Thanks for reading my blog, and stay tuned for more posts coming soon!
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
What is a Conservation Photographer?
I recently read a blog by landscape photographer Benjamin Blatt who questioned his own role in conservation, and it got me to thinking about whether or not I truly had a philosophy of my own with regard to environmental photography, and if so, what it might be. Blatt makes the point that the "wow" shots of stunning sunsets over snow-capped mountains or ocean waves crashing on some remote beach are exploitive, that he took those photos with only the intention of selling them and with much less of a focus on ensuring that such places continue to exist. He goes on to suggest that, from a purely environmental and conservatory standpoint, the only photos that have any power to change or influence are those that are shot with an eye towards encouraging meaningful dialogue or spurring people to action to protect the natural world. Some of the commenters on his blog suggest that even this is not enough, that by flying or driving to these places, he does more damage than good by burning fossil fuels, besmirching the natural environment by his very presence, etc.
.
I simply can't go that far, but I can claim a position somewhere in the middle of the road. I believe it comes down to your own personal attitude about your work. Let's just say I fly all the way to Tanzania, and while there, I capture a really awesome shot of Mount Kilimanjaro at sunset. I can process it, print it, frame it and get it hung in a gallery somewhere and say, "See what a great photographer I am? This can be yours for only $1000!" I might also see if I can get it included as part of an article on global warming, with emphasis on how the glaciers have receded on Kilimanjaro, and will have completely melted within fifteen years at their current rate of recession. The exact same shot, two different messages. Yes, the carbon emitted by the plane that brought me there contributed in a small way to the very problem I claim to be fighting, but it may be a small sacrifice that must be made in order to bring attention to the problem in the first place.
.
Many landscape photographers DO simply take shots meant solely for the gallery, and give no thought to whether or not their work influences others to take action on behalf of the environment or if it might help to form conservation policy, and that's all right. Ultimately, you list photography as a career because you wish to make a living while doing it, so that aspect is hard to avoid unless you specifically work for a publication dedicated to conservation or environmental issues, or if your photography is for an organization like the EPA or UNESCO. You're still selling your work; whether or not that work might be labelled "exploitive" is a matter of perspective. If you don't travel to get those landscape shots in far flung locales, you're stuck trying to find unique ways to photograph what's in your backyard, and unless you also do weddings and graduation photos, you may find yourself hard-pressed to make a living as a photographer.
.
When I shoot a landscape, my first thought is whether or not the finished photo will look good. First and foremost, I am an artist, and I want to produce work that pleases me and hopefully pleases the viewer. After that, I hope it makes me some money, because otherwise, this is a really expensive hobby I've got. Then I think about the greater impact my photo has on the world. The words that DON't go through my mind when planning a shot (or even a trip to take the shot) are, "Oh, I'm not going to take this photo, because it won't change the world." If you choose to call that side of it "exploitive," that is your perogative, but it's not going to stop me from going out and taking photos.
.
People will only fight to protect what they are aware needs protecting. It's hard to convince people to volunteer their time or donate money or write to their congress-people in support of something they know nothing about, and simply telling them about it often doesn't convey the value of what they'd be fighting for. So there is value in showing people the beauty of the natural world, if they know that through either their actions or lack thereof, the little corner of the world you've shown them might be lost. You can take a picture of a Bengal tiger and just caption it, "Bengal tiger, Rajasthan, India," or you could point out that there are fewer than 2500 Bengal tigers left worldwide due to poaching and habitat loss, and of those, most are in zoos. The photo helps you get the message across, but you can't get the photo without going there, so there is a balance between the harm you might do the environment through flying to a location and the good you do by shining a spotlight on an endangered species. If a beautiful landscape photo brings attention to an area of the world threatened by human industry, it isn't exploitive, but rather it gives the viewer a reason to care. Taking a photo of a natural scene or landmark that has already been spoiled by erosion, loss of habitat from clearcutting or strip mining, cluttered with litter or pollution, or otherwise ruined certainly shines a spotlight on the problem, but from what I've seen, if that isn't paired with a photo of what that same scene looked like before people destroyed it, all it causes most people to do is shake their heads, cluck their tongues and say, "What a shame. What a waste." If you wish to spur activism on nature's behalf, you have to also show people what it once was and could be again.
.
If I were given the opportunity to use my photography to initiate a dialogue on an environmental topic, I would certainly jump at it. The fact that the same photo might also sell commercially doesn't bother me -- in the same way that you might recall a particularly memorable commercial when you see the product elsewhere, you might recall the article on wildlife conservation you read a couple of weeks ago when you see the same photo hanging in a gallery or on public display, and it might remind you that you had intended to donate money toward a cause or join a letter writing campaign in support of the environment. To goad people to action in defense of nature is great, and to make a living while doing so is even better. The two are not mutually exclusive.
.
So what's your relationship with the natural world? Exploitive? Advocative? Or somewhere in the middle?
.
I simply can't go that far, but I can claim a position somewhere in the middle of the road. I believe it comes down to your own personal attitude about your work. Let's just say I fly all the way to Tanzania, and while there, I capture a really awesome shot of Mount Kilimanjaro at sunset. I can process it, print it, frame it and get it hung in a gallery somewhere and say, "See what a great photographer I am? This can be yours for only $1000!" I might also see if I can get it included as part of an article on global warming, with emphasis on how the glaciers have receded on Kilimanjaro, and will have completely melted within fifteen years at their current rate of recession. The exact same shot, two different messages. Yes, the carbon emitted by the plane that brought me there contributed in a small way to the very problem I claim to be fighting, but it may be a small sacrifice that must be made in order to bring attention to the problem in the first place.
.
Many landscape photographers DO simply take shots meant solely for the gallery, and give no thought to whether or not their work influences others to take action on behalf of the environment or if it might help to form conservation policy, and that's all right. Ultimately, you list photography as a career because you wish to make a living while doing it, so that aspect is hard to avoid unless you specifically work for a publication dedicated to conservation or environmental issues, or if your photography is for an organization like the EPA or UNESCO. You're still selling your work; whether or not that work might be labelled "exploitive" is a matter of perspective. If you don't travel to get those landscape shots in far flung locales, you're stuck trying to find unique ways to photograph what's in your backyard, and unless you also do weddings and graduation photos, you may find yourself hard-pressed to make a living as a photographer.
.
When I shoot a landscape, my first thought is whether or not the finished photo will look good. First and foremost, I am an artist, and I want to produce work that pleases me and hopefully pleases the viewer. After that, I hope it makes me some money, because otherwise, this is a really expensive hobby I've got. Then I think about the greater impact my photo has on the world. The words that DON't go through my mind when planning a shot (or even a trip to take the shot) are, "Oh, I'm not going to take this photo, because it won't change the world." If you choose to call that side of it "exploitive," that is your perogative, but it's not going to stop me from going out and taking photos.
.
People will only fight to protect what they are aware needs protecting. It's hard to convince people to volunteer their time or donate money or write to their congress-people in support of something they know nothing about, and simply telling them about it often doesn't convey the value of what they'd be fighting for. So there is value in showing people the beauty of the natural world, if they know that through either their actions or lack thereof, the little corner of the world you've shown them might be lost. You can take a picture of a Bengal tiger and just caption it, "Bengal tiger, Rajasthan, India," or you could point out that there are fewer than 2500 Bengal tigers left worldwide due to poaching and habitat loss, and of those, most are in zoos. The photo helps you get the message across, but you can't get the photo without going there, so there is a balance between the harm you might do the environment through flying to a location and the good you do by shining a spotlight on an endangered species. If a beautiful landscape photo brings attention to an area of the world threatened by human industry, it isn't exploitive, but rather it gives the viewer a reason to care. Taking a photo of a natural scene or landmark that has already been spoiled by erosion, loss of habitat from clearcutting or strip mining, cluttered with litter or pollution, or otherwise ruined certainly shines a spotlight on the problem, but from what I've seen, if that isn't paired with a photo of what that same scene looked like before people destroyed it, all it causes most people to do is shake their heads, cluck their tongues and say, "What a shame. What a waste." If you wish to spur activism on nature's behalf, you have to also show people what it once was and could be again.
.
If I were given the opportunity to use my photography to initiate a dialogue on an environmental topic, I would certainly jump at it. The fact that the same photo might also sell commercially doesn't bother me -- in the same way that you might recall a particularly memorable commercial when you see the product elsewhere, you might recall the article on wildlife conservation you read a couple of weeks ago when you see the same photo hanging in a gallery or on public display, and it might remind you that you had intended to donate money toward a cause or join a letter writing campaign in support of the environment. To goad people to action in defense of nature is great, and to make a living while doing so is even better. The two are not mutually exclusive.
.
So what's your relationship with the natural world? Exploitive? Advocative? Or somewhere in the middle?
Thursday, October 13, 2011
What Mike's been up to this fall
Some shots from my recent trips to Mount Rainier and the Palouse. I will be travelling back to Mount Rainier again in a few weeks, and I intend to stop by the Skagit River sometime around Christmas to see if I can get some good shots of bald eagles during the coho salmon run.
Fall 2011 - Images by Michael Uyyek
Fall 2011 - Images by Michael Uyyek
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Creativity and Setbacks
Better artists than I have experienced periods of low productivity and little inspiration, and better writers than I have put into words both the expression and true anguish engendered by the loss of the creative spark upon which the artist depends. It may be described as writer’s block, loss of vision or clarity, loss of mojo, the blahs, even mental constipation. It doesn’t matter how you express your creativity; whether through poetry or prose, photography, painting, sculpture, interpretive dance or other performing arts, we all go through tough times when life gets in the way of producing art. When your creative output is lower than you’d like, what is the artist to do?
What really stops an artist cold is the individual artist himself. Some people simply suffer from motivation issues, and fail to create or innovate because it takes precious time and energy they have convinced themselves they do not possess. They tell themselves, “Well, I’d love to pick up my paint brushes again, but there just isn’t time!” There is time, of course, but sometimes you have make it. It’s a matter of choosing to set aside the time for art, and let the creative juices flow. If you schedule a time every week when it’s just you, an easel and a palette of oils, when no one is to interrupt you for any reason except a house fire or a sucking chest wound, you’ll find that it’s actually quite relaxing, and makes the rest of your hectic week seem a little bit less so because you know you have this moment of creative solitude to look forward to.
