Posts Tagged ‘Photography’

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.

Stock Success for December

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

A good way to start off the week.  I had 5 images accepted at iStock– all wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy images for the most part.  That brings my port­fo­lio there up to 28 images.  Not much of it is great stock really–I need to get more proac­tive about shoot­ing for the use of stock.  I get such a thrill out of hav­ing a sub­mis­sion accepted.  Ahh, exter­nal val­i­da­tion.  It rocks.

In other news, I am now mostly 31 years old.  Am I a bet­ter per­son than I was when I turned 30?  That’s what I will spend much of tomor­row pon­der­ing, when not work­ing for the man.

New Roundbottom: Faery Wintering Nests

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s a low-​​key new Roundbottom today detail­ing what faeries tend to do when it gets cold.  Feel free to drop on by and tell us how your local species pre­pare for win­ter, if your world has one.

We’re run­ning a sale until the end of the year, $5 off each mem­ber­ship kit, and large scale lim­ited edi­tion prints are now only $65 a piece.  After ship­ping and print­ing and every­thing, I don’t make much on these, so order a whole bunch okay?

I am lean­ing right now towards wrap­ping Roundbottom up again for the time being at the end of the year.  The real world is too scary right now for me to be able to con­cen­trate on cre­ated and telling such mostly whim­si­cal sto­ries.  That and I really need to find bet­ter ways of mak­ing money.  Roundbottom is a los­ing project, sadly.  If I sell more prints though, it’ll change my mind.

Jeremy’s iStock Adventures: an Ongoing Saga

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I men­tioned recently that I’ve been dip­ping my toe back into the iStock­Photo waters. I had a cou­ple more pho­tos accepted.  Nothing that will really sell, but  mostly I just want to get them to accept the pic­tures because it means at least by one sub­jec­tive mea­sure, I’m get­ting bet­ter and learning.

Here’s a recent “learn­ing experience.”

I have this fan­tas­tic por­trait of a jack rab­bit that I sub­mit­ted.  Good Easter stock maybe.  Only prob­lem is, I shot it at ISO200.  For those of you that don’t know, ISO is a kind of light sen­si­tiv­ity set­ting.  You can crank it up from 100 to, really high on some cam­eras, only 3200 on my cam­era.  The only prob­lem is, tak­ing ISO up intro­duces noise to the pic­ture.  And iStock hates noise.  They hates it precious.

I uploaded the photo as it was with a minor amount of noise as a test to see how much they would accept in an oth­er­wise good image.  Unsurprisingly,  the image was rejected for arti­fact­ing.  So I ran it through a noise reduc­tion program–the best on the mar­ket, I am told–and resub­mit­ted it.

It got rejected today for “over-​​use” of noise reduc­tion result­ing in a loss of detail.  I looked at that thing for 20 min­utes com­par­ing noise and no noise to see what “loss of detail” other the removal of noise that they did not want, and I can’t see it.  I sim­ply see no detail removed with the noise.  Just noise.  I clearly haven’t devel­oped my eye for noise, or my mon­i­tor isn’t good enough.

The les­son here is sim­ple.  If my pic­ture is not absolutely per­fect com­ing out of the cam­era, throw it in the trash.  iStock has no inter­est in any­thing that has been manip­u­lated, espe­cially if you’re a nobody.  Of course, the bigshots get spe­cial treatment–they’ve earned it.   Don’t waste time on sug­gested cor­rec­tions either, because you’ll never fig­ure out what the sweet spot is for them.

I won’t be wast­ing any time on resub­mis­sions in the future unless it’s per­fectly clear what needs to be done.  Better to just try and get a per­fect shot in cam­era. Which is harder than it sounds, but it’ll be less frus­trat­ing in the long run.

Lately, I’ve been work­ing in par­tic­u­lar on my focus and expo­sure.  Basic stuff, but with dif­fer­ent lenses you often have to relearn this stuff.  I’ve been using the his­togram view on vir­tu­ally every shot I take and adjust­ing expo­sure with expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion until the his­togram has the typ­i­cal look with no clip­ping.  Broad dynamic range, basically.

