fearing nothing

lizard on garden gate

stares at my lens

The advent of digital cameras with auto-exposure, auto-focus, and zoom lenses tended to make photographers a little lazy. They saw something that piqued their curiosity, zoomed in or out to pick the low hanging fruit, took a picture and moved on. Photography is so much more than that.

If you consciously make an effort to be in control, you slow down and make sure you’ve got all the settings right before taking a picture. When you slow down, you have the opportunity to determine if what you see in the viewfinder is what compelled you to stop and take a picture. If it isn’t, you can zoom in until you remove objects that will distract the viewer, or move to a different vantage point and then take a picture.

The first picture you take is what caused you to stop. But you’re not done yet. Milk the scene for all it’s worth. Is there a picture within the picture? Can you create a more interesting or different image from a snail’s eye view or bird’s eye view? When you slow down and take multiple pictures of a scene or subject, you learn how to see. You notice textures and patterns. You notice shapes and curves. Instead of taking a picture of an oak tree, take a picture of a pattern of leaves, a close-up shot of the veins in the leaves, the texture of the bark and so on. Think creatively outside the box and you learn to see and put a unique stamp on your photography.

Another thing to remember is that you don’t have to carry every lens you own. If you limit yourself to one or two lenses, you’ll use your creativity to make wonderful images, instead of rummaging through your camera bag and using technology as a crutch. Less is more.

The following images were photographed with vintage manual focus prime lenses mounted to Fujifilm XE-2 with an adapter. I started with a 50mm f/1.4 Pentax Takumar and then switched to a 135mm f/2.8 Pentacon lens.
Cheers,
Doug

Shapes and repeating patterns

Details

Lines and Curves

A good photographer has the ability to envision an image in his mind’s eye before he brings the camera to his eye. He looks through the viewfinder, which in essence is his canvas, and determines how best to tell a story or convey a message with the elements he sees in the viewfinder. The message can be the beauty of the scene or subject matter; it can be joy or it can be sadness. The artistic photographer looks in the viewfinder and determines which items will convey the message to viewers, and then zooms in until the only those items remain in the viewfinder. He then chooses what he deems is the ideal vantage point, composes the image, and takes the picture.

The image the photographer envisions in his mind’s eye may be a far cry from what the camera is capable of delivering. The image your camera displays on the LCD monitor has been processed as a JPEG image, and may look perfectly acceptable. However, the image you download to your computer, especially if you used your camera’s RAW format to capture the image, is a watered down version of what you envisioned and what you reviewed on your camera LCD monitor. Therefore you’ll have to do some post processing to breathe some life into the image.

Some photographers would argue that post processing is not needed if you capture the image in your camera’s JPEG format. And some photographers think that post processing is cheating. I am a proponent of getting it right in the camera, but I also know that without post-processing, my images would be bland and lifeless. All of the great photographers like Ansel Adams knew this and did their post processing in the darkroom with chemicals and papers that were toxic. Fortunately, we can achieve the same results, and in some instances better results in our digital darkroom.

If you shoot in JPEG format, the JPEG image your camera delivers is compressed during processing. Even though your camera’s RAW image, which in essence is a digital negative, may pale in comparison when you first download it to your computer, you have more data to work with and with a bit of judicious post processing will be able to deliver an image that looks like what you envisioned when you stopped to take a picture. The image below is a RAW capture from my Canon EOS 5D MKll. The image is flat and lifeless, even though it was an absolutely breathtaking afternoon in beautiful Myakka State Park.

When I saw the image in Lightroom, I knew I had my work cut out for me. The image lacked contrast, and was very bland, a far cry from what I saw. With a bit of basic processing, tweaking the tone curve and using split toning in Lightroom, I was able to bring the image to life. The following image is the end result of my processing in Lightroom. But I often use other filters and processing in Photoshop to achieve the images I envision in my mind’s eye. This will be the subject of my next blog post.

The aperture you choose determines the depth of field, which is the area in front of and behind your subject matter that is in sharp focus. If you’re creating a talking head video, a large aperture is just fine. However, if you’re capturing video of a majestic landscape, you want a large depth of field, which requires a small aperture.

If you’re capturing video in bright light, and require a large aperture, the shutter speed will probably be faster than the optimum discussed earlier in this blog post. Therefore, you’ll have to use a neutral density filter to cut down the amount of light that reaches the sensor, which also results in a slower shutter speed. It’s a bit of a juggling act, but when you get it right, the results are well worth it. The following video was captured with a Lensbaby Soft Focus optic.

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