It’s also easy for a new artist to convince himself that it’s all been done before, and unless he creates something truly unique or innovative, it’s all simply derivative at best, and outright plagiarism at worst. This is also a fallacy (except if you’re really plagiarizing something, of course); just because someone has produced something before similar to what you’ve created, it doesn’t diminish the value of what you’ve done. Yes, many painters have done still-life scenes of bowls of fruit in front of a window with morning sunlight streaming in, but not THIS basket of fruit in front of THIS window on THIS day, and unless you’re very skilled and trying very hard to copy another artist, you’re probably not going to paint it in the same way. The jewelry that my wife and I create are fantastic, of course, but because we still choose the materials, the colors and the style in which they are made, they are still uniquely ours even though they may sometimes be similar to the designs of other artists. Other photographers have certainly visited Victoria Falls or gotten good shots of Gentoo penguins in Antarctica, but that doesn’t make mine worse than theirs or less valuable, because maybe I’ve gotten a particular angle or lighting aspect or captured a particular moment in time that is unique in spite of being a familiar subject, and maybe my audience will be seeing this subject for the first time, and so my shot has the greatest impact upon them by virtue of simply being the one they’re looking at right now. Just because someone has already blazed the trail upon which you walk does not make the place less important to visit yourself, and you should certainly not let that stop you from walking the path.
When you hit a wall with your creativity and can’t think of how to get around your mental block or even get started creating, the time you spend on the mechanics and techniques of your craft will pay dividends when it comes time to create. That’s the advice I would give both established artists and beginning ones when faced with a lapse in creativity: just do it. There is a writing exercise that some teachers advise when you have writer’s block to simply start out by writing a page of something, anything, just to get the process going. It doesn’t have to relate to the actual project you want to work on, it will probably be crap, and that’s okay. You’re only doing it to get the creative juices flowing – priming the pump, if you will.
The same goes with any other art form: when you hit a stumbling block in your creative process, the dancer does stretches and forms, the composer plays something else (including other composers’ work), the sculptor makes a crappy ashtray or a vase, and the photographer takes photos of some flowers in his back yard or the fabric patterns of his curtains. None of this is satisfying work of any intrinsic value in and of itself, but often simply going through the motions makes room for inspiration to bloom. Suddenly, in the midst of finding unique angles to photograph a teacup or a handful of flower petals, you might wonder, “Well, what would happen if I did…. this?” Perhaps the sculptor might take the idea of the clay ashtray every kid makes their parents in grade school whether or not the parents actually smoke and build upon that idea to create some expression of innocence lost. There’s a long history of painters who learned the same techniques employed by the masters before them who churned out the same old stuff, until one day someone said, “Well, what if I applied the paint in little dots instead of broad brush strokes? What if I took realistic depictions of mundane objects and made them interesting by employing repetition of form and pattern?” Without even realizing it, you jump start the creative process by simply doing the work, and you’ve created something new.
Will you create a whole new genre or artistic movement? Well, probably not; after all, there is a limited list of artists who have become household names precisely because innovation is hard. Creativity, however, is not limited to just the trailblazers: Picasso was not the only cubist painter, but merely one of the first. Beethoven may have been the first composer to put a choir into a symphony, but that doesn’t mean that Mahler was a poser for liking it and doing the same thing. You can appreciate the work of artists who have come before you and build upon the foundations they have laid by learning from what they have done and continuing along the path they have forged ahead of you.
Is all this a guarantee against mental blocks? No. You may very well hit a period when nothing inspires you and you can’t seem to create anything at all, and that is the time when it’s important to make time to play. Don’t worry about creating anything, just do it because you enjoy it. Start out doing something simple and worthless and mindless. If you’re a sculptor, really do make a small little grade-school quality vase. If you’re a writer, jot down a limerick or three, or just make up a nonsense short story – the sillier, the better. If you’re a photographer, challenge yourself by finding the most boring subject you could possibly photograph, like the contents of your fridge or a pair of shoes, and find as many creative ways to shoot the subject as you can think of. By doing this kind of mechanical work, you focus your mind on the kind of task you’re interested in doing without the pressure of producing something of worth, and it lets you relax into the work. After doing that, you may find it much easier to find interesting things to do when you come upon a more interesting subject.
If that doesn’t work, you can also look to the work of others for inspiration. Photographer Art Wolfe likes to talk about how his study of the great artists informs his own work, because he has a catalog of artistic forms in his mind that he can draw upon in the field. He can look at a landscape and say, “The patterns in the leaves of that stand of trees reminds me of a Pollock painting,” or “The reflection of the wildflowers on the far shore of this pond reminds me of a Degas,” and he is able to find the artistic value in shots that might be overlooked by other photographers. A friend of mine is a writer, and she often reads books from genres having nothing to do with the ones she deals in, but from reading trashy, bodice-ripper checkout-line romances, Louis L’Amour westerns, or epic historical fiction, she gets ideas of where some of her stories might head. I look at the work of other photographers and often think, “I like this, but I think it would be even better if the shot were tighter/wider/less exposed/framed or cropped differently/from a higher angle/warmer/with a different depth of field,” and if I find myself in that exact same spot with the same subject, I can remember that experience and say, “Okay, remember, you thought it would look better THIS way, so let’s try that.”
The creation of art is an active process, so even when you feel you lack inspiration, it’s important to just keep doing it. No one creates only masterpieces: J.S. Bach was arguably one of the greatest composers in history (and certainly one of the most prolific), but some of his stuff is either boring or simply unlistenable. In addition to great and timeless works like Romeo and Juliet and MacBeth, Shakespeare also wrote what have come to be known as the Lesser Plays, not because they’re shorter, but because they’re considered by some to actually be quite bad. If great artists like these occasionally produced turkeys, what makes you think you should be immune to the possibility of failure? And if they can fail at something we all agree they have “mastered,” what’s stopping you from trying to do the best you can? And in the end, the only critic who truly matters is you: if you enjoy doing it, and you like the results of your efforts, who really cares what anybody else thinks of it? If you derive satisfaction from the art you create, that gives the work one form of value that no critic can take away from you.
Travel preparations, Part I
Generally speaking, I travel in the same way as I always have, whether I'm going somewhere to take pictures or just taking a vacation. I try to do a little research on the area I'm going to, find out what the weather is like in the season I'm travelling in, and I get weather reports a little closer to my departure so I have an idea if there might be unusual weather coming on an intercept course. Obviously, you pack your luggage with all the things you think you'll need, but I think many people would be surprised at how little you truly need to bring along.
Take clothes, for instance. If you've got a lot of different activities requiring their own special clothes, you may be stuck bringing more along (if you're doing the tourist thing, but have a formal dinner or two to attend as well, or maybe one of your activities requires hip waders other other specialized gear), but if your days are going to be full of the same kinds of things, you can probably get away with wearing an outfit another day or three, depending on the circumstances. If your destination has weather like the sunny side of Venus, or you're travelling to Pigsty, Oklahoma for their annual weeklong "Mud Crawl and Oyster Bake," okay, your clothes might get a little funky after only one day, but as a general traveller staying in an actual hotel, I'm willing to bet you could wear your clothes again after airing them out a little.
I was once on a trip during high school where some of the other members of our tour group were runners-up in some midwest beauty pageant (we called them the Cow Patty Queens). These ladies were on a two-week tour of England, France and Italy, and had no less than seven pieces of luggage apiece, including separate makeup cases, suitcases for their casual wear, full-length garment hardcases (I didn't know they made these, but apparently they do), and even an honest-to-goodness steamer trunk in one case, and they were always surprised when we had to pick up and move somewhere so soon after they had finally unpacked all their junk (apparently, the pageant hadn't asked them to perform much math, because if you subtract all the travel time, we averaged two days in each major city and a lot of bus tours in between, which doesn't leave much time to settle in any one place). Did they really need to bring all of that stuff? Of course they did, because someone, somewhere, had told them they needed three outfits a day. Really. We'd get back from a morning bus tour, and by lunch, they'd all be in fresh, new outfits and makeup appropriate for the afternoon lighting, and then they'd have to hurry off and change so they'd be properly presentable for our dinner at... The Hard Rock Cafe. Or sometimes McDonalds, but I'm sure they had the RIGHT outfit for McDonalds.
If my trip is onlygoing to be a few days, I bring enough socks and underwear so I can change those out every day, but I only bring two outfits beyond what I wear onto the plane. I'll bring three or four if my trip is going to be up to two weeks, and if my trip is any longer than that, unless I know I'm going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, I make plans to actually do laundry. If absolutely necessary, I'm willing to just rinse my clothes out in the sink or bathtub and hang them to dry; I'm a wash-and-wear kind of guy, anyway.
If you were to create a sliding scale of weather protection for your clothes, with 1 being barely decent and 5 being like Shackleton trying to reach the South Pole, plan most of your clothes to be just right for the location and season you're visiting, but be sure to bring at least one item one notch higher on the scale, just in case. Even if you don't wear it, it's good insurance to have it along -- if it suddenly gets unexpectedly cold, you can't put on a layer you didn't bring with you.
The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared," and it's a pretty good rule to live by. I like to bring some sort of rain gear, even just a simple folding umbrella, no matter where I go. Sub-Saharan Africa may only get a few inches of rain a year, but if a significant percentage of that rainfall happens on the days you're wandering around without any protection, it'll be small consolation to think that it's usually pretty dry the rest of the time. The same goes for your camera gear -- have something along that can protect your gear in case of inclement weather, even if it's a grocery store plastic bag you keep wadded-up in your pocket. Good walking shoes are always a must, and if you're going to wander around in an area with poisonous snakes, thick leather shoes at least ankle-high are probably a good idea. In hot, sunny climates, a hat is also prudent, one that not only keeps the glare of the sun out of your eyes but also helps protect you from sunburn or other heat-related illnesses.
Should you have a first aid kit? Depends; if you're shooting the architecture of a major city, or perhaps masked revelers at Carnivale, then probably not -- basic first aid is most likely close at hand -- but if you're heading somewhere a little more remote, then having at least the bare essentials is a good idea. A good, solid polycarbonate bottle is indispensible -- you need to keep hydrated, and it prevents you from wasting good money on disposable bottles of water that probably came out of somebody's tap anyway -- just do your research and make sure you know the water is drinkable where you're going, and bring purification tablets or filters if it isn't.
