73 — Landscape photography tips — improving boring landscapes

October 23, 2009 By 6 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #73 is all about land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy and how to improve your land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. Many new­bies and advanced ama­teurs con­sis­tently won­der if their land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy is any good. This pod­cast offers up a fair pile of tips to help get your land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy to the next level. Some of the things we talk about include; light­ing for land­scapes, the back­ground and the fore­ground, what makes land­scapes inter­est­ing, expo­sure and land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, fil­ters in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, tripods and post production.

Landscape photography
Yosemite Val­ley, Win­ter 1940 by Ansel Adams

Note the points of inter­est in the fore­ground, back­ground and midground, note the full range of tones and note how skill­fully our eyes are being guided. This is no acci­dent, it’s the result of great plan­ning (the light) exe­cu­tion (exposure/filters/composition) and fin­ish­ing touches (dark­room post-processing — done these days using a graph­ics program).

Landscape photography
Fish­ing spot by Kat

Kat has a great han­dle on the range of tones, expo­sure and com­po­si­tion here and I really like this shot. It’s miss­ing just a lit­tle some­thing of inter­est IMO to get the big “WOW!” Per­haps if a large rock was dropped in the midground with mov­ing rip­ples that would have done it.… this shot is so close it just needs a hint of some­thing “extra”.

Landscape photography
Fly with me…across Aus­tralia (part of a series) by Mad Aussie

This one con­tains the “Wow!” fac­tor for me. Great colour, range of tones, expo­sure and com­po­si­tion. Note the reflec­tions in the fore­ground, the rocks in the midground and that awe­some sky in the back­ground. I love how the midground and back­ground seem to meld into one another.

Links /resources men­tioned in this podcast:

The Ansel Adams gallery
Dar­win Wiggett — Fab­u­lous land­scapes
Rule of thirds pod­cast
His­togram pod­cast
October’s “Scary-Mysterious-Halloween”‚assignment on the Photography.ca forum
Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Face­book
My Face­book pro­file — Feel free to “friend” me
My Twit­ter page — I will fol­low you if you fol­low me (Hey that’s a Gabriel lyric) — Let’s con­nect

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks to‚ jack­la­bel, and Kent Wil­son who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast. Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , ,

Shedding Some Light into Dark Rooms

October 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

We’re in the dig­i­tal age, so why mess with‚a good thing by set­ting up an ancient dark­room? Well, set­ting up a dark room offers so much ‘hands on’ knowl­edge; it’s far more prac­ti­cal for learn­ing pho­to­graphic print­ing than you may think. The prin­ci­pals and tools of Pho­to­shop were par­tially based on how pho­tog­ra­phers worked in the dark­room. Curves, lev­els, crop­ping, sharp­en­ing, mul­ti­ple expo­sure print­ing, dodg­ing and burn­ing are just some of the things pho­tog­ra­phers have been doing in dark­rooms for generations.

Here’s 4 rea­sons why dark­room print­ing rocks;

1 — There’s that spe­cial ‘some­thing’ that comes from doing the major­ity of the work with your own hands. It is far more sat­is­fy­ing to pro­duce a print in the dark­room than by press­ing the print but­ton on your printer. Ask any good dark­room printer that has done both, they’ll tell ya. It’s true that dark­room print­ing takes longer and its pre­ci­sion is less accu­rate than dig­i­tal; and yet it’s still more sat­is­fy­ing.
2 — Since every­body is going dig­i­tal your work will stand out if you stay tra­di­tional.
3-‚ YOUR work will never be doomed to spend­ing its life on a hard drive or on a few web­sites, you’ll always have beau­ti­ful prints to hold and show off.
4 — I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that dark­room prints printed today will be more valu­able than the same image printed dig­i­tally. Why? Because every dark­room print is some­what unique and tra­di­tion­ally, unique items have more value than mass pro­duced ones.

If you decide to set up a dark­room here’s a few things to be aware of. Before you start your dark­room make a floor plan of the room so you can more or less know how to lay­out the wet side and the dry side.‚ Will you be pro­cess­ing b&w and/or color? Colour print­ing is more com­plex (and requires a dif­fer­ent enlarger) than b/w print­ing so it’s prob­a­bly best to start with black and white. A good exhaust sys­tem is highly rec­om­mended as the chem­i­cals you’ll use (unless you buy a pro­cess­ing machine) are toxic.

