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On the Move: Warm Up to Shoot
Creative ideas to inspire your photography
Let Part Represent the Whole: Zoom In Dramatic Angles: Powerful perspectives The Deep Landscape: Hyperfocal Control
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On the Move
This is one of the best photographic ‘warm up’ exercises going. It’s very simple, but once you get started, you should feel those picture-taking muscles limbering up nicely. All you need is your camera, your watch and a window seat.
THE CHALLENGE Take pictures at an interval of a minute or two as you travel along — but only allow yourself a maximum of 10 seconds to frame and take each shot. TALKING TECHNIQUE Taking pictures quickly at an arbitrary interval has a number of benefits. For starters, it challenges you to be creative by continuously confronting you with scenes you probably would never have considered photographing. And, because you’ll typically have only a few seconds to get your shot, there isn’t time to “over-think” your compositions. The images you create will be spontaneous and, in many cases, quite unlike your previous work.
Think of this exercise as the photographic equivalent of calisthenics — you’re practicing and getting your eye in. This isn’t an occasion for editorial deliberation, it’s a chance to break out of your habits and to make yourself take chances. Of course in the end only a (very) few of your shots will make it into the “keeper” category, but experience shows that you’re likely to be pleasantly surprised at just how many interesting pictures you come up with in the space of an hour.
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tips Stick to the schedule and don’t
ever skip a shot. Always take your picture within
10 seconds. Use auto exposure. Keep your lens close to the glass
to avoid reflections — unless you like them! Experiment with panning to
maintain focus on a subject while you’re in motion. For an extra challenge, shoot
every other picture as a vertical. Experiment with shutter speed
settings. Try to shoot for at least half an
hour. Don’t delete anything until after
the exercise is finished.
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Let Part Represent the Whole Photographers casting about for a simple credo could do worse than to adopt that most succinct of creative mottos: “avoid the obvious”. There are of course many ways to sidestep clichés but one of the most reliable is to ask yourself how you can tell a visual story by leaving the maximum room for the viewer’s imagination.
THE CHALLENGE Capture a detail that will summon up a picture of the whole subject in your viewers’ minds. TALKING TECHNIQUE Aside from familiarity with your camera of choice, this challenge does not entail any special photographic techniques. But it will require a detective’s attention to small details and clues. A close-up of a wheel nut says vehicle, but a battered wheel nut with a haze of red dust in late afternoon light says much more. And sometimes it isn’t so much a detail, but the lack of a detail that is most evocative. Imagine a row of boots that says fire brigade. Then imagine the same row, but with one missing pair, and then imagine a third shot with a faded bouquet instead of the missing pair.
A simple technique for finding out how close you can get and still capture a meaningful detail is to shoot a sequence of pictures in which each successive frame is a little closer to the subject. When you finish, pick the image that is one back from being too close. Whilst capturing a detail close-up is the most obvious approach, it is often worth asking yourself how far back you can get from the subject. This can work very effectively with extremely large objects with big featureless areas punctuated by simple details (a doorway in an otherwise blank wall, a single porthole on a large ship and so on). The very best detail images create a little story in the viewer’s imagination. If it takes the observer an extra moment to recognise the subject, all the better!
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tips Avoid static compositions,
remember the rule of thirds and avoid simply centring your subject in the frame. Only show enough of the subject
to tell the story - no more. Think about the context, a detail
isn’t a detail if the larger whole isn’t at least implied. Try shooting details with a
variety of lenses from macro through wide angles to your longest telephoto. Don’t just stand there - change
your perspective. You won’t always find subjects at eye height.
USEFUL LINKS Mundane details group on flickr Less is more group on flickr
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Dramatic Angles
It’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to liven up an image, and yet all too often we photographers just stand there, taking every shot at eye height.