There are a zillion things you could bring with you on a trip, and I can guarantee you won't need them all. This blog post is already getting too long as it is, so I'll just take anybody's questions if you have them, but here is a list of the basic things I take with me when I travel for photography.
Clothing:Long pants X2-3
Long-sleeve shirts X2-3
Short-sleeve shirts or tee-shirts X2
Socks X #of days
Underwear X #of days
Hat, floppy and collapsible
Walking shoes
Hiking boots
Jacket, light windbreaker, weather resistant
Rain gear or umbrella
Incidentals:Small roll of toilet paper (100 uses, some not so obvious)
Small hotel courtesy size bar of soap (not available everywhere)
Toothbrush, toothpaste
Shaving supplies, if I'm expected to be presentable -- may only use on trip home so I don't look like Charles Manson when I walk into SeaTac.
Small comb
Portable first aid kit
Camera Gear:
Main and spare camera bodies, lenses expected to be used on the trip (don't bring what you're not going to use!)
Spare batteries and chargers
Spare memory cards
Transfer cable
Laptop (I have a cheap and cheesy netbook I bring along that cost me $200, mostly just so I have a hard drive to dump my shots onto. Other photographers have told me I need to get a bigger one so I can work on editing my photos in the field -- my netbook is incapable of running Photoshop or Lightroom due to its miniscule, fairly low-resolution screen -- but I actually prefer to work on editing in the comfort of my own home, with a nice big screen and a cup of something warm and slightly alcoholic at hand... but that's just me. Plus, it gives me time when I'm not tired from a long day of wandering in the bush shooting pictures when I can go back over and relive the experience -- even if you're just shooting vacation photos, half the fun of taking them is looking at them again when you're home)
Tripod and head
Shutter release cable (a must if you think there's even a chance you'll shoot something slower than 1/30 of a second)
Lens cloth
Camera bag (I have a Lowepro camera backpack that serves as my carry-on, and pretty much never leaves my side)
Plastic grocery bags (I really do bring these, because you never know when you might need one. Used to bring full-sized garbage bags, but they turned out to be overkill for my purposes)
Take clothes, for instance. If you've got a lot of different activities requiring their own special clothes, you may be stuck bringing more along (if you're doing the tourist thing, but have a formal dinner or two to attend as well, or maybe one of your activities requires hip waders other other specialized gear), but if your days are going to be full of the same kinds of things, you can probably get away with wearing an outfit another day or three, depending on the circumstances. If your destination has weather like the sunny side of Venus, or you're travelling to Pigsty, Oklahoma for their annual weeklong "Mud Crawl and Oyster Bake," okay, your clothes might get a little funky after only one day, but as a general traveller staying in an actual hotel, I'm willing to bet you could wear your clothes again after airing them out a little.
I was once on a trip during high school where some of the other members of our tour group were runners-up in some midwest beauty pageant (we called them the Cow Patty Queens). These ladies were on a two-week tour of England, France and Italy, and had no less than seven pieces of luggage apiece, including separate makeup cases, suitcases for their casual wear, full-length garment hardcases (I didn't know they made these, but apparently they do), and even an honest-to-goodness steamer trunk in one case, and they were always surprised when we had to pick up and move somewhere so soon after they had finally unpacked all their junk (apparently, the pageant hadn't asked them to perform much math, because if you subtract all the travel time, we averaged two days in each major city and a lot of bus tours in between, which doesn't leave much time to settle in any one place). Did they really need to bring all of that stuff? Of course they did, because someone, somewhere, had told them they needed three outfits a day. Really. We'd get back from a morning bus tour, and by lunch, they'd all be in fresh, new outfits and makeup appropriate for the afternoon lighting, and then they'd have to hurry off and change so they'd be properly presentable for our dinner at... The Hard Rock Cafe. Or sometimes McDonalds, but I'm sure they had the RIGHT outfit for McDonalds.
If my trip is onlygoing to be a few days, I bring enough socks and underwear so I can change those out every day, but I only bring two outfits beyond what I wear onto the plane. I'll bring three or four if my trip is going to be up to two weeks, and if my trip is any longer than that, unless I know I'm going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, I make plans to actually do laundry. If absolutely necessary, I'm willing to just rinse my clothes out in the sink or bathtub and hang them to dry; I'm a wash-and-wear kind of guy, anyway.
If you were to create a sliding scale of weather protection for your clothes, with 1 being barely decent and 5 being like Shackleton trying to reach the South Pole, plan most of your clothes to be just right for the location and season you're visiting, but be sure to bring at least one item one notch higher on the scale, just in case. Even if you don't wear it, it's good insurance to have it along -- if it suddenly gets unexpectedly cold, you can't put on a layer you didn't bring with you.
The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared," and it's a pretty good rule to live by. I like to bring some sort of rain gear, even just a simple folding umbrella, no matter where I go. Sub-Saharan Africa may only get a few inches of rain a year, but if a significant percentage of that rainfall happens on the days you're wandering around without any protection, it'll be small consolation to think that it's usually pretty dry the rest of the time. The same goes for your camera gear -- have something along that can protect your gear in case of inclement weather, even if it's a grocery store plastic bag you keep wadded-up in your pocket. Good walking shoes are always a must, and if you're going to wander around in an area with poisonous snakes, thick leather shoes at least ankle-high are probably a good idea. In hot, sunny climates, a hat is also prudent, one that not only keeps the glare of the sun out of your eyes but also helps protect you from sunburn or other heat-related illnesses.
Should you have a first aid kit? Depends; if you're shooting the architecture of a major city, or perhaps masked revelers at Carnivale, then probably not -- basic first aid is most likely close at hand -- but if you're heading somewhere a little more remote, then having at least the bare essentials is a good idea. A good, solid polycarbonate bottle is indispensible -- you need to keep hydrated, and it prevents you from wasting good money on disposable bottles of water that probably came out of somebody's tap anyway -- just do your research and make sure you know the water is drinkable where you're going, and bring purification tablets or filters if it isn't.
There are a zillion things you could bring with you on a trip, and I can guarantee you won't need them all. This blog post is already getting too long as it is, so I'll just take anybody's questions if you have them, but here is a list of the basic things I take with me when I travel for photography.
Clothing:Long pants X2-3
Long-sleeve shirts X2-3
Short-sleeve shirts or tee-shirts X2
Socks X #of days
Underwear X #of days
Hat, floppy and collapsible
Walking shoes
Hiking boots
Jacket, light windbreaker, weather resistant
Rain gear or umbrella
Incidentals:Small roll of toilet paper (100 uses, some not so obvious)
Small hotel courtesy size bar of soap (not available everywhere)
Toothbrush, toothpaste
Shaving supplies, if I'm expected to be presentable -- may only use on trip home so I don't look like Charles Manson when I walk into SeaTac.
Small comb
Portable first aid kit
Camera Gear:
Main and spare camera bodies, lenses expected to be used on the trip (don't bring what you're not going to use!)
Spare batteries and chargers
Spare memory cards
Transfer cable
Laptop (I have a cheap and cheesy netbook I bring along that cost me $200, mostly just so I have a hard drive to dump my shots onto. Other photographers have told me I need to get a bigger one so I can work on editing my photos in the field -- my netbook is incapable of running Photoshop or Lightroom due to its miniscule, fairly low-resolution screen -- but I actually prefer to work on editing in the comfort of my own home, with a nice big screen and a cup of something warm and slightly alcoholic at hand... but that's just me. Plus, it gives me time when I'm not tired from a long day of wandering in the bush shooting pictures when I can go back over and relive the experience -- even if you're just shooting vacation photos, half the fun of taking them is looking at them again when you're home)
Tripod and head
Shutter release cable (a must if you think there's even a chance you'll shoot something slower than 1/30 of a second)
Lens cloth
Camera bag (I have a Lowepro camera backpack that serves as my carry-on, and pretty much never leaves my side)
Plastic grocery bags (I really do bring these, because you never know when you might need one. Used to bring full-sized garbage bags, but they turned out to be overkill for my purposes)
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Getting Into Focus
So now you've got your spiffy new camera and you're just itching to start shooting. First off, I say go for it. Don't wait until you've had a zillion hours of instruction before you start shooting; nothing teaches you about how to use your camera better than just using it, with the single caveat that you need to pay attention to what you're doing. Digital cameras take making rookie mistakes from being painful and expensive (if you had to shell out good money to develop really bad photos) to easily deleted learning opportunities, but only if you learn something from them. Otherwise, you'll spend your life shooting nothing but junk, and and you don't want that, do you?
So the basic thing to know is how to focus. Well, that's easy, right? First of all, most digital cameras have electronic autofocus, which takes 90% of the guesswork out of simple photography, but I would warn you that autofocus isn't perfect. You're depending on a circuit board to read your mind and figure out what your subject is, and while the algorithms the engineers have designed into modern cameras are very good at guessing (some sense when a humanoid shape is in frame and assumes that's your first priority for focus, for example), they are not telepathic and can't guess what every photographer intends to capture every time. And what if you intend for everything to be slightly out of focus because you're trying to be artsy (what they call "soft focus" in the biz)? Your camera isn't going to understand that, so you're going to have to take manual control of focus to get what you want.
Also, even if you intend for the image to be tack sharp, your camera's autofocus is only as good as the guy who calibrated it at the factory. A number of digital cameras have the ability to fine-tune the autofocus, and after a bit of fiddling around with the controls, you can dial it in so that the autofocus is tack-sharp every time, as long as you make sure it's focusing on what you want in focus.
I know what you're thinking. "I'm not trying to make great art; I'm just taking vacation photos and the occasional picture of flowers in my garden, so shouldn't I just try to have everything in focus all the time?" Well, no - sometimes, it makes a photo stronger if your subject is in focus and everything in the background is artfully blurred - if you have to have other stuff in the background or foreground, in other words, it can help to make your chosen subject stand out if it's the only thing in focus. And sometimes your subject itself is viewed at an oblique angle and extends into the background, so you need more than just the closest portion to be in focus. So now we're not only talking about simply focusing on your subject, but also about depth of field.
