Shutter Speed VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1
JULY 6, 2020
PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE
Which Camera is Better? Smartphone vs DSLR
1 PHOTOGRAPHY
By Roberto Blake On the surface this question may seem very straightforward. A real camera is going to take better photos and better videos. But that is not the only thing to take into consideration. Sometimes the weight and size of a camera can be inconvenient. For some folks cost of buying a DSLR may be prohibitive, but through their telephone carrier they can easily finance a high-end smartphone with a great camera. There are many reasons why someone could decide to choose one over the other, and in today’s article we will explore these options to help you make the best decision for your situation. Here are the advantages of each: Advantages of Smartphones There are many reasons that some people would prefer to shoot with a smartphone rather than a DSLR camera. Mostly this choice comes down to overall weight, as well as convenience. DSLRs sometimes just feel like overkill if you’re not doing photography professionally. A smartphone is something you’re likely to have on you and doesn’t require any special accessories most of the time. With each new generation of smartphones adding more features, higher resolutions and expanding into high-quality video, there is a legitimate argument for the average person not needing a “real camera.” --Lightweight and fit in your pockets --Uncomplicated and easy to use --Images are immediately usable --Apps in the phone allow for easy editing --Pictures can immediately be shared online --Capable of easily shooting slowmo and time-lapse --Create easy panorama images without complex editing --Small and unintimidating for models and small children --Affordable 4K video footage.
Advantages of a DSLR Camera Whether you are shooting photography or video a DSLR camera is a powerful option. These cameras are enjoyed by enthusiasts and professionals for several reasons—from the ability to adapt the camera by using lenses and accessories to knowing that one has complete creative control of their image. DSLR cameras have many great features, but the trade off is weight, complexity, and cost. --Interchangeable lenses give you more options --Zoom lenses give you the ability to shoot further away --Superior image quality overall --The ability to have artistic control over the exposure
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--More options for shooting in low light situations --Better overall build quality (some are weatherproof) --Larger image file-size capacity --Higher resolution images and more detailed photos --Better dynamic range and color accuracy --The ability to create high depth of field with wide apertures --Faster shutter speeds for shooting action or sports --Capabilities can be enhanced with a variety of accessories
pressured to do so. There can be other valid options for you including smartphones, point and shoot cameras or mirrorless cameras. It all comes down to user preference and your individual needs, not unlike my Mac VS. PC argument.
Which Camera Solution is Right for You?
When you are shooting professional photography or video that you’re being paid for, the reality is that you should probably be shooting on a DSLR (or Mirrorless) camera. The interchangeable lenses and ability to shoot in low light situations will matter. This is particularly true if
The best camera is the one you have with you and the one that you know best. If you don’t have the ability or the patience to use a DSLR camera you shouldn’t feel
If you find yourself wanting to get shots in the moment and they don’t need to be professional then a smartphone is the convenient option, and still capable of producing a level of quality that is more than acceptable for prints.
you are shooting portraits and need to consider lens compression and distortion, or if you’re shooting events where lighting will be an issue. Final Thoughts on Smartphones vs DSLR Cameras As technology advances, there may come a time when smartphone cameras are truly competitive and offer the options and quality that allow them to replace a DSLR or Mirrorless Camera. For now, traditional cameras still produce superior quality and provide the versatility the professionals need in order to capture moments and create beautiful imagery. For the everyday consumer, a smartphone packs more than enough pixels and features to be fun and affordable.a
3 HOW TO
Phone Photography 101: by Lindsay Kolowich Before the days of smartphones -- if you can remember such a time -- taking a great photo was a labor-intensive process. You'd have buy a fancy camera and editing software for your desktop computer, and invest some serious time and energy into learning how to use them. But, thanks to our mobile devices and the editing apps that come with them, we can now take high-quality photos and edit them without too many bells and whistles -- all from the same device that we use to make calls. Taking a great photo on your smartphone is not as simple as pointing and shooting. There are plenty of bad smartphone photos out there -- I’m sure you’ve seen at least a few. What’s the secret to taking great pictures with your smartphone, then? As it turns out, there are a few of them. Check out these tips below to improve your smartphone photography game.
1. Use gridlines to balance your shot.
One of the easiest and best ways to improve your mobile photos is to turn on the camera’s gridlines. That superimposes a series of lines on the screen of your smartphone’s camera that are based on the “rule of thirds” -- a photographic composition principle that says an image should be broken down into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, so you have nine parts in total. According to this theory, if you place points of interest in these intersections or along the lines, your photo will be more balanced, lev-
el, and allow viewers to interact with it more naturally.
