BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Rules of Photography

by Ibarionex Perello

© Ibarionex Perello All rights reserved

The process of learning photography and taking better pictures is about more than mastering the workings of a camera. It’s about seeing and discovering what elements make for a great image and what things weaken or detract from one.

We learn about lighting, composition, color and contrast and practice until we can make snap judgments in the instant between bringing the camera to our eye and depressing the shutter release button. It’s not an easy thing to learn to do, but practicing by taking picture after picture helps us to develop that skill.

What comes along with this are the “rules” that we feel that we must follow to create a successful image. Rules such as keeping the horizon straight, exposing for the highlights or using a tripod are all things that can help ensure that the images that you make can be as good as they can possibly be.

But if your experience is anything like mine, I can take these same rules and use them against myself. Instead of seeing these rules as things that help improve my images, I can use them as excuses for not taking the pictures in the first place.

I was recently shooting some concert images in a club in Hollywood. The music was fantastic and the performers were full of energy, offering some exciting possibilities when it comes to making photographs. Unfortunately, the lighting wasn’t great. Though it may have satisfied the needs of the performers, it made things especially difficult for a photographer.

To get a decent shutter speed even with my f/2.8 zoom lenses wide open, I still had to raise the camera’s ISO to 1600. This only gave me a shutter speed of between 1/90 to 1/125 second, not ideal for capturing sharp images of a lead singer who moved across the stage as if he owned it.

There would have been a time when I would have given up and said that I can’t shoot this. The light is too low. My images will be blurry. There will be too much noise with the high ISO. This venue doesn’t fit the bill for what I know I need to produce consistently good shots.

That was all true, but I shot anyway.

I steadied myself as best I could and tried to capture those in-between moments when the singer or the members of the band were at the peak moment of a gesture or movement. I set my ISO to 1600, despite the presence of noise, because I wanted to have the fast shutter speed that I knew I would need to get a sharp result. I shot anyway even though I knew the circumstances weren’t ideal and that I wasn’t adhering to all the rules that I had learned over the years.

The result was many blurred and underexposed images. But along with those, I got some fantastic shots that despite the challenges that I faced, thrilled me, including the one that you see here.

Rules are good. They definitely will help you to make better photographs. But never allow them to keep you from taking the picture. Allow yourself to try and shoot anyway. You’ll never realize what magic may happen unless you bring the camera to your eye and shoot.

If there is any rule of photography that you should always live by, it should be the simplest one: keep shooting.

Recognition of Memorial Day

by Jim Zuckerman

When I tell my friends that I haven't had a vacation since 1972, they all laugh. Because I've been to so many places in the world, they think my entire life is a vacation. Well, not really. Even though I travel so much, I'm always shooting, and that for me is work. If I lie on a tropical beach somewhere, after thirty minutes or so I get bored and I start looking around for something to shoot.

In 1981 I made my first trip to Tahiti. The color of the water is so saturated, and the palms and the verdant mountains are so seductive, that one could easily come to the conclusion that this is paradise with a capital 'P'. I flew to Bora Bora from the capital, Papeete, and after checking into my lodge I went straight to the beach and did what everyone dreams of doing: I laid down in the tropical sun and thought I had been instantly transported to Heaven.

And that lasted about a half hour.

Ok, now what? Since this was before the Internet, researching photogenic subjects was done with travel books, post cards, and talking to local people about things of interest geologically, historically, culturally, etc. Someone told me that there were two canons in the nearby mountains, so I decided to hike up to them to see if they were of interest. I thought that perhaps they had been left over by the French army, perhaps from the 1800s, but that was not the case at all. They turned out to be artillery from the United States Navy. To help protect the islands in case the Japanese moved that far east in the Pacific, the Navy placed these canons here early in the war. In fact, carved in a nearby tree was an engraving that read "Katz, USN, 1943".

The canons were rusted and had been covered with graffiti, and by the time I trudged up the mountain carrying my medium format film camera, the sun was already high. I took pictures which I knew would never be considered fine art, and probably would never sell. But I stood there trying to imagine how the servicemen stationed here spent their time as they watched for enemy ships.

These pictures were taken with a Mamiya RB 67 on Ektachrome 64 transparency film. I used a 50mm wide angle lens, which is approximately equivalent to a 24mm lens in the 35mm or digital format. The aerial view I've included in this blog was taken from a small airplane I hired on this trip to do aerial photography, and it shows the rugged terrain in which the canons were placed.

On this Memorial Day I thought it was appropriate to remember these pictures and the sacrifices so many have made for our freedoms.

