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In role-playing computer games (RPGs), the term “special ability” refers to a set of skills of a character, that is unique and cannot be acquired by other characters. In real life, people often develop special abilities due to their environment. Sometimes, these abilities are physical, for example, increased lung capacity and endurance of ethnic groups that live high in the mountains (e.g. Sherpas). In other cases, these are special skills, like horse-riding of Mongols in the middle ages.

Many successful professional photographers suggest looking into one’s own environment to develop a unique skill or vision. The advantage of doing so is that we already have some expertise related to your work, daily activities or surroundings. What remains is translating this expertise into photography and focussing on it.

In my case, working at the university, I have an opportunity to photograph sports competitions, in which our student-athletes participate. Doing so also supports the students and the athletic program, which makes me feel good. The other direction is photographing fluids in motion. It is related to my research in experimental fluid dynamics. In fact, exploring the artistic side of flow visualization has been on my mind for a while. One of the examples that I give in my class when talking about history of fluid mechanics is Leonardo da Vinci, who used his artistic capacity for observation to propose a surprisingly useful analogy for turbulent flows: he described them to be similar to human hair, moving in the wind – large waves carry smaller curls and kinks with them.

I think the relationship between the environment and the special skill or ability it creates is a two-way interaction, as an engineer would say. The special skill acquired because of the environment enables one to make a fuller, more complete and creative use of this environment. In case of the Mongols, for example, living in the steppes made them great horse-rider, which in turn, enabled them conquer the steppes (and much of the known world) under Genghis Khan.

I wrote earlier about the value of imposing certain obstacles, overcoming which help develop photographic skills and, generally, a keener sense of the process at hand. This approach is similar to an artist’s using a limited palette of colors to show the essence of an originally multi-color scene.

Having fewer choices has other important benefits, as Tim Ferris explained in his hugely popular “The 4-Hour Workweek.” I believe it was he, who coined the term “choice-limited lifestyle.” The key concept here is that attention, i.e. ability to focus on something, is a limited commodity, which is required not only for getting things done, but also for appreciating the present moment (e.g. food, music, works of art, company of other people). Making decisions, even good ones, effectively consumes attention, which becomes unavailable for future decisions during the rest of the day (or until some recovery has taken place and the attention budget is restored). Hence, there is a dilemma of making the best decision, but likely being dissatisfied after having invested a lot of attention into it, or making a sub-optimal decision, but never having to second-guess it.

This is a long preamble, but I believe the principle of choice-limiting directly applies to photography. Modern cameras, from entry level (e.g. Canon EOS Rebel T5) to top-of-the-line ones (e.g. Canon EOS-1D X), offer virtually unlimited number of combinations of shooting modes and settings. Rather than spending time, for example, trying to decide on the ideal priority between releasing the shutter and obtaining focus, which can potentially lead to missing the shot altogether, it is better to determine, through systematic experimentation, which few combinations of settings work reasonably well in typical situations, programming them as custom functions, and then focus on shooting. Likewise, in post-processing, it is important to stop tweaking the adjustments of a particular photo and move on to another one. After a certain point, spending more time working on a photo, debating various possibilities for improving it further, will make the whole process progressively less satisfying.

At the end of the year, I move my old photos to external storage, which is a chance to look through the last year’s folders. I certainly have some images that I like, but that are still unpublished on the web. Mostly, however, my Flickr photostream is a good representation of the photos that I like most. Among them, the ones in this post are my personal favourites, in no particular order.

Happy New Year!

Specializing on a particular subject in photography has tremendous benefits in terms development of skills and personal branding. However, it is also important to regularly shoot new subjects. The insight from trying new things can enhance the main area of activity.

For me personally, shooting sports, which I started doing a few years ago, was a drastic departure from landscape and stock travel photography that I was doing up to that point. Skills that I acquired by shooting action enabled me to change my approach to travel photography – instead of focussing exclusively on locations, I began actively including people in the photos. In fact, this changed my view of travel itself. After all, human interactions, including visual communication through photographs, are the fundamental basis of our daily activity. Changing the environment in which these interactions occur, which is the essence of travel, add different flavour to human relationships. I believe that capturing this local flavour of the human element is key for adding emotion content to the photos.

From a purely technical standpoint, learning to compose the image quickly and to be decisive in taking the shot, which are important skills for a sports photographer, is very useful for taking portraits of children.

In my personal projects, I aim to add variety to the shots through consciously pushing my comfort limits by using new techniques (both during the shoot and in post-processing) and exploring new subjects.

One of my current research projects is related to hydrogen infrastructure safety. We study how hydrogen flames behave and how large they become if the gas leaks from a storage tank or a pipeline.

Recently, our industrial partners tried to photograph a hydrogen flame and found that it was not easy to capture the details of the flame because the fuel (hydrogen, in this case) burned very cleanly, so there were not many particles in the flame to “mark” it. This challenge is not unique to the scientific experiments, but is common in conventional photography when fire is involved. So here are some notes on photographing flames.

Including fire in a photo can add dramatic impact, because we, as humans, have a deep emotional connection to it. I wrote before about shooting portraits by a bonfire, but when the fire itself is the subject, different considerations and camera settings apply.