Let's take a break for a moment and think about basic optics. The reason were able to see the world around us is because of light reflecting off of objects. Light coming in from a source (let's say, the sun) hits objects and bounces off in all directions.
When you focus only on Sally, and there isn't anything else in frame, it's okay to have a shallow depth of field (that is, things in the foreground and background can be blurry, and she's the only thing in focus) because she's all you care about. Now let's say halfway through your modelling session, Sally's dog Rex wanders in. Because he's at a different distance from the camera, with a shallow depth of field, he's going to be out of focus because the light bouncing off of him is going to pass through the lens and create an image inside the camera that would be perfectly in focus if the sensor or film were just a little bit closer, but since it isn't, he's going to be blurry.
Here's the tricky bit. You can change your depth of field by varying the aperture. If the aperture is wide open like I'm showing here, there are essentially lots of different images of Rex and Sally that make it through, based on the angles of all the light bouncing off of them and making it through the lens. If, however, you close down the iris so the aperture is very small, it limits the angle that light can travel and still make it past the iris. In other words, only those photons that are at an angle to be in focus will be captured by the sensor or the film, like so:
Don't believe me? I just ran outside and took some pictures of a Dutch iris in my garden as an example. Here is one I took with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, through a EF28-135mm zoom lens with polarizing filter at f/4.5 (wide open), ISO 400 at 1/1000th of a second exposure.
So the basic thing to know is how to focus. Well, that's easy, right? First of all, most digital cameras have electronic autofocus, which takes 90% of the guesswork out of simple photography, but I would warn you that autofocus isn't perfect. You're depending on a circuit board to read your mind and figure out what your subject is, and while the algorithms the engineers have designed into modern cameras are very good at guessing (some sense when a humanoid shape is in frame and assumes that's your first priority for focus, for example), they are not telepathic and can't guess what every photographer intends to capture every time. And what if you intend for everything to be slightly out of focus because you're trying to be artsy (what they call "soft focus" in the biz)? Your camera isn't going to understand that, so you're going to have to take manual control of focus to get what you want.
Also, even if you intend for the image to be tack sharp, your camera's autofocus is only as good as the guy who calibrated it at the factory. A number of digital cameras have the ability to fine-tune the autofocus, and after a bit of fiddling around with the controls, you can dial it in so that the autofocus is tack-sharp every time, as long as you make sure it's focusing on what you want in focus.
I know what you're thinking. "I'm not trying to make great art; I'm just taking vacation photos and the occasional picture of flowers in my garden, so shouldn't I just try to have everything in focus all the time?" Well, no - sometimes, it makes a photo stronger if your subject is in focus and everything in the background is artfully blurred - if you have to have other stuff in the background or foreground, in other words, it can help to make your chosen subject stand out if it's the only thing in focus. And sometimes your subject itself is viewed at an oblique angle and extends into the background, so you need more than just the closest portion to be in focus. So now we're not only talking about simply focusing on your subject, but also about depth of field.
Let's take a break for a moment and think about basic optics. The reason were able to see the world around us is because of light reflecting off of objects. Light coming in from a source (let's say, the sun) hits objects and bounces off in all directions.
However, you are only going to experience the light that bounces off the object at such an angle that the reflected light reaches your eye.
Your eye works much like a camera does, only instead of moving a lens back and forth, the lens in your eye flexes in response to muscle movement, which changes the focal distance and allows the image to focus on the rods and cones in the back of your eye.
So what? Well, let's take a real world example of this. Meet Sally.
Sally has graciously agreed to model for you for the afternoon. If we trace a beam of light from source to camera, it bounces off of Sally, passes through the lens of your camera (getting turned upside down in the process, incidentally, but no matter), through the aperture and then hitting the sensor or film inside the camera and getting captured as an image.
Note that the sage and lavender plants in the background are blurry. Depending on the kind of shot you're going for, you might even want the background blurrier, and would have to either push the depth of field even more shallow if possible or blur it later during the editing process (which might be preferrable, because shooting a three-dimensional object with a really shallow depth of field means that part of your subject might also turn out blurry, since only one part of it will fall into the focused portion of the field.)
If I close the aperture down to f/29, here's what I get:
Now more of the background is in better focus. Please remember, however, that now that I've restricted the light that can come in through the iris, in order to properly expose the picture, I'm going to have to fiddle with the shutter speed to allow enough light to hit the sensor (in this case, I had to slow it down to 1/25th of a second)
Your assignment: play around with depth of field and see where it takes you. I know, you're not a professional photographer, but I'm sure you've got vacation photos where everything was in focus and the picture of your family in the crowd of people in front of the Epcot sphere was kind of like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle; since everything was in focus, your family didn't stand out from all the OTHER sunburnt tourists wearing Mickey Mouse ears. So snap some candid photos of your family when you get a moment and play around using different aperture settings to see what happens (if your camera is capable of manually adjusting such things, obviously). You may be surprised at how much better this single change may make your vacation photos, and for the hobbyist or budding professional photographer, it's a skill that will become absolutely essential in your toolbox of tricks to get great photos. Have fun!
Friday, May 6, 2011
2011 Bucket List
Being a photographer who also has a regular 9-5 job is something of a challenging lifestyle, because my second career often has to take a back seat to the one that makes the majority of my living at the moment, so I'm not able to just up and fly off to Hokkaido or Costa Rica whenever I feel like it (which is almost all the time, but I'm restricted by a budget that keeps me at home most of the year). However, I can plan to do local day trips or weekend photo shoots, and do so on the cheap by camping instead of staying in hotels when an overnight stay is required. Yes, sleeping on the ground kind of sucks at my age, but I accept the idea that a little pain may be required to get to do what I want.
So I intend to make it a regular yearly schedule to hit as many locations in-state as I can, to catch wildlife and landscape opportunities whenever I'm able. And please let me know if you'd be interested in joining me on these little journeys, and we might just do some of them as a group.
Port Angeles/Sol Duc River valley/Olympic National Park/Washington coast -- This is a weekend excursion I'd take, either based out of Port Angeles or nearby. The rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula have some really magical sites when conditions are right -- waterfalls, temperate flora, really dramatic view of sunlight through hanging moss-covered trees, a good mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, and the occasional sighting of larger animals. Along the coast, you have beaches dotted with huge seastacks, and an ever-changing array of flotsam and jetsam that can wash up along the beach if you're interested in such things. Opportunities abound for a variety of shots, and you never really know what you're going to get until you arrive.
Mount Rainier National Park -- in mid- to late-summer, the area around both Paradise and Sunrise explode with wildflowers. The brief growing season on the mountaintop means that the plants and animals adapted to live in that environment expend the majority of their energy during the four months that the mountain isn't covered with snow, so the flowers bloom all at once, and all the animals are either busy gathering food or fattening up for the coming winter or raising their young, and is the best time for a photographer to get a chance to see both. I also want to get back to Mount Rainier after dark, because I have a better idea of how to get good timed exposures, and I want to try for a better shot of the stars over the mountain than the one I currently have (which is nice, but I think I can do even better)
Palouse -- It's a city! It's a river! It's a farming region! It's a desert! All of the above; the southeastern corner of Washington state has farms with colorful barns and old vehicles; charming little towns; stark, rocky landscapes alternating with miles of waving grain and open sky; state and national parks with a wide variety of flora and fauna as well as breathtaking views of a geologically diverse region of the country. Definitely a long weekend worth of shooting, and a lot of driving, but worth the effort (or so I'm told -- I've only seen what can be observed at 65 mph from I-90 as you pass through, so this year will be the first time I'll actually stop and smell the roses... and photograph them)
University of Washington Arboretum - Had a good bit of success finding interesting things to shoot there a couple years ago, and with one thing or another, haven't had time to go back when things are actually blooming (I think I went through in late August or early September last time). I like to start off along the boardwalk trail that starts by the Museum of History and Industry and goes along the Montlake cut, because in the early morning you can get some nice shots of herons and ducks feeding, the occasional rowing shell going by, and of course, the sun rising over Lake Washington. Then you make your way into the arboretum, and there is always a wide variety of flowering plants that beckon, and even in the bright afternoon light, the canopy of trees gives you a dappled light source that can still create dramatic shadows on things if you look for them.
Pike Place Farmer's Market - There's more than just the cliche produce shots to be found around the market (though those are spectacular, and well worth the visit all by themselves). An old series of connected buildings like the Pike Place Market offers hidden treasures for a photographer, with a variety of lighting aspects throughout the day, and a colorful cast of characters available all day long if you're into editorial portraiture. It's possible that the real challenge is choosing what to shoot, rather than finding anything worth taking a picture of.
Other places around town - Alki Beach or Kerry Park to get some shots of the Seattle skyline, particularly around dawn or dusk, definitely a must at some point. For architectural and random people shots, I'll wander around the University of Washingon, Pioneer Square, and the Seattle Center. I can probably get some good shots in Discovery Park in Magnolia, and I'll probably head to the beach at least a couple of times at dawn and dusk, as well as low tide (preferrably when this happens at dawn or dusk) to get some macro shots of tidepools, shells and driftwood.
Any other suggestions? I'm certainly taking any you've got!
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Finding the Subject
Blogging is still not second nature to me, so there are going to be some periods of little activity on this site; sorry. (I'm not the kind of guy who Tweets, either, so you'll likely never see me on Twitter posting things like, "I just made toast! Awesome!")
We just got back from a trip to Orlando, mostly a vacation to visit with some friends and see the old stomping grounds where we used to live while I was stationed there for Navy training back in 1997, but I brought all my cameras with me just in case. We were thwarted in our attempt to photograph the shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center, as delay mounted upon delay due to mechanical issues. As disappointed as we were to have missed one of the last few chances to see a space shuttle launch, I'm okay with the idea that they were trying to do it safely. A stop in nearby Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge also failed to yield a really wide abundance of wildlife like I would have liked.