2. Set your camera’s focus.
Today’s phone cameras automatically focus on the foreground of your frame, but not every picture you take on your phone has an obvious subject. To adjust where you want your camera lens to focus, open your camera app and tap the screen where you want to sharpen the view. If you’re taking a photo of something in motion, for example, it can be difficult for your camera
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How to Take Good Pictures With Your Mobile Device to follow this subject and refocus as needed. Tap the screen to correct your phone camera’s focus just before snapping the picture to ensure the moving subject has as much focus as possible. A square or circular icon should then appear on your camera screen, shifting the focus of your shot to all of the content inside that icon.
3. Focus on one subject.
Many of the best photos include just one, interesting subject. So when taking a picture of one, spend some extra time setting up the shot. Some professional photographers say that the subject shouldn’t fill the entire frame, and that two-thirds of the photo should be negative space -- that helps the subject stand out even more. But be sure you tap the screen of your smartphone to focus the camera on your subject -- that’ll help to ensure that it’s focused and the lighting is optimized.
4. Embrace negative space.
“Negative space” simply refers to the areas around and between the subjects of an image --and it can take a photo from “good” to “great.”
When you include a lot of empty space in a photo, your subject will stand out more and evoke a stronger reaction from your viewer. And what does negative space looks like? It’s often a large expanse of open sky, water, an empty field, or a large wall, as in the examples below.
5. Find different perspectives.
Taking photos from a unique, unexpected angle can make them more memorable -- it tends to create an illusion of depth or height with the subjects. It also makes the image stand out, since most mobile photos are taken either straight -on or from a bird’s eye view. Try taking a photo directly upward and playing with the sky as negative space, like in the first photo below. Or, you can try taking it at a slight downward angle.
6. Take candids.
Posed photos can be great for the sake of memories -- happy moments with friends, family, or the occasional run-in with a celebrity. But sometimes, candid shots of people doing things, or people with people, can be far more interesting. That’s because candid photos are better able to effectively capture the emotion and essence of a moment. One of the best ways to capture this kind of shot is to just take as many photos as possible. You’ll have more to choose from, and the best photos often happen when the “stars align,” so to speak, in a single moment -everyone’s eyes are open, one person is tilting their head just so, and you finally got a shot of your chronically closed-lip friend smiling with his teeth.
5 Q&A
GET TO KNOW JACKSON PATTERSON Jackson Patterson received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009. He began his process in Arizona where he grew up. Exposed to the expansive landscapes throughout the west Jackson laid foundation for his appreciation for the land and the human story within it. He continues to tell the stories of his family and others intertwined with the majestic landscapes in his photomontages. Patterson’s images breathe insight into representation, fabrication, visual language and the relationship of earth and people.
He has been exhibiting his photographs in Hong Kong, London, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Texas, Colorado, Oregon, California and Arizona since 2000 at the Houston Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Morris Graves Museum of Art, the Pendleton Art Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and at the David Brower Center. His work is in various private collections and in the Paul Sack Collection at the SFMOMA. He was recently awarded the Renaissance Photography Prize 2013 for best single image, the International Photography Awards 1st place in 2014, and was a Photo Lucida Critical Mass top 50 photographer in 2015. Jackson currently resides and works in Chicago.
Q&A 6 BY SANDRINE HERMAND-GRISEL
Tell us about your first introduction to photography? “To be honest, my high school mandated that we choose an elective in addition to our core curriculum. My first choice was sports, but after an ankle injury sidelined any hopes of playing baseball, I enrolled in a photography class. Whether I knew it or not at the time, I probably choose that course due to my childhood memories of my grandfather always walking around with a camera around his neck. He was an avid photography hobbyist and I always admired his love of photography and the arts. That class was my first exposure to the camera and working in the dark room (which I loved). Upon entering college, my interest in photography had developed to the point where I was enrolling and pursuing classes outside of my university, seeking out mentors and teachers who could help me develop my point of view, ultimately leading me to pursue a masters in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute.”
Why did you choose to pursue a career as a photographer? “It certainly wasn’t a business decision. I received a Business and Spanish degree from the University of Arizona, but I continued to be really interested in photography. I found myself continually drawn to wanting to know more. Studying at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 was when I truly began to immerse myself and develop my passion for
photography. I would spend hours upon hours in the library, studying, educating myself, and thumbing through every photography book I could get my hands on, soaking up as much as I could. As much as I enjoyed learning the art of photography, the fact that I needed to make a living was not lost on me. I quickly began networking, leveraging my contacts for smaller jobs that eventually led to larger jobs that ultimately allowed me to pursue a full time career in photography.”
what my families histories were. It became clear to me that those weren’t unique and that the human story is intertwined in all of us.”
What equipment do you use?
“Family, the land and the art of photography. The story of the landscape isn’t a human one but we don’t exist without it. Most of my family grew up on some sort of farm or ranch, working the land. For someone like myself who is not a writer, photography is a great outlet for making those connections.”
