Into the bright sun

One mistake that beginner photographers often make is posing people in bright sun with the sun directly overhead or behind the photographer.

While this can result in interesting light when the sun is very low in the sky at the beginning or end of the day, most of the time it just results in harsh shadows and washed out highlights. And subjects often squint in the bright sun, making them less attactive.

A better solution, where possible, is to photograph subjects in open shade. This can be against a north-facing side of a building, or under a picnic shelter or anywhere else that’s not in the direct sunlight, but where reflected sunlight can enter from all directions to illuminate the scene. The shade of trees can be used, but often there’s a dappled light coming through breaks in the leaves that can ruin the shot.

Some photographers use translucent white panels between the sun and the subject. This works really well, but usually involves an assistant to hold the panel, or some kind of set-up with light stands to suspend the panel. Great light, but a little impractical for a lone photographer looking for candid shots.

Often there’s simply no alternative but to shoot in direct sunlight. In such cases, it’s best to try to put the sun behind the subject (but not aiming right at the lens, where it will cause flare), and then to light the subject with a fill flash. The fill flash will even out the light a bit, softening it in effect. It fills in shadows, like those under a hat brim, or around someone’s eye sockets and nose. It also increases the light on the subject in cases where the sun is behind them, so they aren’t silhouetted, but you can still sometimes get nice rim light from the sun behind.

Fill flash is one of the few times when the on-camera pop-up flash works reasonably well. That’s because it’s just fill — it’s not the main source of light. If you use a hot shoe flash, you can often leave the flash on the camera, with or without a diffuser. Sometimes you’ll want to reduce the flash output a little so the effect of the flash is less noticeable.

Below are a few shots where I used fill flash to advantage:

July 1 Canada Day in Ottawa is often very sunny, and this is especially the case shortly before noon. It’s a good time to take pictures of people celebrating, but harsh sunlight often makes people’s faces very contrasty with light and shadows.

In this picture of a girl getting her face painted, the sunlight was extreme, but was coming from behind the girl. Using a fill flash softened the light and shadows on her face, and almost gave the impression of shooting in open shade. In a few pictures in this series, my flash failed to fire, and the result looks very different with harsh shadows across her face. Using a fill flash in bright sunlight, it’s important to keep in mind the sync speed of the camera. On my Nikon D300, the sync speed is 1/250 of a second. Sometimes, especially when you want to soften your background, you need to use a higher speed than that. In such cases, it’s essential to make sure your camera is set to allow the flash to use Auto FP High Speed Sync, a setting that allows the flash to be used at faster shutter speeds.

The photo above was taken this month at the Medieval Festival in Osgoode, Ontario, just south of Ottawa. Here I was right in blazing afternoon direct sunlight, and there was no choice for this shot. I got down low and shot upwards so as to get a bit of the “victim’s” face and better show the action. And I used a fill flash in my hot shoe with no diffusion, and cranked it up an extra EV (f-stop). While it got rid of some of the harsh shadows on the subject, it still wasn’t enough to eliminate the shadow under the rim of the hat of the boy throwing a wet sponge. It’s not easy to overpower the light of the bright sun with a single flash.

In this picture of a soldier waiting to do battle in a re-enactment of a battle from the Seven Years War at Ogdensburg, New York, I also used a fill flash. The effect here is very subtle, and it would be difficult to tell just from looking that a fill flash was used. You still see a sharp contrast on his shoulder (viewer’s left) between the sunlit and shaded areas. In this case, the background was much brighter, and all the fill flash did was add a little light to the subject to reduce the gap in exposure between subject and background. Still, it improves the photo.

The sun is a very powerful element in outdoor photography, but sometimes we need to use a little bit of “sun” from our camera bags to control the light a little better.

Accessing a less common point of view

In an earlier post, I suggested that good photographic technique and creativity were only part of what makes a good photo. Another key ingredient is access to interesting subject matter.

This can mean flying off to a distant corner of the globe to visit a remote Asian monastery. Or, often, it can be a subject much closer to home that the photographer has unique access to because of his or her job, family, or friendships. When you think about it, most people have access to something in their lives that other people don’t see, and this can make a good photographic subject. It can be something as seemingly mundane as an inside view of a factory or a farm or other place of work. Provided you’re allowed to take photos, it may be a chance to take something that most people don’t see, allowing you to present some unique images. 

