obviously your available space will dictate how far back you can get from your model. If you are very short of space, stick to headshots.

kit bag. If you already have flashguns rather than studio lights, there’s no reason not to use those instead of the bigger studio lights. You can even set up an effective wireless 3-light kit at ver y little cost. An all-in-one kit makes sense because you also get the lighting modifiers such as sof t boxes and shoot through umbrellas to help you shape, soften and control the light. Bare bulb flashes would produce very hard shadows on their own, so light modifiers are essential to take your photos to the next level.

Cameras and lenses Whilst there are many compact and digital SLR’s that have both the image quality and the resolution to do your portraits justice, it’s actually the lens choice that can have the greatest impact on your photo. The focal length you shoot at is the first thing to be aware of. Focal lengths in the

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14mm to 24mm range will show a pronounced barrel distortion of facial features where the nose will be very large in the frame and the ears very small. This is not flattering to your subject to say the least. You need to keep your focal length up around the 50mm to 135mm mark for more natural looking facial features. Most DSLRs come with a kit lens that covers the 24mm to 105mm focal range and is perfect for these situations. If you’re looking to have your background completely out of focus with as much shallow depth of field as possible, then a prime lens is an invaluable asset when it comes to good por trait photography. photography. Primes offer la rger maximum apertures than their zoom lens siblings. A good portrait lens can have a maximum aperture anywhere from f/2.8 to f/1.2. Whilst many professional prime lenses are expensive, you can still pick up a basic f/1.8 50mm prime for £90.

Small studio shoot To show what is possible, we decided that we would do a portrait shoot in our dining room. The dining room table was moved into the kitchen to give us space so we could set up. We were going to try and emulate the work of the f amous portrait photographer Joel Grimes. With a technique known as grey screen compositing, he shoots subjects in a studio against a plain middle grey background, and then composites them into a photo taken at a location outdoors using Photoshop, often converting them to monochrome or making them supersaturated for a more surreal image. The challenge was going to be to get some soft lighting and shoot a full body portrait whic h we could blend into a photo taken at a local beach on a moody day. Joel Grimes has the benefit of a large studio space and lots of equipment. We were working in


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Studio lights come in many shapes, sizes and prices. We use AlienBee studio lights powered by mains electricity or lithium power packs for when you need to shoot with the power of a studio light, on the move when working outdoors.

a dining room with very little room for the model, the backdrop and the lights. The backdrop was not very wide, so the subject would not be able to make any expansive gestures or her arms or legs might appear outside the backdrop area.

Setting up Firstly we set up the backdrop on its stand. The backdrop comprised of two lengths of mid-grey vinyl sheet that were tape d together to give us a basic infinity cur ve on which our model could stand [1] stand [1].. We were going to use two studio lights and one flash unit in a three light arrangement. The two studio lights [2] had 36” soft boxes [3] on [3] on them and the flashgun was going to shoot through a white umbrella [ umbrella [4] 4].. Although the flashgun was going to be controlled by a wireless trigger attached to the camera, the two studio lights were not. The two studio lig hts

have optical sensors that can fire the lights wh en a bright pulse of light is detected. Whenever the flashgun goes off, the other two lights will fire as well. Given that it all happens at the speed of light, they synchronise without issue. The only thing to be aware of was that the flashgun needed to be in manual mode, otherwise it would fire a preflash designed to reduce red-eye that would set the others off too soon.

A Canon 5DMK3 and anEF24-105mm f/4 lens is one of our favourite camera/ lens combos for a wide range of shooting scenarios.

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Camera, lens and settings For this shoot we decided to use a Canon 5DMK3 [5] with an EF24-105mm f/4.0 lens [6] lens [6].. This is a favourite combination and great for what we were doing here. With the 24-105mm focal length range, we could shoot tight head and shoulders portraits and also full body shots in the confines of our mini studio. The t wo studio lights were placed directly either side of our

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Here is the lighting diagram for the mini studio setup. The AlienBee studio lights [1] and [2] were both set at 1/16 power directly either side of the model, firing through softboxes. The flashgun [3] was set at 1/4 power and was shooting through a white umbrella. 1

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model, Sarah-Jane, and both were set to 1/16 power. power. It needn’t be any higher power than this since the lights were so close to SarahJane: literally a couple of feet. The flashgun and shoot through umbrella were placed to camera right as near the ceiling as it would go, and angled back down so it was aimed at the subject. This flash was set to about 1/4 power to provide general overall lighting on the subject as well as the grey backdrop on which she was standing. The two studio lights with their soft boxes, would create some subtle highlights either side of the model with some spill light

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that would help light the backdrop too. This meant that there were no ha rsh shadows. This was deliberate as we wanted to match the soft lighting of the scene the subject would ultimately be composited into. The camera was set to an aperture of f/8, a shutter speed of 1/125 and ISO 50. A few test shots confirmed all was well and we could shoot.

Getting the shots Sarah-Jane did a number of standing and seated poses, all careful not to stray outside the limits of the grey backdrop (although (although a

few did sneak past us). Although parts of the dining room and equipment could be seen in the some of the wider shots, including the grey duct tape that was used to bond the two lengths of backdrop together, we knew that we could Photoshop it out by cloning the existing grey backdrop and extending it out to fill the frame or simply cropping things out if required. Between the close-up shots and the full body shots, we were shooting in a focal length range between about 85mm and 35mm. Shooting any wider would result in some serious barrel distortion.


Once the shots were in the bag, it was a case of picking out the preferred shots. Then, starting the procedure of blending the studio shots of Sarah-Jane into the existing landscape photos that had already been shot.


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The chosen shot might need to have its grey background extended to match the proportions of the image it will be combined with. The grey background will provide a crisp edge that will make the masking that much easier.

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You can use Photoshop’s Magic Wand to select all o f the grey areas in the shot and use that selection to create a mask that is a silhouette of your subject.

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In the same document, you have your ready prepared image that will become the background for the subject you’ve shot against a grey background.

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Your subject, on its grey background , needs to be on the layer below. T he mask on the prepared scene above it in the stack allows just the model herself to show through. Blend Modes also help seamlessly combine subject and scene.

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Use the black silhouette of your subject to create a layer mask on your prepared scene. This will effectively punch a hole in tha t image.


You can add various adjustments such as Hue and Saturation, Sharpening and even conver t it to black and white or sepia. You can experiment to your heart’s content.


Post process Once the shots were in the bag, we could pick out the favourites and add a little of that Joel Grimes magic. One particular favourite was composited into the beach image already shot. The grey background now came into effect as it meant that SarahJane could be masked out because her outline was uninterrupted by any background clutter. This clean mask would be used to blend the beach image into the image of SarahJane creating a seamless merging of the two. Then, after some touching up and colour processing the image was complete. Although you could happily use the image of the model on her grey background on its own, this technique gives you great scope to add additional background detail without the need to try and shoot on location.

Home studio magic We were very happy with the end results and did a couple more images in the same style as the first. We did them in both colour and monochrome. There you have it. If you don’t mind having to clear away the dining room table or shift the lounge sofas out of the way so you can set up your backdrop and lights, you can achieve great images that no-one would know were shot in a temporary home studio. n


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Fill light

Key light

Lighting up time Lower power

High power

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If you’re new to portrait lighting then we have a little cheat sheet you c an reference which shows a series of lighting setups and how the illumination will fall upon your subject as the a ngles change. You can use these as the starting point for creating your own lighting recipes. It shows the way light strikes a human head from various points around an imaginary clock face. The light is above head height and is pointing down at roughly a 3 0° angle. There are also some that show how two or three lights will interact with each other too. The diagrams also indicate which light is the key light , and which is the fill light. A key light is essentially the brightest source of light in the shot. A fill light is often used at lower power than the key light in order to lighten dark areas of shadow to make sure they don’t go totally black. Further on in this issue, we also have a few more of the most popular lighting setups listed in more detail for your reference. Good luck and enjoy. n


Key light

Fill light


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Automotive Automo tive rig photography Photograph your car like the pros

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ave you ever seen all those glossy brochures and magazine adverts produced by car manufacturers manufacturers? ? There’s always a very cool shot of their car taken from a low angle, appearing to be traveling at a 100 miles an hour. The car’s wheels are a blur of motion and everything around it is streaking by, portraying an amazing sense of speed. You might look at those images and wonder just how it was done. Was it just some some incredible incredible panning panning shot as the car sped by? Was it taken from another chase vehicle, with the photographer in the back snapping away as both cars speed along a deserted road? Did the photographer have to use settings that catch the car in sharp enough detail, but with shutter

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speeds slow enough to render the moving road and background a complete blur? Although those techniques are used to varying degrees, there is one particular kind of shot that really looks incredible. The high end automotive industry has many trade secrets when it comes to the photography of their products and there are companies that charge huge amounts of money to capture the latest models of cars in exciting ways; but this is one kind of image you can produce yourself and get get professional professional looking results. It is called car rig photography and we’ll outline the process for you. It requires a couple of key pieces of equipment but luckily it won’t put a huge dent in your wallet.

