BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Zoo Photography and Patience

Zoo Photography and Patience

By Jim Zuckerman

In a way, zoo photography is more challenging than photographing in the wild because the environment is usually unnatural and/or distracting. Chain link fences, artificial rocks, and too much dirt on the ground seriously detract from the subjects. In addition, animals are rarely animated. Indeed, they look bored.

If you wait long enough, and are patient, you can sometimes catch a compelling expression and a good pose in a section of the enclosure that looks fairly natural. The clouded leopard that you see here was photographed behind glass – not my favorite scenario – and I spent about two hours watching his moves, trying to anticipate what he’d do. I shot with and without flash, and my favorite image is this eerie, haunting portrait where the flash reflected in the retina of the leopard’s eyes, similar to red-eye in people, and the result is this other-worldly type of creature.

To avoid the reflection in the glass of the flash, I placed the lens right up against the surface of the glass. This was enough to solve the problem.

I invested the time and the patience because to me there’s no other creature as stunning and intriguing as leopards, and this particular Asian species has such beautiful markings that I wanted to take advantage of the close proximity. In the wild, there would be no way to photograph this secretive animal in the thick jungle.

Lighting Tools

By John Siskin

One of the most important things about using tools is understanding
what the tools do. This is particularly true of lights. Our tools do
some of the same things that the lamps you might have in your living
room do. Lampshades broaden the light source to make it softer and
spotlights draw attention to a specific area.

Michael J. Pratt Set-Up #4 Umbrella and diffuser as in image #3, with large silver reflector. Reflector is bouncing light from umbrella through the diffuser. This shows how large light sources are used in the studio. © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Lighting tools fall into two basic groups, tools that broaden light to make it smoother and tools that concentrate light so that you can affect just one part of a photograph. I use, and I think most others do, more of the light broadening tools. These would be things like umbrellas, light panels and soft boxes. The light source, whether it is a strobe or a quartz bulb, is a very small source and consequently produces harsh shadows like an uncovered light bulb. Light broadening tools work like a lampshade: making the light seem like a bigger light source. This instantly reduces shadows and softens edges. A bigger light makes it easier to light most things, both people and products.

© John H. Siskin All rights reserved

The tools for detail lighting include snoots, grid spots and barn doors. All of these control the spread of your light, but they have different characteristics. A grid spot is a metal honeycomb that goes over the light. This reduces the spread of the light more than any of the other tools. A light with a grid spot that is six feet from the subject may light an area that is less than a foot around. There are various sorts of grid spots so you have some control over the size of the spot. A snoot is an empty tube that slips over a light. This reduces the spread of a light dramatically, although not as much as a grid spot. Both the grid spot and the snoot are used with strobes rather than hot lights; they would trap too much heat on a quartz light. Another great tool for this purpose is a set of barn doors. Usually a barn door for lighting is four flat metal blades that are used to control the spread of a light. These give more varied control than the other two tools, but barn doors do not limit the spread of the light as much as the snoot or the grid spot do.

Norman Grid Spot © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

One other tool I use with my lights is Cine Foil. This is a black aluminum foil. It can be adjusted for many purposes; including cutting down the size of the light from a grid spot or a snoot. I can also be used over a soft box to make a thin strip light from a soft box. Since this product is designed for movie use, it may smoke but it will not burn! Nothing ruins a shoot faster than an uncontrolled fire.

Clipping Your Highlights with Digital

When I first began to photograph digitally, I was hearing everyone talk with fear about clipping their highlights, getting "blinkies" on their LCD on the camera, etc., so, not understanding alot of what this was all about, I just exposed so that my highlights were well within the histogram graph. I learned the hard way that this was not the correct way to expose, but managed to save many of the pictures as I was not that far off!

In the 2 years that I've been photographing digitally, and teaching students about digital exposures, I am amazed to still hear people a little panicked about getting ANY highlights blinking. But think about it for a minute: if you have a scene of sparkling highlights on water, and the highlights are overexposed, it may not be an issue. If those highlights are tiny in the overall picture, as sun sparkles usually are, then it may not be a big deal that they are blinking - or overexposed. Likewise, if you are including the sun in your picture, say of a silhouetted lobster buoys and hillside as seen here, the sun will NEVER be properly exposed unless the rest of the picture is also very dark. Since there's no detail in the sun, who cares?

© Brenda Tharp.

This may seem a little oversimplified, but in essence, you have to decide what is critical for exposure in your picture. In this case, I knew the water had to be properly exposed, as did the sky around the sun, but I also knew that the sun might overexpose and cause loss of detail. I was lucky - it rose in a bank of haze enough that I didn't lose much - even though you still can't see detail in that yellow ball of light! If your shadows or your highlights are small, it may not be a big deal if they go off the graph of the histogram a little. You just need to be sure you are checking the histogram and understanding what it is in the scene that's probably off the charts.

While I try to keep everything within the range of the histogram, I realize that it's not always possible and so I make my decision of how I'll expose by looking at my scene, assessing the range, and making sure I keep the details in the area that is most important without losing any highlight detail if possible. But if the water drops on a plant are reflecting pinpoints of overexposed light, it will not be an issue even in a large print.

