Sat 8 Dec 2007

Photography Thoughts

Having bought myself a DSLR camera that was well beyond my abilities and intellect (a Nikon D70) a few years ago, I've been spending a fair amount of time trying to get better at this whole photography thing. Taken many photos, most of which are unpublishable. Still haven't conquered my fear of taking photos of actual people, but that's for the future.

Recently, though, things have started to come together. I read a number of good reviews of Bryan Peterson's book Understanding Exposure and was given it as a present recently. I've now read it carefully a few times and am slowly managing to put his ideas into practice and, most importantly, using my camera in something other than P mode. Also, following on from some articles (and their associated excellent comments) at Tim Bray's blog (such as this recent one), I bought myself a fixed length lens (a Nikor 50mm f/1.8 lens for my birthday and have been trying to do more with less flexibility in the field of view.

After the cut, a few thoughts on some recent experiments. Mostly as notes for myself in the future...

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(All of these photos link back to their respective pages on Flickr, which has all the EXIF data, if you're interested. Also, I've just noticed that Flickr's default link text no longer has the title set to the silly Photo Sharing, but instead uses the photo's title. Thankyou, Yahoo!)

For technical reasons, this is probably the best of the bunch. I wanted to get both stuffed animals into the picture, so getting a sharp focus was a little tricky (the animal on the pillar is a little fuzzy, since I focused on the snake). The hard part was the lighting. That big window near the top was making things interesting in unpleasant ways. In the end (after a couple of false attempts), I did this one fully manually: fixed the aperture, used the camera's exposure indicator to get the shutter speed roughly correct and then slowed down the shutter by a couple of stops so that it was more exposed, without blowing out the highlights from the window. Amazingly, it worked. This photo also shows a problem with the fixed length lens (I was using the Nikor here). Without standing outside the building — and let's keep in mind that I was one floor up at this point — I couldn't move back any further, so framing the shot was only just possible. At the moment, I'm not mentally creative enough to leave my variable length lens at home, because I'm struggling too much to always find a shot with the 50mm one.

[Updated: As the EXIF information on the photo tells me, apparently I wasn't using the Nikor lens here. I did take a whole bunch with the Nikor, but now I remember that I switched to the variable length lens for a couple of shots at the end of the sequence and this was one of those. I had previously been struggling to compose the shot with the NIkor, so the rest of the above paragraph still makes sense.]

Part of a long sequence of not particularly special images, trying to get a feel for the field of view offered by the 50mm lens. The colours really were pretty much all brown like that; a really nice early winter look. Previously, I've noticed a lot of my photos were taken by some drunk who couldn't stand up straight, so I've started working with the grid lines in the Nikon's viewfinder turned on (it divides the view into quarters, rather than thirds, though, which is a little distracting). It's helping me at least keep up and down vertical. I remember this was still a tricky shot, since most of the lines were almost horizontal, but only the water was truly level. So it's not quite straight and I can't really pretend the whole effect is perspective induced, since the whole bridge and waterfall section were 30 or 40 metres away.

Low light photography is still something I need to work on. I have an external flash for my camera, but it's such a pain to carry around that I don't take it out much. So this shot was taken with the on-camera flash. I'm not drastically unhappy with this, since I caught the subjects I wanted to. Earlier that day I'd switched lenses to the 18-70mm lens that came standard with the D70, which was fortuitous, since there's no way I would have fit that much activity into the shot from where I was sitting at the table (with a wall behind me) with the 50mm lens.

My concern here is that I need to remember that I can crank up the ISO setting in low-light situations. There's a whole lot of interesting stuff in the background of this shot. However, it's all swallowed up by the darkness because Elmer Fudd left the camera's ISO setting at 200. I've made this mistake a lot in the past, too, and it's a lesson I haven't learnt yet. Dave Llopis pointed out a similar brain faillure on my part in this shot where I was intentionally trying to capture the background and had left the flash off.

Interestingly, ISO considerations is probably one of the weakest points of the Bryan Peterson book: he mentions it briefly, but doesn't give it nearly the same treatment as the aperture and shutter speed inter-relation. So my brain is possibly too full of new information to also remember ISO settings right now.

With summer here now, I'm either going to have to get my ass out of bed earlier if I want to take local photographs — something I should do more often — or start learning to pay more attention to where the sun is. I'll probably try to retake this photo at some point with a longer lens, since I really like the water pattern, but the sun reflecting off the pool at the bottom gives too many over-blown highlights that ruin it a bit for me. Nice that the light outside (this shot was taken around one in the afternoon) is so bright on a clear day I can use 1/1600s for a shutter speed and still get over-exposed bits. You really need to view a large version of this shot to see the bits I like effectively. More work needed here, but this will be a reference for the future.

Finally, I'll note that photographing books is harder than it sounds. You can't lie them flat without breaking the spine (don't even think about it!) and when they're not flat, shadows go everywhere. This shot, from a Cherie Priest novel, was one of about 15 shots I took and none were particularly satisfactory. Using the flash blew out the subtle background on the page. Using natural light or any number of adjustments to the blinds left distracting shadows. I don't have a tripod, so I didn't have much flexibility in decreasing the shutter speed as I wanted the text to be readable. I thought this was one that was a combination of the external flash reflecting off the ceiling with some light from the window, but the EXIF data doesn't support my memory, so I can't recall what the eventual setup was. There's not post-image enhancement, though, I remember that; I'm going through an "what you take is what you get" phase for a bit on that front.

And I know I said "finally" above, but I can't resist...

That f/1.8 setting on the new lens is fun. If only I had an actual use for this, such as being able to take pictures of people in the foreground. Need to harness this power for good somehow.

Topics: photography