How easy it is to see (and therefore, photograph) the flame depends on the fuel. Generally, for artistic photography, we prefer fuels that do not burn cleanly, but instead “volatize” tiny unburnt particles into the flame, which serve as flow tracers and give the flame its color. Precise color of the flame depends on many factors involving fuel-air mixing, but generally, burning wood, paper or natural textiles give a warm, yellow-orange flame color, while gas- and alcohol-based fuels burn with bluish color. As I mentioned earlier, hydrogen flames are nearly invisible (fortunately, they are not common enough to be a popular subject).

Wood fire is quite easy to photograph, because it emits a lot of smoke and unburnt particles. To capture the details of the flame, a dark, uniform background and a fast shutter speed (shorter than 1/250 sec) work best.

Sometimes, it is best to focus on the traces of sparks (e.g. in fireworks), in which case, I usually take long exposures (2 – 10 sec) in bulb (B) mode.

Smoke is an interesting subject too. It usually requires an additional light source to capture the details of a smoke plume.

When fire is an important part of the photo, but there are other elements in the frame, the main challenge is the high dynamic range in the scene that may be beyond what the camera’s sensor can capture. In this case, I expose for the fire, which is usually the brightest element, and add more light to the other subjects using flashes or in post-processing.

All the things that are worth doing, take time. (I’d like to credit someone for this quote, but too many people said it.) Photography for me is a part-time pursuit, so finding time to do it seriously has not been trivial. However, it hasn’t been particularly difficult either. How can this be? Actually, photography is naturally integrated in most of my activities, both within and outside work.

The main part of my work is academic research in fluid mechanics. In my lab, we use flow visualization (photography of fluid flows). While the goals are far from artistic (we measure forces on submerged objects, etc.) and the techniques are highly specialized (we use lasers as light sources, for example), the basic concepts are the same as in conventional photography. So there is considerable cross-pollination between my interests in experimental fluid mechanics and taking pictures.

Family activities are even more easily connected to picture-taking. Photography gives focus to our vacation trips. It keeps us closer to our families and friends all over the World. Sharing my photography skills with friends feels good, because there are not many other options to give something as a gift, without buying it. Photographs are something of value that I can create myself. Hopefully, this makes them more personal as a gift. So doing photography while spending time with family and friends does not take away from personal time, but enhances it.

It is the same with my practice of kendo. Taking pictures of matches and practices is not only interesting from photography point of view, but also allows me to study kendo more deeply. In fact, I wrote about balancing these perspectives in this post.

I believe that if we look at our activities closely enough, we find that there is no such thing as multitasking. Having said this, we do variety of things in our lives, and sometimes certain activities, skills or interests enhance our experiences in other areas.

Selecting my favourite kendo photos for a photo contest turned out to be more difficult than I thought. First of all, I realized that I did not have that many photos of kendo. This is largely because practicing this Japanese martial art (any martial art, for that matter) and photographing it are mutually exclusive. Still, I have a few shots from tournaments, taken after I had been quickly eliminated from competition.

Keeping in mind that the goal of the contest is to produce a calendar for fundraising, I was looking for high-impact shots, not necessarily those that would be interesting from the standpoint of studying kendo. Also, I wanted to submit a uniform-looking selection, so I decided to convert all submitted shots to black-and-white (or monochrome, to me more precise). Actually, I found that a present called “Yellowed 2” from Nik’s SilverFX 2 plugin works well for kendo photos (after removing the image border).

Converting to monochrome also serves two other purposes: it reduces appearance of noise and it removes distractions from the background. Kendo matches are usually held in school gymnasia, which are painted in colours that are quite horrible for artistic photography. Also, it is next to impossible to avoid the spectators in the background, who wear clothes of all sorts of colours. Even is they are out of focus because of the shallow depth of field (I used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens wide open), the distracting colours are still there. Converting the photos to B&W makes the background colours uniform, which enhances apparent subject isolation.

So my contest submission is done. Would it be nice to win? Sure! After all, the first prize is a ticket to the World Kendo Championship in Tokyo. Wouldn’t it be nice to say: “I was selected to go to the WKC!” Oh, the irony… As I said, kendo photography and kendo practice are mutually exclusive.

The choice between natural light and flashes is an important decision in photography. Sometimes, the choice is easy – the flash is simply not allowed in many venues, such as museums, or at certain sporting events, such as swimming and martial arts competitions.

There are many good reasons for foregoing the flash: it disturbs the participants of the event, the referees, the audience, interferes with the photo-finish equipment and destroys the ambiance of the natural light. Another advantage of using just the natural light is the unmatched flexibility due to the  lack of strobes, light stands, light modifiers, cables and triggers (here is an example of a starter kit, but there is not limit to how complex a lighting setup can become). Being nimble is particularly important for sports photography. Often, it makes a difference between capturing the key shot that tells the story of the game or missing it.

The obvious downside of natural light photography is, potentially, high noise levels in the photos. Fortunately, modern DSLRs, such as Canon EOS-1D X or a more affordable Canon EOS 5D Mark III (Nikon’s counterparts are Nikon D4S and Nikon D810) handle high ISO very well, i.e. with fairly limited noise. Besides, noise can be somewhat controlled in post-processing.

On the other hand, the advantage of using strobes is not only the additional amount of light that they provide, but also total control of the lighting conditions that they enable. As a friend of mine remarked recently, using studio lights makes one learn about the light much faster than using the natural light alone. To me, this is a sufficiently good reason to use the lights, despite their cost, the inconvenience and even despite occasionally missing a shot. On the balance, I think both flash and natural light photography have their place, and both have been incredible fun to learn.