AUTOMOTIVE RIG PHOTOGRAPHY

“...this is one kind of image you can produce yourself and get professional looking results. It is called car rig photography and we’ll outline the process for you. ”


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The rig concept

The view from the camera will lo ok something like the illustration above. The boom arm will be in the shot of course but a little help from Photoshop will remove it in no time.

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Let’s reveal the magic of the car rig straight away. The concept is fairly simple. You have a section of pipe, or a photographic boom arm [1], [1], that will act as the main suppor t. You will also need a couple of suction cups [2] cups [2] that that are mounted to the surface of the car a nd provides the boom arm with a stable base to which it c an be clamped. Your camera is then suspended from a magic arm [3] beneath the end of the boom that is furthest from the car, and positioned to get the framing you require. The position of the boom, the magic arm and the camera is quite important but we will cover that in more detail shortly. When suction cupped to the car, the boom’s function is to hold your camera a short distance away from the vehicle to allow you to photograph it while it’s on the move. Before you ask, there is no high speed

The automotive rig is a deceptively simple idea. At its heart, it is just a camera on a pole placed far enough away from the car to get all, or part of it, in the frame. The camera is set for a 1-2 second exposure and the car only has to move a very short distance at walking pace to produce an effect that makes it look like it is moving at high speed.

risk to your camera involved in this technique whatsoever. In fact you’ll be pleasantly surprised. More on that later.

The parts list The rig we have created uses some simple but effective equipment. The suction cups we used are quad suction pads that are capable of lif ting 120kg in weight. The pad is placed on a smooth flat surface and each cup has a lever that when clicked into place, draws up the cup, pulling a vacuum that holds it to the surface it is on. When each lever is clicked in place, it can easily hold the weight of a large person. The suction cups and the sur face to which it is attached need to be scrupulously clean to make sure of a good seal. The quad suction pad is a good idea, as in effect it gives you some


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redundancy if any cup loses suction. These pads are only about £10 each, so a very cost-effective mounting system. The boom arm can be a length of galvanised metal pipe from your local hardware store about 25mm - 38mm in diameter and up to 2m long. Alternatively, you can get a telescoping photo studio boom arm that is designed to hold a studio light. They range in size and price but you can get a 1.5m boom arm starting at around £18. Some enterprising types have even used the larger ends of carbon fibre fishing rods, albeit to which much smaller cameras are attached. Next you’ll need a magic arm. A magic a rm is a metal articulating arm that can be locked in position, one end has a heavy duty clamp for gripping another object or surface and the other has a hot shoe adapter and a tripod mount screw attachment

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to which your camera can be mounted. A professional magic arm can be purchased for about £14 and is very useful even whe n not being used in a car rig. A couple of extra strong clamps for extra security make up the par ts needed to assemble your basic rig.

The suction pads required to secure the rig to the car come in various configurations. You can get single pads, or for more security; you can also get four [4] or two [5] pad models. The magic arm [6] is the ar ticulating metal arm that allows your camera to suspend from beneath the metal tubing [7] or boom arm [8]. Although the metal tubing is likely to be heavier, it will also be more rigid. You can secure the tubing to the suction pad handles using a couple of two-way heavy duty clamps [9]. All these items are surprisingly cheap to buy, but strong enough to do the job.


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Camera equipment

Lenses

For shots of this nature where the camera is suspended from a boom, the smaller and lighter your camera the better. To be able to confidently support a large, heavy DSLR and lens, the boom arm would need to be very sturdy indeed, and sturdy equals heavy. Smaller mirrorless cameras like an Olympus OM-D E-M10 would work well. Small DSLRs such as a Canon 550D or Nikon D5500 would also do the job. Better still, if you are the owner of an advanced compact camera like the EOS M series or an action camera, like the new GoPro Hero 5 Black, then you have a very small, very light, camera that can also shoot in 12MP Raw format and with a very wide angle of view, that means you don’t have to site your camera too far away from the vehicle in order to get it all in the frame.

The lens you use with your camera will depend on how long a boom arm you are using. The longer the boom arm, the further away the camera can be, and therefore will not require such a short focal length lens to get it all in the frame. To shoot a medium size four door saloon in a 3/4 view with a lens of about 24mm (full-frame) or 15mm (APS-C), you would need the camera to be about 1.5m - 1.8m from the car. Use a 16mm (full-frame) or 10mm (APS-C) lens and you can move the camera to just over 1m. Action cameras like the GoPro, when used on their widest angle of view, are equivalent to a 14mm full-frame lens. The wide angle lenses will produce distortion, but that is something you can control when

you process the shots in your favourite Raw editing program. For our shots, we decided to try an old Canon 5D with a 1 5mm fisheye lens and a GoPro Hero 5 Black on its Wide FOV setting. You can have the camera much closer if you want depending on how much car you want in the shot. If you only have longer focal length lenses, you can still get some great shots. You will just need to be a little more creative with your compositions.

Camera control The next part is how to control the camera. A lot of modern mirrorless cameras, DSLRs and action cameras have the ability to automatically shoot a predetermined number of frames in sequence using whatever

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The smaller and lighter the camera, the better it will be for the rig. Compact system cameras like the Olympus OM-D range [1] are small but have great image quality. Since they don’t have a mirror box like a normal DSLR, they are lighter too. The DSLR cameras will be heavier by comparison but if you have a smaller APS- C cropped sensor camera such as the Nikon D5500 [2], these are generally made from lighter less robust materials with more body components moulded in plastic. There is also the range of small advanced compact cameras to consider such as the EOS M range [3]. They have comparable image quality to DSLRs but in much smaller bodies. An action camera is also a great option, being the lightest and smallest of the lot. The new range of GoPro cameras [4] can also shoot in Raw format which is a great bonus for image quality.

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Interchangeable lens camera systems often have the option of using pancake lenses [5]. These are very compact and very lightweight lenses . They come in wide, medium and telephoto focal lengths and have good quality optics despite their diminutive size. DSLR systems offer much more choice when it comes to lenses but they do come at a pr ice. A good ultra wide angle lens [6] or fisheye [7] is cert ainly not cheap, but they have great quality optics and deliver crisp images.

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settings you dial in. If your camera doesn’t have that function you can always use an intervalometer [8] which [8] which is basically a programmable cable release that plugs into the cable remote port of your camera. It will mean that you’ll need to secure it to the camera or the magic arm that it is suspended from, but they are very light and easy to secure. Beyond that, you can always use a wireless remote control that you can either program, or use the wireless manual shutter release button at any time you choose.

Setting up We decided to do a couple of test runs to make sure everything was going to work as expected. The first order of business was

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to find a spot to shoot that was quiet and free of traffic. We went to an old industrial estate at sunrise on a Sunday morning, knowing the place would be deserted and it had plent y of level roads and parking areas off the public highway. First, we took the camera, and using the live view function, walked around the car to figure out the best angle to shoot and therefore where the suction pads could be deployed. Once we knew the camera angle, we cleaned both the suctions cups and the car where the pads would go [9]. [9]. Many recommend wetting the pads before you attach them as it helps create enough suction to firmly hold them in place [10]. [10]. Then the boom arm was clamped to the suction pads and extended out to about [11]. The magic arm was 1.5m from the car [11].

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secured to the camera hot shoe mount [12] and the super clamp on the other end was placed on the end of the boom arm and firmly tightened [13] . [13] . The camera was a djusted to get the framing right for the car and the magic arm was locked in place. You will probably notice some flex and some ‘bounce’ in the rig. Make sure your camera isn’t so close to the ground that any flexing will cause it to collide with the road surface. Because the camera is lower than the boom arm, you can usually position it so that part of the c ar’s bodywork obscures the suction pads and creates a clean edge [14] that you can use when it com es to the post process side of things; this will involve a little Photoshop to remove the boom arm from the shot.