Focus is a lit­tle harder, espe­cially when work­ing with a long lens.  I don’t want to or have time to always set up a tri­pod when I’m shoot­ing.  I’d been rely­ing on chimp­ing (pulling the photo back up on the camera’s LCD) and zoom­ing in close to see if the photo is sharp. Also watch­ing my focal lengh com­pared to my shut­ter speed and try­ing to keep it  The prob­lem is, I still end up with images that aren’t tack sharp.  The zoom fea­ture only goes so far before it’s worth­less and not actu­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the image. I don’t mind a small loss in sharp­ness in oth­er­wise tech­ni­cally decent pho­tos.  Most would never, ever notice that it’s not as sharp as all that.  But iStock’s reviewer have eyes like a hawk.

The one thing I can say about try­ing to shoot and sub­mit stock is that it’s teach­ing me to be a more tech­ni­cally skilled pho­tog­ra­pher.   The down­side is, some per­fectly good images will never see the light of day out­side of my blog because of it.

Truth is, with mil­lions of pho­tog­ra­phers gen­er­at­ing bil­lions of pho­tos, there’s only room in the stock world for per­fect pho­tos.  Not close to per­fect, just good pho­tos.  Perfect.  Tack sharp, per­fectly exposed, well com­posed, of an amaz­ing sub­ject.   Manage that and you’ll be fine.

I’ll just keep tak­ing pic­tures until they take my cam­era away, either way.  I have to get bet­ter with prac­tice, it’s like a law of physics.

T-​​Day

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Thanksgiving is upon us. While the birds quake in fear, I plan photo expe­di­tions into the wild.    Thanksgiving is hap­pen­ing in Laramie this year, which means a drive up to Wyoming, which I rarely look for­ward to.  However, in this case, I’m schem­ing.  With my improv­ing pho­to­graphic skills, I have a cou­ple of sites I’d like to hit before eat­ing myself sense­less at the inlaws.  Dinner is late in day, so I ahve the early after­noon to drive up 25 into Cheyenne where I can shoot some inter­est­ing rock for­ma­tions, and then over to Laramie on I-​​80, where I can stop and shoot some Vedawuoo rocks.   I’m think­ing more HDR pictures.

I’m back to sub­mit­ting stock.  I just had two new stock pho­tos accepted, which I will blog later on, in case you’re eager to use a nice photo of a ground squir­rel or a close-​​up of a garter snake’s eye in your next design.    I find that if I go slow and just upload a hand­ful at a time, and have a big stack ready to go, I am much more relaxed about rejec­tions. I don’t care about my accep­tance rate.  I don’t care how well it sells.  I’m just inter­ested in slowly build­ing my port­fo­lio and get­ting bet­ter.   It’s nice.

Maybe some day I can treat my writ­ing with the same relaxed manner.

The rest of the long week­end will be devoted to build­ing Diamonds in the Sky for Brotherton and get­ting some Roundbottom scripts in the can.  I’ve got 2 more weeks of sabat­ti­cal and then I’m back at it again.  Bigger and bet­ter than ever, I tells ya.

Roundbottom Memberships On Sale

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Roundbottom Foundation mem­ber­ships (includ­ing a vari­ety of things includ­ing a pho­tonic print) are now on sale for $30 a piece.  You can find out more about this great Holiday gift here.

I had a pro­duc­tive week­end pho­to­graph­i­cally speak­ing.  Some inter­est­ing pho­tos push­ing a new tech­nique I’ve not really tried much before.  Some say that HDR is a cheat and is no sub­sti­tute for real pho­tog­ra­phy, but I just con­sider it another tool in my pos­si­ble toolbox.

I’ve been doing a lot of photography-​​related read­ing lately.  I went to the library on Friday and spent a cou­ple of hours look­ing for inspi­ra­tion in the stacks.  I didn’t really find any­thing, but on Saturday, we had to buy some Christmas presents for the nieces at Barnes & Noble and while there, I browsed a few more books.  These were much enlightening.

