As a photographer I’ve had the good fortune to have traveled to many places. I’ve walked with penguins at the bottom of the world, sailed through the Panama Canal, stood in the Coliseum in Rome, hiked across glaciers in Alaska, gazed upon the tallest mountain in North America, visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and watched elephants splash in the Chobe River in Botswana, just to name a few of my many incredible experiences. Experiencing these people, places, and events has and is wonderful, but being able to share them makes them invaluable. I’ve included as many as I could in this web site, and I hope that in sharing them here, they will encourage you see them at some time on your own, first hand.
Will My Pictures Look Like That?
The short answer to that question is: probably not. Several years ago my good friend, George Williams, and I spent a three day weekend taking photographs along the peninsula that separates Lake Huron from the Georgian Bay in Ontario. At the end of the trip we compared results. With a few exceptions, it was hard to tell we had been on the same trip. Even though we had both photographed the same things, our perspectives and interests were vastly different. I suppose that’s one aspect that separates the art of photography from just taking snapshots.
There are three components to photography that will almost guarantee that one person’s pictures will not look like another’s. The first is equipment. Even with my own equipment, pictures I took with my Canon SLR differ from those I took with my medium format Mamiya or from those taken with film versus those taken digitally. Add to that the different lenses that come into play. Traditionally I use an 18 to 70 mm zoom and a 100 to 300 mm zoom, both with the capability of macro photography (extreme close ups). One of the subjects George and I photographed on our Georgina Bay trip was an old barn at the top of a hill. The barn was off in the distance with a large field of grass and an old split rail fence in the foreground. George’s pictures were mostly taken with a telephoto lens, making the barn the focus of attention. Mine were taken with a wide angle lens, making the split rail fence and the grassy field the focus of attention.
That brings me to the second component: the photographer. None of us sees objects in the same way. When we take photographs we bring into the process our life experiences, both technical and artistic, our interests and our unique perspectives. For example, in the barn photos mentioned above, I was more interested in the wide expanse of field and the old fence. By putting the barn in the distance, my goal was to underscore its insignificance. To George, the barn’s weathered boards and isolation on the hilltop were more important.
The last component is what you might call “post-production.” Whether in the dark room or on a computer, the final touches on a photograph include cropping; adjusting things like color, contrast, lightness, darkness, or cleaning up imperfections. In the darkroom, this may also include blocking something out, or superimposing another image. On the computer, it’s cutting and pasting, layering, texturing, etc. Some “purists” may feel that this is “faking” pictures. I think that depends on what your end product is supposed to be. If your goal is to record history, then I agree: making more than basic adjustments to a picture is distorting the event. On the other hand, if your goal is to produce something artistic, then it’s adding artistic embellishments to your work. I would venture a guess, though, that even Ansel Adams dodged and burned and modified the contrast on his photographs.
I imagine it would be possible to duplicate all the steps, perspectives, and finishing touches on one of your photos so that it would look like these, but, then it wouldn’t be your photograph. It would just be a copy of one of mine. On each trip I’ve taken, my wife has also shot her own photographs. Every once in a while we shoot the same thing in almost the same way. Only one copy gets kept. The other is tossed. What’s really interesting, though, is to re-experience the trip through each other’s eyes.
It’s All About Light
Most of photography is all about controlling and/or manipulating light. There are three factors that come into play in this effort. One is the camera’s f-stop. This is the diameter of the aperture in the lens, which is much like the iris of your eye. What confuses most people is that the larger the f-stop number, the smaller the lens opening. It might be easier to remember that the bigger the number, the more light is stopped. Maybe not. Anyway, if your camera is set to f4 for example, the lens aperture is wide open: stopping the least amount of light. If you set it to f16, then the aperture is substantially smaller, stopping much more light. Imagine your iris in a dark room. It is opened as wide as necessary to allow as much light in as possible. As soon as someone turns on the lights, your iris closes down to reduce the light entering your eye. The camera’s aperture works the same way.
The second factor is the shutter speed: how fast the shutter opens and closes. This is usually measured in fractions of a second, for example, 1/250 or 1/500. The faster the shutter speed, the higher the bottom number. And the higher that bottom number, the less light is allowed in. So, shooting picture at f4 and 1/100 second is going to let a lot of light into the camera.
The third factor is the speed of the film. Most general purpose film has a speed (referred to as an ASA or ISO number) of 100 or 200. This is also considered “slow” film. Fast film which requires less light to make an impression would be numbered as 800, 1000 or 1600. The down side to faster film is less quality, or an increase in the “graininess” of the negative.
