Archive for the ‘How-to’ Category

How Taking Pictures This Past Winter Improved My Photography

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Since I started get­ting seri­ous about pho­tog­ra­phy, I have fol­lowed a rel­a­tively pre­dictable pat­tern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shoot­ing for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found win­ter to be an inspir­ing time for any of the kinds of pho­tog­ra­phy that I like. I don’t have a stu­dio, so almost all of my shoot­ing is out­doors. If that sounds like a bunch of excuses, well, it’s true. More than any­thing else, I think I found win­ter a very unin­spir­ing time. I always thought that in win­ter, I would sit indoors keep­ing my toes warm and instead work on my writ­ing. The sum­mer is for walks through the nature areas with my macro lens, doc­u­ment­ing the odd lives of insects.

That’s what I thought, until this past win­ter, when I became deter­mined to break the cycle and keep using my cam­era past October. The result has been a con­sid­er­able step up in the qual­ity of my land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy in par­tic­u­lar, but in gen­eral, I feel that the effort has improved me in sev­eral ways.

Realization: Cold can Be Beautiful

The first effect that this had was forc­ing me to find beauty in land­scapes and objects that I do not ordi­nar­ily find beau­ti­ful. The color green is per­haps my favorite, fol­lowed by red. I’ve never much cared for the cold blues, but I felt that it was lim­it­ing me to be so restric­tive in the color palette that I liked.

Out here, you don’t get much choice. If you don’t like cold blues and grays, you won’t find much to pho­to­graph in the winter.

I still have my pref­er­ences for vibrant greens, but I’ve learned how to see the beauty in ice and snow bet­ter in the past win­ter than all the years before added up. To get good at this, I had to really stop trust­ing my auto-​​exposure meter in the cam­era and learn to take shots and adjust my expo­sure as much as a stop up or down. Snow turns out an ugly grey on auto most of the time because of the nature of cam­era sen­sors and their pref­er­ence for 18% gray (some say 12%.  Either way, it makes shoot­ing white sub­jects harder). This means you need to force the sen­sor to bump it up in a pre­dom­i­nantly snowy scene. You can some­times fix this in Lightroom, but I’m try­ing more and more to get it just right in the cam­era, or as close as I can.

After play­ing around with the tech­ni­cal aspects of shoot­ing in the win­ter, I real­ized that I had some really fan­tas­tic moun­tain vis­tas I could be cap­tur­ing, so I started to take land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy more seri­ously than ever before. Which leads me to the next point.

It Forced Me to Get Up Before the Sun

At a cer­tain point, cold is cold. And with my new­found inter­est in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, I real­ized, the best light really is dur­ing the “golden hour.” There’s an hour after sun­rise and an hour before sun­set where you get a nice, warm, low-​​angle and dif­fuse light. The qual­ity is unmatched by nearly any other light as far as land­scapes go. I’ve known this for a long time, but I had always had a really hard time moti­vat­ing myself to be up early enough to be in posi­tion for the sun­rise, espe­cially in the winter.

So cold is cold, and if I’m going to be out in it, being out in it a lit­tle ear­lier doesn’t really hurt much. Because I was work­ing on an east coast sched­ule, I found it very easy to rise around 5:30 or 6 AM to be out in the moun­tains in time for the great light.

Being Up Early Makes Animals Easier to Photograph

If you go for a drive in a national park in the mid­dle of the day, you’re going to see some wildlife, but it’s going to be pretty inac­tive. Grazers will be hun­kered down chew­ing cud and won’t make for great shots. You’ll be incred­i­bly lucky to see a preda­tor. And of course, the light stinks, so pho­tograph­ing any­thing results in harsh shad­ows and a gen­er­ally unpleas­ing look, unless it’s really cloudy and you’ve got a sky that has turned into a giant soft­box, but even then, if you want any sky at all in your shot, it’s going to look pretty bland if everything’s just white from the hori­zon up.

Shooting land­scapes in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn, I real­ized, like a dummy, that the elk herds were most approach­able and most inter­est­ing around the golden hour as well. I began to fol­low a pat­tern of shoot­ing the sun­rise for land­scape work, and then mov­ing down to lower ele­va­tions to set up and pho­to­graph elk.

