BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

An Experiment in Flash Photography

By Jim Zuckerman

One of the more interesting pictures I’ve taken was actually a complete surprise to me. I didn’t expect it to turn out as well as it did because the exposure conditions were unlike anything I’d ever tried before or since. I was photographing funny cars at the Orange County International Speedway in Southern California in the early 1980’s, and I was standing at the top of the grandstand. Obviously, even the most powerful flash could never reach all the way down to the track, so I came up with an idea. A number of photographers were positioned down on the track very close to the customized race cars, and I thought perhaps I could use their flashes during a long exposure. The problem, of course, was what f/stop to use.

The educated guess I made was that the guide number of their on-camera flash units was 120. At the time, this was a reasonable amount of power for a portable flash. The formula for calculating the correct f/stop at 100 ISO is:

GN = flash-to-subject distance x f/stop.

It looked to me like the photographers were about fifteen feet from where the cars were going to pass them by. So, 120 = 15 x f/stop, and therefore the f/stop had to be f/8.

I was shooting at the time a Mamiya RB 67 (a medium format camera that shoots 6 x 7 cm slides or negatives) mounted with a 500mm lens. I set the lens aperture to f/8, which on that lens was wide open, and I set my shutter speed to one full second. As the cars roared to life, I pressed the shutter button and panned with the movement. In that one-second interval, several flashes went off by the shooters on the track (if you look closely in the lower left, you can see one photographer crouching down as he's shooting), fans in the audience fired their cameras as well, and the ambient light blurred horizontally as I moved my tripod mounted Mamiya RB to follow the funny cars doing wheelies that left sparks in their trail.

Back then, immediate feedback on something called an LCD monitor wasn’t even a dream. I had no idea what I took until I got the film back from the lab, and I was completely amazed that the ONE SHOT I took worked out so well. I was very conservative in my shooting then (‘cheap’ might be better description), and being much younger and more foolish, it just didn’t occur to me that I wouldn't get the shot in one try.

Editing on LCD monitors

by Jim Zuckerman

This was taken during a workshop I conducted for Betterphoto™ at the Triple D game farm in Montana last January. I especially like this shot because it’s very unusual to see foxes on thin ice, and the frame-filling intimacy of the shot was a real prize because these animals move so fast – they never seem to stop – that just to be able to get it in focus was a major accomplishment. Even with predictive autofocus and fast shutter speeds, there’s no guarantee that such erratic movements will be frozen with crisp detail. I had to shoot and shoot without stopping until the session was over.

One lesson that’s important to learn in a situation like this is that the LCD monitor on your digital camera is too small to really ascertain whether or not you have critically focused on a subject. The detail just isn’t there. Therefore, just keep shooting and edit the pictures later. LCD monitors are great for checking compositions and exposure, but you can’t know if your images are tack sharp or not even with the ability to magnify them. You may be able to tell if they are definitely out of focus, but you can’t know if they are tack sharp.

Controlling Backgrounds in Macro Photography

It's Spring for many of us in the world, but even if it’s not Spring for you, this blog is still of interest if you do macro photography.

I just finished teaching a workshop out at Pt. Reyes National Seashore this past weekend, on wildflower macro photography. One of the most common problems students had was too busy of a background. They wanted everything sharp on the blossom(s), but in getting that looking great, the backgrounds were often too defined and distracting. One reason was that the flowers are small and closer to the ground out there due to weather conditions. So there’s not much distance between the background and the flower. Yet in all types of macro flower photography, background is key to an image’s success. You want the subject to stand out, not the background. Some people use solid fabrics or black to block out the background entirely; but if you want a natural look, you’re going to have to go with the natural field behind that flower.

Here are two examples of the same poppy. In the first image, I chose an aperture of f16 because I wanted the blossom and water drops as sharp as possible. I really liked the red “skirt” at the base of the blossom and that opening into the flower, too. But the background became a little too busy - and even though I gardened a little bit, cleaning up some dead grass stalks and leaves, light areas of highlights out of focus started to become too distracting. It’s not bad, but the second image has a better, simpler background. I chose an aperture of f10 for it. However, the little red “skirt” is less sharp and the opening area appears a little softer, too. But what a difference in the background.

Image #1. Poppy at f16 with 100mm lens. © Brenda Tharp. Image #2. Poppy at f10 with 100mm lens. © Brenda Tharp.

In making these pictures, I used my depth of field preview button to get a sense of what the background would be like. I move the focus back and forth while holding in that button, trying to see the changes in the background and settling on an aperture that gives me the best compromise. I can’t live without that button for this type of picture, yet it’s not easy to see the image at f10 or f16. I throw a dark cloth over my head so my eyes will adjust to the darkened image in the viewfinder, and then I can see so much better. Still, I usually make a few exposures at close, yet different apertures that make the background look good while keeping the subject sharp, too. Then, I review them on my computer to make the final decision.

