Jim Zuckerman’s
PH OTO I N S I G HTS March 2015
• Focus points strategy • Wide angle wildlife photography • Window light portraits• • Polar coordinates revisited • Online photo course • Student showcase • Photo tours
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Focus points strategy Wide angle wildlife photography Window light portraits Whats wrong with this picture? Short and sweet Polar coordinates revisited Ask Jim Student showcase Back issues
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hooting in extreme cold, like I did last month when photographing snowy owls in Canada, is different on many levels than shooting in normal temperatures. You have to protect your extremities -- fingers, toes, nose, and ears -- with serious diligence without regard to how much money you have to spend. Pain from the cold and frostbite on exposed skin has to be prevented at all costs or else photography will be no fun at all. Fingers are the most challenging thing to deal with because we need them to work our cameras. It’s very hard to effectively work the menus and buttons on a camera with thick mittens. As soon as you expose fingers to the cold, the pain can be so severe it totally inhibits photography. I tested again my technique for dealing with the cold in minus 40 degree temperatures (including the wind chill factor -- and the wind at times was brutal), and it worked. In each pocket of my parka, I had five hand warmers. On my right hand, I wore only a glover liner for the dexterity to operate the camera. When my fingers got cold, I grabbed the hand warmers in my pocket and instantly I was warm enough to shoot for a two or three more minutes. The pocket allows air flow, which fuels the hand wamers, and all five of them together seem to feed on each other and they actually got hot, not just warm. When I wasn’t shooting, I kept my hand in the pocket with the warmers and I was fine, even in the coldest of conditions. I have spent a lot of money on serious gloves and mittens, and this technique of wearing only a glove liner with a bunch of warmers in a pocket is much better. photos@jimzuckerman.com www.jimzuckerman.com 3
Focus Points Strategy W
e are constantly challenged when we photograph pretty much any subject. Choosing the right light, the ideal background, the most complimentary angle, the best lens, the correct ISO, etc. is what we deal with every time we snap the shutter. One of the most confusing choices to make is how many focus points to choose, and what arrangement is the right one for any given subject. Focus points are active when
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the autofocus function is turned on, and digital cameras give you the ability to select several different patterns of points. I just completed several back to back photo tours, and two of them entailed photographing birds (Japan and Canada for cranes [below], eagles, and snowy owls). Since this is fresh in my mind and since the focus point choice could make or break your shots, I wanted to address this very important issue.w
Most static single subjects
I use a single focus point positioned in the center of the viewfinder. I do this for most subjects. For pictures like the Venetian portrait above, To understand why, study the horse photo below.
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I shot this in Iceland, and I made a mistake. Look closely at this picture and you’ll see that the eyes aren’t as sharp as the mane. This happened because I used an array of nine focus points spread across the viewfinder, and instead of locking onto the eyes, the nine-point array chose the center of the picture on which to focus. Yes, I should have used a smaller aperture for more depth of field, but I didn’t have time to adjust the camera or I’d miss the shot. Much better would have been a single focus point. With any animal or any person, the eyes must be in focus. With very few exceptions, that’s a cardinal rule. With a single focus point, I could have pointed the center of the viewfinder at the horse’s head, held that focus, and then recomposed and taken the shot. This is why I like a single focus point for most of my
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photography. Single large subjects moving I photographed the little Japanese girl on her way down an ice slide in Sapporo, Japan also with a single focus point in the center of the viewfinder. I didn’t want the camera to lock onto any of the elements in the background, and the single focus point assured me that the sharpest part of the picture would be the subject that I composed in the center of the frame. To hold focus on the moving girl, I used AI servo for the continuous focusing. I also had the frame rate set on high, which for the Canon 5D Mark III is 6 frames per second. I felt that covered all the bases regarding focus and also the girl’s expressions.
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UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS Baby WildlifeWorkshop Hinckley, Minnesota June 26 - 28, 2015
Baby wolves, skunks, coyotes, bobcats, lynx, foxes, bears, plus adult animals in natural looking environments.