“I’ve never been much of a gear head no offense to anyone. I just prefer to find one or two cameras and one or two lenses and work from there. It becomes too much to keep track of otherwise and the story telling is lost for me when I think too much about equipment. That said there are some things you can’t live without as a photographer anymore and the biggest thing is a good computer with really good software. Harking back to the science narrative in photography it’s impossible to work in the modern era without it. Or at least it’s impossible to comment on technological aspects of photography and the direction those are taking us in.”
How do you prepare for your projects? Do you picture beforehand in your mind the images you take?
What advice would you give someone who would like to become a photographer today?
“I work with a lot of archive images so sometimes I will hear the stories of the person/s in the image and then think about that when I am photographing somewhere else. I don’t work in a linear manner however. I am pretty much all over the place and the actual visual connections don’t come together until I’m in my studio.”
“Oh man, this is such a atough subject. Professionally it’s a declining industry and has been so for over a decade. That means if you want to be a professional photographer and you start today you’ll make less money than if you started 10 years ago. As an art form I think it’s just getting started in a lot of ways. The advent of new technologies in photography will be ever present as long as the technological race continues. Wether that’s good or bad I don’t know if we can say just yet. It does mean that our lives will change and maybe that’s ok.”
What inspires your unique storytelling?
How has your work evolved over the years? “I think the biggest evolution my work has taken is from the personal to the collective. I used to only think about the work in terms of
Red Barn by Jackson Patterson
Elevatory Point by Jackson Patterson
7 SHOPPING
Camera Gear and Accessories You Need 1
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SHOPPINHG 8 1. Camera: If you buy a dedicated camera (rather than a phone), pick one with interchangeable lenses so that you can try out different types of photography more easily. -- Cost: $300 to $1,700 (with lens) -- Where: Best Buy, Walmart, Target, B&H. com 2. Lenses: For everyday photography, start with a standard zoom lens like a 24-70mm or 18-55mm. Different type of lenses vary on occasion. They can range from 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, telephoto lens or macro lens. -- Cost: $100 to $2,000 -- Where: Best Buy, B&H.com 3. Flash: Flashes can be expensive, but very helpful in dark areas. -- Cost: $30 to $200 -- Where: Best Buy, Walmart, B&H.com, Amazon. com
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4. Post-processing software: One way or another, you need to edit your photos. It’s ok to start with software already on your computer, or software that comes with your camera. -- Cost: Lightroom and Photoshop as a bundle for $10/month -- Where: Adobe.com 5. Memory cards. Choose something in the 16-64 GB range to start. -- Cost: $15 to $100 Where: Best Buy, Walmart, B&H.com, Amazon.com 6. Bags: Get a shoulder bag for street photography, a rolling bag for studio photography, a technical hiking backpack for landscape photography, and so on. -- Cost: $20 to $400 -- Where: Best Buy, Walmart, B&H.com, Amazon. com 7. A tripod: A landscape photographer’s best friend.
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-- Cost: $60 to $150 -- Where: Best Buy, Walmart, B&H.com, Amazon. com 8. Extra Batteries: Get at least one spare battery to start, preferably two. --Cost: $30 to $100 -- Where: Best Buy, B&H.com, Amazon.com
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How photographers are capturing the resistance to Trump – in pictures Photographer David Moriya started photographing protesters against Donald Trump’s presidency on the day after the inauguration, and at subsequent marches he started sharing his pictures with demonstrators. This grew into the Resistance Photography Project, which shares images of demonstrations with people who march, and with non-profits, such as the ACLU and the New York Immigration Coalition, to use free of charge. Moriya says of the project ‘we’re making ourselves heard, now let us be seen’ All photographs: David Masami Moriya
March for Standing Rock, New York Public Library, Zahra and Leslie chant against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Both got their photos from this day, and also from the march on Not My Presidents Day
These women seized the moment and made this photo a classic. They were sent this photo immediately after it was taken at the Not My President Protest in November 2016.
