Wave action. Olympus E-PM1 Pen Mini, 14-42 kit lens…at 14mm.
Sometimes risks are necessary for experimentation. Just don’t do it with any gear that would be critical if dead, unless you absolutely have to get the shot. MT
POTD: If you’re not getting wet, you’re probably not close enough.
April 20, 2012 by
Photoessay: Hanoi, part two
April 19, 2012 by
Here’s an opportunity to compare the difference between a set shot in color, and one shot in black and white – same subjects, same location, same equipment, same time. Which do you prefer? Which do you think works better? There are no right or wrong answers (nor should there be if both sets are executed well enough). MT
This set shot with a Nikon D700, 85/1.4G and 28-300/3.5-5.6 VR.
Looking at images
April 18, 2012 by
“I don’t need to be told how to look at an image! I just walk up to it and use my eyes.”
That’s what most of you are probably thinking, right?
Wrong.
There are a few simple things you can do when viewing a photograph – or an image of any sort – to get the most out of it; both from a personal opportunity to learn as a photographer, as well as to ensure you understand exactly what it is the creator of the image intended to convey.
Reflections. Prague. Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH
1. Composition
What is the subject? In any good image, this should be obvious. If you can’t tell what it is immediately, either look again (and think about the image – sometimes it’s the image itself, if an abstract composition, for instance) or consider the possibility that it’s just a weak image. Is the composition balanced? Does it feel right? Is there something about the layout of elements in the frame that bothers you – either in a deliberately provocative (i.e. good because it makes you think or suggests something) way, or a bad (it’s distracting) way? How could it have been improved (e.g. were things cut out of the frame due to poor camera placement?). What’s the lighting like? Does it create a strong sense of mood, or emotion? Most importantly: does the picture draw you into the scene and make you feel like you are there just by looking at it?
Retirement. Patan Durbar Fire Station, Kathmandu, Nepal. Nikon D700, 24/1.4
2. Metaphors, allegories and tricks
A good example of this is your stereotypical beggar-against-a-luxury-goods-store contrast. What other compositional and subject-based tools has the photographer used to make you stay that little bit longer to consider the content of the image? Does it make you think? Sometimes the contrasts can be obvious, such as the previous example. Use of reflections or inversions are another example. Inclusion of the photographer in the frame, as a conscious observer. Multiple exposures, allusions to popular culture, folk lore, etc. Chronological progression or development in a single frame. At other times, it can be greater than that and more complicated – a story in a frame.
Letting sleeping dogs lie. Kathmandu, Nepal. Nikon D700, 24/1.4
3. Context
Often, images aren’t strong enough to stand alone. This isn’t a bad thing, because it may not be possible to get a single frame that conveys the entire story for whatever reason. This is where the context of the image becomes important – where is it placed (consider advertising, as an example)? What is the accompanying text? Are there other images that accompany it in sequence that frame it? Most importantly, is the image stronger with the accompanying material, or would it be better on its own?
Soldiers enforcing martial law. The outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal. Nikon D700, 24/1.4
4. Technical details
To help the photographer tell the story, there are a whole battery of techniques that can be used – extreme perspectives, HDR, long exposures, shallow DOF, etc. How well were they used? A good litmus test is whether you notice the technique first, or the subject and content of the image first: if the image just screams ‘HDR’ because of overlapping tonal zones, then it’s probably not a good photograph. However, if the composition wows you first, and then only you notice it must have been shot with a small sensor camera because of the perspective and extended depth of field, that’s a good thing. Equipment and techniques are tools, not the subject. It’s often difficult to create an image that doesn’t bear the signature of the tool used to create it – for instance, the perspective created by a fisheye lens or anything shot with the Leica 50/1 screams ‘Noctilux!’ because of the swirly bokeh. It’s a personal choice, because the specific property of the tool can be used to create a stronger image (for instance, the fantastically smooth rendition of out-of-focus areas in front of the subject delivered by the Zeiss ZF 85/1.4 Planar) – you just have to be careful not to overdo it.
The hardest part of this process is to apply it as a filter to your own work; that will be the subject of a future article. MT
Internal complexity. A. Lange & Sohne Datograph, two images. Nikon D700, 60/2.8 AFS macro
POTD: Photography is a team sport…and a commentary on competitions
April 18, 2012 by
Canon Photomarathon, Kuala Lumpur. Olympus Pen Mini E-PM1, ZD 45/1.8
This isn’t a recent event, but a group of photographers running around the streets of KL in a pack yesterday reminded me of this shot. The aim of the event is simple: it is a competition with several categories of prize, but everything must be shot on the day, in the same location, and you’ve got to wear the same damn shirt as everybody else. Editing is permitted, but everybody submits prints for judging, made on one of those dye sub printers.