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How it works The first order of business is to input setting s on your camera that will deliver a shut ter duration of about 1 - 2 seconds. This will mean setting your camera’s ISO as low as it will go and using very narrow apertures to reduce the amount of light falling on the sensor. If you are struggling to get to 1 - 2 seconds, then you can either wai t and shoot at dusk, when the light levels are low enough for you to achieve the desired duration, or you can use a screw-on ND filter. The neutral optical density of the filter, reduces the amount of light hitting the sensor and as a result, requires you to increase the exposure times to compe nsate. You can even get small ND filters to attach to the f ront of the GoPro cameras in order to get those longer exposure times. As an example, if all you could get was a balanced exposure 1/4 of a second, adding a 3-stop ND fil ter would require you to use a 2 second shutter duration to achieve the same balanced exposure. Make sure you are shooting in Raw format if your camera allows it, to maximise image quality. Then set your camera to manual focus and make sure your desired point of focus is sharp. Then you can either program your camera to automatically take a number of shots with these settings or, as in our example, plug in the intervalometer that was set to keep taking shots with the camera’s settings until we turned it off.

The need for no speed Now the car needs to be moving while your camera is taking those 1 - 2 second exposures. This is best done with two people. One person can sit in the car and control it, the other can monitor the rig and set it going when necessary. The engine can actually be switched off during the shoot. The driver simply needs to release the parking brake and then you simply push the car to get it rolling in a straight line at a brisk walking pace of about 5mph. With the camera shooting 2 second exposures, the car will travel roughly 2m or more during each exposure. This very sedate pace means the camera and the rig shouldn’t bounce around too much as the car is rolling. To To be safe, you can actually shoot a num ber of reference shots while the car is stationary j ust in case there is some camera shake present in the moving shots. The combination of long shutter duration and the car’s movement will produce motion-blurred backgrounds that will suddenly make your car look like it is going ten times faster than it is. The background and the wheels will be a blur and the illusion of speed is achieved by going no faster than walking pace. Having lots of nea rby scenery to be blurred by the long exposure is a good thing. No background scenery will mean no blur and your shot will not have such a great sense of speed. That’s why if you look at the shots the professionals take, there are always city streets, tree-lined avenues, or mountain roads used as the backdrop.

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Unless you are shooting at night or at least dusk, you will need a neutral density (ND) filter on your lens to reduce the amount of light hitting your sensor: enough to produce an exposure duration of around 1-2 seconds. You can get ND filters that range from 1-stop of light reduction, all the way up to 10-12 stops. For daytime work, you will probably be looking at a 4- 8 stop filter. You can even get ND filters for action cameras like the GoPro as well.

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To get an idea of how slowly the car has to move, compare these 4 shots. Shot 1 is a stationary reference image. You can see how blurred the driver is as they walk to the car. Shot 2 is the car starting to roll forwar d. Shots 2, 3 and 4 are actually in sequence. If you look at the background, you can see how little distance the car has covered.

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Bright sunlit conditions on the morning of the first test meant that we couldn’t quite get to 1-2 second exposures. This shot was taken with a shutter speed of 0.3 of a second and it actually worked out quite well.

The second test was shot with an ND filter screwed on to get the 2 second shutter speed. We moved to another part of the industrial estate but encountered roads that were far too bumpy. This is something to be aware of when setting up your shoot. Bumpy roads are not your friend during long exposures.


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Smoothly does it We switched to another car and tried a different location, off the public roads. This was a bit more successful as the road was a lit tle bit smoother and we got some fairly good shots of the truck as it rolled down a small incline. Most of the shots were still suffering from camera shake but we could use our stationary reference shot to sort out the worst of the blur.

The action camera’s turn We then decided to switch to the GoPro HERO 5 Black and return very early the next morning whilst it was still fairly dark. It was mounted in the same fashion as the Canon DSLR and then it was set to take a 2 sec ond exposure every 10 seconds. To our surprise, these came out just about perfectly. The very light GoPro and the rigid steel tube of the rig gave us almost rock steady shots that looked very cool indeed.

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Post processing Then it is a case of ch oosing your favourite shots and taking a little tim e to clone out the boom arm from the shot. Once done, you will have the kind of shots that can look amazing an d have people asking how you actually did it. n

Disclaimer: We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage which you may suf fer as a result of your use of the information or advice which is provided in this article. Great care should be taken to perform these car rig shots in safe, controlled environments away from public highways where there is no risk to other road users. For further information, contact your local authority regarding permits where applicable before proceeding.


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Airshow photography Capturing the action in the skies above

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irshows offer the budding photographer a great photographic experience quite unlike any other. These flying technological marvels are certainly something. Imagine the sight of a modern front line fighter jet screaming past you at 600 knots, turning and firing its afterburners to kick it high into the blue yonder. The sky is filled with the rumble of jet engines, the whine of propellers or the wonderful ‘whup, whup whup’ of a Chinook helicopter’s twin rotors. All these things make for an exciting show but capturing the action can be equally rewarding and exciting when you nail some perfect shots of the aerial action above you. The question is: how can you make sure you get some great images? Well, Well, we have a few pointers and observations that will hopefully get you on track.

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AIRSHOW PHOTOGRAPHY


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Gear choices Photography, like many hobbies, can generally be an expensive one. It can cer tainly dispose of all your available income in one fell swoop with eyewatering precision if you let it. This lea ds us to the main issue when photographing an airshow. How do you capture those craft when they are long distances away from you even at their closest approach? In the UK certainly, rules have been put in place that govern how and where aircraft can display in front of crowds. Safety issues dictate that they keep their distance in case of collision or mechanical failure. This means that your wide angle lens is not going to cut it wh en it comes to catching the airborne action. Long lenses are the order of the day. If you’ve ever been to a football match or other sporting event, you’ll no doubt have seen the rows of sports photographers all using enormous lenses that look like they could replace the Hubble Space

Telescope. They probably could. They certainly cost about the same! A typical 600mm super telephoto lens can cost thousands, which puts gear like that beyond most of us. What options do you have to get some usable long-range photographs?

Telephoto tips You are planning a trip to a local airshow but what should your gear choices be? This will depend on your shooting style but in the s ame way a landscape photographer will always have a wide-angle lens in their bag, an action or sports photographer will have a zoom lens. It doesn’t mean you have to go out and spend thousands on a dedicated super-telephoto lens such as the Canon EF 800mm f/5.6 at nearly £10,000 [1]. You can actually bu y a Korean supersuper-telephoto telephoto 650-1300mm f/8-f/16 lens for £150 [2]. You would have to be aware though, that at this price-

point, it is not going to be exactly world-class quality. Happily, there are other options. The current crop of super-zoom super-zoom digital c ameras are very affordable and offer optical zoom in the order of 30x to 80x magnification. The Nikon COOLPIX P900 [3] has a 16MP sensor and a massive 83x magnification, which is comparable to a full frame camera with a 24-2000mm l ens. If you don’t have a super-telephoto, super-telephoto, you can always choose to crop your shots in your image editing software. The higher the resolution of your sensor, the more cropping power you’ll have.

Seeing double If you already have a DSLR with a medium telephoto in the 70-300mm length range, you could by a focal length extender [4] and double the lens to 140-600mm. The big names like Canon and Nikon offer these extenders for around £350 but you could always opt for third party brands like Yongnuo at half the price.

Nearly new Another option to consider is to buy second hand lenses. Although there is no shortage of them on auction sites, you may be better off purchasing from respected vendors who will be able to tell you the history of the lens. The two biggest lenses we use: an EF70-200mm f/2.8 and an EF100-400mm f/ f/4 4 IS zoom lens, were both second hand buys and they have been brilliant.

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The crop factor Another option is to use a camera with a cropped sensor and use a lens designed for full frame cameras instead. As an example, for some of the shots used in this article, a Canon EOS 550D was used with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4 zoom lens. The lens is designed to project an image onto a sensor 1.6x larger than the one used in the 550D. The actual focal length of the lens does not change but the 100400mm focal leng th range on the lens now appears as if it were 160-640mm.

