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On imperfect conditions

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“It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

– Stephen King, “On Writing.”

I wrote in this earlier post on waterproof gear that bad weather often makes good photos. In fact, incorporating weather (read:bad weather, form a conventional viewpoint) in a photo is almost a requirement in some genres of modern photography. Indeed, Ansel Adams is arguably the most famous photographer ever mostly because he was ahead of his time by using weather elements in his landscapes. Nowadays, every landscape photographer does it.

However, it is not just imperfect weather conditions that promote creativity. Other challenges are also very effective in developing a photographer’s skill. For example, shooting in low light is challenging, but the results are usually worth the effort.

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Likewise, shooting sports action is difficult because of the fast, unpredictable movement of the athletes, lack of control over light, etc. For a while, I was using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II as my main camera and felt that the low framing rate and slow autofocus were really limiting the success rate of my shots. After upgrading to the unbelievably fast Canon EOS-1D X , I can definitely say that my experience with the 5d Mark II was very valuable, as it taught me to determine the characteristic moments of the action, whether it is basketball, soccer, rugby or swimming. If I didn’t have the sense of those decisive, characteristic moments for each sport, it would have been tempting to just let the 1Dx rip at 12 frames per second from the beginning of each play until the end. This would have left me with tens of thousands of poor images, among which it would have been impossible to find a single good one, that would tell the story of the game.

More photos here: http://ow.ly/Ci0o7


So in order to improve at photography, I try to:

  • Shoot challenging subjects;
  • Shoot in difficult light and poor weather;
  • Practice with whatever gear we have to find out the limits of a particular piece of equipment – it makes the new gear, when it becomes available, much more effective.

 

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Using crop tool to improve composition

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Often, it is not possible to perfectly compose the photo at the moment of shooting. This is particularly true for action photography, but it is quite common in most real-life situations when we don’t have total control of the model, the background and/or have limited time to take the shot.

Post-processing can dramatically improve a photo, and one adjustment that has the highest impact is cropping. Cropping affects composition, which is the most fundamental element of a picture. It allows us to emphasize the subject and remove non-essential or distracting parts. In Adobe Lightroom, the crop tool located at the very top of tool panel in the “Develop” module. This is not a coincidence. The tools are laid out in the order of the recommended (read: common) post-processing workflow, where the most important, high-impact adjustments are made first.

Recently, I have been taking increasingly more pictures with my iPhone. Before sharing them online, I often make some rough adjustments using the editing mode of the built-in Photos app. Cropping is usually one of them. Here is what I typically do to improve composition:

  1. Straighten horizon.
  2. Cut off unnecessary/distracting elements that do not contribute to the story I am trying to tell in the picture. When in doubt – crop tighter.
  3. Try to use “the rule of thirds” (position the mail element of the picture at the intersection of imaginary vertical and horizontal lines that divide the width and the height of the picture into thirds). for example, in the image above, the face of the fisherman is positioned 1/3 of the frame height from the top of the frame and 1/3 of the frame width from the right side.
  4. Crop the image so that any diagonal lines intersect a corner of the photo – it helps leading the viewer’s eyes into the frame. Again, in the image above, the strings lead from the bottom left corner of the frame towards the middle. Also, the diagonal planks on the hull of the boat lead from the bottom right corner.

Note: It is a good idea to keep these points in mind during the shoot itself to avoid excessive cropping in post-processing, which reduces the number of pixels (i.e. resolution) in the final photo.

Recently, I was taking headshots of the faculty members of my daughter’s dance school for their website, and looked into various ways of cropping the portraits. One rule of thumb for cropping a headshot is that cutting off the top of the model’s head makes the portrait more appealing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this kind of close crop emphasizes the person’s eyes and make her/him appear engaged with the viewer.

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At the restaurant: dealing with low-light conditions

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Restaurant is a common setting for a group portrait, because dining out often commemorates a special occasion, as in the photo above – last Saturday we went out to celebrate my wife’s birthday. Using flash is not a good idea for several obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. In addition to disturbing other customers, a flash would completely change the character of the lighting, so capturing the ambiance would be out of the question.

Restaurants are typically dimly lit, so low light performance of the camera is very important. This characteristic cannot be narrowed down to one particular specification. It depends on the lens, the sensor and the firmware. Cell phone cameras cannot compete with DSLRs in this regard, so if you must use a cell phone, the first thing to adjust is your expectations.

If you choose to bring a DSLR, a fast lens (f2.8 or lower) is a must. Also, the lens-camera combination should ideally be relatively compact. In the Canon world, a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM is an excellent lens for this situation. Sigma also makes a good quality 35mm f1.4 lens (Sigma 340101 35mm F1.4 DG HSM), which is quite a bit less expensive. (By the way, these are just recommendations based on my experience, and although the links are affiliated by Amazon, they are not sponsored in any other way). In fact, compactness would be a very good reason to choose a cell phone over a pro camera – after all, it is a dinner first and a photo opportunity second. Having said this, I shot this photo with a Canon EOS-1D X, which is anything but compact. My family is probably getting used to me lugging a huge camera. I’d like to think that the photos are worth it. (Still, I am waiting impatiently for my new iPhone 6 plus, with its image-stabilized camera…)

Here is a roundup of the best cameras for low-light conditions compiled by Adorama (as of Summer 2014). A colleague has recently used their top choice, the Sony Alpha a7S, to photograph a fluorescent helium jet seeded with acetone in near darkness in our lab at UVic. But that hardly qualifies as a common photography situation, so it’s a subject for another story.