What’s great to know is that because every­body and their uncle has gone dig­i­tal, there are amaz­ing deals on used dark­room equip­ment. Ebay is your friend!So get your feet wet! Enjoy a get­away from the dig­i­tal everyday…More on dark­rooms here in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum

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Point and Shoot cameras are good

September 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So you are into your DSLR or SLR, and can­not imag­ine using another cam­era… espe­cially a point and shoot cam­era, right? Well they are often a good thing to have on hand in addi­tion to your DSLR .

Point and shoots (P&S) aren’t ideal for learn­ing pho­tog­ra­phy. In fact they are a bad choice. Why? Because you can’t do many impor­tant things on most point and shoots (like change lenses, learn to man­u­ally focus a lens, man­u­ally meter eas­ily, change shut­ter speeds eas­ily etc.) that are essen­tial when learn­ing photography.

But — for some­one that already knows pho­tog­ra­phy, a point and shoot is very con­ve­nient due to its way smaller size. Many pho­tog­ra­phers want to have a cam­era with them at all times because there are always pho­to­graphic pos­si­bil­i­ties around us.

Would I ever bring a point and shoot to a pay­ing gig?‚ Maybe as a 3rd emer­gency backup. The cliche about not bring­ing a knife to a gun­fight holds true for pay­ing gigs and cheap cam­eras. But when I’m not shoot­ing, I want to relax with­out all the gear. I still need to carry pro­tec­tion (the P&S ) though, just in case.

Which point and shoot should you get?‚ There’s way too many out there to list. One that I have my eye on that seems like it may be tasty treat is the Canon Pow­er­Shot G11. It’s sup­posed to be out in Octo­ber. Buying/ordering through the B&H link above helps sup­port the site. Thx.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With:

72 — Exposure compensation

September 22, 2009 By 6 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #72 dis­cusses how to use expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion. It’s a fairly sim­ple con­cept that just means devi­at­ing away from (or com­pen­sat­ing against)‚ the cam­era meter’s rec­om­mended expo­sure to make the image brighter or darker. We also talk about which cam­era modes you’ll want to use expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion with, and I dis­cuss why pro­gram mode sucks and should be avoided. Even though expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion in pho­tog­ra­phy is an easy con­cept, I dis­cuss the rea­son­ing behind it, why I fre­quently use it and why you should too.

exposure compensation
The expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion dial on the Canon G10

Links /resources men­tioned in this podcast:

Orig­i­nal sug­ges­tion thread from our forum — Thanks Iggy!
September’s “New Beginnings”‚assignment on the Photography.ca forum
Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Face­book
My Face­book pro­file — Feel free to “friend” me
My Twit­ter page — I will fol­low you if you fol­low me (Hey that’s a Gabriel lyric) — Let’s con­nect

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks to Nijip, jack­la­bel, jab­ber and Tom Restis who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast. Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: ,

Photographing Tattoos — Tatoo photography

September 17, 2009 By 3 Comments

We eas­ily acquire tips to pho­to­graph flow­ers, peo­ple, and still life. Yet one sub­ject that often doesn’t have clear cut tips and direc­tions is pho­tograph­ing tat­toos. This sub­ject is art in itself, and to effec­tively shoot this piece requires not only patience and an eye for com­po­si­tion, but also tips from peo­ple that have already done it.

Tip one: Do not use a tri­pod unless you have a spe­cific effect (e.g blur) in mind. It is likely going to limit your mov­ing around and will take extra time to set up for each shot.

Tip two: If pos­si­ble, shoot out­side if you’re new to the game, or use great win­dow light, it’s so much eas­ier. Pay atten­tion to clut­ter and dis­trac­tions though. Be aware of what’s in the frame, what’s out of the frame, and make deci­sions on what to include or chop.

Tip Three:‚ Eas­ier light to han­dle might be around sun­set time or on a cloudy day with dif­fused light. A reflec­tor like white card­board can help if needed.

Tip Four: If you already know how to work with flash and/or are com­fort­able with your tech­nique, feel free to shoot in a tat­too shop if you get the per­mis­sion. You’ll likely get cool effects if you try slower shut­ter speeds on their own and/or mixed with flash.

You can find loads of fine tat­too pho­tog­ra­phy in the gallery at vanishingtatoo.com

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , ,

Portrait without a head

September 7, 2009 By 2 Comments

Do all por­traits need a head or is it okay to frame or crop a photo so that it is head­less? Most times I’d say, “for the love of God include the head”. Nor­mally we con­nect with the sub­ject of a por­trait pri­mar­ily by look­ing at the subject’s eyes, which reveal much about the per­son being photographed.