Shooting tips Since you are shooting at long focal lengths, there are a few things you will need to bear in mind. It is a popular rule of thumb to say that if you are using a 100400mm lens at the long end of 400mm for example, it is advisable to make sure your camera’s shutter speed is at least 1/400th of a second. This is referred to as ‘shutter speed as the inverse of focal length’ rule. To be honest, it is probably better to double that figure and shoot at 1/800th of a sec ond to make sure your pictures are as sharp as they can be. If you are using a tripod or perhaps a monopod to support your camera and lens, then slower shutter speeds might yield good results. If you are shooting hand held, then faster is better for the majority of the action shots you’ll be taking. With aircraft however, however, there is one thing to note. When shooting jet aircraft, you can shoot with as fast a shutter speed as you want, when it comes to propellor driven aircraft, it’s a slightly different story. Helicopters are a very good example. If you shoot a helicopter in flight at very high shut ter speeds, you are likely to freeze the motion of the rotors and make it look unnaturally still. Try shooting a sequence with lower shutter speeds to at least capture some movement in the rotor tips and make it look more dynamic and energetic. Yes, you run the risk of camera shake but the more you shoot, the more chances you have of nailing a couple of sharp images.

Fast shutter speed

Slower shutter speed


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Track your subject One of the best ways to capture constantly moving subjects such as aircraft is to use your camera’s continuous autofocus. Continuous autofocus modes, as the name suggests, means that once you get a lock on your intended subject, keeping the shutter button depressed half way will make the camera continuously attempt to focus on what ever the AF point is placed over. Nikon call this Autofocus Continuous-servo (AF-C) and Canon refer to it as Ar tificial Intelligence (AI Servo) [1]. Typically, this is used to track and maintain focus on moving subjects. You place your AF point over the subject to be tracked and press the shutter button halfway to initiate the continuous focus tracking. Focusing is continuous, so there is no helpful beep from your camera this time. As long as you keep the AF point over your intended subject, the camera will keep at tempting to lock focus on that point. If you also use a high speed continuous shooting mode [2], when you press the shutter button, it will shoot at its maximum frames per second rate until you release the button. This means you can shoot a sequence as you track the aircraft as it flies by.

Left AF point

Front and centre It may be worth the effort to turn up early to the event and check out the location. You can select some spots that afford the best view and then set yourself up ready for the show. It’s always helpful to be as close to the front as possible to avoid any people blocking your view. In the majority of cases, the best spot for a n airshow is referred to as ‘crowd centre’ or ‘show centre’. Airshow displays are geared to look their best f rom the crowd’s point of view in this position. The downside is that it will also be the most crowded area too. An alternative is to take up position at either end of the location where it’s at its least crowded. Although you’re not at crowd centre, you can sometimes get great shots of the aircraft turning and manoeuvring themselves for another pass. We were lucky recently as there was a two day airshow which meant we had t wo bites of the cherry in terms of choosing places to shoot from. On day one, we took a few shots some distance from the show. We were on top of a hill but n abbed a few good closeups as the aircraft came in low on their approach to the display area.

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The three images below show how you can change the AF point you use to track your subject to achieve different framing depending on your preference. Typically, the centre AF point is the most accura te.

Centre AF point

Right AF point

AIRSHOW PHOTOGRAPHY

Visual interest

“Other craft may just use white smoke, but against a clear blue sky, this can look just ju st as dr dram amat atic ic.. ”

Although the idea of photographing an airshow on a clear blue sky day might sound appealing, it doesn’t make for the most interesting shots. Believe it or not, clouds are the key to making the background to your shots look more visually dynamic and interesting. Obviously a completely overcast day will either mean a canceled show or a dull backdrop to your shots. If you are stuck with either a blue sky or a grey one, our fearless aviators can help us a little with smoke. A display team like the Red Arrows will use a lot of coloured smoke in their shows. So if you need a little col our boost, capture images where they are using smoke. Usually, the show organisers will have a radio link to the pilots and you can hear their commands which will give you a clue when they are ‘smoke on’ or ‘smoke off’. off’. Other craft may just use white smoke but against a clear blue sky, this can look just as dramatic.


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It’s on the cards

Final thoughts

Given that you may want to shoot sequences of images in rapid succession, we recommend getting hold of a couple of fast memory cards. There’s nothing worse than having some wonderful spectacle in front of you, but you can’t shoot because the camera is trying to buffer images to a slow memory card. If you use either SD or Compact Flash cards, go for the one with rapid write speeds up around the 60 - 160 MB/s mark. They are worth their weight in gold, so always have a spare or two at the ready. You never know.

We advocate it time and again, and this time is no exception. If your camera supports it, shoot in Raw format at the la rgest resolution your camera has. You will no doubt need to crop some shots to get your subjects a little larger in the fram e and shooting in Raw will at least mean you have the m ost image data to play with before saving your final processed images. Since memory cards are the cheapest they’ve ever been, don’t worry about shooting too many images. If you’ve never shot an airshow before, it might be a bit of a learning process. The more you shoot, the more chances you have of hitting that perfect moment; also, the m ore you shoot, the more you learn. Tak Take e time to review your shots and asses what works and what doesn’t. Then go shoot again. Most of all, go and have some fun. n


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Pet photography Time to get our furry furr y friends ready for their close up

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e love our pets. In fact for most people they are more than mere pets and become more like family members, the recipients of love, affection and lavish attention. It is likely then that their owners, at some point, are going to want photographs of their furry friends (or scaly, feathery or otherwise). I have a dog, and the number of photos that include him specifically outnumber those of all my other family members put together. However, pet photography presents its own special problems. Animals, as we all know, can be unpredictable, lazy, aggressive, hyperactive and downright cute. If you’re thinking of trying pet photography, here are a few pointers to get you started.

Pet personality profile profile You don’t need to si t the pet i n question on a psychiatrist’s couch and ask it to tell you about its mother, but before you start snapping away, find out about your subject ’s personality and habits. Where does it snooze if the sun is out? What is its favourite toy? Is i t lazy, sleepy, or does it like to perch on a garden fence or hide

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in the grass? Take Take time to ch at with the owner and observe your subject to gain some insight. It’s also worth spending a little time getting to know the an imal yourself. Cats, dogs, horses, they all have personality, and you need to ensure they are comfortable being around you, and you around them. Scaring a pet right at the outset is not going to make for a particularly happy or productive photo shoot.

Close quarters Think about getting in close to your subject. If the pet is comfortable with you, and if it isn’t too skittish, fill the frame with the pet’s face. Get the eyes nice and sharp. Just like humans, this is a natural point of focus, although focusing on the snout of a dog or cat can also make for an interesting image in its own righ t. A good portrait focuses on the subject and not the background. Yes, there are times when shooting w ide can create a great environmental portrait, but make sure you get a good selection of close-ups. A macro lens is perfect for capturing details of the pet, and shooting with a wide aperture keeps any background distractions out of focus.

PET PHOTOGRAPHY

“Get the eyes nice and sharp. Just like humans, this is a natural point of focus. focus.””

This image of Phoebe was shot as if it w ere a human portrait with some dramatic lighting and then being processed to black and white. As with a human portrait, getting the eyes in focus is a key component to draw in t he viewer.


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Luna is unaware of the camera and happy to do her own thing. Moments like these are worth capturing. Taken with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, the foreground gate creates a nice frame for the shot.

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Having someone just out of shot with a dog treat is a simple way of get ting a dog’s attention. In this shot, Archie is fixed on his owner to camera left and made this portrait easy to capture.


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Bailey was shot with a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L lens. The aperture was set at f/2.8 and at the full focal length of 200mm. This produces some lovely selective focus and gives the benefit of a fast shutter speed.

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PET PHOTOGRAPHY

Capture funny ‘moments’.

Keep the eyes nice and sharp.

Get in close.

Try to keep background distractions to a minimum.

Obviously if the animal is not content to keep still for more than a second, this can be a challenge. Keep snapping away; try using your camera’s continuous autofocus to track the animal as it moves. If it’s it’s proving too difficult, let the animal play a while, and try again. Pets have very short attention spans, so keep it fun, break it up a bit if you have to and always reward and fuss them when they do well.

On the level Your average dog is a couple of feet tall, cats even smaller. The average average adult human i s about 5’ 7”. 7”. If you photograph a pet wh ile you’re standing up, all you’re going to see is the top of their head and their backs, not what you want for a portrait. Get down to the ir eye level, and

Keep an eye out for interactions or displays of behaviour.

see the world from their perspective. If you are able, get lower still. Try pre-focusing your camera and just holding it at ground level so you can look up at the pet. It’s worth a try just for a new angle on things.