This brings me to the subject of... subject. Every photographer has run into a situation when you arrive at a location to shoot something specific, and either your subject simply isn't there (such as trying to shoot a live animal migration or you arrive a little early for a wildflower bloom) or the conditions aren't right (maybe you were hoping for a nice sunrise/sunset, but the day you got there, the day was overcast or pouring rain, or the event you came to document got cancelled due to unforseen circumstances). I've come to realize over time that one of the hallmarks of a good photographer is flexibility. Just because the subject you thought you were there to shoot isn't present or the conditions aren't ideal, that doesn't mean you day is entirely ruined. Granted, there will be times when great photography just isn't going to happen (your desert landscape is obscured by a blinding sandstorm for the duration of your visit, for instance), but you need to look at your surroundings from different angles and with an open mind. Okay, so the herd of reindeer you wanted to photograph didn't get your memo to be in this particular clearing at this particular moment; that doesn't mean that meaningful, powerful images aren't there. Great photography doesn't just happen; it takes work, planning and a creative eye, and the patience to separate all the distractions from the potentially great image before you.
So now it becomes a game, and photographers become really good at finding hidden images. Ask yourself: Where's the shot? If the subject you inteded to shoot just isn't available, what else looks interesting enough to shoot? Maybe you've noticed a mountain that is lit just perfectly or an interesting cloud formation you want to shoot, but a telephone pole or a tree blocks part of your view. Will moving to a different location give you a better angle? Will using a telephoto lens to zoom in on a smaller feature of the overall scene before you make a more interesting composition? Maybe the entire meadow isn't ablaze with wildflowers, but perhaps you can still get some close-up or macro shots of a single bloom, or possibly even some fallen petals might be interesting to shoot. The parade got cancelled because half of the participants ate at Greasy Gert's Gas-and-Go the night before and got food poisoning, so maybe there are architectural features along the parade route you could shoot instead, or maybe even a poignant editorial photo opportunity may be found with the unfortunate snack food vendor who set up at one end of the parade route and now has no customers. I'm being silly on purpose here, because there's no way to predict what kinds of shots will present themselves to you in the moment, or what may appeal to your artistic sensibilities at that point in time, so any suggestion I make here is purely conjecture. What matters is that you roll with the circumstances of your photo shoot and remain open to shots you wouldn't have planned ahead of time but which you come across either in the course of photographing your primary subject or because you can't get the shot you had intended.
So take my visit to Kennedy Space Center for example. No shuttle launch, and with the service gantry in the way, not even a really interesting shot of the shuttle on the launch pad. And if you wander around the site, you'll see a lot of touristy stuff, and you might be inclined to believe there isn't anything a professional photographer would be interested in shooting, but maybe you can still get a shot of something no one's photographed before, or at least not in the way you've done it.
Everybody who visits Kennedy Space Center sees the Saturn V rocket on display that took the Apollo missions to the moon, and many people snap a full-length photo of it (or as close to a full-length photo as they can get, considering how big the thing is). By itself, a photo of a rocket is a photo of a rocket, but maybe there is a more detailed shot available. Take it as a personal challenge to find patterns or interesting features on the rocket that aren't so obvious without looking for them.
Or perhaps the outside of the engine is more interesting to you. These heat transfer vanes create an interesting repeating pattern, and again challenge the viewer to identify what they're looking at. Are any of these great shots? No, but someone may still be interested in seeing it, and they'll only get that chance if you get the shot and show it to them. So even though you might have failed to get the shot of the shuttle launch, you can still find things worth photographing if you take the time to look and stay with a potential subject until all its angles are explored.
We just got back from a trip to Orlando, mostly a vacation to visit with some friends and see the old stomping grounds where we used to live while I was stationed there for Navy training back in 1997, but I brought all my cameras with me just in case. We were thwarted in our attempt to photograph the shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center, as delay mounted upon delay due to mechanical issues. As disappointed as we were to have missed one of the last few chances to see a space shuttle launch, I'm okay with the idea that they were trying to do it safely. A stop in nearby Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge also failed to yield a really wide abundance of wildlife like I would have liked.
This brings me to the subject of... subject. Every photographer has run into a situation when you arrive at a location to shoot something specific, and either your subject simply isn't there (such as trying to shoot a live animal migration or you arrive a little early for a wildflower bloom) or the conditions aren't right (maybe you were hoping for a nice sunrise/sunset, but the day you got there, the day was overcast or pouring rain, or the event you came to document got cancelled due to unforseen circumstances). I've come to realize over time that one of the hallmarks of a good photographer is flexibility. Just because the subject you thought you were there to shoot isn't present or the conditions aren't ideal, that doesn't mean you day is entirely ruined. Granted, there will be times when great photography just isn't going to happen (your desert landscape is obscured by a blinding sandstorm for the duration of your visit, for instance), but you need to look at your surroundings from different angles and with an open mind. Okay, so the herd of reindeer you wanted to photograph didn't get your memo to be in this particular clearing at this particular moment; that doesn't mean that meaningful, powerful images aren't there. Great photography doesn't just happen; it takes work, planning and a creative eye, and the patience to separate all the distractions from the potentially great image before you.
So now it becomes a game, and photographers become really good at finding hidden images. Ask yourself: Where's the shot? If the subject you inteded to shoot just isn't available, what else looks interesting enough to shoot? Maybe you've noticed a mountain that is lit just perfectly or an interesting cloud formation you want to shoot, but a telephone pole or a tree blocks part of your view. Will moving to a different location give you a better angle? Will using a telephoto lens to zoom in on a smaller feature of the overall scene before you make a more interesting composition? Maybe the entire meadow isn't ablaze with wildflowers, but perhaps you can still get some close-up or macro shots of a single bloom, or possibly even some fallen petals might be interesting to shoot. The parade got cancelled because half of the participants ate at Greasy Gert's Gas-and-Go the night before and got food poisoning, so maybe there are architectural features along the parade route you could shoot instead, or maybe even a poignant editorial photo opportunity may be found with the unfortunate snack food vendor who set up at one end of the parade route and now has no customers. I'm being silly on purpose here, because there's no way to predict what kinds of shots will present themselves to you in the moment, or what may appeal to your artistic sensibilities at that point in time, so any suggestion I make here is purely conjecture. What matters is that you roll with the circumstances of your photo shoot and remain open to shots you wouldn't have planned ahead of time but which you come across either in the course of photographing your primary subject or because you can't get the shot you had intended.
So take my visit to Kennedy Space Center for example. No shuttle launch, and with the service gantry in the way, not even a really interesting shot of the shuttle on the launch pad. And if you wander around the site, you'll see a lot of touristy stuff, and you might be inclined to believe there isn't anything a professional photographer would be interested in shooting, but maybe you can still get a shot of something no one's photographed before, or at least not in the way you've done it.
Everybody who visits Kennedy Space Center sees the Saturn V rocket on display that took the Apollo missions to the moon, and many people snap a full-length photo of it (or as close to a full-length photo as they can get, considering how big the thing is). By itself, a photo of a rocket is a photo of a rocket, but maybe there is a more detailed shot available. Take it as a personal challenge to find patterns or interesting features on the rocket that aren't so obvious without looking for them.
Here's a shot inside one of the rocket engines. An interesting view, but it doesn't really challenge the viewer, and compositionally it's not all that exciting. Perhaps closer up?
A shot like this challenges the viewer more, making them stop to ask more questions, like "What is that?" It might ultimately not be their cup of tea, but at least it forces them to consider your photo for longer than a couple of seconds, if only to try to figure out what they're looking at.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
What's A Megapixel, And Why Should I Care?
Some of us are technogeeks. We like reading up about the latest gewgaw, gadget and gizmo, and if possible, possess it for ourselves. Our use of jargon is often so convoluted and esoteric it evolves into it's own dialect, or at least a pidgin. We wax rhapsodic about the pros and cons of various models, knowledgable about all the differences between different manufacturers and even the conditions in the factories where our favorite toys are made. Occasionally, we become so enthralled with the bundled features of a given device that we forget to actually use the device for its intended purpose.
Some of us are, instead, rather more luddite when it comes to technology. We don't really care about the latest innovations if what we're using now suits our needs. We prefer to master the technology we have on hand than to constantly have to update ourselves on current developments. We openly scoff and sneer at the early adopters of new technology, especially when the shortcomings of that technology becomes more apparent over time. Although we sometimes wake up to discover that the world has moved on without us and we have a steep learning curve ahead of us in order to catch up, we believe it's worth the occasional paradigm shift in order to avoid wasting time shopping for new gear every week when we could be using what we've already got.
I think most of us fall somewhere between the two extremes, and when it comes to photography, the technology advances in such fits and starts that sometimes you do discover that there is technology out there that really is measurably better than what you've got. So you decide it's time to buy yourself a new camera, but you haven't paid much attention to what's been happening in the market the past decade or so and don't really know what to look for. That's okay; if you haven't immersed yourself in the lore and jargon of the photographic world, it can get pretty confusing. Even for those of us who are in a deeper section of the pool can sometimes get a little turned around when it comes to the technical aspects of the field, and some photographers find experts to advise them in the kinds of gear they need so they can concentrate more on just shooting photos, rather than studying journals to find out the latest and greatest toys on the market.
So today, we're going to focus on that one word that shows up in the description of every digital camera, but that not everyone really understands: megapixels. Before we get to the real nitty gritty of the topic, however, it might be instructive to back up a bit and discuss how a camera works in general, before getting into the digital stuff.
At it's most basic, a camera is just a light-sensitive media (celluloid film, digital sensor, silver-coated tin or copper plate, etc.) encased in a housing that protects it from light until the moment you want to expose it to the scene you'd like to photograph. That's really pretty much it; everything else on the camera is a bonus feature that either makes it easier to take the photo or improves the quality of the image. There is a mechanical shutter on most modern cameras that serves as the means to let light in (you've probably seen old 19th-century cameras in the movies with the photographer under a cloth hood and sliding a piece of wood out from in front of the camera -- that piece of wood was essentially the shutter, and they could get away with it because their daguerrotype plates weren't very sensitive and required as much as eight minutes to expose properly, so a few seconds on either end while the photographer fiddled with the shutter really didn't matter). The shutter works in conjuction with an iris, which limits the amount of light that can enter when the shutter opens, and these two work together to determine the exposure you get in the final image (much, much more on that in another article). The lens brings the image into sharper or softer focus, and is a means of collecting the light coming into the camera; with telephoto zoom capability, the lens can also bring subjects closer. Flashes illuminate the subject when lighting is not optimal at the time you take the picture. And so on.
