After moving country and job (to Finland and Futurice) I am back to share with you some things I am learning in photography.

This post is just to let you all know that I am back and share some of my pictures I took this January. As it is beep beep beep beep cold here, this morning I woke up to a nice -20 C, I wanted to shoot some pictures depicting the long cold Finish winter and the Arctic climate.  Besides cold I also tried to convey the emptiness of the frozen sea.  The link below will take you to my Smugmug album. Leave a comment here or in the album and let me know if I succeeded.

Gallery link

Happy shooting

So check out photography events in your neighborhood, you might learn something there.

Happy shooting

The techniques used by cinematographers are very similar to those used by photographers. Next time you watch a movie or TV try to pay attention to how the cinematographer is using photography concepts to enhance or influence the story being told.

Look at the use of
depth of field: what is in focus and what isn’t
composition, does the subject fill the frame?
focus: where is the focus?
brightness, is the scene dark or bright?
color, many colors or monochromatic?
shadows, are there shadows on the subjects face?
contrasts, does the scene contain much contrast
etc etc etc
Try to link the use of these things to what is happening in the story and what emotion is the movie maker trying to evoke. Remember that as photographer you are telling a story too!

Happy shooting!

Sharpness:
One of the biggest problems I found was to get the images sharp. The animals move but also if they don’t it is hard to get the right part in focus (the eyes)

Fence:
A defining property of a zoo is that the inhabitant are in cages or enclosed by fences. This makes photographing a little tricky especially because often there is still a distance between the fence and the zoo visitor (a moot or something like that). I found however that you can take pictures through a fence without problems. Since the fence is so much out of focus it won’t show up on your picture as such (you do see a distortion in the boekeh) The picture below is taken through a fence. The holes in the green fence were diamond shaped about 1.5 cm wide and I was about a meter from the fence.

Plexiglass:
I also took some pictures through plexiglass but those didn’t work out. The plexiglass was very dirty for all the kids touching it and those viewpoint were also very busy with people.

Bird show:
The zoo I visited held a bird show where they show a number of birds of prey. This gave a good opportunity to try to make pictures of flying birds. I found that my auto focus was not fast enough so what I did was focus on places close to where the bird was going to land or take off. I took many picture only a few where close to be correctly focused, so I still need more practice.

Taking photos of animals is great to do, but not easy. A zoo is a great way to practice and I will recommend doing it if you want to take pictures of aimals in the wild.

Happy shooting!

Bald Eagle

For my self set assignment to go to the zoo, I went to the zoo. To be precise the safari-park Beekse Bergen. Before I delve into I the things I learned there (which I will do in a later post), I wanted to share with you one tip which I wish I knew before going:

Bring a notebook.

I would have been so happy If I would have written down the name of the animals. Now my picture will bare the name “Bird” If you do know the name of the bird let me know in the comments…

Anyone knows the name of this bird?

This tip applies not only when going to the zoo. It is good practice to carry a small notebook with you. When you take pictures there is a lot more information than that what goes in the photo. You can write down things related to the circumstances like “taken just after heavy rain” or “incoming fog” or memo’s for yourself for future shoots “come back here in Autumn”. Hope this tip help you.

Happy shooting

What causes unsharpness:
Unsharpness is when light from a single point arrives on multiple spots on the sensor (see also the segment on theory at the end. There are 3 causes for unsharpness:

1. Focus. Any object not at the focus distance (S1 in the picture in the theory below) is out of focus and causes unsharpness
2. Motion. If either you or the object moves during the time the shutter is open, the object will be projected on different places on the sensor.
3. Lens deviation. The above theory applies to perfect lenses. Deviations in the exact shape of the lenses can cause light to travel on slightly different paths.. This is why expensive lenses are sharper. Much more effort goes into making the lenses as perfectly shaped as possible.

