Minute Differences

What a difference orientation can make to a shot. I learned this totally by accident while idly snapping in my mum's garden the other day.

I'd say up until that point, some 99.9% of my nature shots had all been shot in Landscape orientation. It was just the way the camera naturally went to my face. The results were all fine, nice, good even, but I was getting totally bored with nature shots. In fact, I started writing up a post just the other day on how uninspired I was feeling.





These shots are all fine. Good, even (by my own meagre standards); certainly I would happily show all of them as part of my portfolio. But I felt like it was all getting kinda samey.

Then by total accident I shot this at my mum's:



Ignore the processing I've done on this for a sec and just think about the composition. It's not a huge change; you have the subject in neat focus and the bokeh is nice and smooth, same as the others. But somehow I feel like the change from Landscape to Portrait has made the shot a little more interesting, a little more pleasing to the eye, a little more inclined to make you stop and look.

Of course I didn't realise this until I came to process the shots the next day; needless to say I got kind of excited and went straight to the park to test my theory.






Well whaddaya know! I love all four of these. Maybe other people looking might just think "feh, more flowers, they all look the same" but to me the difference, as minute as it may be, is enough to renew my love for photography and the myriad ways one can capture the world's beauty.

Incidentally, who know tulips were so darn photogenic?

Also I just want to throw in there that all of the shots on this page were taken with manual focus. I am extremely pleased with my progress in learning how to control every setting on the camera to get exactly the shot I want -- in close-ups, auto-focus just doesn't do it for me -- and the fact that my shots are continuing to get sharper is happy-making. In fact for most of the last set of shots I did, I didn't even have to run the Unsharp Mask in post-processing. Hooray!

German Shepherd, and the Importance of Manual Mode for Animals

My parents have a beautiful German Shepherd unfortunately named Kane, and yesterday when I went to visit I caught a few shots of him messing around in the garden.



I wanted to close the aperture down a little (around f/5) to increase the depth of field and get more of the dog in focus, however as always I stayed in Aperture Mode for the first few shots. Even though it was a bright and lovely afternoon, his fur is mostly dark, so my camera picked up on this fact and slowed the shutter speed down to around 1/40th.



Here you can see around his snout there is a little motion blur. This is why it's important to always be aware of your settings; to me, the shutter speed sounded fast enough that I didn't even consider it until I looked at the LCD after taking the first few shots.

The general rule of thumb with shutter speed is to try and keep the speed faster than the focal length you're working at. So with my 50mm lens I should at least have been at 1/50th, or 1/60th to be on the safe side. Even at 1/40th, the dog was moving around so quickly and erratically, there was motion blur.

I realised this eventually and switched into Manual mode, stopping down to around 1/80th:



Similar pose, virtually no motion blur; much better! I also opened the aperture by half a stop to f/4.5 to compensate so the shot wasn't too dark, and the beauty of shooting in RAW is that to an extent, as long as you don't go mad with it, you can correct the exposure a little after the fact.

In retrospect I would still prefer to have stopped the shutter speed down even more, to about 1/100th, maybe bumped up the ISO to 200 to compensate, and taken a step back from the dog to help with the depth of field. We live and learn and it's good for me to think about these things even after it's too late, so I know better for next time.



NOM NOM NOM.

On and On We Go

I got over my nervousness and ended up doing some maternity shots for Sarah the other week. As it happens, she is a wonderful model, it was a very relaxing atmosphere, and I discovered something about myself that day too: when I look through the viewfinder, I lose all self-consciousness about what I'm doing. I kept the camera glued to my face most of the time which enabled me to find some great angles of her as she turned to talk to her sister or boyfriend:


Posted with permission

I had no qualms in telling her to "HOLD IT!" and overall they were really happy with the shots.

Another great thing was again, how much it taught me about post-processing. I had a minor disaster which turned out to be a blessing in disguise; each time I opened a shot and edited it, GIMP was compressing the JPEG a little further, until I ended up with some really weird and pixelated results which I only happened to notice on close inspection the day I was supposed to hand the shots over. I had to redo them all from scratch - but it was a good thing really, because I had overcooked the shots a little bit, and second time around I went a little easier, just let the mother's beauty show through with less editing, and I was much happier with the results.

-----

In other news, I did another gig shoot for Goldrush Radio where the lighting was terrible and I wasn't as happy with this set as the previous:



Still, the guys liked them enough to ask me to do a promo shoot with them. This will again test my creativity as I have no idea how to do this sort of thing without it coming out cheesy. Much input from the band will be needed.

In between all that I've been shooting some more nature shots, mostly because I find them easy and fun and very relaxing. Cliché I know but I am still able to use this type of shooting as a learning experience. For example:



Ah, I love love love this shot. The light, the colour, the bokeh... The sun was just setting and the light was such a beautiful colour; I was lucky enough to chance upon these blooms coming out of someone's garden so I took a few shots of them from different angles and this one really captures the scene I saw. Taking light into account in composition is not something I'd considered that much because in the past couple of months, due to the time of year the light has always been pretty much the same. Now I can see what the spring/summer evenings have to offer and again, it has given me something else to think about.