Again, shoot­ing wildlife with a tele­photo in low-​​light con­di­tions? Not easy. Technically, I had an incred­i­bly hard time get­ting a decent expo­sure in focus. I had to learn how to wield ISO bet­ter. I hate shoot­ing at any­thing other than 100 ISO, hon­estly, but my tele­photo isn’t fast enough to make good use of the light. Even with in-​​body sta­bi­liza­tion, I had to learn bet­ter meth­ods of brac­ing my cam­era from the car, and I was forced to finally spend a lit­tle money on a good, decent carbon-​​fiber tri­pod. The legs can be locked into 4 dif­fer­ent posi­tions, it’s light weight, and it allows for a more sophis­ti­cated ball-​​head mount.

Shooting in less than ideal con­di­tions really does a lot to make you think about how to get bet­ter. I spent a cou­ple of trips and came back with noth­ing remotely good. Under exposed, blurry from cam­era shake, or worse. I could have been dis­cour­aged, but I loved being out there so much (annoy­ing tourists not with­stand­ing), that I kept at it, and slowly my work began to improve.

In the end…

In the end, I feel like I’ve taken my tech­ni­cal skills up a notch. I’ve learned to uti­lize nat­ural light bet­ter than before, and I don’t trust my cam­era to give me the best expo­sure auto­mat­i­cally in every sit­u­a­tion. I’ve learned bet­ter meth­ods for sta­bi­liz­ing my cam­era by hand, and when to increase the ISO to get more light. I learned a lit­tle bit about ani­mal behav­ior and how to take advan­tage of it, but I still have a lot to learn about wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy (and a lot of time I need to invest into it).

Would I have learned some of these things if I had put up the cam­era in the fall and waited for spring? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have learned them as quickly and in the same com­bi­na­tion. Some I might not have learned at all, and my goal is to be a well-​​rounded photographer.

Pushing myself out­side my com­fort zone for a win­ter paid off in spades. I hope that some of the pho­tographs I’ve included in this post have helped drive home that point. All of these were taken in this past winter.

Do you have a story to share regard­ing how push­ing your­self out­side your com­fort zone helped you improve at some­thing? Share your story with us in the comments.

Diamonds in the Sky: Free Hard SF Anthology

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The anthol­ogy of astron­omy sto­ries I’ve been work­ing on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally com­pleted and avail­able: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthol­ogy is free and you can go there now and read the sto­ries, most of which are orig­i­nal but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award win­ning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astron­omy and should have some edu­ca­tional value, but are hope­fully first and fore­most sim­ply enter­tain­ing and good qual­ity sto­ries. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a pub­lic edu­ca­tion and out­reach effort, and I’d like to reach as many read­ers as pos­si­ble so please spread the word!

via Mike Brotherton: SF Writer.

I did the web­site for Diamonds over a year ago.  This one has been a long time in the works, but it’s now finally live!

Digital Photography Tips: David Pogue’s, and Lifehacker’s, and now mine

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lifehacker has a col­lec­tion of starter pho­tog­ra­phy tips today that you might find use­ful.  They use David Pogue’s tricks as a jump­ing off point.  I’m going to assume you go off and look at these and either find them use­ful or you find them too basic.  Now here are some pho­tog­ra­phy tips of my own to try and get you shoot­ing like a semi-​​pro.

Shoot in Aperture Priority Mode

Your cam­era prob­a­bly has a mil­lion modes that you may or may not have played with.  Some might be icons, and some are prob­a­bly just let­ters like “A”, “P” and the dreaded “M.”  Your cam­era may not have any of those set­tings.  If that’s the case, I sug­gest you find one that does.  They’re get­ting cheaper and cheaper.  So what is aper­ture pri­or­ity mode?  It’s prob­a­bly “A” on your mode dial, to start.

I’m not going to bore you with the sci­ence of lenses and light and irises.  Aperture mode is 50% of what you need to make your pho­tos look more pro­fes­sional.  You know how nice pro­fes­sional pic­tures iso­late the sub­ject, and how every­thing in the back­ground is blurry?  But you know how your snap­shots are tack sharp all the way through? The dif­fer­ence is basi­cally aper­ture.  Select aper­ture mode and dial it down as far as you can (aper­ture is mea­sured in some­thing called f-​​stops).  The lower the num­ber, the more blur you will have and the nar­rower your focal range is.  Really low set­tings and you could take a pic­ture of someone’s face where their eyes are in focus and their ears are not.   I am almost always shoot­ing at the small­est aper­ture set­ting on my cam­era.  Sometimes I dial it up if I want to increase the depth of field.