But.…once you know the rules, you can try to break them to achieve a par­tic­u­lar result. This image is a good exam­ple of a head­less por­trait that works IMO. If we try to ana­lyze WHY it works, it works because the cou­pled ele­ments tell a story. The Jake tat­too on the hand cou­pled with the suit, cou­pled with the Royal Monaco car actu­ally tell a SPECIFIC story. These are all ele­ments of the movie The Blues Broth­ers and both the pho­tog­ra­pher and I likely show our age by know­ing this fact.

How­ever, even if I did not catch the Blues Broth­ers con­nec­tion, for me this shot still works. The ele­ments are still there. The tat­too, older freck­led skin, suit and older car all sug­gest a story. The fact that the shot is in black and white rein­force this fact. It’s up to the viewer to extract the story for them­selves, but all the ele­ments are there.

Okay then — do you agree? What do YOU think about this shot and the con­cept of a head­less portrait?

Many thanks to 1putts of our pho­tog­ra­phy forum for allow­ing me to use this image. Here’s the orig­i­nal photo.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

The truth about polarizing filters

September 5, 2009 By 2 Comments

The truth about polar­iz­ing fil­ters is that every pho­tog­ra­pher should have one in his/her bag at all times. It is pos­si­bly THE sin­gle most impor­tant and‚ use­ful photo acces­sory you’ll own. When there is light out­doors, this fil­ter is on my cam­era the vast major­ity of the time.

A CPOL (cir­cu­lar polar­iz­ing fil­ter) can be used any time you’re in the out­doors, espe­cially in the bright sun. It reduces reflec­tions, and deepens/saturates col­ors like a blue sky. In bright sun,‚ you’ll often get skies that are blown out if you don’t use this fil­ter. It makes the sky much bluer and richer look­ing in many cases with­out really affect­ing the other tones in the image. You will note the great­est results when the sun is low in the sky (so early morn­ing and later afternoon/evening). The CPOL will not help your color and sat­u­ra­tion much on over­cast days, or when the sun is high in the sky.

For more infor­ma­tion on this amaz­ing lit­tle gad­get, includ­ing a lit­tle insight into the ‘rule of thumb’ when using a CPOL, visit this link on polar­iz­ers in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Here’s a link from B&H where you can look at or pur­chase dif­fer­ent polar­iz­ers.
Buy­ing from this link helps sup­port our site.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

71 — Portable flash

August 31, 2009 By 10 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #71 dis­cusses the prin­ci­ples of using a portable, exter­nal flash. We talk about how flash works, the dif­fer­ent types of portable flash, on cam­era and off cam­era flash, using a portable flash as a main light source ver­sus a fill light, bounc­ing the flash, sync speeds and more.

Depth of field guide

Depth of field guide

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Pod­cast #33 — Stu­dio light­ing for begin­ners
Pod­cast #47 — Flash sync speeds
Pock­etWiz­ard from B&H
Peanut slaves from B&H

August’s‚ “Water”‚ assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , ,

Photography subjects that are off limits

August 28, 2009 By 2 Comments

What is con­sid­ered ‘off lim­its’ in pho­tog­ra­phy? Well, the answer of course can cer­tainly vary from one pho­tog­ra­pher to the next.

These days, pho­tograph­ing chil­dren raises a red flag for many peo­ple and some pho­tog­ra­phers steer clear away from them. There may be a sense of ‘intru­sion’ into the lives of these chil­dren, and pho­tograph­ing them may just not feel right. There is also the per­ceived risk that some­one may call the author­i­ties sug­gest­ing that the pho­tographs are being taken for sex­u­ally moti­vated rea­sons. Other pho­tog­ra­phers that pho­to­graph chil­dren do so in order to show the true beauty and inno­cence of who chil­dren are. They don’t care about per­ceived risks as they know that the pho­tographs they take are art­ful and eth­i­cal. Com­pletely dif­fer­ent sides of the story, right?

Another inter­est­ing choice of sub­ject to some pho­tog­ra­phers are street scenes — cap­tur­ing the beauty of sur­round­ings with peo­ple pass­ing by. No wrong doing right? Well again, to some pho­tog­ra­phers, there is a sense of dis­com­fort in shoot­ing com­plete strangers with­out get­ting their per­mis­sion first. Other pho­tog­ra­phers that know their rights (it’s legal to pho­to­graph any­one in a pub­lic place) have no issue with the ‘shoot first and ask ques­tions later’ policy.