Commercial Micro Photography

By John Siskin

Nanogel Product #1 © John H.  Siskin All rights reserved

I was working on a micro shot yesterday for client. Their product is transparent and about a millimeter long. Consequently it is astonishingly difficult to shoot. I thought I would discuss some of the tricks that make shooting a micro project possible.

First I define micro as a project where the image of the subject is bigger than life size on the camera sensor. In this case the subject is about 1.5 times life size on the sensor. I call anything that is less than life size on the sensor macro. I don’t suppose that the distinction makes much difference, except to the choice of lens. When you do work with a very small subject the shorter the focal length of the lens the less space you need between the lens an the camera and the less working room you have between the lens and the subject. I have about half a dozen lenses for micro work. The sorter lenses, about 30mm long work well for products between 5 and 15 times life size on to the sensor. Lenses between 50mm and 75mm work well for slightly larger products that will be reproduced between 1 and 7 times life size. In this case I used a Zeiss Luminar with a focal length of 63mm.

Background for macro shots © John H.  Siskin All rights reserved

The background is often a problem with a shot like this. For slightly larger products that won’t be enlarged as much I print out a background with my inkjet printer.

Nanogel Product #3 © John H.  Siskin All rights reserved

This image has a variety of colors and a gradation so it serves as a very handy background for macro work. In the case of yesterdays shot the reproduction ratio showed up the dots from the inkjet printer. This interfered with seeing the subject. In this case I used paint chips from Home Depot. They have an even painted surface that is a good background.

Concrete with Bubbles © John H.  Siskin All rights reserved

French coin with concrete dye © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Another problem with very small subjects is communicating just how big the product is. I often put the product on top of a penny to show size. I have a couple of proof pennies that I use for this purpose. Proof coins are specially minted for collectors; they have a much finer surface than a normal coin. I have also used coins from other countries for products sold in other countries.

Most of the time I use one or more Norman 200B strobes for lighting. I put them on Bogen/Manfrotto Articulated Arms to give me control over light placement. I use different reflectors to create lighting effects. In this case I used a snoot to increase contrast.

Nanogel Product #2 © John H.  Siskin All rights reserved

Thanks, John Siskin

Photographing Friends

Ibarionex R. Perello

Jervey Tervalon © Ibarionex Perello All rights reserved

My friends know that if they are going to hang out with me there is a high likelihood that I’m going to take their picture. I always have my camera with me and there are times when I’m just inspired to make a picture. It could be because of the way they look, the light or the setting. Whatever is inspiring me, I’m always eager to take advantage of those opportunities to make a nice image. Thankfully, I have friends who practice a high degree of patience. Though of course, it could be that they are expecting me to pick up the tab as a result.
Several months ago while I was having lunch with my friend, the writer Jervey Tervalon, I noticed the color of the wall in the restaurant where we were eating. I knew immediately that it would work beautifully well with the red pullover that he was wearing. So, even before we had finished eating, I was telling him that I was going to photograph him after we were done.

I placed him in the corner of the patio and had him sit on the cushioned bench that was there. I told him to get comfortable. I purposely chose the corner to photograph him, because I hoped that he would take advantage of it to get into a very comfortable pose. He didn’t disappoint. He leaned his back against the wall and brought his left leg up on the bench and placed his hand on it, resulting in a very relaxed and natural pose.

I often try to find objects like walls or fences for people to rest against because when they do, they appear to find a little security and comfort positioning their bodies against or behind such objects. I think it leaves the subject feeling less exposed and vulnerable and provides me with a very pleasing portrait.

The diffused light provided by the overcast day was perfect for the shoot and I shot several dozen shots before I was finished. I was very pleased with the result as I hope he was.

Always having my camera and looking for opportunities for good photographs is key if I expect to improve my skills as a photographer. And the fact that I can produce nice portraits of my friends makes it all the better.

Have fun with your friends!

Photographing Car Shows: Hot Shots of Cool Cars

By Kerry Drager

I love photographing the artsy details of custom cars, classic cars and gleaming hot rods at outdoor car shows.

This means zeroing in tight for strong graphic-design images that feature great lines, sensuous curves, shiny chrome, mirrored reflections, and bold colors. By looking for creative close-ups, I can also avoid the many background distractions of car shows - show goers, other cars, and even buildings - that draw attention away from the main subject. A few tips for car show photography:

1. Arrive early. In fact, visitors often can get into an event before the "official" start time while car owners are getting their cars ready. This lets you take advantage of the early-morning light and the casual, pre-show atmosphere. (To be safe, call ahead to verify that non-owners can gain early access.)