Several thoughts:
1. There’s a HUGE market for photography equipment in Malaysia. This relatively small segment of the population was at least a thousand-strong, with easily $3,000 or more of gear for each person on average. There was more than one person going around with 1-series bodies and 300/2.8s.
2. It’s commendable that somebody bothers to organize something on this scale at all.
3. How on earth the organizers expect to see good results when you restrict the participants is ludicrous – it just makes you look bad because the level of photography is is low.
4. You’re not going to get any good reportage style images or candids when you’re milling around in a pack of hundreds or thousands of very conspicuous people. And more often than not, if you try something that looks out of the ordinary, a whole bunch of people will follow you immediately afterwards and it ceases to be unusual. And in the end the entire event just turns into an equipment masturbation session, with plenty of mine-is-bigger-than-yours. Or maybe that’s what the organizers want, so they can sell more cameras.
5. Postprocessing is as much part of the modern photography process as darkroom work was for film. So treat it as such, not an aberration or ‘cheat’. If you’re going to do something unnatural like HDR, it’ll be obvious to the judges (we hope).
6. Dye sub printers produce horrible color. Perhaps processing doesn’t matter because you won’t be able to appreciate the subtle tones anyway.
7. My final point is a criticism leveled at the organizers of almost all competitions, not just this one: yes, I can understand why you’d need limited rights to republish the image afterwards, but why on earth do all competitions result in the photographer having to surrender any and all rights to all images entered? Don’t the organizers realize that the really good photographers and pros will never agree to do this? I certainly would not enter my best images if I know I’ll have to surrender the rights to them. And if I’m not going to enter my best images, then why bother entering at all? If you’ve got a whole pool of people who think like this – and I know a lot of pros and talented amateurs do – then you’re just lowering the standard in general.
What I’d like to see – or perhaps even organize – is a competition based solely on merit; with no rights transferral or ownership, so we’d see people putting their best foot forward. Anonymous entry, so we don’t bias based on names or fame. Something to think about for the future, perhaps. MT
Photoessay: Hanoi, part one
April 17, 2012 by
Hanoi is one of the more interesting places I’ve been recently – these images were shot during downtime on a business trip about a year ago. It’s a fascinating mix of French colonial and Southeast Asian chaos; juxtapositions abound, and rich textures are plenty – making for great shooting. Part one, in color. I’m told Ho Chi Minh City is a lot more developed an interesting, but I haven’t had a chance to visit yet. MT
This set shot with a Nikon D700, 85/1.4G and 28-300/3.5-5.6 VR.
Quantum mechanics at work again: the scene changed because the subjects noticed the photographer.
Feels like France.
A vomit-inducing ride. Notice passenger on the right hand bike.
If only I knew what cards she was holding.
POTD: Hommage a Hiroshi Sugimoto
April 17, 2012 by
Seascape. Part of a full set coming up later. Olympus E-PM1 Pen Mini, 14-42 kit lens.
The sea is one of those odd subjects – like the sky – that’s seemingly full of infinite variation, but at the same time is instantly identifiable for what it is. I could take a thousand images of the sea, and none of them would be the same – but you’d know instantly that it was the sea. Even if the processing was the same, which I’d never do because it’d be boring.
What you don’t immediately notice here is that to achieve this perspective, the shot was taken at 14mm and just inches above the water, about 30m away from the beach and out to sea. (Interestingly, the EXIF data records the subject as being 4.3 billion meters away – I’d say that’s infinity, and in fact, further away than the moon.) Not exactly the least hazardous environment for photographic equipment! I suppose the only reason I even attempted this series was the relatively low cost of the equipment at risk; no way would I do it with an M9, for instance. I didn’t take anything heavier in the way of photographic equipment because it was meant to be a break. But at the same time, I don’t think I’d be able to truly relax unless I knew I had the ability to make the shot if the opportunity arose.
Sometimes we need time in a different physical location to reset our seeing process, if nothing else. MT
Kuala Lumpur reader meetup!
April 16, 2012 by
I’m thinking either Friday 4 May, in the evening – say 7.30pm – or Saturday 5 May, in the morning – say 1030am. Location: at the fountain outside Pavilion.