So don't be too scared of the highlights, so that you err like I did and expose too much 'to the left' on the histogram. But pay attention to them just the same, so you'll be sure that if they are important, you'll have them properly exposed.

If you want to learn more about your histogram, take Ellen Anon's course on What the Histogram Tells You here at Betterphoto, or Tim Cooper's course on Understanding Natural Light, where he goes into detail about the histogram for digital photographers.

Have a great week of photography!

Brenda

Hand Coloring B & W

by Jim Zuckerman

I will often re-visit techniques that I have used in the past – and sometimes the far distant past, like this one – and I’ll come up a many new images that had been waiting for me to ‘discover’ them. This portrait of my wife was taken a couple of days ago, and I decided to use one of the techniques I teach in my Creative Techniques in Photoshop course – hand coloring. Coloring black and white photos has been around since the 1800s, but digital technology makes is easy to do, easy to correct mistakes, and there’s no need to spend quite a bit of money on expensive sets of paint in tubes.

I took the original shot in my den, using only a single light source. I didn’t feel like setting up a whole studio situation, so I used a household lamp, minus the shade, and a plain wall background. In Photoshop, I converted the color image to black and white with Image > adjustments > hue/saturation by moving the saturation slider all the way to the left. This method of conversion left the image in RGB, even though it looked black and white.

I then used the paint brush tool on about 30% opacity to apply the color for the lips and the eye shadow. The paint brush tool takes color from the foreground color box at the bottom of the tools palette, so I clicked in that box to choose the red color.

With the burn tool, I added some shadows to dramatize my wife’s features. She doesn’t like this portrait because she says I made her face look narrower than it really is. I like it because of the stylized, high contrast look and the severity of the expression.

Making the Most of Bad Weather

© Brenda Tharp

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but inside, it's so delightful...so goes a popular American holiday tune, and for some of us, having bad weather right now, we might want to stay indoors and read a book curled up by a fire, or work on our thousands of images that need converting from RAW, or need cataloging. I was reading John Siskin's blog about keeping a clean studio and felt it really applies to my office, too - which I've been cleaning thoroughly the past two weeks, in between projects. I won't show you a picture, because it's not finished - yet! That's because when the weather's not great, I find I head outside - because it's the time for an outdoor photographer to get out there and make pictures!!

© Brenda Tharp.

Now I'll be the first to admit that there are times when the weather is just plain ugly - flat, detail less gray skies, no direction to the brightness coming through the clouds, no wet leaves, -nothin' to inspire. But there are just as many times when I head out there and find that there are pictures galore - droplets of water on grasses, flowers, pine branches; ice-encased berries, a path of wet leaves; and there are times when the drama in the sky is fantastic - so just because it's "frightful" weather, don't give up and stay inside every time or you'll miss the magic that's happening outside. Additionally, even if you come away without a great picture for that day, you will hopefully have experienced Nature in some special way. So no matter where you are in the world, when weather hits, you can often find great things to photograph outdoors.

Have a great week, no matter what your weather is, everyone!

Black and White Fine Art

By Jim Zuckerman

I do very little black and white photography, even though I admire great black and white prints. All serious black and white photographers have been influenced by Ansel Adams at least with respect to his remarkable ability to bring out the richest tones and beautiful contrast from a negative. I thought I’d challenge myself to take one of my color images and turn it into a black and white rendition with the kind of classic tonalities that Ansel would have created.

The image you see reproduced here is my attempt at doing that. It’s not a print, of course. It’s a digital file of the kind of print I would like to make. One of the primary goals in producing a black and white image is that detail should be seen throughout the photo and no highlights are overexposed (with a loss of detail) and none of the shadows have gone black.

This photo was taken in White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. The sand that makes up the dunes is gypsum, which is white. I specifically worked hard to make it look white with full texture and detail -- without going too gray -- and I also protected the darker areas of the image from going black. I placed the moon into the sky using Photoshop, and the contrast was manipulated in both curves and levels until I was satisfied with the drama of the landscape I really love color, but this black and white version looks to me better than what I had taken originally in color.

Creativity in the Studio

Hi Everybody!

Sorry I haven’t been able to get to this blog for a few weeks. Being a business is occasionally busy. Anyway I wanted to continue talking about the way to increase your creativity. Since I am a studio photographer one of the things I need to do is to keep my studio an energetic creative place to work. For me the first step in doing this is to keep the studio clean. I went to a workshop a few years ago where the instructor said that it was very important to clean up the studio after every shoot. The point he made, and I think he was right, is that if you leave stuff out after a shoot you will try to make the set-up you did yesterday fit the shoot you do to today. The problem is that if I am doing the best work in my studio I will be thinking about the specific project. It is too easy to pull; together the gear you have out and use it on the new shoot, even if it isn’t the best way to work.

Clean Studio © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Similarly I want to have my tools where I can find them. Tools I can’t find I don’t use. So part of what I do when I am not working is to do maintenance on the tools. There is so much maintenance. Light stands need to be cleaned so they don’t stick. Color needs to be checked on strobes, to make sure everything matches. In general everything needs to be checked regularly.

