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…

You know what happened a couple of nights ago? A really nice con­stel­la­tion of Moon and chapel of Saint Patrick’s Col­lege could be seen right from our bal­cony, includ­ing a nice cloud which added to the mood. Unforun­ately I left my own cam­era over in the office that day, so I had to dig out Steff’s 7 year old Nikon Coolpix 5700 to cap­ture the scene.

But any­way, hav­ing the cam­era res­ted on the bal­cony table, and snap­ping off a few 8 second expos­ures, I had to smile a bit when our neigh­bours had the same idea: Unfor­tu­nately, they were try­ing to use their flashes to get the pic­ture right… This made no sense, as 1) any on-​camera flash is so weak that it usu­ally never reaches more than a few meters (and the trees and tower were a couple of hun­dred meters, and the moon a couple of hun­dreds of thou­sands of kilo­met­ers away). Thus, all they were doing was 2) wast­ing their cam­era bat­ter­ies and 3) redu­cing the con­trast in the pic­ture (as the flash would have lit the slight mist in the air and thus just make the blacks look “milky”).

What you need to do in such extremely dark con­di­tions would be first of all turn off your flash. Then, make sure you rest your cam­era on some­thing (a tri­pod would obvi­ously be the easi­est solu­tion) and use the self-​timer to take the shot (as press­ing the shut­ter your­self would shake the cam­era and your pic­ture will loose crisp­ness).

So as I was say­ing in the last post, it’s not the most expens­ive cam­era that takes the pho­tos, but the pho­to­grapher with his exper­i­ence and taste.