There are many inter­est­ing sub­jects to shoot, and which is right depends on the photographer’s pref­er­ence, taste, and com­fort zone. What sub­ject mat­ter are YOU uncom­fort­able shoot­ing and why?

For more on this sub­ject, check out the Pho­tog­ra­phy sub­jects — off lim­its thread in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

Done to Death

August 25, 2009 By 3 Comments

There are so many sub­jects out there to pho­to­graph, yet accord­ing to some, there are also sub­jects that have been ‘done to death’. Sub­jects such as a sun­sets, or ‘drop of water’ close-ups come to mind. What about flow­ers — why are they so pop­u­lar to shoot? Per­haps because flow­ers are acces­si­ble, beau­ti­ful, and they just stand there and smile. Yet flow­ers ( as well as other com­mon ‘over­done’ sub­jects) are quite good learn­ing tools for sev­eral aspects of pho­tog­ra­phy includ­ing DOF, focus, com­po­si­tion, color, and exposure.

There’s also some­thing to be said for the “who gives a crap atti­tude”. Just because these types of shots are com­monly shot, does that mean you should not shoot them? I mean are you NOT going to shoot the Eif­fel tower or the Taj Mahal or a sea of red tulips just because they are com­monly shot? You’re going to shoot them because these are YOUR shots.

If you absolutely adore these types of shots, but feel as if they are all too com­monly done, chal­lenge your­self. Be as cre­ative as you can with the shot and it will be sure to stand out among the rest.

For more on this sub­ject, visit our photo forum: http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=4202

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

To crop or not to crop this photograph

August 21, 2009 By 4 Comments

Aside from tak­ing a ‘win­ning shot’ myself, I love to help peo­ple get the most from their images and I try to pro­vide daily advice to those peo­ple that post on our forum. Some­times peo­ple take my advice and some­times they don’t and that’s totally cool. The pho­tog­ra­pher of course decides the ulti­mate fate of his/her photograph.

Here is an exam­ple image that I wanted to share taken by JJelling a mem­ber of our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

When I first looked at this image, I imme­di­ately liked it. I like the envi­ron­ment and the expo­sure is very well han­dled here. The thing I like about the shot the most though is the expres­sion of the girl on the right. It sug­gests day­dream­ing, veg­ging out or‚pensive thought dur­ing the daily com­mute.‚ What I like least about this shot is the woman on the left. She’s just not doing any­thing that con­tributes to the photo, she is shot from behind and takes up a promi­nent posi­tion in the pho­to­graph. I wish she was not there.

My sug­ges­tion to JJelling was to sim­ply crop her out and MAKE the shot about the girl on the right. Here’s my crop of his pho­to­graph which he gra­ciously allowed me to do.

For me, this image tells a stronger and tighter story, it’s clearer. But what about those beau­ti­ful win­dows on the left that get cropped out along with the girl?‚ Although I liked those win­dows and the light­ing, for me they needed to be sac­ri­ficed to get the strongest image pos­si­ble, albeit a dif­fer­ent image. Crop­ping out extra­ne­ous parts of images is a great way to guide the eye of the viewer and make the image stronger. Some­times the result­ing crop is obvi­ously bet­ter. Other times (like in this shot per­haps) we may be less sure.

What do other peo­ple think?‚ Which shot do YOU pre­fer? here’s the orig­i­nal link to the thread.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography tips Tagged With: , ,

Thinking Sharp

August 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Have you ever found your­self with a hand­ful of images that just don’t give that ‘crys­tal clear’ or sharp look you wanted out of your images? Well, you are not alone. Many pho­tog­ra­phers run into the same prob­lem. So why the prob­lem and how to fix it?

Along with a high shut­ter speed for mov­ing objects, and good depth of field, the qual­ity of your lens has a lot to do with image sharp­ness. Shutter-speed may affect the sharp­ness of your image if you get to a point where you’re too slow to hand-hold. In gen­eral though, most dig­i­tal images need a tweak in sharp­en­ing. A dig­i­tal photo that was shot with a good depth of field and a high shut­ter speed will nor­mally be blur­rier‚ than the same image shot from a film cam­era. To go about sharp­en­ing, pho­to­shop (or Gimp) have tools (like unsharp mask and smart sharpen) to help you make your images nice and crisp
For more infor­ma­tion on keep­ing your images crispy.. err.. crisp, read more check out this link on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum and this link to a pod­cast on get­ting sharper images.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,
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