Yes, you can use the computer and Gaussian blur that background, but I prefer to get most of my work done while making the picture, so I have more time in the field photographing than in the office doing Photoshop. Personal choice - and a pride in being able to get it the way I want it in the field.

There are lots more tips to help you maximize depth of field and minimize backgrounds. If you want more information, consider signing up for my Macro I or Macro II courses.

Have a great day!

Photographing Springtime in the Smokies

Redbud Tree and Little River, Tennessee.
© Brenda Tharp. All Rights Reserved.

You never know what you’re going to find when you plan a trip to photograph Spring somewhere - or any season for that matter. If you have a flexible schedule that allows for last minute changes, you might be able to watch the progression of the season to predict when it might be peak for certain things - wildflowers, fall foliage, etc., and make changes to your travel plans. But most of us don’t have that flexibility. My field workshop in The Great Smoky Mountains National Park last week was planned over a year ago for the school to finalize their scheduling and advertising. It’s not possible to know what Spring will be like for 2006 way back then! I arrived on April 7th, only to find that Spring had not really come to the Smokies just yet. Barely begun, the redbud tree were blossoming, but little to nothing else. The dogwood, which often come after the redbud, were scarcely seen save for a blossom here and there on an early blooming tree. The other trees were mostly bare, with few catkins or seeds just beginning to emerge. I was in shock; as I drove around, I wasn’t finding much that grabbed my attention, and I had 12 people coming to meet me on Saturday night! They were anxious to capture the essence of Spring in this park, and it was my job to teach them how. “Yikes!” I remember saying to my assistant as we scouted out all my favorite places there. “Nothing’s happening yet, at least not very pronounced at this point, anyway. What are they going to photograph?” Concern was beginning to set in, as I had specific expectations. That’s when I remembered the danger of going out with a specific plan. And that I know from past experiences that you can always find things to photograph if you look closely and appreciate what’s there. I had to reframe, shift my thinking, pull in my sights. The big vistas of forests dressed in lime-green leaves and bright white dogwood blossoms weren’t happening; so what was? As I looked, I found early spring flowers blooming. And the water was flowing wonderfully over sculpted rocks and mossy boulders, freshly green from the last few days of rain. Bark patterns were still there, and textures of moss with tiny green plants embedded in them. It might not be perfect, but there were things to photograph. The historic cabins were still there, with their silvery weathered wood and peaceful settings in forest clearings and coves. Sparks Lane held possibilities, if we got good morning light and maybe some ground fog. As I inventoried what was there, I began to feel a little better. In the end, I needn’t have worried so much. The students really found great things to photograph, as shown here in these three small examples.

© Rick Tolbert, © Kat McFarland, © Mike Turner.

Many more were made, too. And as each day progressed, Spring began to burst forth and we had new things to photograph! When the end of the week came, it was just coming around nicely. Once again the point was proved that if you are open to what’s around you, and if you love being out in Nature, you will find beautiful things to photograph, no matter what the season. It isn't always about the large landscape; sometimes the beauty of the season is contained in the small things.

Have a great week, everyone!

Alien Worlds

By Jim Zuckerman

Just for fun, I decided to try a unique program that allows you to create alien worlds. It’s called Artmatic. Each would-be landscape takes quite a while to render, but the results are pretty amazing. As a business concept for my stock agency, I thought I’d use Photosop to cut and paste a businessman into the scene, and I liked the result very much. I don’t really know if this has commercial application, but it was fun to do.

Exposure for Backlighting

By Jim Zuckerman

Strong backlighting can be a serious exposure problem because the bright light behind your subject adversely influences the meter reading. The subject ends up much too dark as the meter tries to make the bright scene middle toned.

The bird of paradise that I photographed in Papua New Guinea presented a typical situation where the bird would have been hopelessly underexposed. To avoid that, I took a spot reading on the bird’s medium-brown chest feathers and then locked that reading in place with the AE Lock feature on my Canon 1Ds Mark II. The result is an exposure that I’m very pleased with.

Painting your Photos

by Jim Zuckerman

I never realized I was a frustrated artist until I started using the program Corel Painter. This remarkable program enables photographers to transform their photos into any style painting you can imagine. Many well-known artists actually use photographs from which they base their oils or acrylics on canvas. In fact, when I was in Kenya a few years ago I ran into a very famous wildlife artist who was photographing animals from which he would base his paintings. In using Painter, the process is not the same in that photographers paint over the original images instead of sketching the image freehand and then mixing the paint and applying it.

The results, though, can look remarkable similar. The two photos I’ve included here show two recent examples. I used two different brushes to achieve varying effects. In the course I teach here at Betterphoto (http://www.betterphoto.com/photocourses/JZK06.asp) I explain how to become the artist you always wanted to be.

