A photographer should take the time, every so often, to see things with his own eyes and not through the camera lens.  This sounds easy enough, but gives the irony of the photographer.  The photographer as the chronicler of the event is there as a third-party.  Not a participant, and not an observer, but a recorder of things.  In my view, to be a better chronicler of events, the photographer has two choices:  he has to know what is going to happen so he can prepare for the shot; or he can observe without immersing himself.

The wedding photographer is part of the former.  Today’s weddings and receptions (specially the reception) are setup affairs for the entertainment of the guests.  In this context the wedding photographer can orchestrate every move and shoot or re-shoot as needed.  This forces the photographer to re-create a wedding with every assignment, ending up with all the weddings looking the same.  The spontaneity of the picture would be almost missing.

For a more creative approach, or a novel approach, the photographer has to immerse himself in the event and understand what’s happening.  In this context, after a while, the amateur photographer has to let go of the camera and enjoy the celebration, or event.

Besides, there is a whole lot more fun in taking a picture which is not posed, nor expected.  Treat is as an exercise in creativity.

For candid shots, you need a telephoto lens, and/or a wide-angle lens.  Preferably, you should use an SLR (or DSLR).  But if you only have a point-and-shoot, then open it up to its maximum zoom.  Set the exposure for the lighting before-hand.  It’s necessary to set the exposure first, and allow the camera’s auto-focus feature to work when taking the shot.  This would result in faster focusing.  The aim of the exercise is to shoot fast.  When taking candid shots, you want the subject to stand out.  You can have the camera blur the background.   And double check that the flash is not set on auto-mode.

This takes lots of practice.  It also helps if you have a sense of humor, or an eye for capturing an unposed scene.  It would be good to have some practice in the wild, taking pictures of people, total strangers, in the mall, or at the park, and to do this unobtrusively.  With a wide-angle lens, you can take a picture without looking through the viewfinder.  It’s also particularly effective when taking pictures from a moving vehicle. And with a long telephoto, you can take a photo far away enough not to be noticed.

Candid photography is hard to come by.  And it is this freshness which a lot of ad photographers aspire to, putting a spin on an assignment, making the picture look more natural.  For the amateur, a candid photo is something which was not composed with the subject.  For a professional photographer, a candid photo is something very hard to capture even while it was set up to look that way.

The present popularity of digital cameras came about because of the 1980′s and 1990′s boom in point-and-shoot 35mm film cameras. These are easy to use, no hassle, just point (automatic self-focusing) and shoot. Next step is to go to the photo print shop and have the film developed. If the user does not know how to take out the film (or even insert the film in the first place) the store clerk can assist you in taking it out — and making sure that the film is not exposed in the process.

The digital cameras go up one evolutionary step higher. There is no film, so the pictures get downloaded and printed from the computer or if the user so wants, he can still get this printed at the mall’s print shop. Since almost everyone with a digital camera also has an email address, logically, lots of these pictures also get sent to wherever friends, relatives, websites are.

With almost all major film (and camera and computer) manufacturers also creating their own line of digital cameras, it stands to reason that there might be more pictures being taken now with digital cameras than with film-based cameras. Because there is no film.

There was a glaring problem with point-and-shoot cameras. It was so glaring, that it differentiates and defines the quality between pictures taken by dedicated hobbyists and professionals using SLR cameras pictures taken by real amateurs or beginners with point-and-shoot cameras. Most of those taken by amateurs and beginners are center-oriented. The subject is literally in the center of the picture.  Even with the “free film” of digital cameras, this is still the case. This is partly because to the photographer it doesn’t really matter how the photo is composed. If you do not have the “eye” for composition, and no inclination to study and develop composition, this will not happen.

The other reason, is because with early point-and-shoot cameras, off-center subjects are off focus. To a certain extent this is still true of digital cameras, as some cameras will not focus unless it is centered. Other cameras just default to center-focus and the user doesn’t know the difference.