To get even more blur, zoom in.  Now I mean opti­cal zoom.  Turn off dig­i­tal zoom if your cam­era has it. It sucks.  Anyway, this decreases the depth of field even more.  So, you want to iso­late your sub­ject and get nice blur, zoom in, turn on aper­ture mode, and dial aper­ture to the small­est num­ber you can get.  Instant qual­ity boost.

Another good rea­son to shoot in aper­ture mode?  You need less light to expose a photo.  Less light means faster shut­ter speed which means there’s much less chance your pic­ture will turn out blurry because it’s impos­si­ble to truly hold a cam­era still.  The greater your focal range (the far­ther you can zoom in) the faster your shut­ter speed needs to be to avoid the dreaded cam­era shake.  For instance, I shoot with a 300mm lens often, and even with my camera’s image sta­bi­liza­tion, I try to shoot at no less than 1/​600th of a sec­ond, and even then, I get blurry shots sometimes.

Find your ISO set­ting and turn it up when indoors

Have you ever tried to take pic­tures in your house and found that the pic­tures turned out either under­ex­posed or blurry, or worst of all, you used the on-​​camera flash and every­one looks dazed?  We gen­er­ally light our homes pretty dimly as far as pho­tog­ra­phy goes.  There’s some num­bers I could throw at you that explain the aver­age light­ing as it relates to cam­eras, but who cares.  Here’s how you get bet­ter indoor pic­tures quickly, but at a sacrifice:

Your cam­era most likely has a set­ting for some­thing called ISO.  Remember how film had speeds?  Well, ISO on cam­era is about the same thing, only the rea­sons for it are dif­fer­ent.  The higher your ISO, the more sen­si­tive your camera’s sen­sor is to the light.  Try boost­ing to ISO 400 or even ISO 800 when shoot­ing in your house.

The down­side of boost­ing ISO is that you get noise.  Noise looks good in black and white.  It sucks in dig­i­tal pic­tures and often is “chroma” noise which means it’s all kinds of dif­fer­ent col­ors.  It’s up to you to decide how much noise you can stand in your pic­tures.  Try tak­ing some shots at dif­fer­ent ISOs and look at them to get a feel.  Figure out your hard limit and never go above it.  I never shoot about ISO 400 if I can avoid it.  My par­tic­u­lar cam­era does not han­dle low light con­di­tions very well.  But some­times, noise is much bet­ter than under­ex­posed.  And if you can afford the bazil­lion dol­lars for some spe­cial soft­ware, you can strip out a lot of that noise (although even those really expen­sive pro­grams have their limits).

Forget Everything I Just Said and Use a Tripod

Cheap tripods cost $30 or so.  Buy one if you want to take pic­tures indoors often and don’t want to have to shell out for a hot-​​shoe flash (you can snap off the on-​​camera flash for all that piece of crap is worth).  Put your cam­era on the tri­pod and let your shut­ter speed be what­ever it needs to be.  Now, if peo­ple are mov­ing, expect the back­ground to be in focus and them to be blurry.  This can be a neat effect some­times.  I like shoot­ing peo­ple danc­ing this way. But basi­cally, the goal is to get the cam­era sta­ble when in low light because you’re going to have longer shut­ter times which means the pic­ture is more prone to pick­ing up your palsy.  Not that you have any, but every cam­era thinks you do.

Don’t want to carry a tri­pod around?  There are other options, like the poor man’s tri­pod and goril­lapods that I can go into in the future.  You could just sit the cam­era down on a shelf or some­thing, that works too.  Just don’t hold it in your hands unless you can get that shut­ter speed up!

