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.

Encouraging people to pose - tips for great photography

As a professional photographer I have actually only rarely worked with a professional model. My most recent experience of models was working with the Oxfam Bridal Shop in Heswall. The manager had arranged for some volunteers to wear the dresses and I would photograph them.

Click on the images to see them larger

So may people are shy of having their photographs taken and neither of these two girls had been formally photographed before. However, they had a natural beauty and without too much posing created some every elegant and simple images.

These we intend to enlarge and use in the shop window to advertise the quality of the wedding dresses which can be bought there. I hope it gives these two young women and their families a buzz to see their glamorous images large on the high street. Perhaps they will be less shy next time the photo opportunity comes.

Here is an idea, find someone else with a camera, both dress up, and take pictures of each other in a beautiful garden or other location. Take lots of pictures and I am sure many will look fantastic!

Telephoto lenses - tips for good photography

A telephoto lens brings you closer to distance subjects. Very useful when you are photographing wildlife and sport. Also useful when you want to take candid shots of people at a wedding, you can stay remote and observe the action from a distance. If you are not using a flash they may not even know you have taken a picture.

The pictures below were taken at telephoto focal lengths.

 

Focal length 90mm using a 'prime lens', not a zoom

Focal length 160mm using a zoom lens which can go from 28 to 160mm

Focal length 160mm using a zoom lens which can go from 28 to 160mm

Focal length 330mm using a zoom lens which can go from 105 to 450mm
I wonder what the groom had just said to his dad?

Telephoto lenses do two key things to the image. They foreshorten perspective, making things not only look closer to you but also distances between objects at different distances away appear closer together. Secondly, the depth of field, the amount in focus is also shallower, which generally means distracting detail in the background is lost to blurring and the 'bokeh' effect seen clearly in the highlights in the vegetation in the last picture.

Have fun playing with your zoom and telephoto lenses but use their effects knowingly, and creatively.

Wide angle lenses - tips for good Photography

Currently my widest angle lens is 18mm and I use it mostly for landscape shots and when I am forced to stand too close to the subject and want to get more of them, or the background, into the frame. I don't tend to use it for deliberate distortion effects but may do if the right subject comes along.

The first picture is of Buckstone Edge. With the wide angle I was able to include the grass in the foreground which I also lightened by 'dodging' in photoshop to add depth to the image. Depth is a perspective advantage of wide angled lenses. It also fitted with the sunshine and shadow weather. The second is of Talacre Lighthouse. The wide angle makes the lighthouse appear to lean backwards but I chose not to correct it as the effect added to the height of this sad derelict building. The last shot is of Eliseg's Pillar and although I have partly corrected it, there is still a slipping away on the right due to the distortion of a wide angled lens. In all three images getting a lower perspective added to the wide angled effect. If you photograph people with a wide angled lens up close from a  low or high point of view then either their feet or their heads look disproportionally big! Try it and see.

Distortion increases towards the edges which can be a problem when photographing buildings and people at the edge of the frame. Convergence of lines is also a greater issue with wide angle lenses, bit all can be either corrected or reduced afterwards with the right software and willingness to learn how to use it. An extremely wide angled lens is also called a 'fish-eye' because the distortion is so great but sometimes this effect can work to the advantage of the photographer with the right subject and situation.

To zoom or not to zoom? - tips for good Photography

Many cameras have a zoom lens as standard now. Even when you buy a 'big' DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex Camera) the lens that comes with them as a standard is usually some kind of zoom. It is because we all want the detail, the close-up, the intimate, to be able to catch the distant action. These three images of the beautiful Raffaelle Monti marble statue of a Veiled Vestal Virgin show how a true optical zoom work, all the increasing detail is real detail. The stone seemed almost semi-transparent, an amazing carving. It is to be seen in the Oak room at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. It was featured in the recent film version "Pride and Prejudice". The alternative to zoom is to actually  get in closer and not to be 'lazy' about composition by using the zoom.

The Human eye has no zoom, but is remarkably good at differentiating light and dark and colour. We have designed cameras and binoculars to do with lenses what we cannot do ourselves, and that is to get up close and personal even when we are sometimes physically remote.

Do not however trust digital zoom. As mentioned in a previous post digital zooms are filling in the tone and colour between the known tones and colours using software prediction. Any real detail is not being recorded. Optical zooms are actually using a set of lenses to effectively get closer to the subject and real detail is being seen, just as if we were walking up the the object to see it better with our eyes. Unfortunately all those lenses and the distance makes the image dimmer and poor quality lenses not only create a blurred image, but one that is often darker and flat in tone. Of course the higher the quality of the lens then the higher the price, but for good quality images there is no shortcut.

Next blog will be on wide angle and telephoto lenses and some of the interesting effects you can get when using your different lenses.