Lighting When meeting a new animal, bring a flash and, with the owner’s permission, while greeting or playing with the pet, fire a couple of test flashes away from them to see their reaction. In daylight particularly, they never seem to mind the flash at all. If they do mind, then stick with natural light and use a white or silver reflector if you need to fill in any shadow areas. Indoors, a bright continuous light may be preferable. I have have a photoflood light that, rather

than using old tungsten bulbs, uses three daylight-balanced energy saving bulbs. They are housed in a 22” reflector that I can cover with a diffuser to soften the light if need be. You can also try placing your subject near a window to use the natural light. If I am using flash with a willing subject then I invariably use cross-lighting, avoiding shooting a flash directly at them.

Be patient and carry on! As they say, “memory is cheap, but memories are pricel ess”. Pets are challengi ng subjects so you’re just going to have to stay sharp and keep shooting . The more you shoot, the greater your chances of hitting that perfect shot! n


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Still life photography Sounds simple, simple, but still life is a demanding demandi ng art form

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till life photography is defined as the depiction of an inanimate subject. You are probably familiar with classic paintings of still life subjects which often tend to be bowls of fruit, bottles, and flowers. Although some might frown upon photographing a still life that mimics an old painting, it actually takes a deft touch with lighting and a skill in knowing how to set up and arrange your particular subjects. In fact, it is said that a still life photographer is ’making’ a picture, rather than ‘taking’ it. Of course still life is not limited to bowls of fruit and such, but on a rainy day, when you’re stuck indoors looking for a photography project, a good still life can teach you a lot about light, texture, contrast and c omposition.

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STILL LIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

The two images above represent the key difference between ‘found’ still life images and ‘created’ still life images. The image of rusty old tools in a tool chest on the left could easily have been found by the photographer who decided to record it as it was discovered. The image on the right is obviously a deliberate creation, and has the hallmarks of being lit in a studio environment.

Still life does fall into two categories. The first is ‘created’ still life which, as the title may suggest, is where the final scene has been crafted and constructed with a deliberate final result in mind. It may also have been lit by by artificial means. Daylight or any ambient light was not present

in the final shot. The second type is ‘found’ still life. This is a subject that has bee n found and its arrangement has occurred by natural means or at the very least had no input from the photographer in creating the scene that they shot. It is as they found it.


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A simple grey faux leather fabric creates a great backdrop for your still life composition.

Creating a still life For our example, we are going to assume it’s a bad weather day, and we’ll set something up indoors and create a still life. Where do you start? Well, the best idea is to start with something simple, on a simple background, with simple lighting. Sounds simple, right? It is good practice to begin with an object that is non-reflective, if you’re new to still life photography, you don’t want the additional headache of dealing with unwanted reflections if you’re not able to black the room out. Once you’ve made your executive decision about the subject you are going to capture, you’ll need to build a set for it to inhabit. You’ll need a surface or backdrop to create your environment for the subject. It can be as simple as the surface of a wooden table or a piece of fabric, cloth or canvas.

Set the scene Light backgrounds have a light and pleasant mood, whereas dark backgrounds are more dramatic. It is generally held that the background colour should be of similar tones and colours as your subject, perhaps just a shade lighter or darker than the main elements. Although that is the rule, you can experiment with colour combinations that suit your taste.

Your subject With a background set up, it ’s time to introduce your subjects. The beauty of still life work is that you can shoot literally any thing you want. You can amalgamate several disparate elements or harmonise the subjects to your heart’s content. There is a quoted maxim that arranging objects in odd numbered groups (1, 3 or 5 etc.) is more harmonious than even numbered groups. However you do it is up to you.

Lighting up time When you have your background and subjects ready, it’s time to introduce light. This can be as simple as arranging your scene next to a window on an overcast day and using the soft natural light. If that is not an option, then there is no reason you couldn’t employ a couple of desk lamps as your primary light sources. Bounce the light of a nearby wall or piece of white card to create a much larger softbox effect to reduce the appearance of harsh shadows due to small light sources, or place the lamp a distance behind a white sheet and turn the sheet into your light source. Some white card can also be used as reflectors to bounce a little light back into the scene to reduce the depth of the shadows.

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Although our final set up uses flash lighting, you can use desk lamps, torches and household lighting such as this bedside lamp shown on the left and still get a great result as seen in the main picture above.


On the left of the set up is the flash u sed at the 4 o’ clock position w ith an orange gel. The flash on the right had a large white sheet hung over it to increase the apparent size of the light source to create softer shadows.

Getting in the mood In our example, we were going for a moodier look. Something that looks more like an old 17th century oil painting. In fact, a Google search for 17th century still life paintings will provide you with many inspirational references where you can study how they chose to capture the light in their scene. Our example was set up on the dining room table with curtains drawn to subdue the ambient light, it was the closest we could get to having the room blacked out. A local fabrics shop had a couple of interesting leather-effect sheets you could buy off the roll. We had a meter each of a grey and a brown textured material, ideal for our backdrops.

Lights and camera We were working with two wirelessly controlled flashes as our primary sources of light. The camera was set up on tripod to avoid camera shake, and a favourite 24-105mm f/4 lens gave us ample compositional and framing scope of

our first subject on the grey material which was a house-warming gift, plus a candle and a piece of jewellery. The subjects were arranged and the lights were set. The process began to dial in both camera settings and the power required of the flashes to light the scene.

Settings We ended up with one flash at 1 /2 power shooting through a large white sheet to mimic a window and the second at 1 /64 power with an orange gel placed over the flash to cast a warm glow across the back of the scene. The camera was set at a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second, an aperture of f/8.0 and ISO 100. We would have chosen a shutter speed at the camera’s x-sync x-sync speed of 1/160th of second, but the camera was an older Canon 5DMK2 and the wireless controller was designed for newer Canon cameras such as the 5DMK3 and the 7DMK2. As such, the controller limits h ow close you can get to the top x-sync speed and will not let you use high-speed sync at all, which is a sham e.

However, However, the settings we had were fine for our set up so we could get shooting.

Shooting the first scene We shot a few frames, tweaked the position of both lights. If you imagine the ca mera is at the 6 o’clock position, the main flash with the white sheet over it was at the 4 o’clock position and the flash with the orange gel was at the 10 o’clock position, aimed at the grey leather-effect background. This created some nice shadows across the scene and in the petals of the flowers. Try to avoid front-on lighting as it has a tendency to flatten objects out. Shadows help create a sense of depth and give a more 3D quality to your image. The final thing to do was light the candle. Our camera’s shutter speed settings were such that enough of the ambient light in the scene could still show up in the shot, so the brightness of the candle flame was not lost each time the flashes fired. A small amount of smoke from the lit candle also showed up very well in the shot, adding to the scene.


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“The colours of the bottle and the brown leather complimented each other well, and the orange gel rom the second fash added

greater warmth to the scene.”

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Once the lights and camera settings were dialled in from the previous set up, shooting the second scene was just a case of making sure the lights were in the right place so as to avoid showing up on the glass of the bottle and the tumbler. For any remaining unwanted reflections, the image was processed, opened in Photoshop, and any remaining issues were cloned out of the image.

Next up Having captured the scene, it was time to set up the next one. This was a subjec t close to the heart, and liver, of the photographer. We set the brown leather sheet up as we did with the grey one and placed a bottle of single mal t scotch that had an interesting bottle design, a glass tumbler, and the cork from the bottle in position. Happy with our lights from the first scene, we could use the same settings as before and just frame the shot as desired. A few test shots and some light position tweaks, we could finish preparing the scene. Some cool

spherical ice cubes were placed in the glass, and scotch was poured into the glass from a beaker. The colours of the bottle an d the brown leather complimented each other well, and the orange gel from the second flash added greater warmth to the scene. The scene was set and we could shoot. As we m entioned earlier, watch out if using shiny surfaces in your shoot. Be aware of what reflections are appearing in your objects. We used a little positional sleight of hand to make sure most unwanted reflections of the camera and tripod were hidden by the bottle label.