Effect of unsharpness on your image
First a very important point. We stated above that unsharpness comes from light from a single point arriving on different points on the sensor. This is only perceived as unsharp if your eye can see the difference. If those different points on the sensor are seen as one point by your eye, your image will be sharp. This relates sharpness to how your images are displayed. If you print or display them large, sharpness is a much bigger issue than if you print them on 4″x6″ or have a small version shared on facebook.
Now back to the effects of unsharpness on the image. Let’s look at the effect cause by cause

1. Focus. unsharpness by objects which are out of focus give a very natural blur. Your eyes are used to this kind of blur. it is used to separate the thing which has your attention from the rest. This is why it is a very useful tool when you want to draw your public’s attention to something in your image, simply place that into focus. An image which has noting correctly in focus will seem odd, you are easily distracted. In the two images below the focus is slightly different one is on the face and the other slightly behind the face. (click on the image for a larger version)
   
   Focus on the face (click to enlarge)
   
   Focus behind the face (click to enlarge)
2. Motion. The one kind of sharpness you always want to avoid is camera shake. Motion blur by camera shake feel like dizzy. The motion blur induced by you being not completely steady. Whether you see camera shake in your images depends on the shutter speed and the focal length of you lens. The basic rule of thumb is to take the focal length of your lens (say 50mm). The longest time your shutter can be safely open is 1/(focal length). So for 50mm it would be 1/50th of a second, for 200mm 1/200th of a second. Some factors modify that safe shutter speed. Image stabilization will allow lower shutter speeds (for 50mm it might go as low as 1/13th).
   
   Without VR (image stabilization), (click to enlarge)
   
   With VR, (click to enlarge)
   Motion blur can be a tool when you want to relay motion in the image.
3. Lens (optics) This one is the least noticeable, but when sufficiently enlarged you can see it. Below I used my prime (50mm F/1.8) and kit lens (18-55 F/3.6-5.6) both at 50mm and F/5.6. The idea is that both the prime itself is a sharper lens and that at F/5.6 the prime lens is closer to its sharpest F/stop than the zoom is. (Lenses are less sharp at their maximum and minimum F number). The image is a small detail. When you look at the whole image is is not noticeable.
   
   Prime lens (click to enlarge)
   
   Kit Lens (click to enlarge)

Well this turned out a lengthy post I hope it was useful to you as it was to me learning all about sharpness.

Happy shooting!

Some theory: what is (un)sharpness?

Your lens is, eh well, a lens (actually a whole array of lenses but that is beside the point). A lens projects an image on a surface.

Lens workings (Creative Commons image)

The red lines in the picture are the paths light is traveling upon towards your camera. (note that the paths shown are not all paths there are many more going in between the red lines) Your camera sensor would be the green arrow at S2. That is if your image is in focus. So if the image is in focus (sharp!) all the light paths from the object arrive on your camera sensor on the exact same spot. Now imagine the sensor moving a bit closer to the lens (so a bit to the left of the green line). You see now that the light paths arrive at different places on the sensor. The object is now smeared over a small area on the sensor. In your image the object is blurred or not sharp.
Note that when you focus effectively what your camera/lens is doing is changing the distance between the lens and the sensor

One of the most important and easy editing tool you have is cropping. Most people stick to the standard 4:3 (or 3:2) aspect ratio (often a check-box ‘constrict to master aspect ratio’ or something like this). This is not needed. You should pick the crop which works best for the image at hand. Your photo is an artistic expression and shouldn’t be limited by some arbitrary standard.
Things to take into consideration are getting rid of distractions, overall composition (like Rule of Thirds), good color balance etc.
The argument for sticking to the ratio is the standard photo paper sizes. Most images live on the web nowadays and never get printed. And when you do want to print, you can easily add borders to fit it to the paper.

Happy shooting (and cropping)

Happy shooting.

Task: Experiment with sharpness

In about a week or two I’ll share with you what I’ve learned. If you are learning with me let me know what you’ve learned by adding it in the comments.

Happy shooting!