2. Work with the light: Is your favorite car in the shade? If so, keep looking, since you'll probably want to a more cooperative (i.e., sunlit) subject. But remember: If you're there all day, a vehicle that's in shade in the morning will likely be in sunlight in the afternoon.

3. Reflection thought: Often, the shady side of a black car can very nicely reflect a colorful sunlit neighboring vehicle: click here for an example of a car-show reflection .

Additional information and inspiration:
- My BetterPhoto.com article: Cool Cars: How to Photograph Car Shows
- My BP online photo class: Creative Close-ups
- BP's digital photography school
- BP's gallery of cool car pictures

(c)Kerry Drager
1957 Chevy; early-morning light; 105mm lens; 100 ISO; 1/25th sec.;
f32 for good Depth of Field, plus slight sunburst effect on highlight; tripod

(c)Kerry Drager
1932 Ford Sedan; car show; 105mm lens, ISO 100; 1/25th sec.; tripod;
F32 to get sunburst effect for highlight on headlamp

(c)Kerry Drager
1948 Ford; early morning light; 105mm lens; f25; 1/40th sec.; ISO 100; tripod

Futuristic architecture in the Pyrenees Mountains

By Jim Zuckerman

Andorra is a tiny country nestled between France and Spain, and recently I spent a couple of days in this wonderful place in the Pyrenees Mountains. I spent the time around Escaldes-Engordany, a beautiful city that is immaculately clean. I discovered that in the center of the city there was the most incredible public spa, and not only did I enjoy swimming in their huge indoor pool with fountains, terraces, stunning lighting and music, but I photographed the futuristic architecture as you can see below.

For this shot, I used a tripod (fortunately no one objected) and my 16 - 35mm wide angle lens. I had to have complete depth of field so all of the incredible detail was in focus, so I chose f/22. At ISO 200, this forced my shutter speed to be a full six seconds. I used a daylight white balance to get the yellow/orange color out of the tungsten lights because the contrast with the blue was so dramatic. The camera was only about 18 inches above the floor at the base of the stairs so I could exaggerate the perspective in this amazing place.

Converting Color to Black-and-white

By Richard Lynch

Question:
I'm a black-and-white enthusiast from my film days. I've just been using Photoshop to desaturate color images, and that doesn't seem to give great results. Is there a better way to convert from color to black-and-white?

The Short Answer:
Leverage your color using channels and image tone to make the best conversions to black-and-white.

The Whole Answer:
Conversion to black-and-white can be done in several simple ways like by desaturating, but the simple ones aren't usually the best. I've written whole chapters about black-and-white conversions in Elements books and have created several actions/tools for conversions that I sell on my website (http://hiddenelements.com) and include in books (like my Hidden Power book that you can find in the betterphoto.com book store). But there are several levels of complexity to making good black-and-white--and different quality to results. Lets look at a few conversions using Figure 1 as a starting point.

Figure 1

The first thing you will want to do with any image you are converting is color correct it. This may seem odd, but you want to have the best source to work with. We look at color correction in all of my courses on different levels (Photoshop 101, From Monitor to Print: Photoshop Workflow, and Leveraging Layers).

The "Desaturate" method of converting to black-and-white is the most basic conversion, and probably produces some of the least favorable results. You can do it as a one step command (Enhance>Adjust Color>Remove Color), and that does the same thing as creating a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and lowering the saturation to -100. The result would be like Figure 2.

Figure 2

Better methods for converting to black-and-white are based on extraction of image tones. For example, you can do a Luminosity extraction (covered in more depth in my Leveraging Layers course), which is essentially:

1. Create a new layer at the top of the layer stack and name it Luminosity.
2. Press Command+Option+Shift+E / Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E to copy visible to that layer
3. Change the layer mode to Luminosity
4. Create a new layer below the Luminosity layer in the stack.
5. Merge Down (Command+E / Ctrl+E).

This isolated the brightness of your image and more accurately reflects what you might expect to see over desaturation. You can see the result in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Other increasingly complicated and better methods include separating RGB components and combining them in different ways. My favorite option combines luminosity (33%), red (lighten, 60%), green (duplicated, Screen 70% and Screen 100%), and blue (Overlay 16%) channels. The process is a bit complicated (over 100 steps in Elements), but I have made Actions (a type of script used with Photoshop and Elements) to simplify the process to a click. You can find them on my websites: http://hiddenelements.com, or http://photoshopcs.com. For Figure 4 I did the usual conversion from my actions and then strengthened the Blue channel to 60%.

