After the rather extens­ive last post, here’s a slightly shorter one. At least with a shorter mor­ale: “Be ready”.

Well, to be ready to pho­to­graph any inter­est­ing things you might come accross in your daily routine, you’ll need a cam­era to cap­ture it. Unless you have a semi-​decent cam­era in your cell­phone /​mobile /​handy, you’ll thus need to bring one along every­where you go, since you never know what’s going to hap­pen.

Ever since I got the small Fuji­Film Z20 I try to keep it in my jacket — of course with it’s bat­tery charged and with at least some space left on the memory card. That way, whenever I see some­thing curi­ous, beau­ti­ful, ugly, puzz­ling or whatever, I can take a photo.

What you see above is a lonely plant in the middle of a park­ing lot, fight­ing to sur­vive (I guess) or just hanging out. I tried to go low again to give some per­spect­ive and back­ground inform­a­tion on where the photo was taken, inten­tion­ally includ­ing a few the road mark­ing. A bit of vign­ette, desat­ur­ated col­ours and there you go. An impres­sion of the “con­crete jungle” of mod­ern days.

Here’s some really basic (and quite import­ant) info that’ll help you take bet­ter pic­tures, trust me. It’s a long post, but worth your while read­ing it (at least I hope).

Ever wondered what the little +/​-​but­ton (or menu entry) on your cam­era does? It when you access it your cam­era will usu­ally dis­play a scale like so: [ -2 … -1 … 0 … +1 … +2 EV ] and might men­tion some­thing along the lines of expos­ure com­pens­a­tion or adjust­ment.

Well this func­tion­al­ity is quite an import­ant one and worth­while under­stand­ing. Let me start by (loosely) explain­ing how your cam­era determ­ines how to set the expos­ure in the first place (that is, how much light it’ll have to cap­ture so that the scene looks “cor­rectly” exposed, not too dark, not too bright, but “just right”). Sci­ence has shown that your aver­age, cor­rectly exposed pic­ture will have a cer­tain aver­age bright­ness of around some value x (on a cer­tain scale). In other words, if you cal­cu­late the aver­age bright­ness of each pixe in the image, you should get a value around that cer­tain value x. Hence, to get a “nor­mal” pic­ture, your cam­era adjusts aper­ture, shut­ter speed and ISO so that the res­ult­ing image will have an aver­age bright­ness of x. Got that? Right.

Here’s a prob­lem: not every situ­ation you will pho­to­graph will be “aver­age”. Two extreme examples would be 1) a white bunny sit­ting in the snow — a pic­ture where your aver­age pixel will be much brigther than “nor­mal” — or 2) an actor dressed in black on a theatre stage with a black back­drop — here the aver­age pixel bright­ness will clearly be darker than nor­mal. Well in both cases, your cam­era doesn’t know that it’s look­ing at “extreme” scenes and thus will try to do what it always does: expose such that the aver­age pixel bright­ness will be x. The res­ult: bunny and snow will be grey, instead of white — and the theatre back­ground will be grey, instead of black.

The solu­tion: In those extreme cases, you tell the cam­era that it’s con­fron­ted with an extreme situ­ation, that is a scene that is either brighter or darker than aver­age. And, you guess right … this is what the expos­ure com­pens­a­tion func­tion is for: Neg­at­ive val­ues on that scale tell the cam­era the scene is darker, and pos­it­ive val­ues stand for brighter than aver­age. Easy enough, right?

Here are some more situ­ation where you might want to try using this adjust­ment: Even­ing scenes and sun­sets (set neg­at­ive val­ues), bright days and sum­mer beaches (try a pos­it­ive value). The photo above was taken late-​ish in the even­ing. Without any com­pens­a­tion the pic­ture taken by the cam­era was way to bright, the sky was almost white and it looked like it was taken in the middle of the day. But with a –2 EV com­pens­a­tion the pic­ture then reflec­ted much more what the world looked like when I was there.