Many thousands of visitors to Ottawa visit Canada’s beautiful Parliament buildings every year, and many of them take pictures of the Centre Block and Peace Tower. It’s a beautiful view, and as long as their photographic technique is good, the picture will look good. Only a much smaller number will come away with unique-looking pictures as the result of creatively using a different point of view or technique to create an unusual photo. Very few, however, have access to much more at Parliament than the main public areas.

In my day-to-day work, I often see behind the scenes in Canada’s political process, and occasionally I’m allowed to take pictures.

I admire the photography of Ottawa photographer Jean-Marc Carisse, who I’ve met on several occasions. Carisse was photographer to such Canadian Prime Ministers as Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien and he’s often photographed international leaders when they visited Ottawa or when Canadian leaders travelled. One of my favourite Carisse photos shows Chrétien and Bill Clinton playfully climbing a garden railing to give the media the slip. I know some of the regular news photographers were envious of Carisse’s access, which enabled him to get pictures that were not accessible to the media. Indeed, the title of Carisse’s coffee table book is Privileged Access with Trudeau, Turner and Chrétien. Carisse is a talented photographer, but his work owes much to that privileged access.

While I don’t have Carisse’s skills or the privileged access he once had, I’m occasionally called upon to take pictures of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff at various events. Often these are public events where he’s delivering a speech at a poorly lit podium — hardly the kind of scene that lends itself to a Carisse-style photo.

Recently, on May 12, Mr. Ignatieff’s birthday, his wife and his staff organized a surprise birthday party for him at Stornoway, the official residence of the Leader of the Opposition. I was pleased to be asked to take photos at the party, and I had a lot of fun taking candid pictures of his staff socializing. When people are having fun, they are often more willing to be photographed, as long as they trust that you won’t embarrass them by using less-than-flattering pictures.

When the Leader arrived home with his wife, he was caught by surprise for the second year in a row. He was good natured about it, and spent a while socializing with staff and blowing out his birthday candles. But, this happened to be the night of the seventh and deciding hockey playoff game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Pittsburgh Penguins. And many of the guests were already watching the game on TV.

Mr. Ignatieff is well known as an intellectual, but it’s less known that he’s a rabid sports fan. Still wearing his suit, like his guests, he and his wife Zsuzsanna sat in front of the TV to cheer the Canadiens to their 5-2 victory. Bouncing my flash from the ceiling of the little room at the historic Stornoway house, I shot a few pictures of them engaged in the game. It was a chance to see a side of Mr. Ignatieff that the public doesn’t see.

One of those shots was used by Globe and Mail columnist Jane Taber in her blog. I have a long way to go before my photos can match those of someone like Carisse, but the experience was a lesson in the value of using uncommon access to get photos from an unusual point of view.

Cheering on the Habs

Cheering on the Habs (2)

Franz Kafka goes to Disneyland

Every year at tulip time, I try to get out and photograph the tulips. In Ottawa, the two nicest seasons, spring and autumn, are also the shortest. The fall colours last a few weeks, but the spring tulips last mere days.

One view I especially like is looking across the Ottawa River towards the Parliament Buildings from a tulip bed just below the Museum of Civilization on the Gatineau (Hull), Quebec side of the river. There’s a plaque there honouring Malak Karsh, the late photographer who produced spectacular colour images of Ottawa.

One evening after work I headed down there, impressed by the changing light as storm clouds moved in, but sun and blue sky kept emerging from behind them. I set up my tripod and tried a number of shots, often using a neutral density graduated filter, which darkens the exposure of the sky at the top to balance the light better with the ground below. This is especially useful when, as that evening, the tulips in the foreground were in shade, but Parliament Hill is in sun. I also have a few coloured graduated filters, and I sometimes use a mauve one to give a slight fantasy look to the sky.

I took a few multiple exposures for HDR (high dynamic range), another technique used to overcome a wide range between light and dark in a scene. You take multiple identical shots at different exposures — typically I do five ranging from much too dark to much too light. These are then combined on a computer to create a scene where there are no dark silhouettes or white areas of blown-out light. I got a few images I liked.

Tulips and clearing storm clouds, Ottawa

I also got a number of shots that were more ho-hum. One of these I had taken at five different exposures with the intention of doing an HDR. Suddenly, looking at one of the exposures, I got an idea. What if I showed the Parliament Buildings darker, as a silhouette, but lightened the rest of the scene just a little bit? It was one of the shots with the mauve graduated filter, so the sky had just a little bit of a dreamy mauve cast. I decided to play with a single image rather than do an HDR. I made only small tweaks — no fancy processing — and then I layered on the Parliament buildings from one of the darker exposures so they appeared as a silhouette. This was the result.