Read your manual

The only man­ual I ever read is my cam­era man­ual (yes, I am a typ­i­cal guy in that way).  Especially when you have a $1700 pro cam­era like mine, you have to read it just to fig­ure out where they’ve hid­den all the damned set­tings. But even if you have a cheap point and shoot, you should read your man­ual.  Learn what those weird sym­bols stand for, because each one of them has a time and a place. You may never need them, but if you don’t read the man­ual, you’ll never know, will you?

Sometimes you have to get off the inter­net and shoot

Nobody taught me how to take pic­tures except myself.  I had a class in junior high and I grew up around pho­tog­ra­phers int he fam­ily, but they never put a cam­era in my hand and explained how they worked, and if they did, it was with equip­ment so archaic that cave men could have fig­ured it out.

I learned just like you’re learn­ing now.  Reading stuff on the inter­net, read­ing my man­ual, and exper­i­ment­ing. Each time I learn a new tech­nique I do a bunch of shots around it until I burn it into my middle-​​term mem­ory.  Not every­thing I read about turns out to be some­thing I care much about, but some­times, I learn some­thing that takes my work up a notch.

I’ve made around $400 this year on pho­tog­ra­phy.  I prob­a­bly spent ten times that at least.  Maybe in the long run, it will pay for itself, as I get bet­ter.  But don’t worry about that.  Buy what you can afford.  If you want to get seri­ous, then you should be read­ing some­thing other than my post.  But if you just have a casual inter­est in pho­tog­ra­phy, these tips and the tips in the arti­cles linked above should help you get bet­ter pic­tures most of the time.

And hey, chances are you’ve been laid off recently so you prob­a­bly have a lot of spare time on your hands between all those job inter­views and appli­ca­tions, so more time to prac­tice! Once you have your cam­era, dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy is basi­cally free.  Just don’t get any ideas about try­ing to make money off of pho­tog­ra­phy unless you really really like wed­dings and have the calm of a zen mas­ter when being berated by Bridezilla.

Five Things I Have Learned About Wildlife Photography

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

For a lit­tle over a month, I have spent every week­end morn­ing and some after­noons after work out pur­su­ing local wildlife to pho­to­graph.  I’m not inex­pe­ri­enced when it comes to spot­ting and observ­ing wildlife, but throw­ing pho­tog­ra­phy into the mix has forced me to relearn a lot of old skills and add new ones to my toolkit.

1. You will never have enough reach.

I thought that buy­ing my 70-​​300mm lens (equiv­a­lent to a 600mm on a stan­dard  crop cam­era) would finally give me that power that I had always wanted.  I day­dreamed about sit­ting com­fort­ably in a lawn chair on a hill and tak­ing por­traits of ani­mals hun­dreds of yards away.  Without hav­ing looked through a lens and seen just how much mag­ni­fi­ca­tion I could get, i had no idea what to expect until I put the lens on the cam­era.  At first, I was dis­ap­pointed.  To take the kinds of ani­mal shots I wanted, I still had to get much closer than I imag­ined.  But slowly, I real­ized, I still had to get close, but not as close. I had more dis­tance between me and my sub­ject, which meant I had an even bet­ter chance of get­ting my shots before my sub­ject became uncom­fort­able and fled.

I could buy a tele­con­verter and dou­ble that at the cost of a full f-​​stop, and I might, some day.  But if you’re like me and can’t afford the ten thou­sand dol­lar fast zoom lenses, then you will prob­a­bly never be sat­is­fied with your reach.  There will always be a per­fect shot you just can’t get close enough to get.  You learn to make do, and how to get the shots you <em>can</em> get.

2. Good things hap­pen when you have patience.

It’s been a strug­gle for me, because I have that hunter’s instinct.  I don’t feel like I’m work­ing if I’m not mov­ing around, try­ing to come into con­tact with birds and ani­mals.  But when I can calm myself down and set­tle into one spot, be in the moment and take in the sights, the scene around you comes to life.  A mov­ing human is much more threat­en­ing and vis­i­ble than one who is rel­a­tively motion­less.  So far, my best shots have been taken while I was relax­ing in the grass on the banks of ponds, just soak­ing in the sun­light.  Its almost like the ani­mals can sense your des­per­a­tion and they taunt you by run­ning away.  When you relax, they do too.  I know that’s a bit of an anthro­po­mor­phiza­tion, but there’s some truth to it too.