Frog & Reptile Workshop Close-up encounters with poison dart frogs and exotic reptiles in St. Louis, MO.
April 11 - 12, 2015
Home Photoshop workshop Learn amazing techniques to help you be more creative in photography.
May 16-17, 2015
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Multiple planes With pictures like the dwarf lake irises on the previous page, it was important that all of the planes be sharp. Therefore, my strategy here is to use the single point of focus in the center of the frame so I can choose where exactly the focus begins. Then I close the lens down for complete depth of field using f/32 and a tripod.
that whatever is in the middle of the picture should be sharp, and the array of points means that anything in a larger center area will be sharp. In these situations, you don’t have time to decide something off-center should be the point of focus simply because things are moving too fast. Therefore, since I know the most important portion of the picture is usually in the center, that’s where I focus.
I use this same technique for landscapes.
Birds in flight
A phalanx of subjects When there are several elements coming toward the camera such as in the picture of the horses, below, I use nine focus points centrally arranged, right. Various cameras have focus point patterns that differ from the Canon 5D Mark III, but you get the idea. My rationale is
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Without question, birds in flight are the most difficult subjects to capture well. The challenges are many: You need to fill a significant part of the frame with the birds to make the images impressive and that limits depth of field. Bird photography requires very long (and expensive) lenses that are tough to maneuver quickly, and a fast moving bird can be in and out of the frame in an instant. The shutter has to be fast enough to freeze the action which means you need decent light (or a high ISO). Most importantly the autofocus mechanism has to keep the subject in focus. If, in fact, it does keep up with the bird, it takes only a fraction of a second for the autofocus points to lose the bird in the frame and the AF then goes haywire, trying to focus on the sky. And the shot is lost. In the past, I struggled with bird photography because my camera couldn’t track the bird and
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keep it in focus. With many modern cameras, this problem has been solved. The other issue was that I was using the center grouping of focus points instead of what I did just recently photographing snowy owls in Canada. I used all of the focus points. The Canon 5D Mark III has 61 points, and by using all of them my ratio of in-focus shots of birds in flight went up exponentially. (Some Nikon cameras have 51 focus points and the results are the same.) This is particularly true when the birds are photographed against the sky as in the snowy owl below. There is nothing for the AF mechanism to focus on in the background, so by choosing all of the focus points, whatever subject is in the frame will be sharp. This is dependent, of course, on how fast the AI servo can lock onto the bird, but with all the points selected the odds that the AF mechanism will do so are increased
substantially based on my experience. By comparison, when there are background elements as in the picture of an owl swooping down from tree tops, below, and the distant forest behind the Japanese crane, right, a different approach is needed. You can’t use all the focus points because they may lock onto the trees behind the bird. Therefore, in this situation, I choose a 12 to 15 point central array of focus points. I try to keep the bird in the center of the frame -- hard to do with fast flyers -- and hope the central array locks onto the bird and not the background. That’s the best we can do with present technology. In addition, I use a little depth of field -- usually f/11 -- to make sure as much of the bird as possible is sharp. §
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WIDE ANGLE WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY In order to fill the frame with an animal in the wild, photographers use telephoto lenses simply because most species don’t allow a close approach. Therefore, we are used to seeing pictures with out of focus backgrounds and a compressed perspective. When an opportunity presents itself to move in extremely close and use a wide angle lens, the effect is visually arresting because it’s unusual and unexpected. There are not many situations in nature where photographers can get just a few inches from an animal, but that’s how to make these kinds of shots dramatic -- placing the camera as close as possible to the subject. In the case of the Japanese macaques, below (also called snow monkeys), I was able to shoot from six to twelve inches away. It is unbelievable how mothers with babies are completely oblivious to photographers. In fact, several of the babies tried to reach out and touch my lens and one succeeded. I had to try water drops off the glass with a microfiber cloth!
