The Pros and Cons of a Telephoto Lens

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a terrible blogger. A naughty, negligent blogger. I could try to make the excuse that the OTHER job has kept me from pursuing my art to the extent I would have liked, or that I’ve been swamped with my new exercise and diet regime, my work with the Seattle Symphony Chorale, or just trying to keep up with Mrs. Yuk, but those really are just excuses. I’ll take my spanking later, but for now, I have blogging to do.


I recently learned that Haystack Rock, the prominent seastack that stands sentry over Cannon Beach, Oregon serves as a spring nesting area not only for more common sea birds like gulls and cormorants, but also to tufted puffins. Unable to resist actually seeing them in the wild, I sped on down there
for a weekend of shooting, only to confront a near perfect storm of photography challenges:


1) The weather along the Oregon coast is unpredictable at best, and while I was there, it was mostly overcast and often raining with a steady drizzle and light but steady winds.
2) Haystack Rock is a protected wildlife area and marine sanctuary, so while you can approach its base, you cannot climb upon it, both for public safety reasons as well as not to disturb nesting sea birds. Therefore, I had to content myself with shooting with my telephoto lens at a distance of about 100 yards.
3) Animals have this annoying habit of moving around a lot.


That particular weekend, the morning low tide occurred right around dawn (part of the reason I planned to go when I did, reasoning that I would get good light during the "golden hour" just after dawn), but when I got to Haystack Rock, I had to wait a solid hour before there was even enough light to pick out any of the birds on the rock face and locate any puffins, because the cloud cover was so thick that it stayed dark and dismal well into the afternoon. With my Canon EF 28-135 mm lens, this is what I could get later in the afternoon (shooting a Canon EOS 5D II in RAW mode, f/11 ISO 400 at 1/15 sec)

Attaching my EF 100-400 telephoto zoom didn't quite do enough, so I was forced to attach my doubler as well. This meant that the widest apeture I could shoot with was f/11 (using my doubler meant that I was effectively shooting with an 800 mm telephoto lens, but because of the physical size of the internal glass, it reduced the size of the opening through which light could pass. Luckily, I wanted to try to get better depth of field, so f/11 was fine with me, but it also meant that the autofocus was disabled, so I would have to do it all manually, and I was still stuck with fairly slow shutter speeds) With this combination, I managed to get this shot (f/11 at 1/6 sec):

Still not exactly an exciting photo, until you zoom in digitally and discover what you're really looking at.

Success! Puffins! Only, not a success in terms of capturing an image with enough quality to sell commercially; kind of grainy and noisy because I had to crop so much, and not tack sharp due to the aforementioned focusing issues. Here's where that perfect storm came into play. Because the light was quite dark both mornings, I had to use a very slow shutter speed (usually between 1/4 and 1/10 sec), so any slight movement by the bird or the grasses would cause motion blur. In addition, the wind kept jostling the camera, also introducing motion blur - because I was forced to zoom in so much, any tiny vibration of the camera on its tripod translated to a lot of motion in the image) Compound that with the fact that my vision has never been so great, yet I had to manually focus on an image that shook like an earthquake due to the extreme zoom I was at, and I was lucky to capture anything at all.

So two questions arise from this experience, the first being: what good is a zoom lens, then, if it introduces all these challenges? Well, if you use a telephoto or zoom lens to bring objects closer (within reason), you can capture details of an overall scene that a shorter lens might overlook. If I

stuck with only a short lens, all I would have gotten was the wide shot I showed first up above. If I then cropped in to see the puffins, they'd just be a black blur with an orange blob in the center, right? Although it is useful to photograph wildlife at a distance (especially large groups of animals), the closer you can get to your subject is still better for getting more detail, even when using a telephoto lens. The closer you can get (still within the focal distance of your lens, naturally), the less that camera shake will affect the image, the crisper the focus will be and the more light you can collect from your intended subject.

What do I mean? Remember the post I did last year regarding focal length and depth of field? Now take another look at the wide and zoomed shots of Haystack Rock above. The wide shot received all the light reflecting off of all those surfaces and coming straight in through the lens. The narrow,

zoomed shot of the puffins and muirs only caught the light reflecting from that smaller area and making the 300 ft journey to my zoom lens. That's why professional wildlife photographers invest the money to get really fast telephoto lenses (i.e. ones that gather a lot of light), which allow you to

shoot with a faster shutter speed while zoomed in on your subject, and therefore you have a better chance of catching a nice, crisp shot.

The second question is a little more subjective: why did I bother taking the shots at all, knowing they probably wouldn't end up being usable? Because I'm a photographer, and I went down there specifically to shoot puffins, so that's what I did. It's not all about getting the shot that will sell,

sometimes it's the challenge of getting the best image you can possibly get under the conditions in which you find yourself. Sometimes, it's about getting a shot that you like to look at, even if it will never be commercially useful, but because you think it's beautiful. And if you're serious about wildlife and landscape photography, you have to accept the fact that there will be times when the animals didn't get the memo to appear when and where they were supposed to, that the weather will not always cooperate, or the flowers bloom exactly when you expected them to, or possibly,

unbeknownst to you, they built a TGIFridays right on the spot where you planned to shoot your favorite vista. It's a test of your flexibility and ability to adapt to the situation.

I've heard lots of stories from photographers who travelled sometimes thousands of miles to shoot a seasonal migration or some intermittent event like the Northern Lights, only to find that they basically came all that way to camp for a week without seeing what they wanted to shoot. They simply needed to shift their expectations and look around their environment to find something else to shoot while waiting for their primary subject to arrive, and often, they found something a lot more interesting than what they came to shoot in the first place.

As always, therefore, I encourage you to play with your equipment and learn the limitations of each piece you own. You can see the kinds of images you'll get if you do zoom way in on something, or at how slow a shutter speed you can still handhold your camera, or what kinds of lens flare or

vignetting you get with which lenses in your kit. If you're thinking of upgrading, I highly recommend visiting your local camera shop and finding out if they rent equipment -- for $25, you can find out if you like how a piece of kit feels and operates, without spending $500-$1000 for something you

might not like. It always pays to take things for a test drive before buying, if you have the option. This way, you have an idea of what your gear is capable of doing, and whether or not a certain loss of image quality due to conditions beyond your control are still worth it to you. (Here's a hint: it's usually worth it)

Video: 2011 recap

Thanks for reading my blog, and stay tuned for more posts coming soon!

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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So what's your relationship with the natural world? Exploitive? Advocative? Or somewhere in the middle?

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!