Tips From an Erstwhile Photographer

I was once a professional photographer. From about 1983 through 1990, I made my living taking pictures of sports, corporate events, and just about anything else that happened my way. I was paid from $2 a photo up to $300/hr. So, during that run I picked up a few things here and there that seem to always come in handy whether you are shooting with top of the line equipment an Olympic gymnast doing her signature move in an international meet , or taking some birthday snaps of a 3-year-old with a disposable camera. The principles remain the same even when the tools evolve.

When You Think You Are Close Enough…

…get closer. When I was in the game, this was my mantra. The primary compositional failure in so many photos is that the subject isn’t large enough in the frame. This is largely due to the photographer not wanting to risk a potentially great shot by getting in so close that information is lost, never to be seen again. As a result, people take photos that have so much background information in them that any impact is lost. True, there are times when the context is at least as important as the subject, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for lack of photographic courage.

The argument then, as now, was that you could simply enlarge and crop the photo to get the best composition. True enough. I do that a lot myself. However, the less you need to enlarge and crop, the better the quality will be. With film, too much enlargement made the film grain very apparent. With digital, it’s noise and artifacts. To avoid these, you have to make a choice when you frame the picture and be willing to take a risk every now and again.

Sharp As a Bowling Ball

Focus is very much a key for good photography. Being a sports photographer in an age of manual focus, I had to learn to bring quickly moving athletes into sharp focus. This isn’t the hassle now that it once was as most, if not all, digital cameras will do the focusing for you. The thing you have to be careful of is whether the right thing is being focused on. Some cameras will evaluate the entire scene, picking out faces and objects of interest and then calculate what it thinks are the optimum settings. More often than not, that’s pretty much what you want to have happen, so go for it.

But what about those times are occur less often? Do you know how to get your camera to focus on what you want it to focus on? On most digital point-and-shoot cameras, you can still go the autofocus route by placing the thing you want in focus in the middle of your focusing box, slightly depress your shutter button to lock in that setting, and then while still holding the shutter button in place you move your camera back to compose the scene. Then, when you complete the pressing of your shutter button, the focus will be on your locked in setting. It’s harder to explain than to do.

But what if you have the ability to manually focus in the old way, via a ring on your lens? The rule of thumb was to not rely on split-prisms or anything like that. Just use your eyes and don’t obsess about it too much. Focus smoothly until the image gets into focus and then just slightly goes out of focus, back up gently until it again comes in focus and just goes out of focus, tweak it back until it is sharp and take the picture.

Expose Yourself Well

If your image is over- or under-exposed, you’ve lost information compared to a properly exposed image. When shooting outside, the touchstone is the “sunny 16” formula which says:

Thus, on a sunny day (or a bright hazy day), if you were using ISO 200 speed film, or had your digital camera set to an ISO of 200, then your shutter speed would be about 1/250 sec @ f/16. You vary this in the usual way of 1 shutter speed up means 1 aperture down, and vice-versa (e.g. 1/500 @ f/11).

But what if you let your camera set the exposure for you? That’s fine about half the time, but you need to be mindful of what the camera is seeing. Very often it is basing its exposure on 18% gray, which is the approximate gray things would be if you took a black and white photo and averaged out all the shades. But who of us hasn’t seen shots of snowy days end up as too dark because the camera thought the white of all that snow was actually gray? Or that shot of an dark-skinned friend wearing a dark suit only to have the rest of the scene end up unnaturally light?

That’s where the automatics can really mess you up. However, with just a little observation, you can correct for that, even when you don’t want to do things manually.  How? On just about every digital camera there is a button or a menu that will allow you to adjust the EV (exposure value) level. You’ve probably noticed something that has:

-2 . . -1 . . 0 . . +1 . . +2

That is the EV scale. It allows you to make changes to how your camera is doing its automatic exposures. You can either go down up to two f-stops (making the image darker) or up to two f-stops (making the image lighter).