The “rule of thirds” is a simplified interpretation or rule of thumb in composing pictures. You divide the shot into 3, and have the subject occupy the left or the right — rarely the center. Simple and easy to follow. And out of focus because the camera does not focus on the 2-thirds which is the left and right, but in the middle. Could have been a great composition, just that the picture is blurred. The only solution is to study the camera manual and experiment. Should take the regular user about 2 to 3 weeks to go through the camera features while taking pictures. And forever to remember how to do it right. Sounds almost like a manual SLR learning curve.  This is also related to the rule about the “Golden Ratio.”

Of course, there are now auto-focus systems which are not center-weighted, but even then, most photographers don’t pay attention to this very simple rule.
Which is why, sooner or later, I will get myself a digital SLR, so I can go full-manual again. I do sound like a throwback sometimes.

One of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century was of Albert Einstein.  In 1999, his portrait was on the cover of TIME Magazine as the “Person of the Century.”  The picture was taken in 1947 showing a mournful Einstein narrating his role in the US’s development of the atomic bomb.  The photographer was Philippe Halsmann, in 1958, Popular Photography ran a poll and he was names as one of the “World’s Ten Greatest Photographers.”

It would be hard to put his work in any modern context, except to say that he had a way with his photo subjects, making them feel at ease and natural.  He also made them jump.

He reasoned out that he didn’t want to take pictures where the subjects were edgy or uncomfortable or stiff.  He was a patient man and shot rolls and rolls of film, with hundreds of photos over several hours to get a good portrait.  Celebrities he took pictures of were mindful of being celebrities.  He found that one way to see the real person through the lens was to take lots of photographs.  Another was to ask the subject to do something unusual for them to let their guard down.  Asking a person to jump forces the person to think of the landing and lets go of his mask along the way.

It’s one technique which a lot of photographers have used to good effect.  Though there have been instances when photo shoots have depended too much on jumping and you end up with lots of ads with people jumping all over the place.

It’s a technique to think about when you have a stiff subject, edgy or uptight about something, or somebody who wants to maintain a persona for the camera.  Philippe Halsmann published a book of his photographs featuring personalities in mid-jump and different jumping poses.  It worked wonders for him.

A common photo opportunity for the amateur photographer is a group picture.  People, specially kids, have a natural tendency to have their picture taken.  And no occasion is complete without the attendees being photographed in groups, with the host, or in various activities.

Using manual SLR cameras, most of the shots are set and composed, to ensure that everyone is in the picture and that.  This usually results in a picture of people as if they were in a police lineup:  all of equal distance from the camera, looking in one direction and waiting for the shot (or flash).  And this is the reason why group pictures always look so formal.

Of course, there are workarounds to this.  With film-based cameras, it’s to use the manual setting, and to shoot when the

Increasingly, digital cameras have included face recognition software.  Embedded in the camera is a software which checks for faces in the field of view and ensures that the people in the picture are in focus.  This is a neat feature, though the implementation varies between camera brands and make.  Some cameras can only include up to 5 people, and though this is currently the baseline, expect that succeeding cameras will be able to frame more people.

One offshoot of this is that the photographer now takes more time framing the shot until all the people in the view finder (or LCD with Live View) are recognized by the software.  And again, depending on the software and camera, this is several seconds on top of the camera’s auto-focus function.

Face recognition software relieves the photographer of the job of making sure everyone is in focus.  This results in more dynamic pictures, with less formal and wacky poses, and more depth of field.  Depth of field is defined as the difference between the minimum and maximum distance that subjects are in focus.  This is a function of the aperture setting.  The higher the f-number, the deeper the depth of field is.  However, the higher the f-number is, the more light is needed.

Put another way, a wide-angle lens will have a better depth of field for a given f-number compared with a telephoto lens.  That’s because the wide-angle lens captures more light.  By the same token, for a film-based camera, the more sensitive the film (higher ISO-rating) the better depth of field you would get.  That being said, most lenses have depth of field markers which indicate the distances objects are in focus.

As a useful rule of thumb, to ensure that all the people are in focus, people should be between 10 and 15 feet away from the camera.  This will also make sure that the flash will reach the persons in the back and those in front don’t reflect too much of the flash.