Sonia Sheron, a musical performer, plays with her partner, Liah Alonso, dressed as Lady Liberty and Gypsy Cowgirl. They received their photos at the Day Without a Woman protest
Women’s March, NYC where a huddle of Nasty Women walk up 1st Ave
A rally for trans students at the Stonewall Inn. During a speech, the crowd chanted in resistance and then the rally marched into Macy’s cosmetics department and protesters gave speeches
DT standing on a lamp post at a rally for trans students, where I sent him this image
These Nasty Young Women scaled the scaffolding and made themselves seen at the Women’s March in NYC
11 EDITOR’S CHOICE
The Story of the “Migrant Mother”
By Ben Phelan
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s the United States sank into the Great Depression, a photographer named Dorothea Lange turned her attention away from studio and portrait work toward the suffering she was seeing around her. After taking a job as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency tasked with helping poor families relocate, Lange one day found herself in Nipomo, California, at a campsite full of out-of-work pea pickers. The crop had Dorothea Lange been destroyed by freezing rain; there was nothing to pick. Lange approached one of the idle pickers, a woman sitting in a tent, surrounded by her seven children, and asked if she could photograph them. From Lange's notes: "We just existed," Florence Thompson said. "We survived. Let's put it that way." I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that [she and her children] had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. Lange took six pictures. One of them, Migrant Mother, became the iconic photo of the Depression, and one of the most familiar images of the 20th century. With her children cowering behind her for protection, hiding their faces, the Migrant Mother gazes distractedly into the distance. At the time, the dust-blown interior of the United States was full of families like hers, whom poverty had forced off their land and into a life of wandering. Their poverty was total; they had nothing. Where is her husband, the children’s father? She is on her own. There is no help, no protection, and nothing over the horizon but work, want and more wandering. Her worried, vacant expression seems to communicate what we, at our end of history, already know: Things were not going to get better for a long, long time. There are few images as deeply ingrained in the national consciousness as Migrant Mother. Yet for decades, no one knew what had become of this woman and her family. No one even knew her name: Lange never asked, and by the time the photo appeared in a local newspaper, the woman and her family had moved on to the next town. Finally, in 1978, a reporter from the Modesto Bee found the Migrant Mother, tracking her down to a trailer park outside Modesto, California. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson; she was 75 years old. Lange had promised Thompson that her name would never be published — Thompson wanted to spare her children the embarrassment — but once she was discovered, she revealed her name and told her story. Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie, a Cherokee, in a teepee in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in 1903. She married at 17, then moved to California for farm- and millwork. When she was 28 years old and pregnant with her sixth child, her husband died of tuberculosis. Thereafter Thompson worked odd jobs of all kinds to keep her children fed. For most of the 1930s, she was an itinerant farmhand, picking whatever was in season. During cotton harvests, as she described in interviews, she would put her babies in bags and carry them along with her as she worked down the rows. She earned 50 cents per hundred pounds picked and says she “gen-
erally picked around 450, 500 [pounds a day]. I didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds.” For a while, she and her children lived under a bridge. “When Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield — at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn’t even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt.” One day in 1936, while driving from Los Angeles to Watsonville, Thompson’s car broke down. She managed to get the car towed into the Nipomo pea-pickers camp, had it repaired, and was just about to leave when Dorothea Lange appeared. Thompson was not eager to have her family photographed and exhibited as specimens of poverty, but there were people starving in that camp, one of Thompson’s daughters later recalled, and Lange convinced her that the image would educate the public about the plight of hardworking but poor people like herself. Within days, the photo was being published in papers across the country — an instant classic of American photography. In the years to follow, the Thompson family kept their identities to themselves, but the photograph was a continual subject of conversation. “It always stayed with her,” said Katherine Thompson McIntosh of her mother. “She always wanted a better life, you know.” Thompson moved to Modesto in 1945 and went to work in a hospital there. She had one of the most famous faces in the United States, yet, to keep her family together, she had to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. “I worked in hospitals,” Thompson told NBC in 1979, “I tended bar, I worked in the field, so I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids.” Thompson profited nothing from Migrant Mother. “I can’t get a penny out of it,” she once said, but she wasn’t exactly bitter. She had posed for the photo to help others, not herself, yet the disparity between her high profile and low status couldn’t help but bother her. Meanwhile, Migrant Mother made Dorothea Lange’s reputation, helped earn her a Guggenheim fellowship, and conferred fame and a permanent place in the canon of American photographers. Lange certainly deserved her success; she had an eye, talent, training, and drive. Yet it seems unjust that Migrant Mother, one of the most successful photographs in American history, should have helped so many, but done nothing for the woman whose face and body were able to express so much. Thompson was a model; she was posing, and she knew why. She was to represent the very Figure of Poverty. So she organized her posture and set her expression just so for Lange’s camera. And that is a talent, too. Thompson and Lange, for an instant in 1936, were collaborators. Yet the gulf between their fortunes, already colossal, would only grow wider as years passed. The Thompson clan, which eventually grew to 10 children, worked their way into the middle class, but Florence Thompson never felt comfortable in a conventional home. Even after her children bought her a house, she chose to live in a trailer. “I need to have wheels under me,” she said. In 1983, Thompson had a stroke. Her children, unable to pay the hospital, used her identity as the Migrant Mother to raise $15,000 in donations. The money helped to defray Thompson’s medical bills, but Thompson herself gained nothing. She died soon after her stroke. A few years earlier, a reporter had asked Thompson about the life she eked out for her family. She spoke plainly, with no sentimentality. “We just existed,” she said. “Anyway, we lived. We survived, let’s put it that way.” During the Great Depression, that was never a guarantee. “We never had a lot,” said McIntosh, her daughter, “but she always made sure we had something. She didn’t eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate.”