One area I am struggling with is my 365 Project. A 365 is, simply put, a project where you have a shot for each day of the year (preferably taken on the day in question). For the first three weeks it was a piece of cake to pick up my camera every day and get something a little different each time, but the past ten days or so have proven a little trickier. It's not that I have no opportunity to shoot, but more that I have no idea how to be original every single day. So yeah, between you and me I have cheated a little bit; missing a couple of days then uploading a few from the same day and changing the date stamp. It's hard, man! Although on reflection I'm surprised I only have four flower shots in the whole collection thus far.

The hardest part is getting out and about. There's only so much random crap in my home that I can take extreme DOF shots of. But out in the world there is no end of opportunity as long as you keep your eyes open:



MOO.

Happy snapping, darlings.

Updates - the Nifty Fifty.

I'm working on a post explaining the last part of the exposure triangle (ISO) but I've hit a wall with it, in that I understand what it does and when to use it, but am struggling to explain it in an understandable way. So bear with me on that. :)

In other news, I received a new lens the other week - a 50mm f/1.8 portrait lens, otherwise known as the "Nifty Fifty". It has a fixed focal length, meaning no zooming in or out, but I really haven't found that to be much of an issue, and at 50mm it's roughly close to the focal length of the human eye, meaning that what you see through the viewfinder should be more or less the same magnification as what you see normally. This lens has a ton of practical applications and really hasn't been off my camera since I got it.

First off, the wide maximum aperture allows for some seriously shallow depth of field. While I'm already sensing my skill improving past the "bokeh-whore" stage, I do love bokeh, and opening that aperture right up allows me to capture some really great shots.



What I have learnt though, is that opening the aperture up to its widest at f/1.8 is inadvisable if you are doing close-ups and your subject might move even the slightest amount, e.g. a flower in a breeze. The DOF is so, so shallow that movement of the subject will throw it outside of that narrow focus area:



What's happened in the above shot (f/2.2) is that the breeze blew slightly and I ended up with the little leaves cupping the bud being totally focused, and the bud itself slightly out.

As I've used the lens more and learned about its strengths and weaknesses, it really has proved itself as a marvellous bit of glass. When I have used it for its intended purpose (portraits) the results have really been stunning.



Just look at that little sweetheart. Doesn't his face just make you "aww"? Look at the little water droplets in his beard! Is that water or drool?!

This shot was taken the first day I had the lens, and I went mad with the wide aperture (that shot is f/1.8). The result is that, even at 6pm on a pre-Spring evening, there is enough light coming into the camera for the shutter speed to speed up and capture him crisply before he moved. Unfortunately though, the focus is roughly at the bridge of his nose, and due to the insanely shallow DOF, his eyes are ever so slightly out. If I had stopped the aperture down to about f/2.5 his whole face would have been tack sharp, and in fact reviews I have read say this particular lens performs at its best when stopped down to f/2.5 - f/2.8. Either way I am very happy with that shot.

The other most impressive use of the lens so far was when I went to see my friend's band play the other night; I took my camera to experiment with the sort of candid photography a gig atmosphere provides and when Dan spotted it he asked if I would try and get some shots of the band. I played the whole thing down a little (I'd never shot in such dark conditions before, am a total amateur, didn't want them to anticipate any really good shots) but I was really, really happy with the results.



I opened the aperture up all the way (f/1.8) but because I wasn't right on top of the guys, the shallow DOF was less pronounced. This meant I was letting in the maximum amount of light possible. I also had to bump up the ISO (light sensitivity -- will explain this more when I get rounf to finishing the jargon post!) to 1600 which is very, very high and resulted in a lot of digital noise (or graininess) on the shots. However in doing so I was able to speed up the shutter speed to about 1/25 sec, and avoid the guys just being artsy blurs as they performed. Grain is always preferable to blur -- it can be fixed, to an extent, in some processing software, and also for the black-and-white shots it added a really gritty, "live" feel which I think added to the shots.

Speaking of black-and-white... my researching on the best way to turn a picture from colour into B&W has generally led me to believe that a) don't use your camera's B&W function as you then have much less control over the highlights in post-processing; and b) use the Channel Mixer instead of just desaturating as it means you have control over the highlights, luminosity and tones. I will cover B&W post-processing in more depth in the future, but the gig shoot has helped me to learn a lot more about how to do this successfully. Most of the B&W shots in that gig set were done because the real light was so red or unflattering; the Channel Mixer enabled me to turn the light into something more natural-looking.

Overall I am beyond happy with the 50mm lens. The band were so chuffed with the shots that they have asked me to do some staged promos. Also another friend whose girlfriend is very heavily pregnant has asked me if I would do some artsy bump shots before she drops -- the prospect of this is a little daunting but I'm going to do it; if it goes wrong at least it's just my friends and not someone who is paying me!

Erk...