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

Panoramas - Tips for great photography

I was recently commissioned by a company who wanted a set of pictures of Chester and Crewe. One thing I tried out which I have mentioned before is the way photoshop, and many other software packages, can stitch images together. My previous example was a beautifully lonely spot in Wales called Cwm Idwal. This time I took on the picturesque, but urban landscape of Chester. You will need to click on the pictures to see them larger. To make them internet friendly I have reduced the pixel size of each file quite dramatically so the quality has suffered. Have a go yourself and explore this side of the software you use. I will look to see if there is any free online software that does it for you.

Competition! Can you name 7 landmarks, one in each of the pictures? No prizes but I would enjoy your involvement.

Panorama 1

Panorama 2

Panorama 3

Panorama 4

Panorama 5

Panorama 6

Panorama 7

Making a slide show or film out of your images - tips for good photography

I have recently been making some simple slide shows and movies to improve the presentation of my images. I have deliberately not tried to be too clever or fussy about this on the bases of 'less is more' and simple means elegant. It really is very easy using a package such as Windows Live Movie Maker which also makes it very easy to upload to the web. The hard bit for me is to find the right music to go with the pictures. Fortunately for me I have a beautiful and musical wife who helps me.

Here are the two 'movies' I made most recently. I hope you enjoy them.

To see this movie larger follow this link: Wedding dresses from Oxfam

To see this movie larger follow this link: Bride to be - A portrait

Fast shutter speeds - tips for good photography

Fantastic! Brilliant! Amazing! Awesome!

Yesterday a firm of solicitors had booked me to photograph them and their clients having a taster day at The National Cycling Centre in Manchester. Had a great time photographing them learning to cycle fixed wheel around the velodrome, and doing a time trial.

After lunch we all went back into the velodrome to watch the UK cycling team in training. If it had been a challenge to photograph the racing clients under lowish lighting conditions in the morning, I had my hands very full trying to capture some of the fastest people in the world on two wheels in the afternoon!

Anyway, I think I got some pretty good images, and here are some of them.

To freeze action you have to use a high shutter speed. The shutter is a curtain that opens and closes across the cameras sensor, its array of pixels. The faster this curtain moves the less light gets to the sensor which means to compensate you normally have to have a larger aperture. Even so, unless you have a lens with a really large aperture of 1.4 or 1.8 the chances of freezing the action can be even more difficult if you are not allowed to use a flash. Guess what the coach told me when he spotted me taking photos? The only other thing to do is to change the ISO setting on your camera. This increases the sensitivity of the sensor in the camera but usually leads to increased grain and noise on the finished picture. Noise appears as flecks of bright colours in dark areas of the image or dark flecks in lighter areas. More expensive cameras have better sensors and noise reduction, but it remains a problem.

Getting the balance right between shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensitivity and flash, if you are allowed to use it that is, is what either the camera does automatically or you choose. The more you choose to do, the more challenging and fun the photography becomes. It also means you can be creative in exposure control and, in this case, how much you want to freeze the action to create a more 'arty' effect.

Feel free to comment and ask questions and I will try to respond.

Aperture priority - tips for good photography

As a professional photographer I spend a lot of time, particularly at weddings, shooting in aperture priority so that I can control the depth of field. Depth of field is the range of distance in which people and objects appear sharp and the aperture has a great deal to do with controlling this.

Wide apertures have shallow depths of field so focusing has to be spot on. When it is people in the frame make sure as mentioned in previous advice that the eyes are in focus. Wide apertures allow the foreground and background to be blurred and much of the creative content of a photograph is down to this effect.

Small apertures give greater depth of filed bringing more of the foreground and background into focus. This might be essential where the context is important in a landscape or in an architectural picture. It might also be important in a lifestyle photograph although it is important to avoid a cluttered and distracting background, remembering it is actually a portrait and something must draw the viewers attention to the person.

The widest apertures are 1.4 and 1.8, numbers that are usually followed by a letter 'f'. When buying lenses for your camera always look for as low a number as you can find as this will give you the greatest control over depth of field and allow you to work in lower light conditions without a flash.

Have a go at the aperture setting, it usually is represented as an 'A' on the programme dial and ther camera should then allow you to choose the aperture.