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I took the picture of the sea lions on the previous page in the Galapagos Islands. Mammals, birds, and reptiles in these unique islands have no fear of man and therefore they have no problem with photographers getting close. I shot this with film -- the Mamiya RZ 67 medium format camera -- and the lens I was using at the time was equivalent to a 24mm wide angle. I took this from a tripod at f/32, and the camera was about 14 inches from the noses of the sea lions. One of them opened an eye to see what I was doing, and then it went back to sleep. The exposure was a full one second with 100 ISO Fujichrome Velvia. I captured the unusual and very dramatic picture of a leopard, below, at a facility in Namibia where I take my photo tours. The leopards are in captivity to protect them from being killed by farmers, but they live in the bush in total-
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ly natural conditions. This picture was taken through a ‘photographer friendly’ electric fence with a 24 - 105mm lens set to the widest focal length. I was laying on the ground, and the woman who owns the ranch (it is 65,000 acres) was feeding the cats. My camera was about 18 inches away from those teeth. The leopard was growling at another male leopard a few feet away. When I was in the Falkland Islands on the way down to Antarctica, we stopped at a colony of rock hopper penguins. Our guide told us not to approach the birds too closely, but if they come to us it’s not a problem. So, I laid down in the grass with a 24 - 105mm lens on my camera and waited. One of the penguins waddled over to me and came within 18 inches of my outstretched hand that was holding the camera. I took the picture on the next page without look-
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ing through the viewfinder. Instead, I shot the penguin multiple times angling the camera in positions that I hoped would give me acceptable compositions. My settings for this picture were 1/1000, f/13, 640 ISO. The black rhino, below, had a 24 hour armed guard in Kenya for protection from poachers. It was on a private reserve, and my photo tour group was able to get up close and personal with it. Because it had been raised from a calf by humans, we could actually pet it. I took this picture with a 16 - 35mm lens from a low perspective, and again this is something you never see except under extraordinary circumstances. The settings were 1/125, f/16, and 200 ISO.
closeups is so compelling that I feel it’s worth exploring whenever you have the opportunity. Just remember that the closer you get to the subject, the more dramatic will the pictures be. And shooting from a low angle, such as in the rhino picture and the coyote howling, gives the subject greater stature. §
Many wide angle shots have the look of captivity or at least an animal under human control. That’s true. But the unique look of wide angle
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Window Light Portraits M
y favorite type of lighting for indoor portraits is window light. It is free, easy to expose for, and you can see exactly what it looks like before you take the picture -- unlike when using strobe equipment. There are two important factors that you must heed to make this work. First, the light coming in through the window has to be diffused. Direct sunlight doesn’t look good in most (but not all) cases. It’s too harsh. Use a north facing window or shoot on an overcast day. Second, the background is critical. A busy background or one showing part of the win-
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dow frame, elements in the room, or distracting curtains will ruin the pictures. In the case of the Grand Opera performer in a village in China, below, the cluttered and unadorned room created an environment I liked so I included it. This is an exception to my own rule. For the window light portrait of my great Pyrenees on the next page, I taped a piece of black velvet to the wall behind him to eliminate the window, the curtains, and the room interior. In both of these shots, notice the soft lighting and the lack of harsh light. You can actually duplicate this kind of lighting with studio softboxes and strobe equipment, but you can see that spending a great deal of money isn’t nec-
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essary at all if you simply take advantage of the light that enters your home through windows every single day. The portrait of my son when he was very young at right was illuminated by light coming in through French doors. I used a wall in my office as the simple and non-distracting backdrop. For the portrait of a woman spinning wool, below, the weathered wood of a 19th century porch was perfect for this period shot. The lighting, instead of coming from a window, came from the side of the porch open to the outside. This provided the same kind of light as window light except that there wasn’t any glass. For the picture of the Himba woman, lower right, I used an open door to her mud home as the light source. §
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LEARNING TO SEE
online course
by Jim Zuckerman
The ability to ‘see photographically’, to really grasp how your camera and lenses capture a subject or scene (which is different than how we see with our eyes) underlies successful picture taking. It is the bottom line that you’ve been looking for to take that quantum leap forward in your photography. The great thing about online courses is that they can fit into any schedule. Life gets in the way at times, and Jim puts no limit on the time you can submit your work for his critiques. CLICK THIS PAGE to read more about this course. 21
BOTSWANA/SOUTH AFRICA p h o t o t o u r June 6 - 20, 2015
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What’s wrong with this picture?
