Getting things on the level - tips for good photography

The eye is very sensitive to imbalance and even though the horizon, or vertical lines might be only slightly out, the eye can pick still pick it up. Fortunately on many camera viewfinders there are lines to help get the horizontals and verticals right, but sometimes things go astray anyway even though we are sure everything was square when we took the picture. Not to worry though, because even the basic on line photo editing usually allows you to correct sloping horizons or wonky walls.

Derelict Crane on Dublin Harbour Breakwater - geometrical shapes will be a give away for wonky horizons!

When I am doing landscapes, and have my trusty tripod with me, I use the inbuilt spirit level to get things as horizontal as possible. I also have a small cube level which my son gave to me one Christmas to fit into the 'hotshoe' on top of my camera. This is really useful when I am doing panoramas and stitching multiple images together. If I had not got the pictures straight using the level I would have probably lost parts of the picture at the top and bottom when the software stuck the images together.

The Harp Bridge and the Jeanie Johnson tall ship on the Liffey

Sometimes you may want to deliberately tilt the camera over to create energy and abstraction in your image. That is great if meant! I have blogged on that before if you want to search for it.

The swing bridge that does swing! Looking upstream into Dublin

I liked these in black and white.

Keep it on the level! 

Letterbox crop - tips for good photography

Hi reader! Sorry I am a day late but work and a football match, Manchester City v Villareal (Final score 2-1 to City) got in the way.

As it happens the match gave me food for the blog. As I was taking pictures I wondered whether a letterbox crop would be better for the images than the normal dimensions. Certainly cropping brings the action closer, and with a forward moving game like football the narrow perspective perhaps adds a sense of pace and direction to the image. What do you think?

Framing images in this format would certainly make for an interesting display. Bespoke frames would probably be needed.

All these photos were taken under floodlight; no flash. The camera was a Nikon D300 with a 70-300mm lens. I use 3200 ISO at f5.6 and 1/200 of a second. A bit grainy for my liking.

The sports pro photographers in the last picture were probably using 500mm lenses and were probably getting down to f2.8. This would allow a faster shutter speed and more action freezing.

Auto-focus or manual focus?- tips for great photography

My Nikon camera has 51 separate focus points in which to place an object and the camera on auto-focus will use all, or any one or group of these I choose, to be the part of the image in focus. I normally work with just one focus point which I put over the eye of a person whom I am photographing, the part of the person, place or object most crucial in terms of sharpness. The auto-focus on quality cameras is extremely good and allows the photographer to think more about the quality of light and getting the exposure right.

In this picture I placed the focus point on the little girls nose,

getting the face and flower as sharp as I could

Only rarely do I actually set focus to manual, under low light conditions when auto-focus struggles, when something like a wire fence in the foreground is deceiving the auto-focus, very close-up photography, or I am using the hyperfocal distance in a landscape. Hyperfocal distance is the jargon for picking the point of focus in an image which enables you to maximise foreground and background sharpness and depends on the focal length of the lens, more on this in another blog.

Above Pott Shrigley on a stormy autumn day - I used the hyperfocal distance to get nearly everything in focus. I also use a very small aperture and slow shutter speed to make sure the depth of focus was maximised

Learning to control the focus point on your camera is very useful and this is actually what many non-professional cameras mean by manual focus, like Oona's Panasonic FZ38. In manual focus the photographer can decide on the focus in the very centre of the image using the little joy-stick on the back of the camera. The joystick operates the motor that changes the focus on the fixed lens. On a larger camera with inter-changable lenses there is a ring on the lens that you rotate to do this so you are directly moving the lens not the cameras focus motor.

 The little button in the middle when presses three times changes focus to manual

 The little joystick when pushed up and down changing the focus to be

nearer or further by activating the motor

on the fixed lens on this kind of camera

The ring on the left of the image is how removable lenses can be focused manually

and the little window tell you how far from the point of focus the camera is

So mechanisms might be different, but the purpose is the same, to get the vital bit of the picture sharp. Have a play with the focus setting this week. I had a great time playing with Oona's camera finding out how it worked!

ISO - Tips for good photography

When I first started taking photographs Kodak and Ilford film were found in everyone's cameras. I used Kodak colour 200 ISO and Ilford black and white 125 ISO in the two cameras I used then.

ISO stands for International Standard Organisation and allowed everyone to agree a scale to measure the sensitivity of a film. Sensors on modern cameras can also be made more or less sensitive in the same way different films were used.

From the back of the church ISO 3200

In the days of film I would use 400 or 800 ISO films when light was poor. Today I would use this level of ISO when photographing a wedding from behind the pews. This sometimes happens because vicars and priests refuse to let photographers near the bride and groom for fear they would spoil the solemnity of the service. I try very hard to be discreet and not to overwork the shutter, and to go with the mood and atmosphere as this always means better pictures and much happier clients.

Making the sensor more sensitive by raising the ISO also increases the grain of the image, what is called 'noise'. In the days of film this textured the images and gave them an arty feel and this can be true today too, some photographers even add 'noise' for this very reason.

When light is good, especially in my studio where I can control it completely, I use the lowest ISO I can, which on my camera is 100.  This gives very little noise and is great for smooth transitions across colours and tones, showing fine detail very clearly.

Studio portrait ISO 100

So I would suggest you take control of the ISO setting on your camera instead of leaving it on automatic. Automatic is OK , but if you want a bit extra out of your images and fine control you need to be brave and experiment with it.

Studio portrait ISO 100