Post processing All that remained was to download the shots and pick out the favourite one from the shoot. The processing was fairly straightforward. We added sharpening, some saturation, and also a dark vignet te to make the edges of the shot darker to add the mood we were seeking to create and we were done. Why not try your hand at still life photography? Whether ‘found’ or ‘created’, ‘created’, still life is a very good exercise in arrangement, composition, and lighting skills, and well worth a go. n


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Landscape photography photograp hy tips A guide to getting the most from your landscape l andscape photography

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or many people new to the world of photography, one of the easiest and most accessible areas first explored is the great outdoors and w hy not? You don’t need a studio or masses of expensive equipment. There is plenty of available light, unless you’re feeling adventurous and want to try night photography and beautiful seaside or countryside scenes are usually not too far away by car or a brisk walk. Landscape photography is an amazing and rewarding experience for both novice and seasoned professional. Whether it’s just a record of a day trip you’ve made to a new location with the family or a more serious professional

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endeavour, landscapes when taken well, are able to instil all sorts of emotions in the viewer of the final shot. Even if it is that most mun dane of emotions summed up in the simplest way: ‘wish you were h ere’. Before you venture out there, why not take a quick look at our 30 essential landscape photography tips. Over the following pages we have assembled a useful quick reference guide to landscape photography that can take your photographs to the next level. Go from ‘snap’ to ‘masterpiece’. There is so much that could be covered but we will show some of the main tips and tricks to get you on your way to being the next Ansel Adams. n

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS

“Landscape photography is an amazing and rewarding experience for both novice and seasoned seasoned professional.”


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Landscape Landscape photography photography tips 1 Research your location Take Take time to research your possible shooting destination if you have not been there before. Just Googling the location you want to shoot will call up all sor ts of information. Most of it may be useless to you but you can guarantee that there will be examples of other photographs taken there. The experiences of other photographers in this location will give you the heads-up as to whether it is an easy or difficult place to reach. There may be tips concerning local by-laws and the best nearby parking spots etc.

2 There’s an app for that There are apps available that can tell you where the sun will be at any point on any given day. These apps can overlay information on a map of your given destination, showing where the sun will rise and fall and where it will track through the sky on whichever day you choose. This is great for working out what time is best for you to shoot in the location you are researching. Sunseeker for iOS and Sun Sur veyor for Android are two great examples of these types of a pp.

3 Be prepared Make sure you dress for the conditions you are shooting in. If you are going to be on rough terrain, then sturdy shoes are essential. A sprained ankle miles f rom anywhere, could be very unpleasant. Travel Travel light if possible and the purchase of a good quality rucksack or rough terrain camera bag will stand you in good stead for your journey. Make sure someone knows you are out there and that you have your phone with you at all times. You never know.

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4 A golden rule It can’t be stressed enough, if you want the best from your shots, you need to switch to Raw shooting mode. Most modern cameras now allow you to capture your images in Raw format. Raw as the name suggests is the uncompressed and unprocessed image data straight from the camera’s sensor. The files are much bigger than their jpeg counterpart but they give much greater latitude when it comes to processing your final image.

5 Filter systems Think about investing in some filters. A circular polariser is very useful. It can boost the contrast in blue skies and is very useful for reducing or even eliminating reflections in water; just be aware that polarisers work best when the sun is at 90° to you. If you are shooting a scene where there is a large difference in the tonal values between your land and a bright sky, an ND grad will help stop those skies from burning out.

6 Lock it up For extra tripod stability, a lot of photographers hang their camera bags underneath the head of the tripod to act as a counterweight, helping to immobilise the tripod. In addition, even the movement of your camera’s mirror flipping up and down with each shot can create vibrations that affect a shot’s sharpness. If you set your camera for mirror lock-up, it will flip the mirror out of the way long before the shutter opens to take the shot, giving time for any vibrations to cease.


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Landscape Landscape photography photography tips 7 Light fantastic In photography you may hear reference to ‘the golden hour’. For gorgeous landscapes you cannot do better than to shoot at sunrise and for an hour or so after that; or at sunset and th e hour or so before it sets. The light has a luminous warm glow, shadows are long and show off the contours of the land. The sky ignites in pink, orange and red hues and if you catch a sunrise or sunset with an interesting set of cloud formations, then all the better.

8 Blue hour There is also what is referred to as ‘the blue hour’. This is the twilight period you experience at either end of the day when the sun is a fair dista nce below the horizon but its influence can be seen in the sky. It is ideal for cityscapes where you can capture the city lights against a deep, inky blue sky. The window of opportunity is relatively small before either the sun rises and lights the sky or it sinks and renders the sky black. It usually lasts about 45 minutes after the sun has set or before it rises.

9 Stable conditions A tripod is a must for landscape work. You may be working in low light conditions and handheld shots are not going to yield sharp images. You might also want longer exposure times to render water soft and misty or show clouds moving in the shot over a number of seconds for added drama. There are plenty of strong, lightweight tripods to choose from that won’t be a chore to carry with you on your shoot; couple a cable release with it and you are set.

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10 Take control contro l If you are relatively new to DSLR photography, photography, you may still be using your camera’s auto or semi-auto functions where it will decide on the best settings to use in either Shutter Priority or Aperture Priority. As long as it is in auto, it will keep making decisions for you and you will end up with shots that don’t match your expectations. In manual mode you can decide on how the scene is exposed. Make the creative decisions; don’t leave it to your camera.

11 Depth cueing A photograph only has two dimensions and any indication of depth in a photograph is purely optical. One of the simplest ways to add depth is to use leading lines like the curve of san d on a beach image or railway lines converging towards the horizon. Another method is atmospheric perspective where mist and fog shroud distant objects making them lighter and with less tonal contrast compared to darker foreground objects.

12 Don’t fear the histogram A histogram is a graphic representation of the tonal values in your shot and how they are distributed. If the graph is bunched at the far lef t, then your shot is very underexposed and you risk the loss of a lot of detail to shadow areas. If it is sliding off the right hand side, then it w ill be overexposed and detail will be lost in the highlight areas. A good exposure will have all the major tones in the middle of the histogram.


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Landscape Landscape photography photography tips 13 Framing & composition Composition is a very subjective thing. What looks good to your eye may look odd to someone else. If nothing else, keep the ‘rule of thirds’ as your main compositional tool. Imagine that your frame is split by lines into thirds, both vertically and horizontally. Placing an object of interest at one of the points where these lines would intersect means you are adhering to the rule and this will help bring balance to your shot. Rules can be broken though, so it ’s up to you.

14 Stay sharp Photographers will want their scene to be as sharp as possible from front to back. This is where depth of field comes into play. At large apertures such as f/2.8, the area of sharp focus in front and behind the point of focus will be relatively small. Using a much smaller aperture such as f/11 that ‘zone’ of sharp focus is much greater. As a rough guide, focus on a point about one third of the distance into your scene to give yourself the best chance of maximising the depth of field available.

15 Maximum exposure Consider using longer exposures in your landscape shots. Photographers often employ exposures that last seconds or even tens of seconds, to show clouds streaking across the sky rather than looking static and puff y. Scenes shot with a much longer exposure will turn the water to a misty, milky fog. It is safe to say that your tripod is the key to the success of these shots.

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16 Out of the shadows While a bright summer day may seem like the perfect time to take photos, at midday every scene will appear flat and featureless with shadows sitting directly beneath every object. The perfect weather for outdoor photography is a bright day with a few white clouds to help diffuse the light and take the edge off the shadows. The perfect time is around sunrise and sunset with long shadows defining the contours of the land.

17 Wet weather If you’re taking your camera out in wet weather make sure it’s properly protected. Keep your camera in a rain proof bag or case until you need to use it. If rain gets on the lens, wipe it off with a soft lens cloth. If your camera does get wet, take the battery out, dry it thoroughly using paper towels for the body and soft cloth for the lens; then leave it somewhere warm and dry for 24 hours before trying it again.

18 Persistence pays off The great outdoors is unpredictable to say the least. The weather has a ha bit of doing exactly the opposite of what you want, when you least want it to. This can be a big turn off for m any new to photography. Don’t let below par weather put you off. Sometimes you have to be brave and get out there and be prepared to sit and wa it. You could be rewarded by a break in the weather that reveals some sublime lighting that makes it all worthwhile.