The big thing I am focus­ing on right now is really truly learn­ing how expo­sure works and how to con­trol it.  Most of my pho­tos are not exposed cor­rectly in cam­era.   It seems pretty basic, I know, but this is my focus right now.   I have to get the basics down before I can really advance my skills much further.

Photo: Big Trucks

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have no idea what these are. Some kind of mon­ster dump truck. They sit in a field out­side of Laporte and col­lect graf­fiti. I thought they would make good HDR sub­jects. I was correct.

Big Trucks

Dr. Roundbottom Limited Editon Prints Now $65

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hello, good peo­ple!  Here’s the skinny.  I’ve low­ered the prices of my lim­ited edi­tion Dr. Roundbottom prints from $125 to $65 a piece.  That’s a 16“x20” print on high qual­ity paper, suit­able for fram­ing, etc.  Signed and num­bered.  Only 10 of each image available.

If you’re look­ing for a bar­gain on a mem­ber­ship kit, never fear.  I have some stock I need to try to get rid of before the end of the year, so I’ll be offer­ing a dis­count on mem­ber­ship kits for a sub­set of the images next week.

I’m think­ing of open­ing a low-​​cost gen­eral prints store for my nature pho­tog­ra­phy as well.  Let me know if such a thing inter­ests you and it might moti­vate me to actu­ally do it.

Before the end of the year, I hope to hone down the pic­tures I have taken in the last sev­eral years to a tight port­fo­lio of just the best work.  Just in case National Geographic comes call­ing, hah hah!

Oh, and if you would be so kind as to share the word about my reduced prices, I would be grate­ful.  Have a lovely evening, dear readers.

Weighing My Interests

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I had a very long week at work this past week, so most of my week­end was devoted to very low energy pur­suits.   I read a lit­tle, watched some TV, saw Quantum of Solace (okay, but not as good as the last one) and played the demo of Left 4 Dead, Valve’s new Zombie Survival Co-​​op game (fan­tas­tic so far and I can’t wait to play the full game).  More than half of today was devoted to mak­ing a prop for tomorrow’s Roundbottom photo, and then shoot­ing.   The newest post should be pretty amus­ing, even if it’s not the most meaty thing I’ve writ­ten lately.  After this, I’m tak­ing a 2 week hia­tus to attempt to build up some mate­r­ial and think about what I really want out of this project.

Lately, I have felt like I have to make a choice between writ­ing and photography–that I only have enough time out­side of my job to really mas­ter one of these two pur­suits.  It’s prob­a­bly not true, but I know that I split my ener­gies among too many things.  I was feel­ing okay about maybe dip­ping my toe back into the writ­ing waters, espe­cially after see­ing a great review of the Seeds of Change antholo­gies.  And then I saw some com­ments on a site about some of my work that was pretty bru­tal, and I lost what lit­tle moti­va­tion I had.

Until I can find a rea­son to write that can stand up to the whims of Joe Random Internet Commenter, then it’s best that I not do any writ­ing.   This is one of the things I like about pho­tog­ra­phy.  If peo­ple don’t like your pho­tog­ra­phy, they rarely say any­thing.  If they like it, they do.  But when it comes to fic­tion, peo­ple seem to be com­pelled to tell you at length just how much you suck. It prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with the time invest­ment it takes to con­sume a story vs look at a photo.

Sometimes I think that my pho­tog­ra­phy would get bet­ter if it was cri­tiqued to the same degree my fic­tion has been, but then, neg­a­tive comments–comments of any sort–don’t really count as cri­tique.  And maybe some of the fun of pho­tog­ra­phy would be drained if I took it that seriously?

Earlier, I went for a pho­towalk down by the river to clear my head and just be in the now.  Lately, I am too busy think­ing and the nature of my work doesn’t allow for me to get into the now very often.  By “the now” I mean, the groove,  the flow, what­ever.  A state of being and doing, where time is mean­ing­less and the ego slips beneath the sur­face.  I took a few decent shots, and stum­bled upon a bunch of beaver chews.  I walked up and down the area look­ing for the dam, but I couldn’t find it.  I will prob­a­bly go back the next time I want to take a walk and see if I can spot it.  It was very nice.