As a more general resource for handling low-light situations, check out this book: Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography with Available Light.

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Window light

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Window light is ideal for indoor portrait photography. In fact, some light modifiers (e.g. umbrellas or soft boxes) used in studio lighting setups are designed to replicate this natural lighting condition. There are several good reasons for this.

First, a window is a very large light source, compared to the subject, which results in a diffused, flattering light with soft shadows (smooth transitions between the lighted and shaded areas). A general rule that applies here is this: large light source (e.g. cloudy sky) = soft shadows; small light source (e.g. uncovered light bulb) = harsh shadows.

Second, the colour temperature of the daylight matches that of a daylight-balanced (read: standard) flash, which makes it very easy to use a fill-in flash without having to worry about correcting the skin tones in post-processing. A caveat here is that the shoot is happening close to the middle of the day, not during the “golden hours” around sunrise and sunset that are so desirable for outdoor portraits. So, here is a tip: schedule an indoor photo shoot during the day, if there is an access to a large window.

Third, there is something “right” about the height of the light source represented by a typical window – it is neither too high nor too low to cause unnatural shadow patterns on the subject’s face.

Because of these nice features of window light, I always try to take advantage of it when my daughter is getting ready to go out and is looking out of the window in our hallway. These moments are fleeting, so here is another tip: experiment with camera setting beforehand and save them as a custom preset if your camera allows it. (Here is how to find custom functions in a Canon EOS camera.)

In the photo above, my daughter is going to Raffi‘s concert, and to a dance class in the image below.

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Young athletes

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I was taking photos of Vikes children’s summer camps couple of weeks ago and noticed how wide is the range of athletic abilities of the kids of the same age. Boys and girls, who are about ten years old, are particularly different.

At the Boulder rock climbing gym at Stelly’s Crossroad, most of the boys noticeably struggled to climb much higher than about twice their own height. I must say, I clearly remember that I was the same at that age – any sort of climbing was not my strong suit. (Come to think of it, I might still be the same now…) However, some girls from the same age group literally walked up the climbing wall, all the way to the 50-foot-high ceiling. Clearly, girls have an advantage in terms of power-to-mass ratio!

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Interestingly, things were just the opposite in the soccer camp. With very few exceptions, little girls were quite unbalanced when striking the ball – from the kendo background, I could clearly see that their weight shifted to the back foot as they ran up to the ball and also during the defending drills (for the older girls). On the other hand, most of the boys could kick through the ball quite confidently, keeping their balance throughout the motion.

Correction (few days after): now after looking at the photos, I can say I was wrong about the soccer: boys and girls look about equal – most are quite clumsy. Image below is an exception – this little dude was amazing!

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On sharing

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My daughter is three years old and has a strong sense of personal property, typical for this age. About two weeks ago, she gave us a vivid illustration of the fact that sharing, as a concept, is a two-way interaction.

On the way to the Beacon Hill park, we realized that we left our daughter’s sandbox toys at home. She was a little upset, but we told her that there were many other interesting things at the park – swings, slides, a zip line, etc. She would just need to share them with other kids. The virtue of sharing is not taken for granted at her age, to say the least, so it took quite a bit of convincing before she agreed that sharing is a good thing to do.

As we came to the playground, she saw somebody else’s plastic bucket and toys in the sandbox and immediately suggested: “Let’s share those!” How can you argue with this? After all, sharing is good!

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Disneyland

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The ASME PVP conference in Anaheim is over. It was my first major organizing effort. Everything went well, but I must say, I am happy that it is finished. My wife and daughter came with me to the trip, and we are now enjoying a week-long vacation in Venice Beach, CA.

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My daughter was talking about flying in an airplane for weeks before the trip, and she actually enjoyed the flights – a rare (I suppose) case of expectations matching the reality. At the Hyatt hotel in Anaheim, we received an upgrade to a “fireworks view” room, from where the daily fireworks shows over the Disneyland are visible. In this case, the reality proved to be too intense for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Our little one is not crazy about loud noises, to say the least. So, by popular request from the audience, curtains were drawn over the fireworks shows.

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On Friday after the conference, we went to the Disneyland. It was the first visit ever for me, and the third for the ladies, who went there two times while I was at the conference. After all, apparently, it is the only attraction in Anaheim. Our daughter is a bit too young for most of the rides, but she enjoyed visiting the princesses, the Goofy’s house, a play at the Royal Theatre.

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Photography-wise, I tried to follow the advice of Jim Harmer of Improve Photography to take images that have personal meaning and emotional content (he gave an example of a close-up of a child’s sweaty forehead taken while climbing the Eiffel tower over a cliché full-figure portrait with the tower in the background). I took a few pictures of my daughter, all with a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens, mostly wide open. The colours in the Disneyland are so bright and open, that even when the surroundings are completely blurred out.

Each day during this trip is ending by either my wife or me reading a book on an iPad to our daughter before bed. “Varezhka”, based on an old Russian cartoon, is the current favourite.

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