3. You are not a silent ninja.

I am fairly good at keep­ing quiet in the wild.  I’ve spent good chunks of my life track­ing game for fun and work­ing on my skills at mov­ing qui­etly in under­brush.  I may be quiet by aver­age human stan­dards (and when I go out with oth­ers, I am con­stantly reminded of how much qui­eter I am by the stomp­ing and tromp­ing oth­ers do).  However, I am not a silent ninja that can sneak up on, well, any­thing but the most pre-​​occupied ani­mals.  In the wild, most ani­mals are on the look out for preda­tors.  They’re con­stantly in dan­ger, and their atten­tion is focused because of that.  You may think you can slowly, slowly sneak up on that beaver, but he knows you’re there already.  He knew you were there before you were aware of him.  He sim­ply hasn’t decided if you are a threat or not.  Nine times out of ten,  threat dis­tance is the same as how close you need to be to get your shot.  Funny how that works.

4. Get up early.  Really early. No, ear­lier than that.

Most ani­mals are active at dawn and dusk.  I think it’s a mat­ter of safety.  A lot of ani­mals are active at night, but there isn’t an ISO high enough to take those pic­tures, so we’re stuck using at least some form of sun­light most of the time.   I find that I have very lit­tle luck at dusk, and that’s because the areas I fre­quent are fre­quented by other humans as well.  By the end of the day, count­less peo­ple with dogs have been through the area, trau­ma­tiz­ing my sub­jects.  They flee the area to much more inac­ces­si­ble locales.

But at dawn, or just before it, things are qui­eter.  Sane peo­ple stay in bed.  I find it’s a good idea to get up well before sun­rise, get to your loca­tion, set­tle into a good spot, and then wait.  The area will come alive and sur­prise you.  And plus, the light will look much cooler at a low angle, improv­ing your shots con­sid­er­ably.  When the sun is high and bright over­head, you get much deeper, less inter­est­ing shadows.

5. Know your cam­era and lens.

All of the above will be for naught if you do not know your lens and camera’s capa­bil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions.  At full exten­sion, my lens is only capa­ble of f5.6.  This is not a very fast lens.  Dialed to this, you’re not get­ting a whole hell of a lot of light.  And remem­ber the rule of thumb that your shut­ter speed should at least be equal to that of your mm, and take your crop fac­tor into con­sid­er­a­tion.  So when I am shoot­ing at 300mm, my shut­ter speed needs to be 1/​600th of a sec­ond to min­i­mize cam­era shake when not using a tri­pod.  I didn’t believe this rule of thumb until I took a cou­ple of days worth of slightly blurry pho­tos.  I carry a tri­pod with me, but you don’t always have a chance to set it up, so you should know how to take an in-​​focus, prop­erly exposed shot with your lens with­out one.

Now, at the time of day we’ve dis­cussed, get­ting a 1/​600th or faster shut­ter speed isn’t easy if want a prop­erly exposed shot.  This means you have to change your sensor’s light sen­si­tiv­ity, the ISO.  The higher the ISO, the more noise, but also, the less light you need to get an exposed shot.

I have learned that with my lens and cam­era, I have to shoot at ISO 400 to get the shut­ter speeds I need to shoot fully zoomed in in the light I am usu­ally deal­ing with.  If it’s over­cast, I am basi­cally screwed, because the noise above ISO 400 on my Olympus is unac­cept­able, and I really, really hate shoot­ing with tripods when your sub­ject can run or fly away any second.

I’ve learned to be much more aware of my camera’s set­tings. I don’t always shoot in man­ual, but I do more so now than I ever have before.  I gen­er­ally shoot in aper­ture pri­or­ity mode, bring­ing my aper­ture down until I get the shut­ter speed I need.  Most of the time, I want the bokeh that comes with hav­ing a nar­row aper­ture any­way, unless I am shoot­ing macro work.  But that’s the sub­ject for another post.

Concluding Thoughts

The more you’re out there shoot­ing, the more you learn about your sub­jects.  I shoot wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy because I find nature the most beau­ti­ful thing there is, and I want to share the beauty I see out there with oth­ers. My cam­era is a kind of Noah’s ark.  I want to get two of every­thing inside it.   With this tips, hope­fully, you can come closer to nature too.