Concrete with Bubbles © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

In addition to all this are all the props I need to have. I have a proof penny. This uses what I learned from collection coins as a child. I needed the coin last week when I was hired to shoot tiny bubbles in concrete. The coin gave the shot size. I have dozens of pieces of fabric and seamless to use as backgrounds. I have a box full of little boxes to use for holding products in various positions. Hundreds of props from things the size of a butterfly wing to a refrigerator I got for a client. And, of course I have to know where to find them all.

This is the essential dichotomy of a good studio, rigid control of all the tools and an organic collection of props and backgrounds. My studio has about a third of the available space devoted to storage! You may want to check out one of my articles on BetterPhoto about studio lighting: www.betterphoto.com/article, or one of my lighting courses like Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio.

Backgrounds Make the Shot

by Jim Zuckerman

I think backgrounds are underrated. Too often, in the classes I teach at Betterphoto. I see photos that students upload for assignments that have distracting and uncomplimentary backgrounds that seriously detract from a subject.

Sometimes, of course, there’s nothing you can do about a background. You have to live with it or use Photoshop to change it. Such was the case when I passed a beautiful farm in Pennsylvania and stopped to get a shot of it. The background wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exciting, either. An hour earlier I had taken a very pretty hillside in peak autumn foliage, and I thought the two would be perfect for each other.

In my Creative Techniques in Photoshop course, the second lesson is all about cutting and pasting one photo into another. It’s basically a simple procedure, but it takes a little finesse to make it look believable. The most important factor to pay attention to is the lighting. It’s critical that the light be the same in both photos, as they were in these two shots. You can see what a dramatic difference a great background makes.

Choices for Stabilizing your Camera/Lens for Sharp Pictures

I had a few students discussing tripods, mono pods, etc. this week in my travel class, and thought I'd continue the discussion here.

For those of you using vibration reduction (VR per Nikon) and Image Stabilized (IS per Canon) lenses, you might think you can get away with not using a tripod or other form of stability. While these features are terrific and can gain you up to 2 stops of shutter speed hand-held, it all depends upon how steady you are and how long your lens is and the shutter speed is for that situation.

For optimum results, a tripod is the best choice. It allows you to carefully set up your composition, use settings that give you great DOF, -or just the depth you want, choose a slower shutter speed to give you more DOF or to capture some action in the still scene. REMEMBER - turn off your stabilization motor when mounted on the tripod for sharper results.

There are times, though, when a tripod is NOT always going to be allowed, or make practical sense, so here are some other options and their pros and cons:

a) mono pods - these are great for adding some stability when you need it, but either can't carry it or are not allowed to use a tripod as it takes up too much space where you are. The most effective way to use one it to wrap one leg around the mono pod, and hug the pod close to your body. This uses the body as the other 'legs' and creates a quasi-tripod, at least in effect. I can usually gain 2-3 shutter speeds with this method. Having a small ball head on the tripod is useful to allow you some flexibility in positioning the camera, too. And panning using a mono pod can be very effective, as it helps to keep the up/down motion to a minimum as you are moving horizontally with the pan.

b) table top tripods - those tiny little tripods we often see people using with small cameras are really very useful for more 'serious' photographers, too. I carry one with me when I travel and I have a small ball head mounted to it; I press it against my chest and it gives me about 1-2 stops more stability. It's also great if you have a table, rock, fence post, etc. that you can set it on, but so often they are not in the perfect position, so propping it on my chest and holding the camera with two hands when I shoot works very well.

© Brenda Tharp. All Rights Reserved.

c) bean bags - while these can be heavy - they can also be emptied and refilled when you get somewhere - with dried beans, rice, sand, etc. I use one on my car window to cradle the lens when shooting from the car as a blind. I have used one over the railing in an Egyptian tomb when tripods were not allowed. I have also used them for macro work when getting very close to the ground and my tripod/ball head combination won't get me there. I also used one to rest my lens on the lower railing of a small yacht when photographing harbor seals in Alaska. They can be simply a heavy duty freezer zip lock bag, doubled, and filled with your choice of materials!

d) Tension strap: This little idea has taken form in various homemade versions, and currently Kirk Enterprises makes one that's convenient to use and not too expensive. The theory behind these straps is that by inserting your foot into a loop, or stepping on the strap, that is attached to the tripod mount hole on your camera, you are creating tension and therefore some stabilizing to the hand-held camera. I can tell you I used one in the markets at twilight in Egypt and it worked very well! Kirk's has a quick-release plate that matches his base plates for cameras, so if you are not using a slotted type of release plate system, this will not work but you can easily make your own screw-in top to the webbing with a little ingenuity and sewing skills.

The bottom line of it is that no picture, no matter how great the moment, how dynamic the composition, or dramatic the light, is worth keeping if you didn't get a sharp image. Camera shake is the #1 pitfall for photographers who think they can hand hold solidly enough as average shutter speeds of 1/20-1/60. Don't let it happen to you!

Have a great week, everyone.