A few years ago I made a painting of one of my photographs in Painter and then printed it on canvas. I took the canvas to an art store in Los Angeles to buy stretcher bars for framing, and one of the employees of the store studied my ‘painting’ very closely. He was an artist himself, and he saw artists all day long at the store. After he had examined my canvas for a few moments, he asked me, “What was your medium, oil or acrylic?”

Wow.

WORKING WITH A DIGITAL SERVICE BUREAU

© Brenda Tharp. All rights reserved

I had a client order a 16x24 of a fine art image the other day, one of my favorites from my Impressions of Nature series. After I stopped jumping up and down with joy, I had to get down to the task of having it printed. I don't have a large printer, so that meant having a professional printer do it for me. But that was easy, since I developed a great working relationship with a digital service lab a few years ago.

It's great if you have the experience of using Elements, Photoshop CS2, or even Painter, to produce a quality digital file to print from, and the means to print it on quality archival printers. If you don't, you need to find someone you can trust to produce the image as you envision it. Some of that responsibility will fall on your shoulders, to communicate what you want to the digital preparer, but ultimately, you still want to work with someone who has a strong eye for photographic printing and won't interpret your image their way.

Here are some tips for getting the most from the digital service bureau:

1. Send them a TIFF or PSD file, not a JPEG, for best results.

2. If you have prepared the file digitally yourself, send them a good quality reference print from your printer. They won’t be able to match it exactly, due to the difference in papers, inks and printers, but they’ll have something to refer to and it will help.

3. Find out the specs for sending a prepared file to the service bureau. Do they want the file as a flattened or layered TIFF? Do they want a certain color profile embedded into the file? Do they want to size and sharpen it or have you do that? (and, do you want to trust them to do that?)

3. Ask for a proof print. If you haven’t prepared the file digitally, and are counting on them to do it, that proof will be essential to seeing what their interpretation was of the file you sent them, and you might be pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised with the results! But this is where you get to change things - and adjust contrast, color balance, dodging/burning areas, etc. to arrive at a final print that you’ll be happy with. Even if you have prepared the file yourself, ask for that proof.

If you don’t know what to tell them, in terms of contrast, color, etc., then it’s best to have someone who’s eye you trust, and ask for their opinion on what needs changing on the proof print.

Even though my skill in Photoshop is continually growing, when it came to making the best print I could for my client, I took this image to my trusted service bureau, Colorfolio. Based in Sebastopol, Colorfolio works with clients across the county. They have topnotch equipment for scanning, preparing and printing, and the knowledge to use it all well. Bob Cornelis, the owner, is also a fine art photographer, oil pastel artist, and a guru when it comes to Photoshop, so I know my images are in very good hands when I leave them off to be worked on with Bob and his staff! If I haven't done the prep work myself, I know I can trust them to get very close in the proof print, and we discuss it from there. I have used their services for 6 years now, and the results are always great. I use them for drum-scanning my slides, and to prepare files that are more complicated than my skills can handle right now. Although I’ve been saying for a while that I’m going to get my own printer and get up to speed on Photoshop, having such a great lab has allowed me to focus my time on other things instead, and maybe that large format printer will just wait a little while longer.

Have a great day, everyone.

Important Considerations When Buying a Lens

by Jim Zuckerman

The two photos shown below were both taken in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Michaelangelo’s famous Pieta is behind protective glass and the other sculpture was in the open. No tripods were allowed inside the church, so the only thing I could do to get acceptably sharp pictures was to increase the ISO. As we all know, if the ISO is too high the image quality suffers. There is too much noise, or grain, and the sharpness of the subject is somewhat degraded as well. The diminished color saturation and contrast can be repaired in Photoshop, but the other problems can’t really be fixed.

There are two other factors that help put the odds in our favor in this kind of situation: Image stabilization (or in Nikon-speak 'vibration reduction') and a lens with a large maximum f/stop. IS (or VR) lenses were developed to address the issue of small movements that naturally occur when hand holding a lens, especially a heavy telephoto. Photos are normally blurred when slow shutter speeds are used unless you have this feature. A lens that is equipped with this type of technology enables you to take sharp pictures in low light environments with much slower shutter speeds than you would normally want to use. This makes a huge difference; in the case of shooting in St. Peter’s, it was the difference between getting the photos or not.

The maximum lens aperture is also critical. Fast lenses – meaning lenses that have large lens openings, like f/2.8 in a telephoto lens – let more light into the camera. The result is that the shutter speed can be faster. The photo of the Pieta was taken with a 70-200m f/2.8 telephoto with image stabilization. My shutter speed was 1/30th, which usually is considered to be an impossible setting to use for hand-holding a telephoto lens. For the other sculpture, I used an astonishing 1/10th of a second and it turned out tack sharp.

When you consider buying a lens, consider the factors carefully. Lenses with smaller maximum lens apertures are cheaper and lighter to carry. But – you will miss getting sharp pictures in many situations.