If you’d like to join, please vote for a time in the comments below. Thanks!
Singapore is still on, but I’m awaiting a final schedule from Leica before I post any dates/ times. MT
Contact sheets, and how to use them
April 16, 2012 by
This article is a lead on from my earlier review of the Magnum Contact Sheets book.
Contact sheets are a tool that date from the days of film: basically, the developed negatives are laid out directly on top of photographic printing paper, exposed for the appropriate duration, and fixed. They aren’t ‘proper’ prints per se, but a provide the photographer and editor a quick way of looking at all of the images in a sequence at once.
A printed (or from negatives) contact sheet would probably look something like this.
The photographer would then mark out his first and second cut images, followed by the verification from the editor; the chosen images would then be printed properly from the original negatives, with any tweaks required (such as dodging and burning, increasing exposure, changing print density etc.) With the analog photography process, that marked the end of the line for the photographer unless they also did their own printing – which was rare.
Interestingly, contact sheets were considered something of a luxury item for photographers because of the cost of producing them – especially when there were a lot of rolls of film to go through – most photographers just used a loupe and light table, or if desperate, held the negatives up to a window.
Contact sheets still remain a useful tool, not just because they allow you to see all images at once and judge their relative merits, but also because they force you to look at the distilled essence of an image: if a shot makes a compelling thumbnail, it’s generally also quite powerful at larger sizes. However, the reverse isn’t true: some shots need to be printed large to work well, landscapes, for instance. With images like this, contact sheets aren’t necessarily the best tool (unless you’re shooting medium format, or have larger thumbnails to work with).
Not shooting film? Don’t worry. We can still do the same thing today in the digital world. Photoshop itself has an automated tool (File>Automate>Contact Sheet) to create contact sheets of images; these are useful to print or send to clients. Alternatively, programs such as Bridge and Lightroom effectively let you create digital contact sheets which you can interact with on the fly:
Today’s contact sheet: screenshot of Adobe Bridge, thumbnail view.
What these programs let you do is a) see everything at once; b) see only the ones you wanted; c) use a magnifying loupe to check sharpness on a particular image or several images to compare; d) here’s the important bit: rate images. With Bridge and LR, Command-[number] lets you tag a star rating from 1-5; later on, you can filter by images rated at a certain level or above. And it works for raw files too, so long as the camera is supported by Adobe Camera Raw.
My current process is to keep all images from a shoot (except the obvious duds or unsuccessful experiments, which I bin in camera) and then conduct a first pass edit using the contact sheet view as soon as they’re in the computer – I’ll rate my images 3, 4 and 5*; 3* are kept because they’re useful for stock or remembering a particular event; 4* are good images and deliverable to clients; 5* are portfolio grade, best-of. The rest aren’t worth keeping and get binned. I’ll work on the 5* images first, and go down the quality ladder from there. That way, my best images are immediately ready to go, and if I don’t get a chance to make a final file (analogous to printing) of the 3*s, I can always come back later.
As photographers, we often fall into the trap of either being overcritical (bin all) or sentimental (bin none) – neither approach is good. For personal work, using contact sheets helps you to edit and see what worked and what didn’t (and by combination, what ideas might work in future if combined). On assignment, it lets you see the relative merits of each image and ensure that you’re only turning in the very best. Contact sheets are a powerful tool to help you achieve this – and the cost of printing is no longer really an excuse. MT
Look out for a future article on Editing: how to select images.
POTD: Reflections and reflections on reflection
April 16, 2012 by
Reflections. Leica V-Lux 3.
I still haven’t found a camera that can quite capture the luminous nature of reflections in glass – they all either seem to make it look too ‘solid’, or too transparent; I suspect it has something to do with the sensor filtration or the transmission properties of the lenses used.
Here’s a second interesting thought: why don’t camera makers match the spectral response of the sensor to that of the human eye, rather than limit it to an arbitrary range of wavelengths? Our eyes don’t work that way, and that’s probably why it’s so darned difficult to capture exactly what we see. MT
Photoessay: Abstracts in metal
April 15, 2012 by
In an earlier photoessay, I covered some of what goes on at a shipyard; today’s coda represents the outtakes that didn’t make it into the final deliverable for the client, but I shot as part of my body of personal work. There’s just so much abstract geometry and texture going on with the interplay of parts, metals, surfaces and finishes at the yard it’s impossible to ignore; I’m pretty sure some of these would make rather interesting large prints. MT
This set was shot with a Panasonic TZ3.