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How it it’’s done done You don’ don’tt need to travel t ravel the t he world to t o fnd wildlie pictures

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hile the top wildlife photographers jet off to exotic locations to capture their photos, for those of us of more modest means, zoos and wildlife parks can provide many opportunities to photograph animals in more controlled and easily accessible locations. Most wildlife parks try to ensure that their animals are kept in surroundings that closely match their natural environment. Zoos and parks will usually actively encourage photography, and often build their enclosures to provide an unobstructed view of the animals, so by careful use of a telephoto lens it should be possible to exclude anything from the shot that might give away the fact that it was not shot in the wild. Since like most zoo animals the big cats are accustomed to visitors, they are quite happy to pose for their photo, giving the photographer time to compose the shot. A wide aperture has reduced the depth of field so that the background is out of focus, using a higher ISO setting also helps to provide a nice fast shutter speed to freeze any unexpected movements or chance of camera shake. A long telephoto zoom lens magnifies the view, allowing the photographer to crop out the surroundings and concentrate on the animals. n

The shot of this animal was taken with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4 L image stabilised lens like the one shown here.

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HOW IT’S DONE

“A wide aperture has reduced the depth o feld so that the background is out o ocus, providing a ast shutter speed to reeze any unexpected movements.”


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How it it’s done done This is how you see the bigger picture

D

igital SLR systems offer the greatest versatility of any photographic system, and represent the best compromise between quality and portability. The best CSC systems are still some way behind, but are catching up fast. There are lenses and other accessories available to suit every type of photography, both amateur and professional. It’s important to choose the right lens for the job, but be aware that top quality DSLR lenses can be extremely expensive. This photographer is using a very specialist lens to get this distorted effect of the Padirac Caves in France.

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The very wide field of view me ans more of the stone structure can be seen. The kind of lens that can do this is called a fisheye. Whereas most lenses are trying hard to eliminate distortion, the fisheye uses it to its advantage to give you an unparalleled angle of view that can encompass 180°. In the case of the example le nses shown here, the Nikkor 10.5mm DX fisheye can create a 180° image, whilst the Canon 8-15mm fisheye can actually create a fully circular 360° image at the 8mm end of the zoom range up to a 180° corner to corner image when zoomed to 15mm. Just be prepared to shell out well over £800 for the privilege. n

HOW IT’S DONE

Although a very specialist lens, the fisheye can create some memorable images. Landscapes, particularly from an elevated or lowered position, can produce some extreme and dramatic results.


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Glossary A list of some general photographic photographic terms Aperture Behind the lens of your camera is a movable circular iris which opens and closes to control the amount of light falling on the sensor. This is usually controlled by the camera’s light meter, although some cameras have a manual aperture control. Altering the aperture also changes the depth of field.

Aperture priority This is one of the semi-manual exposure options found on some cameras. The user sets the aperture according to the depth of field they require, and the metering system sets the shutter speed to obtain the correct exposure.

Artefacts When an image is stored in your camera’s memory it has to be compressed to fit, usually into a JPEG file, and in the process some information is inevitably lost. When the image is uncompressed for viewing, noise creeps in and appears as angular blocks in the image, which are known as artefacts.

Autofocus Almost all digital cameras have automatic focusing. There are essentially two types; contrast detection, used in compact cameras and most CSCs, uses the camera’s main sensor and works by detecting the borders between high-contrast areas and trying to make them as sharp as possible. Phase detection AF is used in digital SLRs and some CSCs, and uses a separate sensor. It is usually faster and works better in low light. AE lock Stands for Auto-Exposure Lock, a function found on most advanced digital cameras. This enables you to take a light meter reading from a particular part of the image and then hold that setting while you compose the image.

as the size of the internal memory buffer. You’ll typically get about three frames per second from a standard digital camera in burst mode.

Centre-weighted metering This is when the camera takes an average light reading from the whole frame, but pays more attention to the centre of the image where the subject normally is. This has been largely superseded by multi-pattern metering, which is better able to cope with unusual situations.

CCD Stands for Charge Coupled Device. This is the light sensor behind the lens of your camera that records the image when you take a photograph. It consists of a grid of millions of tiny light sensors, one for each pixel of the image. The size of a CCD is measured in megapixels, and the higher the megapixel rating, the better the image quality.

Chromatic aberration Coloured fringes that appear around objects, often toward the edges of the frame. Caused by light rays of different wavelengths coming to focus at different distances from the lens.

Circular Polariser A filter that is placed in front of the camera lens in order to darken blue skies, manage reflections, or suppress glare.

CMOS Stands for Complimentary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. A chip-manufacturing technology used to produce the sensors in an increasingly large proportion of digital cameras. Cheaper but with better tolerance than other methods.

Depth of field Back lighting Backlighting occurs when your subject is brightly lit from behind, such as somebody standing in front of a sunlit window. Unless you adjust the exposure to compensate for this, your subject will appear as a dark silhouette against the bright background.

When you focus your camera on a subject, some detail behind and in front of the chosen subject will also be in focus. The distance between the nearest and furthest in-focus objects is known as the depth of field. It is changed by altering the size of the aperture; the smaller the aperture, the larger the depth of field.

Barrel distortion

Digital zoom

Barrel distortion occurs when a lens, usually wide-angle, distorts an image so that it appears slightly spherical. If you take a seascape with a wide-angle setting and notice that the horizon seems to curve, this is barrel distortion. It’s most noticeable when there are straight lines near the edge of the frame. In digital images barrel distortion can be corrected in image-editing software.

Some cameras give you the option of zooming in on the centre part of an image by expanding it in the camera. Although the zoomed area looks bigger, it still contains the same number of pixels as it did originally, so it will appear blocky and will lack resolution. Not to be confused with optical zoom, which is far superior.

Dynamic range Bokeh The visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens.

The difference between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. If a camera can simultaneously capture shadow and highlight detail then it has good dynamic range. Few cameras can do both.

Bracketing

DPI

Bracketing shots is where a photographer takes the same shot three times or more, each at different exposures. This increases the chance of getting an ideally exposed image. Also, it’s possible to combine the shots in software to increase the light and shade within the image, which is how HDR works.

Stands for Dots Per Inch. The sharpness of an image produced by a printer is defined by how many dots of ink per inch of printed paper its print head can produce. A figure of 1,200dpi or higher is usually required for photographic-quality results, although most modern printers are capable of this.

Burst mode

Effective pixels

Many cameras offer a burst mode, which means they can take several images in rapid succession, just as you’d get with a motor-wind on a traditional film camera. The number of shots that can be taken is limited by the speed of the camera’s image capture and processing systems, as well

Although your digital camera may claim to have 13.6 million pixels on its CCD, some of that number will not be used for taking the picture. Usually, some pixels around the edge of the sensor are painted black to provide a colour balance, while others fall outside the range of the lens.

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Electronic viewfinder Some cameras have a viewfinder containing a miniature LCD monitor showing you what the camera sees. This usually uses less battery power than the LCD screen on the back of the camera, but can be a strain on the eye and difficult to focus.

Exposure When you take a picture, the light meter in the camera determines how long the shutter should be open for and how wide the aperture should be, thus obtaining the correct exposure. If a picture is too dark, it is underexposed, whereas if it goes the other way and is too light, it is overexposed.

External flash This means that the camera has a connection, usually a hot shoe, that enables you to use a flashgun other than the one built into the camera. This allows a lot more creative freedom and control over lighting, because the flash can be positioned further away from the camera. This feature is only usually available on more expensive or professionalquality cameras.

EXIF The Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) format is used by nearly all digital cameras that output pictures as JPEGs. It enables information, such as the GPS co-ordinates, date and time the shot was taken, plus exposure and other camera information, to be stored in the image file alongside the normal picture information.

Fixed focus Cheaper cameras have fixed-focus lenses, which means they cannot be adjusted. Instead they rely on a very narrow aperture to make everything appear in focus, from a few feet in front of the camera out to infinity. They are fine for snapshots at average distance in good light, but are not so good for creative photographs where focus can be used to produce unusual effects.

Focal length In brief, this term describes the magnifying power of the camera’s lens. The longer the focal length, the greater the magnification. Conversely, the smaller the focal length, the more wide-angle the lens. Most digital camera zoom lenses can vary between short and long focal lengths.

f-number This is the number which describes the ratio of the aperture of a camera’s lens to its focal length. Generally, a higher quality lens will have a smaller f-number, which bizarrely means a wider maximum aperture, and thus more light entering the lens. See also ‘Depth of field’ for more information about focusing.