This also serves as a useful workaround if you want to shoot fast without worrying if the shoot is blurred or not.  Whether the camera is a film-based of digital, and it doesn’t matter if it has face recognition software or not, set the camera on manual mode and shoot when the subject is within the prescribed distance.  Lag time between shots will also be minimized, allowing you to take the next shoot almost immediately.

There are some things every person takes for granted.  Eyesight, for instance, is an easy enough ability which is low priority, till you lose it, you start having problems with your eyes, or you start having headaches.  For an SLR camera (film or digital), most everyone will say that the most important part is the lens.  And most everyone will also say that they bought the lens without any idea how well it works besides the zoom factor or the f-number.

Most lens buyers would not take the time to shoot a picture before buying a camera.  In fact, practically nobody notices that a kit lens may not give the sharp pictures.  And to think that there are some lenses out there which are more expensive than the camera body.

The most common problems for a lens are barreling and pin-cushioning.  To understand this better, understand the main feature of a fish-eye lens: the edges are curved and the middle is enlarged.  This is barreling taken to it’s logical end.  Named after the way a barrel has curved sides, barreling is a side-effect of wide-angle lenses.  The wider the angle (like that of a fish-eye lens) the more pronounced the barreling.  For regular wide-angle (28mm for a 35mm camera) this should be nonexistent or insignificant.  But with a shorter focal length, barreling would be inevitable, and would be only a question of how much does it affect the picture.

On the other end of the spectrum, pin-cushioning occurs when the straight lines on the edges of a picture curve inwards.  This effect is more common with long lenses.  Barreling and pincushioning are both sides of the same coin, and it’s an indicator of how good the zoom lens is.

Barreling and pincushioning are less common in primary lenses, as these fixed-length lens were designed not to have these effects.  There are 18mm wide-angle lenses with minimal barreling. Minimal meaning that it’s noticeable but kept low, and therefore acceptable.  And for fixed length long telephoto lenses, pincushioning is almost nonexistent.  At least these problems do not appear or are kept to a minimum.  It would be a shame to have a 400mm reflector lens with noticeable pincushioning.

There is only one way to check if the lens has this problem and that’s to take a picture, preferably of straight horizontal and vertical lines.  If it’s not possible to take a picture and develop it, you would have to content yourself in looking through the viewfinder.

For a point-and-shoot and bridge cameras with large magnification (5x and up), expect barreling and pincushioning to appear in shots with the wide-angle and maximum telephoto shots.  There’s nothing anyone can do about this, as the lens are not interchangeable.

However, there is a workaround and it depends on studying the camera.  Take test pictures vertical lines.  The multiple shots should be from the widest angle to the highest zoom.  Study the resulting pictures and take note at what lens lengths the barreling and pincushioning becomes pronounced.  And if you don’t want these effects to appear (and ruin) your pictures, then don’t use these arbitrary lens limits.

One of the easiest photography projects there is is a silhouette.  All that’s needed is a light background and a dark foreground subject.  That being said, the next step is to find the right subject or picture topic.  That’s the hard part.  It’s not easy to find something interesting if you won’t be able to recognize any details about the subject, because the subject is supposed to be a big shadow.

For the best dark foreground with an interesting background, I usually choose sunsets.  There are lots of possibilities with sunsets.  There’s the play of clouds with the rays of the sun going through them, or the bright red disk hovering on the horizon and reflecting on the surface.  With a sunset background, there’s more than enough time to shoot lots of pictures, but maybe not enough time to prepare for the picture.

A sunset background, with the reddish light, makes the foreground that much darker.  If you shoot the subject with the sun directly behind it you would get nothing but a black shape (the silhouette).  If you’re lucky, you would be able to shoot the sun’s rays as well.

A traditional silhouette would be a profile or side view picture of a person or an object.  If this is too static, you might try a picture of kids playing, but with the sun almost at the edge of the horizon, or at least very low.  This would add more emphasis on the shapes up front.  Pictures are static, and a silhouette makes a picture more static than it already is.  It’s useless to shoot set pictures, like groups or people with the sunset as backdrop, the picture might accidentally turn out as a silhouette.  Instead try to shoot a picture denoting some action, like kids playing.  This would make the shadows in front a lot more interesting.