All technologies prior to the digital age relied on chemical mixtures that underwent a reaction when exposed to light. Films were coated with layers of photosensitive compounds such as silver oxide, treated to react to different colors of light. Once exposed, the film was processed with solutions that developed the film and fixed the final image to the film. The image could then be transferred to photosensitive paper and finally developed as a positive print.
A digital camera replaces film with a sensor called a charge-coupled device (CCD). It works like this: the surface of the CCD is an array of photosensitive capacitors, often made of silicon doped with boron, that develop a charge relative to the intensity of light which hits each capacitor. The capacitor is then allowed to pass its charge on to its neighbor, and at the end of each row is a connection to an image processor which measures each of those charges, calculates which charges came from which capacitors, and then converts and saves this information as digital data.
The capacitors are grouped into trios that are able to sense red, green and blue light (the primary colors of the visible light spectrum), and these trios are what are referred to as pixels (if you look very close to an older CRT television screen, you'll probably see tiny squares or rectangles that are either red, green or blue -- those are pixels, too; the modern 1080P HD plasma screen you just bought means that it can disply 1080 pixels across the width of your screen.) So when you see a camera that says it has 8 megapixels (MP), they're saying that the CCD inside the camera has a total of eight million pixels on the surface of that sensor. Very generally speaking, the more pixels there are on the sensor, the better the camera's resolution. If you take the exact same picture with two different cameras, one with 3 MP and one with 18 MP, you'll end up with the same basic image but the 18MP camera takes a picture that you can zoom in on many more times without loss of image quality because it can capture more data in that image.
Okay, you say, so a digital camera with more megapixels is better. So I should go out and buy one with the most megapixels I can afford, right?
Well, no, not necessarily. I think photographer and teacher John Greengo explained it best with a little visual aid.
Here is the world's simplest digital camera CCD: a four pixel camera. Let's say you bought this four pixel camera a few years back and have gotten a lot of use out of it, but you're considering getting a new one. So what about doubling the number of pixels? Well, it's hard to arrange eight pixels in anything other than a rectangle, like this:
Some of us are, instead, rather more luddite when it comes to technology. We don't really care about the latest innovations if what we're using now suits our needs. We prefer to master the technology we have on hand than to constantly have to update ourselves on current developments. We openly scoff and sneer at the early adopters of new technology, especially when the shortcomings of that technology becomes more apparent over time. Although we sometimes wake up to discover that the world has moved on without us and we have a steep learning curve ahead of us in order to catch up, we believe it's worth the occasional paradigm shift in order to avoid wasting time shopping for new gear every week when we could be using what we've already got.
I think most of us fall somewhere between the two extremes, and when it comes to photography, the technology advances in such fits and starts that sometimes you do discover that there is technology out there that really is measurably better than what you've got. So you decide it's time to buy yourself a new camera, but you haven't paid much attention to what's been happening in the market the past decade or so and don't really know what to look for. That's okay; if you haven't immersed yourself in the lore and jargon of the photographic world, it can get pretty confusing. Even for those of us who are in a deeper section of the pool can sometimes get a little turned around when it comes to the technical aspects of the field, and some photographers find experts to advise them in the kinds of gear they need so they can concentrate more on just shooting photos, rather than studying journals to find out the latest and greatest toys on the market.
So today, we're going to focus on that one word that shows up in the description of every digital camera, but that not everyone really understands: megapixels. Before we get to the real nitty gritty of the topic, however, it might be instructive to back up a bit and discuss how a camera works in general, before getting into the digital stuff.
At it's most basic, a camera is just a light-sensitive media (celluloid film, digital sensor, silver-coated tin or copper plate, etc.) encased in a housing that protects it from light until the moment you want to expose it to the scene you'd like to photograph. That's really pretty much it; everything else on the camera is a bonus feature that either makes it easier to take the photo or improves the quality of the image. There is a mechanical shutter on most modern cameras that serves as the means to let light in (you've probably seen old 19th-century cameras in the movies with the photographer under a cloth hood and sliding a piece of wood out from in front of the camera -- that piece of wood was essentially the shutter, and they could get away with it because their daguerrotype plates weren't very sensitive and required as much as eight minutes to expose properly, so a few seconds on either end while the photographer fiddled with the shutter really didn't matter). The shutter works in conjuction with an iris, which limits the amount of light that can enter when the shutter opens, and these two work together to determine the exposure you get in the final image (much, much more on that in another article). The lens brings the image into sharper or softer focus, and is a means of collecting the light coming into the camera; with telephoto zoom capability, the lens can also bring subjects closer. Flashes illuminate the subject when lighting is not optimal at the time you take the picture. And so on.
All technologies prior to the digital age relied on chemical mixtures that underwent a reaction when exposed to light. Films were coated with layers of photosensitive compounds such as silver oxide, treated to react to different colors of light. Once exposed, the film was processed with solutions that developed the film and fixed the final image to the film. The image could then be transferred to photosensitive paper and finally developed as a positive print.
A digital camera replaces film with a sensor called a charge-coupled device (CCD). It works like this: the surface of the CCD is an array of photosensitive capacitors, often made of silicon doped with boron, that develop a charge relative to the intensity of light which hits each capacitor. The capacitor is then allowed to pass its charge on to its neighbor, and at the end of each row is a connection to an image processor which measures each of those charges, calculates which charges came from which capacitors, and then converts and saves this information as digital data.
The capacitors are grouped into trios that are able to sense red, green and blue light (the primary colors of the visible light spectrum), and these trios are what are referred to as pixels (if you look very close to an older CRT television screen, you'll probably see tiny squares or rectangles that are either red, green or blue -- those are pixels, too; the modern 1080P HD plasma screen you just bought means that it can disply 1080 pixels across the width of your screen.) So when you see a camera that says it has 8 megapixels (MP), they're saying that the CCD inside the camera has a total of eight million pixels on the surface of that sensor. Very generally speaking, the more pixels there are on the sensor, the better the camera's resolution. If you take the exact same picture with two different cameras, one with 3 MP and one with 18 MP, you'll end up with the same basic image but the 18MP camera takes a picture that you can zoom in on many more times without loss of image quality because it can capture more data in that image.
Okay, you say, so a digital camera with more megapixels is better. So I should go out and buy one with the most megapixels I can afford, right?
Well, no, not necessarily. I think photographer and teacher John Greengo explained it best with a little visual aid.
So you've doubled the resolution in only one direction while leaving the other dimension the same (two pixels high). This is fine if you're buying a panoramic camera; coupled with a wide-angle lens, you could take really wide landscape photos at the same basic image quality of your old camera, but if you want to improve overall resolution, you're going to need to increase it in both the vertical and horizontal directions.
This nine-pixel camera accomplishes that: you go from two to three pixels in both dimensions, for a 50% increase in resolution overall. But to get that 1.5X increase in resolution, you actually had to have 2.25X the number of actual pixels on the sensor. This leads us to our rule of thumb: a given increase in digital resolution requires the square of that increase in pixels.
So going back to our four pixel camera, in order to double the resolution, we actually need four times as many pixels, so you'd need to buy a sixteen pixel camera.
So let's apply this to the real world. The Canon EOS 50D digital SLR camera features a 15.1 MP sensor, and you're thinking of upgrading to a Canon EOS 5D with its 21.1 MP sensor. Well, 21.1/15.1 is 1.397x the number of pixels. Take the square root of that, and you see that it's 1.182X the resolution, i.e. you get an 18.2% increase in resolution. Will you notice the improved image quality? Maybe you will, maybe you won't; it kind of depends on what subjects you like to photograph. If you do a lot of close-up work of really detailed subjects, then you might notice the difference. If you do a lot of really broad landscape photography, you might not.
Here's where the difference lies: the sensor is smaller in the 50D, less than 3/4 the area of the sensor in the 5D. There are physical issues involved with trying to cram ever more pixels into a limited amount of sensor real estate, principal among which is noise. At high ISO or long exposures, all cameras are subject to a certain amount of noise (in film cameras, this was known as grain or graininess), but with a sensor that is smaller relative to the aperture you're shooting through, there is a higher probability that the light that is sensed by each individual capacitor or pixel will either be a slightly different shade from the actual absorbed photon due to variations in the charge developed for a given photon energy level, because the individual pixels are crammed in closer to one another and may have a tendency to bleed charges into one another. So although you might not notice the 18.2% increase in resolution, if you add in the reduction in noise from having a sensor that is 25% larger, it might be worth it, if you plan on doing a lot of long exposures or photography requiring a high ISO (frequently in underlit environments, for instance)
Therefore, it might still be a tough decision if you wanted to upgrade from a 50D to a 5D, but at least you have one bit of information: There will be an improvement in image quality based on a larger sensor with more pixels available. The question is whether that improvement in image resolution is worth paying an extra $1400 (the difference in price between a 50D and a 5D on Amazon at the time of this writing). For the casual vacation photographer, it's almost certainly not worth it; for the $1400 you save, you can be happy with a really good consumer camera and spend that money on jetski lessons and umbrella drinks.
For the semi-professional or professional photographer, a little more research is required; the sensor offers a somewhat better image, in terms of increased resolution and decreased noise, but what may provide as good an improvement in image quality as a better CCD might be better quality lenses. So while you grapple with the decision whether or not to upgrade your camera body, you also need to ask yourself if you need better glass. That will be the topic of my next article.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Gear, Part II
On the subject of equipment upgrades, I know every photographer struggles at least some of the time with the question of whether or not you need a new camera, new lenses, or a new tripod or head mount. And for every photographer who asks the question, the answer is always a solid, definite, “It Depends.”
In very general terms, for the casual vacation photographer, the answer is almost always no, unless your camera is so antiquated that it lacks the functionality you require, or is no longer supported by the manufacturer, or no longer performs as it once did (I’ve discovered dropping a camera onto a marble floor does not improve its operation one bit). For someone like you, a reasonably inexpensive digital camera can be yours for under $100 that will do just about anything you’re going to need it to do, and software is available for your computer that can accomplish in post editing what your camera cannot do in the field. My current phone possesses photo and video capabilities that actually exceed those of my first digital camera, so you don’t have to buy an expensive rig to take decent photos. If you insist on shooting with film, you can probably go even cheaper by buying a gently-used one, but just realize that there are fewer and fewer companies making film these days, and it may make better sense from a long-term investment standpoint to bite the bullet and go digital.