Figure 4

Other less realistic conversions can be achieved as well, using Channel Mixer, or the new Black & White adjustment tool found in Photoshop CS3. For Figure 5 I used another custom conversion action I created that mimics an Infrared effect.

Figure 5

Converting to black-and-white is often more art than science, and you can get greatly varying results as shown here. Converting to black-and-white can lead to other explorations, like toning (e.g., sepia), handcoloring, and more. But everything about a good image starts with good capture, good color management/workflow and good image correction! Courses on betterphoto can help you in all these facets.

The Power of Silhouettes

by Jim Zuckerman

In my Creative Techniques in Photoshop course, I explain how to turn an ordinary photograph taken in shade or mid-day lighting into a silhouette. The power of this technique is that you can create something exceptionally bold and visually striking. The photo below is comprised of three photos -- each giraffe is a single photo, plus the grass -- and then I added the color background.

To make the sun, I simply used the elliptical marque tool and then filled it with yellow. I did this after I had filled the background with red/orange using the Edit > fill command in CS3. The large sun simulates the use of a telephoto lens. I created this poster-like graphic as a different way for my stock agency to communicate the idea of Africa, wildlife, photo safaris, conservation, the environment, and travel.

When you submit work to a stock photo agency, your creativity can be turned into profit. You must constantly look for eye-catching ways of communicating familiar concepts, and when you can do that -- with or without Photoshop's help -- you will make money in photography. In my course Making Money with Photography, I help students choose the best images from their files for various markets. This picture is best suited for advertising.

Investing In Photo Gear

By John Siskin

I was thinking about how photo gear endures. I used to think about wearing out equipment, and I still do. But I don’t think about wearing out my camera. Technology will force me to replace it long before it wears out. I am on my fourth digital camera system and, as with the others, it will be retired before it stops working. That wasn’t the case with film cameras. I have a Speed Graphic, still my favorite film camera, that isn’t worn out after fifty years.

4X5 Speed Graphic Camera © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

I still use it when I want to do personal work with a large negative. It was a pleasure to use. My first digital camera was a Leaf back, a DCB 2 that fit on a Mamiya RZ67. I really disliked that camera. It made 3 separate exposures in order to make a color shot. It was very slow and awkward to work with. I was glad to see it go. But, when it did go it was a working camera, a technological dinosaur. I wanted to write about this topic not to whine about digital cameras, but to discuss the expected life times of photoproducts; and how that should affect the way we buy them. For instance, I think that we should buy cameras that have been on the market for a while; my business can’t stand a recall. I also think that I will need a camera with a large file, I do some business in display prints. As a consequence I believe that a camera has a lifetime between 3 and 5 years. It needs to pay for itself quickly!

When I think about lenses, I have different considerations. Current lenses will wear out: the motors that make the lens auto focus will not work forever. Also the focus tracks are very lightweight, they will have wear problems. The tracks are built this way in order to allow auto focus to function. I would guess that the lenses I use frequently are going to last between five and ten years, not too bad. I can make an investment in a lens that will pay off more slowly, even buying specialty lenses that I might not use more that once a month. So I can easily make a case for buying quality lenses.

Fish Eye camera I made this camera from a Ukrainian lens and and a Speed Graphic Camera. It makes around image 8cm across. It sees 180º, everything in front of the camera © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Tripods last for decades. I would not be surprised to see my current tripods, I have five, and each may last for more than fifty years. So the cost of a tripod is very inexpensive because of the thousands of times I will use it before it fails. By the way I have five tripods because I have small medium and large cameras. My 8X10 camera requires a tripod that is unnecessarily large for my digital camera. If you buy a good tripod it may outlast ten cameras, a poor tripod may be lousy from the first day.

Toyo 8X10 Feild Camera/Ries Tripod The big camera! © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

I actually started writing this blog so that I could talk about lights. In my discussions about strobes I often here how expensive they are. An investment in strobes is like buying a tripod, since strobes last such a long time. I have some Norman equipment that I bought new in 1983, that’s almost 25 years. The tubes haven’t broken and the strobes still work. Not bad. More to the point, of the photos I’ve made for money since 1983 all but a handful required strobes. More than any other piece of equipment, lights separate the assignment photographer from people who don’t do jobs. So, although it may not seem that way when you right the check, strobes are cheap; they really do pay for themselves. Good strobes may make good photographers!

Calumet Travelight 750 A monolight © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Norman 5 © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Thanks,
John

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