Last week I was photographing Southern Oregon forests under a brilliant clear blue sky. The fresh green foliage sparkled, reflecting the bright sunshine. These are the conditions that call for a polarizing filter. It’s one of the few filters I use with my digital camera, and there’s no good way to simulate its effect in post-processing software like Photoshop or Lightroom. Continue reading
Have you ever come back from a photo excursion, looked at one of your pictures and wondered, “What was I seeing when I snapped that photo?” My mother even saved some of my early “what’s that?” pictures, like the one above. I must have seen something interesting in that early spring messy corner of my dad’s garden but it sure didn’t come across in the picture. I don’t know why she didn’t toss those clunkers, because that’s what she should have done and what I do today. (I was 7 when I took that picture in 1961.)
Sometimes it’s downright hard to find the photograph in a chaotic scene. I’ll feel there’s something interesting in there somewhere, but it’s not always obvious how to convey what I’m seeing or feeling in the frame. Slowing down and really looking for the story is a good first step.
A few days ago I took a walk through our woods with my camera. Spring growth was fresh and green, the early morning light was soft, and I felt engaged with the forest. I wanted to capture how the woods looked and felt to me. Continue reading
One of the exercises I give to all of my photo class students is to find a subject and photograph it from different viewpoints. The idea is to expand creativity and explore new ways of seeing a subject. You can apply this concept to almost anything you’re photographing.
Last month Natalie and I spent a week vacationing on the wet side of the Big Island of Hawaii. The weather was mostly overcast, with periods of heavy rain, not the brilliant sun most people think of for Hawaii. We spent a lot of our time exploring for plants and birds, including a couple of days at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Almost all the plants we saw were new to us. A lot of them blended together — mid-sized broadleaf evergreen shrubs and small trees that didn’t have showy flowers. But a few stood out and I made several photos of them with my pocket camera. Continue reading
Little details matter when you want to set your pictures apart from the masses. You don’t want anything to intrude into the frame that shouldn’t be there. Your viewer’s attention should go to whatever it is you’re photographing, without distracting stuff getting in the way. I call it “cleaning up the frame.” Here are five ways to clean up your photos before you press the shutter button.
Watch for objects like telephone poles, trees, or lampshades growing out of people’s heads. It’s usually pretty easy to move over a little, or ask your subject to move, to fix the problem. I have a snapshot of myself and some climbing buddies commemorating our climb to the top of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming many years ago. I handed my camera to another climber and our party posed around the post marking the summit. I failed to realize that when I sat with my back to the post the spike came out of the top of my head. It would have been a better photo if we’d grouped ourselves with the post between two of us. Continue reading
Aperture, the size of the hole letting light through your lens, is the third variable you control to get properly exposed photos. Last October I discussed ISO, the sensitivity of your camera’s digital sensor. In November I wrote about shutter speed and how your choice is a creative one as well as an exposure control.
Like shutter speed, the aperture you choose affects the “look” of your photo as well as the exposure so it’s both a creative and technical choice. The family portrait above was made at a middle aperture to balance depth of field and shutter speed with proper exposure.
You can think of the aperture as the size of the “light pipe” carrying photons through your lens. The larger the diameter of the pipe, the more photons go through, just as a 2” water pipe carries more than a ½” pipe. Continue reading
Last month I introduced the three things you can control on your camera that affect exposure: ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I explained how changing the ISO setting changes the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. If you missed it, or need a review, read about ISO here.
Shutter speed is this month’s topic. Choosing an appropriate shutter speed for your subject is a creative choice as well as being one of the variables that affect exposure. All cameras have a hole inside the lens that, when open, lets light hit the sensor (or film). The shutter controls how long the hole is open.
When the shutter is open for a very short time you are able to stop motion and freeze action. Conversely, a long exposure can blur a moving subject. If you’re hand-holding your camera you need to choose a shutter speed that is short enough to compensate for any movement of the camera in your hands. The longer the focal length of your lens the shorter the shutter speed needs to be to avoid camera shake.
When you go to the beach do you want a sunburn, a nice healthy tan, or a pale complexion? You’re in control by how much you expose your skin to the sun. If I spend too much time outside without my hat, my balding head gets burned. That’s analogous to an over-exposed photograph, although the results usually aren’t so painful.
This month and the next few I’m going to help you make sense of the three variables that interact to affect photographic exposure: the sensitivity of the digital sensor (or film), how long the light strikes the sensor, and how big is the hole the light passes through. We call those the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I’ll get to each of those and how they interact in this and the next few installments, along with exposure compensation.
You may wonder why this is important if you always use your camera in its fully automatic mode. In full auto, your camera is measuring the light and setting the ISO, shutter, and aperture to expose the subject correctly. Taking control yourself gives you creative options you don’t have in full auto mode.
Last month when I was on a bus tour of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania gardens with the Garden Writers Association I got caught out without my usual rain cover for my camera. We only had 20-30 minutes in each tour garden and I certainly wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to photograph lush and beautiful gardens just because it was raining and I didn’t have proper protection for my camera. I really like the look of a garden in the rain. Continue reading
Chances are you’re going on a vacation somewhere this summer and you’re going to take a whole bunch of pictures. You’re going to want to savor those memories in the years to come. That means you need to caption your photos and file them where you can find them again. I wrote about digital filing systems back in November 2011 when I wrote “Where’s My Stuff?” This month I’ll address captioning.
My mother was a captioning queen. She was super organized and diligent about writing names, dates, and locations on the margins or back of prints or on the edges of slide mounts. My dad, who taught me the basics of photography, was also pretty good about captioning his pictures. I’ve also been diligent about captioning my photos, since if I can’t find it I can’t sell it. Continue reading