THE CHALLENGE Shoot your subjects from the most dramatic angles you can find. TALKING TECHNIQUE While this exercise does not require a particular kind of camera, you will probably find it easiest to work with a wide angle lens - or with your zoom at its widest setting. Essentially what you are going to look for are ways to photograph your subjects at acute angles. Typically this means positioning the camera close to a dominant plane (eg the ground for low angle shots) and angling it to at least 45 degrees. Thanks in large part to the influence of cinematic framing conventions, different angles often imply a particular emotional state. Thus, the worm’s eye view portrait bespeaks power, or perhaps looming danger, whilst the
bird’s eye view reverses the effect, and places the viewer in the dominant position. In the context of landscape photography the emotional notes change to a sense of the precipitous if the angle of view is upward, or vertiginous if one is looking down from a great height. Another way to introduce an expressive angle to your photographs is to tilt the frame itself off the horizontal or vertical. In cinema-speak this is sometimes called the Dutch Angle and it is used to create a sense of imbalance or tension by tilting the entire scene. Easy to overuse, it nevertheless can be quite expressive.
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tips Avoid shooting from eye height,
get down at ground level, climb up a ladder or hug a wall. Use converging lines - either real
or implied - to emphasise the angle. Take a series of shots at
increasingly acute angles - until you go too far! Experiment with foreground to
background focus relationships (depth of field) by shooting at different apertures. For cinematic inspiration watch
Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane, Carol Reed’s The Third Man or classics of German expressionism such as Nosferatu. USEFUL LINKS Cinematic techniques on
Wikipedia Worm’s eyeview flickr group
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The Deep Landscape
Many people see the landscape as something that by its nature is off in the distance. When they try to photograph it, they put the horizon in the middle of the frame and zoom back to their shortest focal length to “fit it all in”. Sadly, this approach is almost guaranteed to produce a dull result. However, you can create a much more interesting and punchy picture by employing a technique well known to experienced landscape photographers in which hyperfocal distance is used to precisely control the zone of focus.
THE CHALLENGE Create a dynamic landscape image by placing an interesting object or appropriate scenic detail in the immediate foreground of your picture while at the same time maintaining sharpness out to infinity. To do this, you will control your depth of field by using the hyperfocal distance technique.
TALKING TECHNIQUE For any combination of lens focal length, aperture setting and camera sensor size, there is a particular point of optimal focus. Called the hyperfocal distance, everything from half this value out to infinity will be in focus. Let’s say you have a DX format DSLR and for your composition you want to use the lens at its 18mm setting. If you select an aperture of f/11, the hyperfocal distance will be 1.4 metres and the zone in focus will extend from half that distance (ie 0.7 metres) out to infinity. By ensuring that your important foreground detail is no closer than 0.7 metres, you can be certain that your photograph will be sharp from up close to infinity.
Specialist landscape photographers will often carry a table that tells them exactly what the hyperfocal distance is for any given combination of focal length and aperture. You’ll find several links below right to free online resources for easily creating such a table for your particular lens focal length and sensor size. If you don’t have a hyperfocal calculation table, there is a rough rule of thumb when shooting landscapes wherein you manually focus on a point roughly a third the way into the scene (your estimated hyperfocal distance) and then re-frame the shot to place your important foreground element about half way between you and the hyperfocal point.
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tips Use a short focal length lens or
lens setting (wide angle). Use aperture priority mode
and select a small aperture to maximise depth of field. (To achieve reasonable sharpness, avoid apertures smaller than about f/16). Focus on the hyperfocal distance
manually then re-frame to achieve your composition. Use a tripod (small apertures
will require longer exposure times). Look for a foreground subject
with strong tactility; ideally you want your viewer to feel as though they could reach out and touch it. Give yourself every opportunity
for drama. Shoot when the sun is at a low enough angle to pick out the detail and contrast in the scene. Late autumn to early spring will give you a natural advantage. Avoid shooting at midday. Experiment with a graduated
neutral density filter to balance bright skies with the landscape.
USEFUL LINKS About hyperfocal distance Basic hyperfocal table from the
Nikonians site Hyperfocal charts Depth of field calculator
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Eugene Tan, EOS Pro Photographer. “It was my ďŹ rst time in Hawaii, which is odd as I make a living from shooting beautiful waves and Hawaii is the world centre of surďŹ ng - I just hadn’t got there yet because I was distracted with less crowded spots. I took this shot at a remote beach I found. No hotels, no tourists, no Waikiki that’s for sure. It was about 35 degrees and I shot a series of images with my Mark IV, cooling off in the shorebreak. This clear wave wobbled and drew sand as I swam behind it creating this incredible abstract image. I love the buckled shape that the water is making. People think it’s not a real shot, so I love that it was captured in camera. It’s funny how in the land of giant waves, the small ones are pretty great tooâ€?.