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love this portrait of a little girl I took in Sapporo, Japan during the snow festival last month. The lighting is soft, her pretty face is framed by the cute hat, and her expression is lovely. She was standing on some steps made of snow, and when I kneeled down to shoot I liked the upward angle as well. One thing bothers me a lot about this picture, however. The background on the left side shows a dark element and a very defined demarcation line between that dark, out of focus element and the white sky. It is the line, especially, that is the problem. Whenever you have a clearly delineated line behind a subject it is almost always distracting. This is true whether it is in focus, out of focus, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or even curved or round. It is simply too graphic and too pronounced, and it pulls the eye away from the subject. This was a grab shot because she had just finished sliding down an ice slide, so I didn’t have time to critically examine the background when I took the picture. 23
To solve the problem, I used Topaz Remask 4. This is the only software that could successfully retain the detail at the edge of the fuzzy white fabric. Fortunately, there was enough contrast between the white fuzz and the dark background for the software to do its magic. I was happy to see that all of that wonderful detail was retained in the final composite. Once the mask was created in Topaz, I just dropped in a sky of gray clouds using the Photoshop command Edit > paste special > paste into. The original sky picture I used for the new background was sharp, so I used Filter > blur > Gaussian blur in Photoshop to soften it to maintain the look of a telephoto lens. Since I used a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter to take the picture, the background would naturally be soft. ยง
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SHORT AND SWEET 1. When you photograph two subjects like this, make
sure that they are positioned equidistant to the camera. That will help you maintain enough depth of field so both of them will be sharp. If one of the subjects isn’t tack sharp, the picture will be ruined.
3. Bodies of water reflect the sky.
These rice terraces in China are an example. Getting up at the crack of dawn pays off when you see beautiful sunrise colors in the terraces. I added a bit of saturation and contrast, but these are natural colors that add a lot to the landscape.
2. To freeze the wings of birds in flight, use a shutter
speed of at least 1/1600th of a second. That will guarantee that even the wing tip feathers will be sharp. If there is enough light, use 1/3200th. Raise the ISO until you get the shutter speed you want.
4. Urban decay offers some very unique photo oppor-
tunities. Piles of junk, broken down and abandoned homes and buildings, shattered glass, graffiti -- all of these things can yield unique and compelling compositions. The picture below was taken in Detroit, Michigan -- home to 60,000 abandoned buildings! §
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NAMIBIA June, 2015
Photography Tours 2015 - 2016
VIETNAM, CAMBODIA, LAOS Sept, 2015
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BOTSWANA/SOUTH AFRICA June, 2015
MADAGASCAR August, 2015
BURMA (MYANMAR) Sept, 2015
ETHIOPIA November, 2015
CARNIVAL IN VENICE Feb, 2016
WHITE HORSES, FRANCE April, 2016
SNOWY OWLS Feb. 2016
GALAPAGOS ISLANDS March, 2016
CROATIA, SLOVENIA April, 2016
CHINA 2016 Sept. 2016
For a complete list of all the photo tours/workshops Jim is conducting, go to his website: www.jimzuckerman.com.
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Polar Coordinates Revisited
T
he Polar Coordinates plugin is native to Photoshop. It was in the first version I used back in 1991 -- Photoshop 2.0. After distorting a few images with it, the effect gets old and then usually we forget about it. But a new twist offers a very different kind of technique. Here are the steps to achieve the kind of image you see below: 1. Create a panorama image. Shoot a series of vertical pictures, all with the same f/stop, focal length, and ideally in diffused light. Make the images overlap by 25 to 40%. You can use a tripod or make the sequence of shots hand held as I did for the Venice skyline. The number of frames can vary; for this picture I used 12.