Why does this matter? Doesn’t the photo processor at the Big-box Store, or Photoshop, have the tools to fix this for me? Yes, but…

Just as with getting in close enough, you will have better image quality if you don’t have to do much, if any, post-processing. You see, as I mentioned, if your exposure is off, you’ve probably lost information. If you underexposed, it will be in the shadows, if you overexposed, it will be in the highlights.

The fact is that no camera, film or digital, actually captures the full range of colors that we see. That fact has been used to advantage by photographers since long before I started in the business. The rule of thumb was to underexpose slide film by 1/3 to 1/2 of a stop, and to overexpose negative film by up to 2 stops (though 1/2 to 1 was more ideal). This played into the way the two types of films recorded their data. Slide film would tend to blow out highlights but would preserve enough detail in the shadows that could be recovered with special processing. The similar but opposite was true with negative film.

What about digital? It’s a little more iffy, especially with point-and-shoot cameras. The thing is, you’ll have to pay attention to your LCD screen. I’m not going to go into how to read a histogram here, but if you can and you have that available to you, then use it. Otherwise, set the exposure so that the lightest nearly white things in the photo aren’t 100% white (also known as “blown out”). Digital images tend to store more detail information at the bright end of the picture than the dark end, so you sort of want to err to the side of too light if you have to, and then fix it in the computer, later.

An added problem with digital is that most sensors aren’t able to capture the full range of values that some film can (though that’s disappearing on the high end). Combine that with the less than full-frame sensors (i.e. most consumer point-and-shoot and DSLRs) will tend to generate more digital noise in the shadows and under-exposed areas. It’s up to the photographer to experiment and see what’s acceptable while also remembering that a noisy picture is still better than no picture at all.

ISO

The ISO film speed or digital setting is an important consideration for the photographer. Generally speaking, the lower the number, the better the quality. Unfortunately, as you can see with the “sunny 16” formula above, the combinations of shutter speed and aperture you can use are tied to the ISO setting. Rule of thumb: 100 for sunny days and flash, 200 for overcast days and well-lit indoor scenes, 400 for cloudy days and indoor scenes without flash, 800 for indoors and you need to stop action (e.g. in an arena), higher settings are not recommended because of added digital noise (unless, of course, it’s the only way to get the picture), but that’s changing with some cameras. What if your camera has setting lower than 100? Another rule of thumb: do not use the lowest or highest settings of your equipment unless you have a specific need—the outer parts of a range tend to be straining the limits of the technology’s limits, generally resulting is lower than expected quality.

Bright Days

I’ve found bright sunny days among the worst to photograph in. The shadows are harsh and the highlights tend to burn out. If you place the sun behind the subject, then either the background is overexposed or the subject is underexposed. The solution is something most people don’t immediately thing of: use your flash.

That’s right. Use your flash to illuminate your subject while letting the sun illuminate everything else. Using the flash will also tend to soften the shadows in order to make the scene look more natural.

The better solution would find a shaded area and to take pictures there.

The best solution is to have a couple of helpers to hold a shade over the subject to stop the shadows, and a reflector to bounce softened sunlight onto the subject.

Soft Light

When you want to do a portrait that looks professional, one of the most crucial techniques is to use soft lights to illuminate your subject. This give few shadows, and the ones that are there are softened. Fortunately, this is easy to do.

Get a couple of those clip-on reflector lights from a home-improvement store (about $7 each). Also get a couple of translucent shower curtain liners ($2-5 each). Set up the reflector lights and hang the shower liners in front of them (probably not a good idea to hang them too close…we don’t want any fire hazards). Voila, soft lights.

And if you need to reflect some light, I find foamcore to be the most cost-effective solution. Keep one side white and glue aluminum foil to the other and you can handle most any situation.

Not Done

This only scratches the surface on some of the things that photography requires. I’ll be posting more, but hopefully you’ve gotten one or two things that will help you out in the meantime. Now go out and take some pictures. Have fun.