For the amateur photographer or hobbyist, and anyone above that level, you may or may not require better gear. It really depends on the kind of photography you plan on doing. For $300-$500, there are some really excellent digital point-and-shoot cameras out there with good enough resolution to print clear 8x10’s, with different shooting modes that take most of the guesswork out of taking photos under different lighting conditions and a variety of subjects. I’ve even sold a few prints of shots I took with my old Olympus C300, so you’re already getting into the area where your current camera may be good enough.
Okay, I hear you ask, if my current camera is good enough, why do professional photographers buy cameras for thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars? Are they really that much better? Do they really need to spend that much for what they do?
Yes… and no. Great photography is a synthesis of technology, talent, skill, planning and a dash of good, old-fashioned luck (more on that in another post). I know photographers who regularly take gallery-worthy photos with their iPhones. I have also witnessed snobbish dilettantes whip out their $30,000 Hasselblads and their 1:1.2 Swarovski crystal lenses, train them on the mountains at the first hint of sunrise and take a series of stunningly bad blurry photos of their thumbs.
Think of some of the pioneering photographers in history and the gear they had to work with. Some of the first cameras were little more than a piece of film in a wooden box, with a simple glass lens and a sliding shutter, that you then mailed back to the manufacturer to develop. Imagine waiting a week to get a print of your single photo, and you can see the kind of planning and forethought that a photographer had to do before ever taking a photo. (Don’t believe me? Look up “Box Brownie” on Google or Wikipedia sometime). Ansel Adams lugged a sheer mass of bulky, awkward equipment up Half Dome that seems positive ludicrous by today’s standards. Yet look at the powerful images they created with a level of technology we simply don’t have the patience to fiddle with today. The tech does not an instant masterpiece create.
That being said, there is also a place for better tools. If I handed you a section of tree stump, a handful of stone hand-axes from 5000 BC, and a box of modern surgical steel chisels and said, “I’d like you to carve me a salad bowl,” you would probably choose the steel chisels over the stone tools, wouldn’t you?” (Okay, you’d PROBABLY turn and point at the Ikea catalog, but work with me here)
A master wood carver would know how to use the stone tools to hollow out the stump and eventually create the salad bowl for me, but he would probably do it faster and with less swearing with better tools. You’d end up with the same masterfully carved bowl, but the woodworker might not actually hate you when he’s done if you gave him the right tools for the job to begin with. The same goes for a camera rig: You can spend a lot of money on the fanciest cameras and lenses, but if you don’t know how to take a good photo to begin with, chances are pretty good you’re still going to be disappointed with the results.
So the results you get from your photography really depend more on your abilities as a photographer than on the gear you bring with you. A better camera and higher quality glass won’t make you a better photographer, in other words, but once you start to improve your skills, better gear could make it easier to achieve the same results.
I experienced this this past weekend, at a shoot I did at a dressage show in western Washington. I did a few sessions at this indoor arena before, but because the lighting was dim on all but the brightest days, my lower-end rig just wasn’t up to the task much of the time. My telephoto lenses tended toward vignetting and chromatic aberrations, and didn’t have the light-gathering capabilities I really needed. My camera was prone to a good deal of noise at high ISO, due in no small part to the manufacturer trying to cram so many megapixels onto a ¾-frame CMOS, so many of the images turned out grainy. Since I was dealing with large, live animals, I didn’t feel comfortable using much flash, because I didn’t want the liability or guilt arising from killing some innocent rider because I spooked their horse right out from under them.
Yesterday, though, I cranked the ISO as high as 4000 in the early morning and dropped it to 1600 as the day wore on. This let me keep the shutter speed between 1/250 and 1/400 sec most of the time, and got great depth of field with the aperture as wide open as it would go. No flash required, I could keep the shutter speed fast enough that I didn’t get motion blur unless I wanted it, and no noise or graininess that I could see in the final images. Before, I would have to process my photos through Photoshop to try to adjust for the exposure and attempt to remove the noise, and many shots came out okay in the end, but now I can get shots that are just as good without having to retouch them at all. Now I can worry a lot less about how it’s going to look and focus more on getting what I want in the frame, because I know the camera is actually capable of capturing what my eye sees and my artistic sensibilities envision.
There is, of course, the final extreme end of the spectrum. Are there fancier cameras out there than mine? You bet. There are medium- and large-format cameras that have the luxury of placing 60 megapixels or more on their sensors due to roomier real-estate (more on that in another post, if you’re interested), higher shutter speeds to catch bullets in flight or hummingbird’s wings in motion, hand-ground crystal lenses from fifth-generation jewelers, lenses that are so large they look like artillery and require the help of two grown men and a small boy to carry around. Are they actually better than I have right now? Overall, no – they’re overkill for my daily use, even on a professional level. I rarely run into a situation where I think to myself, “Darn, if only I had a 1200mm lens with me, I’d be able to get this shot of something a mile away;” I just try to get a little closer to my subject, and I'm thankful I don't have to haul a 35-pound lens around. Until I’m actually asked to shoot something for a mural or billboard-sized print, I’m probably not going to need a medium- or large-format camera, either, nor can I afford one anyway (and besides, there are ways to blow up images through digital processing that promise to preserve detail even as you expand the image). And let's be brutally honest: I'm kind of clumsy, and given the choice between dropping and breaking a $2500 camera or a $25,000 camera... I'll cry less over having to buy a new $2500 camera.
Moral of the story: think about the kind of photography you want to do, shop around to find the gear that gives you what you want at a price you’re comfortable with, learn everything you can about all the features of your new camera and truly learn how to use them, and be happy with your decision in the knowledge that yours was an intelligent and considered choice. With photographic gear, as in much of life, it’s not so much about getting everything you want, it’s wanting everything you have.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Gear, Part I
Admittedly, I'm still getting accustomed to the whole idea of blogging, so bear with me. I suppose since we're at the beginning, I should start at the beginning: my camera history.
Like most people, my first camera was a cheap hand-me-down, a Kodak Instamatic, as a matter of fact. It took those chunky cartridge-style film rolls that had its own take-up reel, and was about as basic as it got, but I loved that thing. I shot many, many rolls of film, mostly of nothing -- when you're twelve, the things that interest you in that moment when you decide to raise the camera to your eye are not what interest you by the time the film is developed and you look at the prints. Still, there were shots I have from my school years that were actually halfway decent, mostly by virtue of the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, standing in the right way at just right distance from my subject that it took advantage of the precise focal length of my camera's lens, rather than by any intent or forethought on my part. I rarely considered how the final print would look, and I only invested in one of those disposable cube flashes once, just to see what the camera could do with night photography (with rather uninspiring results, I must admit) -- most of my photography was the result of one little corner of my brain taking over and saying, "Ooohpretty*click*"
Noticing that I seemed to enjoy snapping photos of every random thing that crossed my path, one of my sisters gave me a Pentax P3 SLR, with a 50mm 1:1.7 lens; I think she hoped that better equipment might at least make some of those random things look a little better. In high school, I took an actual photography class, and this introduced the concept of composition, that maybe if you THINK about the shot before pressing the shutter button, you might be more pleased with the results. For some projects, I borrowed my brother's 70-200mm telephoto zoom lens (which seemed, to someone like me who had gotten accustomed to little lenses with a single focal length, to be just ridiculous to lug around, but cool all the same), but mostly I concentrated on portraits and landscapes, which suited the 50mm lens just fine. I still shot a lot of film with only a few prints worth keeping, and I had yet to develop any real sense of composition or style, but I like to think I did better work as I got older and that I was refining my own aesthetics over time.
I dragged that P3 with me into my Navy years, and considering how much time it spent rattling around the cramped, cluttered and somewhat fetid environs of my rack, it's a wonder it continued to function at all, let alone well. Yet as I travelled the world and arbitrarily documented my various misadventures, it did just that, despite smashing into a hundred different hard surfaces in fifteen or twenty different countries, being subjected to temperatures ranging from around 5F (Alaska) to 110F (Bahrain) and humidity from 0-100 (and more, since it actually got submerged in water twice), never having quite all of the sand removed from its internals or the internals of the lens such that focusing on a subject made an intermittent ratcheting sound like a fishing reel with stripped gears, and actually getting smeared with a mixture of peanut butter and Sriracha hot sauce (don't ask). The trouble was, since the photographer was also getting smashed, frozen, fried, submerged and smeared right along with the camera, there was a certain lack of attention to little details like lighting and exposure, focus, depth of field, and framing, not to mention overall composition. It was costing me a lot of money to keep buying and developing film when I wasn't getting shots worth keeping, and I soon began to think about making the transition to digital -- at least with pictures that only existed on a computer screen, you could delete all the garbage shots and not be out potentially hundreds of dollars in developing fees. You could snap away with impunity and not feel that bad about it.
The first digital camera I bought was an Olympus C-300. It was a 3.0 megapixel point-and-shoot, and was... not sexy. Bigger and better digital cameras were available even at the time, but out of my price range (and to be honest, out of my skill range as well). To be honest, I paid way too much for this camera, but it turned out to be a little workhorse for quite a while, certainly good enough for the family photos I was taking.
I got more serious about my photography only very recently. Before taking a trip to southern Africa, I bought another Olympus, an SP-550UZ 7.1MP digital camera with an amazing 18x optical zoom, and I still have this camera for simple vacation photos or to document things around the house -- the files are much smaller than my professional camera, and it's much lighter so it's easier to carry around. This really opened my eyes to what was out there in the market; the greater resolution and zoom capability, coupled with better in-camera software and image stabilization meant my shaky, tentative photography produced much clearer images than I had ever shot before. This camera made it look like I knew what the hell I was doing, and perhaps for the first time in a long while, I actually enjoyed taking photos and invested a lot more energy in trying to make them more visually interesting. Of course, with all the automatic functions within the camera taking care of me, I got technically sharp and well-exposed shots, but I struggled to defeat those functions when I actually wanted to do something a little more artistic, partly because I'm kind of a big-thumbed ape when it comes to technical details and partly because I was still trying to figure out what I wanted out of any given shot and how I should go about actually getting it.