2. Stitch the frames together to create the panorama. In Adobe Bridge, highlight all the frames and then go to Tools > Photoshop > photo merge. In the dialog box, select the frames that will comprise the composite -the ones you highlighted -- and Photoshop does the rest. 3. Flatten the layers with Layer > flatten image. 4. If you need to crop the top, bottom, and sides of the frame, do so after you see the resulting panorama image. 5. Flip the panorama vertically: Edit > transform > flip vertical.
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6. Use Image > image size and make the photo a square. Uncheck the constrain proportions link, red arrow, right, and type in the same dimension for both the height and width. The higher the number, the more megabytes the final image will be. Click OK. 7. Now go to: Filter > distort > polar coordinates. In the dialog box, check the button that says rectangular to polar. Click OK. 8. To add the joker costume to the Venetian skyline on the previous page, I simply selected the model and pasted her into the scene.
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The image below is from Singapore. I used the same technique except I didn’t flip the pano vertically before I made it a square. §
ASK JIM
Every month Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at photos@jimzuckerman.com.
Q: Jim . . . When shooting on snow, where the snow takes up most of the frame, how much should
I compensate for the underexposure that I know will happen? And with film, we used to use half s/tops. The digital cameras today use 1/3 f/stop increments. Is this better? Megan Parker, Simi Valley, California
A: Exposure increments in 1/3 f/stops are more accurate, and therefore they are better in my opinion.
Digital cameras, just by their very nature, are more accurate in many ways compared to film cameras.
Regarding exposure compensation, it’s hard to give a definitive answer because there are so many scenarios, such as sun on snow, overcast light on snow, sunset lighting on snow, etc. I would say generally a one full f/stop compensation is a good start, but you’ll probably end up using 1 1/3 or 1 2/3 f/stops to compensate. Check the LCD monitor and adjust the exposure based on what you see. I like to keep my exposures on the darkish side to protect the highlights from possibly being blown. In my own work, therefore, I underexpose by 1/3 or 2/3 f/stops from what I see on the LCD monitor and then tweak the image in post-processing to taste.
© 2015 Megan Parker
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Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos photo tour
September 13 - 28, 2015 Culture • Ancient ruins • Great people photography • Temples
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
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NAMIBIA PHOTO TOUR June 22 to July 3, 2015
Wildlife Bushmen Dunes Epupa Falls 31
Student Showcase
Each month, Jim features one student who took beautiful and inspiring images on one of his photography tours or workshops. It’s really fascinating how photographers see and compose such different images even though we may go to the same place. Everyone gets great images on my trips.
Wayne Guenther, Springfield, Virginia China photo tour
Š 2015 Wayne Guenther
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Student Showcase, continued
Š 2015 Wayne Guenther
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Student Showcase, continued
Š 2015 Wayne Guenther
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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my home
Sat. & Sun., May 16 - 17, 2015
Photoshop is a photographer’s best friend, and the creative possibilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and ‘homey’ environment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using ‘grunge’ textures, modifying lighting, replacing backgrounds, using layer masks, blend modes, adding a moon, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many great techniques that you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do. I go over each technique several times to make sure you understand it and can remember it. Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from different points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you
creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you’ve already taken. I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I’ll give you my address and you can find my home on Mapquest or with a GPS. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel. Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up (photos@jimzuckerman.com). All you need is a laptop and a lot of your pictures. If you don’t have a laptop, I have two Mac Book Pro laptops I can loan out for the duration of the workshop. §
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PHOTO INSIGHTS®
published by Jim Zuckerman, all rights reserved © Jim Zuckerman 2015 email: photos@jimzuckerman.com snail mail address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014 42