Dark fantasies, Ottawa

Small-town fair

Perth, Ontario is probably one of the province’s prettiest towns. Not surprisingly, given its name, Perth was settled by Scottish settlers in the 19th century, and it has some wonderful old stone buildings. The little Tay River runs through the town, and through a picturesque green Stewart Park where broad willow trees cling to its banks.

I happened to pass through Perth last weekend, not knowing until I got downtown that my visit coincided with Perth’s Festival of the Maples. It was a nice day and I had a brand new camera lens I was eager to try out, so I strolled around the festival taking pictures.

Small-town fairs are a great subject for photography. Most people are having fun, and so they aren’t usually bothered by the presence of a camera. And they are doing interesting things. When I worked for small-town newspapers several decades ago, I used to enjoy shooting off several rolls of film at the various fairs and festivals.

Being unfamiliar with my lens, I decided not to ask people to pose this time, and instead shot some of the non-human elements that told the story of the Festival of the Maples. Here are a few shots.

Goat kid in petting zoo

Grilling sausages

Duck pond at the fair

Young people, Chinatown and a lighting experiment

Last weekend I was shooting pictures of the lights and buildings in Montreal’s Chinatown at night. A group of young people saw my camera and tripod and asked me to take their pictures.

It’s been a while since I’ve done much people photography in anything other than fairly conventional lighting. And all I had was the pop-up flash on my Nikon D300, and the tripod. No external flash and no reflectors, etc. When trying a new technique or one you haven’t used in a while, it often takes a bit of experimenting to get it right.

At first I just shot the group with the pop-up flash and a normal flash setting. They arranged themselves in a pose, and I was mainly concerned about how the lighting would look. The result was OK, but the background was very dark, and the light on the kids was harsh. It had a snapshot look.

Young people shot with pop-up flash and regular setting

I immediately realized that if I wanted to soften the light on them and bring in more details from the background, I would need to try something else — like a slow-sync flash setting.

A regular flash shot uses a fast shutter speed just long enough to allow the flash to completely light the subject. Slow sync, on the other hand, fires the flash, but the shutter stays open in order to properly expose the background and other areas that aren’t lit by the flash. It’s like two exposures in one — a quick exposure with the flash, and a longer exposure for the background similar to what you’d get if you just took a long exposure without the flash.

The problem was that I didn’t know just how long the exposure would take. And the kids, after seeing the flash go off, assumed the picture was finished, and they moved away. The result was a strange, but interesting ghosting effect.

In this shot I used a slow-sync flash, but the kids moved before the exposure was finished.

In the result above, the boy in the front has stayed relatively still. The flash records the features of the others sharply, but then as they move or leave, there is a blurring and ghosting effect as the slow shutter continues exposing for a few seconds without the flash.

So I tried again.

Another attempt with slow-sync flash.

Here they held still for longer, but still didn’t quite wait for the camera to finish exposing after the flash went off. I was communicating with them in a mix of English and French, and realized I had to be more clear that not only should they not move, but they should hold the pose until I indicated the shot was finished. I tried again with the whole group.

Trying again, but asking them to stay still.

They tried to stay still for this one, but to get a group of nine excited young people to stay absolutely still for several seconds just wasn’t going to work, no matter how hard they tried. So I tried again with just three of the boys, again emphasizing that they had to remain absolutely still.

Slow sync with the kids not moving.

I liked the result of this one the best of the series, even though some of the ghosting ones had an interesting effect. The slow sync brought out the lighting of the background and softened the light on the kids. There’s still some ghosting of people moving by, but they are in the background and so less distracting.

It gives me more to experiment with next time. In hindsight, I should have taken more time and tried a few different apertures and shutter speeds to vary the ratio of the exposure time with and without the flash. I’d also like to try it with an external flash and perhaps a reflector. Finally, I should have spent more time choosing the right background, and working with the kids to get the best poses.

Who are your photography gurus?

In a photography group on Flickr, I recently asked participants to name their photography gurus.

To me a guru is more than just someone whose work you admire and try to emulate. It’s also someone who’s a teacher. We don’t necessarily try to imitate the styles of our gurus, but we learn from their ideas and techniques as we develop our own styles.