Here’s another prac­tical tip for you all. When you take pho­tos of a child, get all the way down to their eye level! This will give you some amaz­ing per­spect­ives plus you’ll have a fun time dodging greasy, gooey fin­gers that are try­ing to touch the magic­ally attract­ive front ele­ment of your lens :-)

I’m sure you can image that when you take a photo of a small child from your adult’s per­spect­ive, you’ll end up get­ting a pic­ture that a) makes the small child look even smal­ler, b) usu­ally doesn’t prop­erly show its face, c) instead provides you with ample vis­tas of the ground (and not the actual sur­round­ing) and d) is just plain bor­ing because that’s how you per­ceive the world any­way, every day.

So next time you’re pho­to­graph­ing the little ones, down at least to their eye level, if not lower — even if this means lay­ing flat on the ground.

PS: The kid on the photo is the lovely and com­pletely ador­able son of a col­league of mine.

And here’s to fine wine. This is another­one of the shots I had sub­mit­ted to the “More Than Words” photo com­pet­i­tion. This was one of the first pho­tos taken with my (at the time) new macro lens, a 100mm ƒ/2.8 lens, that I had just got­ten a few weeks earlier. It shows one of the more “res­id­ent” inter­na­tion­als stu­dents in Maynooth hav­ing a nice glas of white wine in the Caulfield’s pub.

Macro lenses clas­sic­ally come in sev­eral focal length, typ­ic­ally around 50mm, 100mm and 200mm. In par­tic­u­lar the 100mm ones are quite often used as por­trait lenses too as they can give quite flat­ter­ing per­spect­ives in terms of a just-​right amount of per­spect­ive com­pres­sion when tak­ing head-​shots or a bit fur­ther out. Here’s for instance a very nice por­trait of Barak Obama taken with a 105mm lens (thanks to the EXIF data left intact ;-)).

So if you hap­pen to own a macro lens of around 100mm, don’t just use it for mac­ros, give it a go with por­traits or other non-​macro-​y sub­jects too!

Here’s some more about your every­day, cheapo point-​and-​shoot cam­era, rather than expens­ive D-​SLRs: Macro shots.

With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the res­ult­ing rather large depth-​of-​field, that is the “depth” of the in-​focus parts of the image) they’re really good for tak­ing close-​up shots. Most of those little bug­gers have a ded­ic­ated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-​symbol some­where on it) that allows you to get the cam­era really close to your sub­ject, so that you get a good mag­ni­fic­a­tion. While you can achieve sim­ilar effects with a ded­ic­ated macro lens on an SLR, they eas­ily costs 5 times as much as whole point-​and-​shoot cam­era, and you usu­ally have a hard time get­ting an extens­ive depth-​of-​field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find your­self stop­ping down to ƒ/​22 or less, and still not hav­ing enough depth-​of-​field. But then, stop­ping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refrac­tion prob­lems from the small aper­ture… All in all, not nice.

The shot above shows the cap­pu­cino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-​held on my office desk, with no spe­cial light­ing or any­thing. The cam­era: a 100 EUR (or less) Fuji­Film Z20.

Any kind of reflec­tion usu­ally makes pic­tures more inter­est­ing. But flip­ping a pic­ture upside down may also be a good attention-​grabber.

First of all, it takes time for your brain to pro­cess the image, fig­ure out what’s going on and why things are slightly odd, why we are not fully at ease when look­ing at the pic­ture. This takes a couple of seconds or so. It’s only then that we start actu­ally dis­cov­er­ing things in the image, like the per­son on the bot­tom right, or the cute little waves from the fall­ing rain drops.

Although one should always strive to make a pic­ture as eas­ily “decod­able” as pos­sible — that is a clear sub­ject, simple, organ­ised struc­tures and col­ours, all in a some­what logical com­pos­i­tion — doing the exact oppos­ite may also cre­ate some inter­est­ing pic­tures. Here’s a thought: The fact that you have to “fight” a bit with the image until you get through it may just be enough to get some extra atten­tion, so that ulti­mately the viewer spends a bit more time with it to dis­cover what it has to offer, instead of just skip­ping to the next image…