Forced perspective This is a technique which employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.

HDR A rather over-used technique whereby several shots at different exposures are combined to produce one image capturing a very wide range of contrast, or dynamic range. Useful for high-contrast lighting and night-time shots, but can be over-used by art students who’ve just discovered it.

Histogram A histogram is a graph of brightness. It ranges from black through grey to white along the horizontal axis, while values in the vertical axis represent the number of pixels at the appropriate brightness. It

GLOSSARY

provides a means of checking the exposure of an image. If too many pixels are present at the left-hand side of the histogram, the image is underexposed, while if it’s weighted to the right, then it’s likely to be overexposed.

Hyperfocal Distance This is the distance between a camera lens and the closest object which is in focus when the lens is focused at infinity.

with exposure and depth of field. Essential for creative photography.

Megapixel Megapixels are a measure of the size and resolution of the pictures that a digital camera can produce. Mega means one million, and in this case a million pixels, or more accurately a million individual light sensors on the camera’s CCD. The more megapixels, the better.

Infrared Infrared (IR) light is the part of the EM spectrum that people encounter most in everyday life. It is invisible to human eyes, but people can feel it as heat.

Interpolation Some cameras and image-editing software can increase the size of a digital image by adding extra pixels in between the original ones. They take an average of the pixels around the new one and attempt to match the colour and brightness to create a seamless image. Some systems give better results than others.

ISO Stands for International Standards Organisation. In conventional photography, the ISO number is a measure of the light sensitivity of photographic film, and this has been carried over into digital photography as a way of expressing the light sensitivity of the CCD.

selects an appropriate aperture setting and shutter speed in an attempt to get the best exposure and performance out of the lens.

Memory card Most digital cameras store your pictures on removable cards full of computer memory. They come in a variety of sizes and there are several different types, including CompactFlash, SD and MicroSD cards as well as Sony’s own MemoryStick format.

Metering system This is how the camera measures the amount of light being reflected by whatever you are trying to photograph, to determine the correct exposure for that particular scene. There are many different types, including spot metering, multi-pattern metering and centre-weighted metering.

Monobloc A monobloc is a self-contained flash unit usually found in a photographic studio.

Raw Raw mode is found on most high-end digital cameras. It is an option which stores the uncompressed raw data from the sensor, which can then be processed on a computer using software such as Adobe Camera Raw, Bibble etc. Raw files contain more information than JPEGs, and take up more memory. Raw is actually not an acronym and so shouldn’t be all capitals; it should really be written simply as “raw”.

Resolution The more pixels there are in an image, the larger that image will be. This is the resolution of the picture, and is usually expressed as two numbers representing the height and width of the image in pixels, such as 3,872 x 2,592. Multiplying these two figures gives you the effective megapixels, in this case 10.03MP.

Shutter The shutter is a device behind the lens of the camera which is normally closed, but opens for an instant when a picture is taken to allow light into the camera and onto the CCD. The length of time the shutter is open for is determined by the metering system, and is known as the shutter speed.

Multi-pattern metering JPEG

This is a sophisticated means of determining the correct exposure of a photograph. The camera takes light readings from several different areas of the frame and compares them to its pre-programmed data.

Shutter priority

Night-time Night-time mode mo de

SLR

A program exposure mode that compensates for low light by setting the aperture to maximum. This lets the most available light into the camera and gives the fastest possible shutter speed under the circumstances.

Stands for Single-Lens Reflex. A mirror or prism reflects the light coming in through the lens to the viewfinder, so when you look through it you see exactly what the camera can see.

A program exposure option found on many mid-priced cameras, this function automatically selects the best exposure settings for taking landscape photographs, usually a longer shutter speed and the narrowest possible aperture to maximise depth of field. It can also refer to holding the camera horizontally, which is usually preferred for landscape shots.

Optical zoom

Spot metering

With recent advances in lens manufacturing technology, many digital cameras now have small but powerful optical zoom lenses. This means they can be adjusted to magnify the image (zoom in) or to capture a wide-angle shot (zoom out). Because the image uses the full capabilities of the CCD this is preferable to digital zoom.

Found on the more expensive cameras, this metering mode enables the photographer to take a light reading from a small area in the middle of the frame, usually marked in the viewfinder. This is the best way of dealing with difficult lighting conditions such as backlighting, and is normally used in conjunction with auto-exposure lock.

LCD

Pixel

Time lapse

Stands for Liquid Crystal Diode, a display technology first developed in the 1970s, and in widespread use today. Most cameras have an LCD monitor screen mounted on the back for viewing photographs. Some also have an LCD electronic viewfinder, and some DSLRs also have a separate LCD data display panel.

Short for Picture Element. If you enlarge a picture on your computer, you will see that it is made up of tiny squares of a particular colour and brightness called pixels. A pixel is the basic building block of a digital photograph, and there can be several million of them in an image. The higher the pixel count, the better the quality of the photograph.

We’ve all seen films of flowers opening at incredible speed, or the sun and clouds racing across the sky. This super-fast motion technique is called time-lapse photography, whereby a stationary camera takes several successive shots at time intervals of a few seconds, minutes or even hours. The images are then played back rapidly, giving the impression of continuous motion.

L-ion

Portrait mode

Stands for Lithium Ion. This is the latest kind of rechargeable battery, superior even to Ni-MH. It can hold more power, and does not suffer from ‘memory effect’, where a partially charged battery, when recharged, will only register the additional charge rather than its full capacity. However, L-Ion batteries are quite expensive.

This is a program exposure mode that optimises the camera for taking classical portrait shots, widening the aperture to minimise the depth of field. This ensures that only the subject is in focus, while the shutter speed is increased to minimise camera shake.

This file type stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, and is the most commonly used system of image compression. Using a sliding scale between file size and picture quality, it enables digital c ameras and computers to squash a large picture into a small amount of memory. Be careful when compressing files, though, because too much compression will reduce the quality of your image.

This is a semi-manual mode that enables the photographer to specify a shutter speed while the camera’s metering system sets the aperture for the correct exposure.

Landscape mode

Processor Macro mode Refers to a lens that can focus closer than its designated focal length, but these days it is used to describe any facility for taking extreme close-ups.

All digital cameras have an image processor, which takes the data from the sensor and turns it into the finished JPEG image that you see on the screen. A faster processor means larger resolution images can be processed more quickly, improving the camera’s performance.

Manual mode Found on higher-end cameras, this is for experienced photographers only. It gives you full control over both aperture and shutter speed, enabling you to experiment

Program exposure Found on most digital cameras, program exposure is an automatic setting where the camera’s metering system

VGA Stands for Video Graphics Array, and refers to an image size of 6 40 x 480 pixels. This was once the standard size of a computer monitor output, but these days even mobile phones have larger displays. VGA is still sometimes found as an image size mode, particularly in the video recording modes of some cheaper cameras.

White balance Most modern digital cameras automatically adjust the colour balance of the picture to compensate for any tints in the ambient light, such as sunlight, fluorescent strip lights or normal light bulbs. This is called a white balance, and means you can take a picture indoors without that orange tint you get with a film camera.


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BDM’s Complete Guide to Digital Photography

Digital

Photography Beginners’ Guide

Getting started New to photography or looking to upgrade to a new camera? Searching for a new one can present you with a bewildering amount of choices. Then there are lenses and accessories to consider as well. We can help you make some better informed decisions by outlining some of the main types of camera, lenses and accessories available.

If you enjoy photography and want to improve your technique but aren’t sure where to start, then this guide is just what you need. Within these pages you will find many useful tips and advice on how to improve your photography, get the most out of your equipment and produce photos that can rival the pros.

Tips and advice

New creative ideas

The techni technical cal aspects aspects of photog photograp raphy hy can appear quite bewildering to those who are new to the medium but that need not be the case. This This guide guide is designe designed d to to help help you understand the main technical aspects of photography that ultimately will let you flourish and become more confident and creative. All the main areas are covered including exposure, shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

When you’re ready, we have a collection of projects that we hope will fire up your creativity and get you excited about trying new things and exploring new photographic techniques. From capturing trackside motorsport action to shooting landscape images and setting up a simple home studio, we cover it all . Look no further for some fresh new ideas on how to shoot like a pro.

Digital.Photographer-Beginner.Guide-P2P.pdf

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