With digital camera pricese getting cheaper, specially good, high-megapixel digital SLRs, a lot more people are into selling pictures.  One such site where amateurs sell pictures is DeviantArt.com, however, this website is not primarily into selling pictures.  For serious picture trade there are stock photography sites and agencies.

Stock photography is one way of making money out of pictures.  The idea is that the photographer still owns the picture, and allows the buyer the use of the picture.  One other way of earning from a picture, specially for  professional photographers, is to take in commissions for works from ad agencies, book publishers and other users.  The resulting works would be owned by the entity which commissioned them.  In stock photography, the pictures are for limited use or one-time use, or with various exclusivity options.  There’s also the older business model of paying royalty for pictures.  The royalty is paid for every use of a picture.  Nowadays, there are stock agencies which offer non-royalty use.  There is a one-time payment for a limited time and unlimited use.  Even then, there are some pictures which have been sold multiple times and earning the photographer a lot of money.

Stock photography is like an inventory of pictures for sale by a buyer.  To be successful, an agency must have a big volume in stock.  Some agencies (and photographers) specialize in a specific style or genre.   Other agencies, pick a wide range of pictures and photo styles.  For a photographer, compiling large numbers of pictures of a particular style or genre would be best.  Specializing on wildlife or cityscapes would allow the photographer to hone his craft and develop his technique some more.

Some people think that owning a camera is already automatically means that they take good pictures, or that the pictures are good enough for selling.  In stock photography, this is not a problem as the industry started with photo discards from journalism assignments.  And besides, this is a numbers game:  the more pictures a photographer has in stock, the greater the chances from him earning because somebody picked up his picture.  For a stock photographer, having 100,000 pictures in stock means that he’d probably earn more than 10 times compared  to having only 10,000 pictures.

There are a lot of stock photography sites on the web.  And it’s not a bad idea for an amateur to submit to these sites.  It’s one way of earning money from photography.

Cam-whoring is a very common exercise for the bored camera owner.  In some instances, there are those who have bought cell phones in order to play around with this exercise.

I don’t subscribe to the term.  I would rather use the more formal “self-portrait” to describe this activity.  Taking picture of oneself is an honorable tradition, and it would do well to come up with a self-portrait which reflects your personality.

Here are some tips for a game and unique self-portrait:

• Use the self-timer and a tripod.  This is a basic requirement.  You can do without the tripod, as long as you can set the camera somewhere stable.
• Unique means one of a kind.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that you were original in how you shoot the self-portrait.  You don’t need to limit yourself by borrowing from Ann Leibowitz or Avedon or Helmut Newton.  You can recreate shots from paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt or Norman Rockwell.  (Though one Norman Rockwell self-portrait would be difficult to replicate:  it’s a triple self-portrait of himself working at the easel, painting a self-portrait, and with a mirror where he’s looking at himself.)
• Create an image.  Project yourself into the picture.  Smile with your eyes, or better yet, allow your eyes to communicate with the camera.  Send a message through your facial expression.
• Dress up the image.  That is, play dress up for the photo shoot.  Get some old clothes and do a retro shoot.  Or bring out the neckties and coats, and do a corporate shoot.  Or go with a holiday theme: like Halloween, or Memorial Day or Fourth of July.
• Or create a story.  The best pictures relate a story.  The image may be static but it conveys something or an event to whoever is viewing the picture.
• Compose the picture as if you were taking the shot.  Ask yourself, how did you compose your best pictures, and then recreate it with yourself as the subject.

These and more ideas result in pictures which are a lot more fun to look at than just the regular cam-whoring pictures from cell phones.

There are some landscapes where the photo taken from a regular camera is not large enough to take everything in.  Of course there are special cameras which can take a whole 360 degree panoramic view, but if you don’t have one of those then you’d have to be content in stitching the pictures.