Taking better photos inspired me to... well, take better photos. After I returned from my Africa trip, I realized just how much I enjoyed photography, and that I wanted to take it further, so I bit the bullet and invested in a Canon EOS 50D digital SLR. It came in a package deal with a selection of lower-end lenses: a 50mm fixed lens, an 18-55mm telephoto, a 70-300mm telephoto, a wide angle and a macro lens, along with a handful of filters, a cheap flash I never used, a camera bag and a few odd and sundry bits and pieces. This gave me a lot more functionality than the Olympus, better resolution, and was a little easier to fiddle with to get long exposures or to under-expose when I wanted it, or to get soft focus when I wanted that. I also still have this camera, and I've gotten several years of use out of it, and it has proven to be suprisingly rugged -- I have yet to see anything fail, despite many inadvertent attempts to break it, and actually continued to perform well in environments where more expensive cameras simply gave up (a particularly heavy rain on the Olympic Peninsula comes to mind). The shots I got from the 50D were clear enough and composed well enough (especially after futher education, including a few sessions under the tutelage of Art Wolfe) that I felt confident enough to actually put my work up for sale.
For a professional photographer, the 50D has some limitations, of course (which is why Canon lists it as a "semi-professional" model). It's obviously not the highest resolution camera Canon makes, but in this case, it's really size that matters: it has a 3/4 frame CMOS, meaning the sensor is not the same size as a piece of 35mm film. So all those megapixels have to be crammed in closer to one another, and at least theoretically, that means a higher probability of signal noise in the final image. Since I'm interested in getting photos that are tack sharp and with as little noise as possible, I need to do everything I can to reduce digital errata, so I made the upgrade to a full-frame sensor and bought a Canon EOS 5D and some better glass (which one will improve my images more is a subject for further debate, but I'll take whatever does the trick and not lose sleep over it). I haven't had it long enough to report fully on its plusses and minuses, but I know a lot of professional photographers who swear by it. (We'll have the Canon vs. Nikon disussion at a later date, when we have much more time and a bit more alcohol on board)
Where will I go from here? Hard to say; technologically, I've reached a point that many professional photographers are comfortable settling at. There may at some point be a need to get a medium- or large-format camera for detailed work that I'll want to blow up to mural sized prints, but for the moment, I can't justify it (not at current market prices, particularly) and I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm using. We'll see; if somebody invents a digital camera that takes pictures in 3-D, I might have to jump on that bandwagon, but until we start doing holographic field photography, I'm happy with my 5D. I'm done buying toys for a while... until someone shows me something else that bright and shiny.
Like most people, my first camera was a cheap hand-me-down, a Kodak Instamatic, as a matter of fact. It took those chunky cartridge-style film rolls that had its own take-up reel, and was about as basic as it got, but I loved that thing. I shot many, many rolls of film, mostly of nothing -- when you're twelve, the things that interest you in that moment when you decide to raise the camera to your eye are not what interest you by the time the film is developed and you look at the prints. Still, there were shots I have from my school years that were actually halfway decent, mostly by virtue of the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, standing in the right way at just right distance from my subject that it took advantage of the precise focal length of my camera's lens, rather than by any intent or forethought on my part. I rarely considered how the final print would look, and I only invested in one of those disposable cube flashes once, just to see what the camera could do with night photography (with rather uninspiring results, I must admit) -- most of my photography was the result of one little corner of my brain taking over and saying, "Ooohpretty*click*"
Noticing that I seemed to enjoy snapping photos of every random thing that crossed my path, one of my sisters gave me a Pentax P3 SLR, with a 50mm 1:1.7 lens; I think she hoped that better equipment might at least make some of those random things look a little better. In high school, I took an actual photography class, and this introduced the concept of composition, that maybe if you THINK about the shot before pressing the shutter button, you might be more pleased with the results. For some projects, I borrowed my brother's 70-200mm telephoto zoom lens (which seemed, to someone like me who had gotten accustomed to little lenses with a single focal length, to be just ridiculous to lug around, but cool all the same), but mostly I concentrated on portraits and landscapes, which suited the 50mm lens just fine. I still shot a lot of film with only a few prints worth keeping, and I had yet to develop any real sense of composition or style, but I like to think I did better work as I got older and that I was refining my own aesthetics over time.
I dragged that P3 with me into my Navy years, and considering how much time it spent rattling around the cramped, cluttered and somewhat fetid environs of my rack, it's a wonder it continued to function at all, let alone well. Yet as I travelled the world and arbitrarily documented my various misadventures, it did just that, despite smashing into a hundred different hard surfaces in fifteen or twenty different countries, being subjected to temperatures ranging from around 5F (Alaska) to 110F (Bahrain) and humidity from 0-100 (and more, since it actually got submerged in water twice), never having quite all of the sand removed from its internals or the internals of the lens such that focusing on a subject made an intermittent ratcheting sound like a fishing reel with stripped gears, and actually getting smeared with a mixture of peanut butter and Sriracha hot sauce (don't ask). The trouble was, since the photographer was also getting smashed, frozen, fried, submerged and smeared right along with the camera, there was a certain lack of attention to little details like lighting and exposure, focus, depth of field, and framing, not to mention overall composition. It was costing me a lot of money to keep buying and developing film when I wasn't getting shots worth keeping, and I soon began to think about making the transition to digital -- at least with pictures that only existed on a computer screen, you could delete all the garbage shots and not be out potentially hundreds of dollars in developing fees. You could snap away with impunity and not feel that bad about it.
The first digital camera I bought was an Olympus C-300. It was a 3.0 megapixel point-and-shoot, and was... not sexy. Bigger and better digital cameras were available even at the time, but out of my price range (and to be honest, out of my skill range as well). To be honest, I paid way too much for this camera, but it turned out to be a little workhorse for quite a while, certainly good enough for the family photos I was taking.
I got more serious about my photography only very recently. Before taking a trip to southern Africa, I bought another Olympus, an SP-550UZ 7.1MP digital camera with an amazing 18x optical zoom, and I still have this camera for simple vacation photos or to document things around the house -- the files are much smaller than my professional camera, and it's much lighter so it's easier to carry around. This really opened my eyes to what was out there in the market; the greater resolution and zoom capability, coupled with better in-camera software and image stabilization meant my shaky, tentative photography produced much clearer images than I had ever shot before. This camera made it look like I knew what the hell I was doing, and perhaps for the first time in a long while, I actually enjoyed taking photos and invested a lot more energy in trying to make them more visually interesting. Of course, with all the automatic functions within the camera taking care of me, I got technically sharp and well-exposed shots, but I struggled to defeat those functions when I actually wanted to do something a little more artistic, partly because I'm kind of a big-thumbed ape when it comes to technical details and partly because I was still trying to figure out what I wanted out of any given shot and how I should go about actually getting it.
Taking better photos inspired me to... well, take better photos. After I returned from my Africa trip, I realized just how much I enjoyed photography, and that I wanted to take it further, so I bit the bullet and invested in a Canon EOS 50D digital SLR. It came in a package deal with a selection of lower-end lenses: a 50mm fixed lens, an 18-55mm telephoto, a 70-300mm telephoto, a wide angle and a macro lens, along with a handful of filters, a cheap flash I never used, a camera bag and a few odd and sundry bits and pieces. This gave me a lot more functionality than the Olympus, better resolution, and was a little easier to fiddle with to get long exposures or to under-expose when I wanted it, or to get soft focus when I wanted that. I also still have this camera, and I've gotten several years of use out of it, and it has proven to be suprisingly rugged -- I have yet to see anything fail, despite many inadvertent attempts to break it, and actually continued to perform well in environments where more expensive cameras simply gave up (a particularly heavy rain on the Olympic Peninsula comes to mind). The shots I got from the 50D were clear enough and composed well enough (especially after futher education, including a few sessions under the tutelage of Art Wolfe) that I felt confident enough to actually put my work up for sale.
For a professional photographer, the 50D has some limitations, of course (which is why Canon lists it as a "semi-professional" model). It's obviously not the highest resolution camera Canon makes, but in this case, it's really size that matters: it has a 3/4 frame CMOS, meaning the sensor is not the same size as a piece of 35mm film. So all those megapixels have to be crammed in closer to one another, and at least theoretically, that means a higher probability of signal noise in the final image. Since I'm interested in getting photos that are tack sharp and with as little noise as possible, I need to do everything I can to reduce digital errata, so I made the upgrade to a full-frame sensor and bought a Canon EOS 5D and some better glass (which one will improve my images more is a subject for further debate, but I'll take whatever does the trick and not lose sleep over it). I haven't had it long enough to report fully on its plusses and minuses, but I know a lot of professional photographers who swear by it. (We'll have the Canon vs. Nikon disussion at a later date, when we have much more time and a bit more alcohol on board)
Where will I go from here? Hard to say; technologically, I've reached a point that many professional photographers are comfortable settling at. There may at some point be a need to get a medium- or large-format camera for detailed work that I'll want to blow up to mural sized prints, but for the moment, I can't justify it (not at current market prices, particularly) and I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm using. We'll see; if somebody invents a digital camera that takes pictures in 3-D, I might have to jump on that bandwagon, but until we start doing holographic field photography, I'm happy with my 5D. I'm done buying toys for a while... until someone shows me something else that bright and shiny.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Stock photo site
Oh, by the way, my new stock photo site is up on Photoshelter. I'm still tweaking it, but it's available for viewing -- sometime very soon, people will also be able to buy prints and licenses as well. It's located at http://uyyek.photoshelter.com/
Welcome!
My name is Michael Uyyek, and I am a wildlife and landscape photographer based in Seattle, Washington. I hope that as time goes on, you will join me as I continue to travel the world and see new wonders of nature and places that still remain untamed. I'm also interested in documenting scenes a little closer to home, and am equally drawn to more man-made images as well. I'd like to share with you some of the lessons I learn along the way as I become a more seasoned photographer and traveller, and in a way, you'll be coming with me everywhere I go. Thanks for joining my journey, and you'll hear from me again soon!
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