In my first attempt to answer my own question, I named three photographers whose work I admire for very different reasons. Each though, has published numerous books and articles explaining their techniques – often in an entertaining manner.

They are:

Joe McNally - Joe is an expert on using portable strobes on location, and often works with multiple flashes, linking them wirelessly through the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS). Even if you’re not a Nikonian, you’ll learn a lot from his highly readable books like The Hot Shoe Diaries and When the Shutter Clicks. I highly recommend a DVD he appears in A Hands-on Guide to Creative Lighting. His work appears in some of the best magazines, like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.

Bryan Peterson - Bryan runs the online Perfect Picture School of Photography, and he’s authored a number of photography books. I really like the way he focuses on creativity and technique, and dispels the idea that expensive gear is the key to successful photography. He has a very clear and accessible way of explaining things, and his books are richly illustrated with his photos. Some I’ve read are: Understanding Exposure, Understanding Close-up Photography, and Beyond Portraiture: Creative People Photography. Excellent books for beginners, but also lots for more experienced photographers.

Scott Kelby - Scott is the guru for post production using software like Photoshop and Lightroom. He too provides online training. As he is a photographer, his books are geared to photographers. He has a goofy sense of humour that isn’t for everyone, but he has a great way of explaining things.

I soon realized that all three of them were American. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but as a Canadian who enjoys landscape photography, I thought I’d better add three Canadian landscape photographers who have also written numerous articles and books I’ve found helpful as I’ve developed my technique:

Darwin Wiggett darwinwiggett.wordpress.com/ – based in Alberta.

Daryl Benson www.darylbenson.com/ – another Albertan.

Dale Wilson www.dalewilsonphotography.com/ – from Nova Scotia.

Others answered with names of photographers they admire, who aren’t necessarily teachers. Check out the discussion:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/critique2/discuss/72157623518953846/

What makes a great photo?

Often I show a group of photos to different people, and I’m always struck that there is rarely a consensus on which is the best photo. Different people are drawn to different things — a photo that speaks to one person seems to leave another person flat.

Sometimes I’ve had to pick a photo — my own or someone else’s — for a publication or some other purpose and I canvass opinions. Some people agree on one photo, while others feel strongly that other photos are better.

The quality of a photo depends a lot on the use you intend to make of it. A picture to hang on a wall will be judged by very different criteria from a picture to be used for editorial purposes (e.g. in a newspaper), or shown in a gallery. A portrait of a person may be stylish and edgy, or conventional and Conservative, and the appropriate picture depends on the person and how it will be used.

To me, there are three elements that must be present for a picture to be good. They may be present in different amounts, but they must all be there:

• The photo must be technically good
• It should be presented in a creative and interesting way
• The photographer should have access to interesting subject matter

I’ll comment more on each of these elements in later posts, but for now, here are a few examples of what I mean.

Technical quality:

Many pictures are technically very good, but the subject matter isn’t interesting. But good subject matter can be ruined if the picture isn’t technically good. The elements of a technically good photo include the right exposure — not too dark or two light; and the right depth of field and focus. You normally want your subject to be in sharp focus, but whether or not you want a sharp or soft background depends on the subject matter and your creative choices. Good technique involves understanding and using light and shadows for the best effect. You also need the right balance of aperture and shutter speed to control depth of field (the area in focus) and the movement of the subject (blurred or frozen sharp).

Creativity:

Thousands of photographers photograph the same subjects day after day, but a creative approach is needed to make a photograph stand out from the pack. Usually this involves choosing an interesting angle, framing the shot appropriately, and ideally including or excluding various elements for added effect. Ideally, a photographer uses technique in a creative way, for example using light and shadows to create a special effect, or freezing or blurring motion to emphasize movement or highlight the subject. Creativity is probably the most important element of a good photo.

Access to subject:

A person who lives in the area of an interesting natural feature is going to have a huge advantage over someone just passing through on a short visit, all other things being equal. The local person will know the best time of day to photograph that subject, and the best angles. They can return over and over under different weather and light conditions or different seasons to get the shot just right.

Likewise, a person who has access to unique subject matter because of where they live or work has an advantage. It’s always best to write about what you know, and the same applies to photography. Subject matter you are familiar with is going to be easier to present in photos than strange subject matter. This is not to suggest you need to live in an exotic place to get great pictures — often there is exciting subject matter in your own home or backyard if you are creative enough to find it.

I’ll comment more on these points in a later post.