 

Of course this could be done with a wide-angle lens.  And in fact some cameras which dub themselves as panoramic are just the same shots, only boxed in with black borders top and bottom.  Though there are problems with wide-angle lenses.  Too wide and the shots start to show barreling, where the straight lines at the sides of the picture are curved.  Fish-eye lenses are natural progression of the barreling effect.

 

The alternative is called stitching.  With manual cameras, stitching is done by taking multiple pictures of a landscape or building.  The pictures are of different parts of a larger picture.  For instance, when taking a picture of a building, you can take portrait oriented (tall) pictures, maybe about nine of pictures, three of the top thirds, another three of the middle third of the building and three more of the bottom thirds.  After developing the film, the nine photos are mounted overlapping each other as a single large picture.

 

Some photo exhibits or nature exhibits do away with stitched photos do away with a rectangular form, and instead mount the photos according to the general shape of the subject.  A stitched photo of a lake may be oval in shape.

 

With today’s digital cameras, there are some, like Canon, which come packaged with photo-stitching software. Alternatively, this could be done manually with Photoshop or most other photo manipulation/editing software.  There are also photo-stitching software which are free and available for download from the web.  

 

The first requirement when doing photo stitching is the set of pictures.  The pictures should overlap a bit when they were shot.  In doing this, it is best if you use markers on the big picture, and to have the neighboring shots include these markers.  For instance, if you were to shoot the other bank of a river, use specific trees or other landmarks as markers, and make sure that succeeding shots include these.  And to minimize any errors, it would help if the overlap were around 25% on each side.  

 

[Note:  The 25% overlap could be less, but not more.  If you used a 25% overlap on each side, each shot would effectively have only a 50% unique area.  All the rest are shared with the neighboring pictures.  If the planned picture were to use more than one plane, each of the shots would only have a unique area of about 25%]

 

The only variables which could not be controlled would be the lighting.  Cloudy weather, with gusts of wind means that the sunshine would vary for the shots.  For the most part, these gradations would have to be cleaned up manually, after the photo stitching.

 

Most photo stitching software I’ve used are fairly automatic.  You load up the pictures, in any order and the software would rearrange the photos (like solving a jigsaw puzzle with rectangular pieces) and stitch the photo with no user intervention.

 

Photo stitching is a fun exercise but it’s not for everyone as it takes a lot more post-production work than the actual photography.

I just saw a photo done on a website with a photo submissions page for amateur models (and I presume that the photographers are also amateurs) and only now have I realized that current digital cameras really are fast.

The beach scene picture was of a model wading in the water and throwing her head back, with the wet hair trailing water.  The picture itself was only 600×900 (portrait) and was a full body shot, however, the water trail was from the knees to about another three feet above her head, with the hair extending upwards as well.  What’s important to note is the detail of the water droplets in varying sizes, from knee high water to the arc above her.

Technically, there are several requirements for the scene to be captured.  The light has to be quite strong.  Since the picture was on a beach in the Maldives, that was taken care of –  the subject’s face was quite sun-burned.  The aperture has to be wide, to capture the most light.  And from the picture it sure looked like it, as the background showed a blurred shape up to his waist in water.  And if you looked closely, even the waves a few feet from the subject was already blurred and out of focus.  These two perquisites are to ensure the third one, a short exposure of maybe 1/1000th of a second, at most.

A few years back I would have added a fast film, at least an ASA/ISO 400.  (But who brings ISO 400 film to the beach?)  But nowadays, a good quality DSLR with manual settings could take the shot.

With good weather, this beach money shot could be taken around 8:00am to 10:00am in summer.  It could actually be taken as early as 7:00pm, but you run the risk of not having enough light.  Later than 10:am and the sun would be too high.  In the afternoon, after 4:00pm and you run the risk of a reddish tint to the picture.  And do make sure that the photographer (and camera) has his back to the sun.

Beach pictures are usually problematic.  The sand reflects light and the shot might be over-exposed.  White balance settings have to be set properly.  It would be best to attach a polarizer to the lens to catch bluer skies and clearer waters.

This kind of picture is not usually taken during trips to the beach.  It takes some time to set up and compose.  Again, the good news is that if your digital camera has a manual setting, it’s worth the time to set it up.

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