When I think about how plea­sur­able it is to go on a pho­towalk or take pic­tures in gen­eral, I won­der why I can’t have that much fun writ­ing any­more.  At some point, it stopped being about fun and started being some­thing else.  God knows I value my leisure time like it’s made out of dia­monds since my Dad died, so maybe I take writ­ing so seri­ously because I don’t want to waste anyone’s leisure time with crap writ­ing.  Ahem.  Which I sup­pose I am kind of doing right now.  I com­mand you not to read this unless you are steal­ing time from your employer!

There, I feel better.

One day I am going to look back at all the time I have spent ago­niz­ing over all this and I’m going to be angry at myself for not just shut­ting up and doing some­thing.  I used to tell peo­ple that the key to writ­ing was to “shut up and write” but I’ve got­ten awful at fol­low­ing that par­tic­u­lar advice.  But not tonight–I’m too tired to be angry with myself about it.

New Roundbottom: The Inkblot Spider…

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

…and her prey.  This week, I wasn’t able to get to a decent pod­cast script, so I worked up an image I’ve had in the hop­per for a while now.  This week details the pre­da­tions and some bio notes of a unique species of spi­der that feeds on moth pix­ies in Roundbottom’s world.  Check out the Inkblot Spider and share your thoughts.

In other news, I am weigh­ing a sale for my inven­tory of images that I have printed.  I’m con­sid­er­ing $30 mem­ber­ships from now until the end of the year or until I run out of pre-​​printed stock, whichever comes first.

I’ll admit that I’m dis­ap­pointed with my suc­cess regard­ing mem­ber­ship kits.  I sold 9 kits, and I really appre­ci­ate those of you who bought them.  Unfortunately, sales have dropped off entirely.  I’m con­sid­er­ing giv­ing up entirely on lim­ited edi­ton prints and sell­ing every­thing on the site for $20 a piece.  Any thoughts?

It’s hard to keep at this so much when I feel like it’s not as pop­u­lar as I want it to be.  Traffic is low, sales are nonex­is­tent.  I know what you’re thinking–do it because you enjoy it, not to make money.  Well, no.  I’m sorry, but I’d like to make a liv­ing from my cre­ative endeav­ours and I don’t think there’s any­thing wrong with that.  I enjoy the project, but if there is not a large enough audi­ence to jus­tify my time and energy in the project, then I will have to move on to some­thing else.  I have a lot of faith in the gen­eral con­cept of the project, but I am increas­ingly cer­tain that it won’t turn a profit at all.  My best bet is prob­a­bly to use all of it as back­ground research and turn out a novel.  Keep the site updat­ing on a lower fre­quency and turn the whole thing into a good rea­son to pub­lish the book (beyond it being really good or something).

I’ve been mean­ing to write a book for a num­ber of years now.  I started writ­ing my first book attempt just before my father was diag­nosed with can­cer.  I’ve given up on that book along wth most of  of my writ­ing.  But the truth is that I haven’t been able to let go of that cre­ative urge, that drive to make some­thing that mat­ters, even if it only mat­ters in the form of fleet­ing entertainment.

But even though I’ve given up so much, I haven’t been able to give up on Roundbottom.  Maybe it’s because the char­ac­ter is a thinly dis­guised ver­sion of what I wanted to be once upon a time.  I don’t know.  But I want to keep try­ing to make some­thing of this in some form, even if it’s not the web­site and the weekly updates.  I just don’t know exactly what the best use of my time would be.  Look, I have stu­dent loans that would make you wince.  I may never be out of debt in my adult life with­out devel­op­ing some sort of alter­na­tive rev­enue stream to accel­er­ate my pay­off. I’m try­ing to buy my free­dom here.  If this doesn’t work, I’ll find some­thing else to sell, and I’ll keep try­ing until some­thing comes out of my gourd.   Because I want my free­dom so bad I can taste it, and right now, these projects are the best thing I have to accel­er­ate my earn­ing that.