So what does this all mean for digital photographers? Most digital cameras and many film cameras have a fully automatic setting. In this mode the camera determines the optimum settings for the f-stop, the shutter speed and the “film” speed. Cameras also have the capability to allow for changing these settings to f-stop controlled or shutter speed controlled. In these modes, you can select either the f-stop setting you want or the shutter speed you want, and the camera will automatically adjust the remaining settings to compensate.
Most digital cameras also have icon settings for portraits, landscape, extreme close ups, and sports. In these settings the camera again makes the determination on the optimum settings, but most of these are governed by the f-stop. For example, in the setting for extreme close ups, or macro photography, the camera will usually opt for a low f-stop: f4 or f5.6. This allows the camera to select a faster shutter speed which will help reduce vibrations or movement that would otherwise blur the picture. In the sports setting, the camera will normally opt for a fast shutter speed and a fast “film” speed to allow quick action to be stopped, again reducing blur. So, if you want to include blurred lines in a sports picture to dramatize the motion being captured, you should not choose the sports setting.
Given this, what settings do you think the camera would choose for portraits and landscapes? I’ll cover this when I talk about depth of field.
So What Exactly Is Depth of Field?
Depth of field is a relatively simple concept that can get fairly complicated. Simply put, it’s the area of a picture from front to back that is sharply focused. What’s so complicated about that, you may ask. Here goes: depth of field is generally controlled by three factors. The first is the aperture opening (see my blog “It’s all about light”). The higher the f-stop number (meaning more light is stopped), the greater the depth of field. In gauging the depth of field, keep in mind that the rule of thumb is that one third of that depth is in front of the subject and the other two thirds are behind it. This will get clearer (no pun intended) later on. The second factor is the focal length of the lens. The shorter the focal length, the deeper the depth of field. What this means is, if you’re shooting scenery and want to get the foreground and the distant mountains all in focus, you should be using a wide angle lens rather than a telephoto. Of course, if you were trying to get the foreground and the distant mountains in the same picture, you’re probably already using a wide angle lens – duh! The third factor is the shooting distance – how far you and your camera are from the subject. The closer you are, the shallower the depth of field. There are some other contributing factors, but these are the big three.
All right; now that you know this, how do you use it and why would you bother? In viewing a photograph, the eye is always drawn to a clear image rather than a blurred image. If you’re taking a portrait, the subject’s face is usually what you want the viewer to concentrate on. Having a sharp background can be distracting. Keeping in mind the three factors above then, the optimum results would come with using a longer lens (at least 75mm), a low f-stop (around f4 or f5.6) and standing as close to the subject as you can get to have the picture properly framed. Doing this will normally result in the face being sharply in focus and the background blurred.
One of the other contributing factors that will get the desired results would be to have the subject distant from the background. If the subject is standing up against a wall, it won’t matter how low the f-stop, how long the lens or how close you are – the background won’t be blurred. Another example of how depth of field can be used is in photographing a long line of subjects, for example, a picket fence, a long walkway, or a long line of soldiers. Let’s use the line of soldiers as an example. Imagine 50 soldiers all standing at attention with one end of the line at your immediate right and you’re looking down the line at their overlapping profiles. If the goal is to show how alike each soldier is, then you probably want as many in focus as possible. To do this, first select a short lens: 50mm or less. Then select a high f-stop: f11 or higher. Finally, stand as far from the closest soldier as you can (remember, you can crop the picture later on to get rid of extraneous background). If you go to my photo of “lobster traps” under the Nova Scotia/Canada tab, you’ll see what this end result would look like. As you can see, there are 11or 12 traps in a long line. The depth of field in this photo extends from the first trap to about the sixth or seventh. The same thing occurs in picture 5 of 5 under the Quebec/Canada tab. The walkway at the foreground is in focus, and the lone walker at the other end is still at an acceptable level of clarity.
Using the same example of the soldiers, if you wanted to demonstrate the individuality in such a long line of similarity, you’d probably want to focus on only one or two of the soldiers, while keeping the extended line in the picture. To do this, use a long lens (at least 100mm), a low f-stop (f4 or lower, if possible), and get as close as allowable to the soldiers. What you’ll end up with is a very short depth of field and the soldiers before and after the subject soldier will quickly begin to blur. In most of the photos I take, I look for extensive depth of field. However, if you look at images 17 and 18 under the Virginia/USA tab, you will see examples of very shallow depth of field. Note how the eye is drawn to the sharpest berries or the sharpest grapes in those pictures, and that the background, although relatively close, is blurred.
I mentioned earlier that I’d “clear up” the concept of one third in front and two thirds in back. Depth of field doesn’t change abruptly from sharp to blurred. It’s a gradual transition, although the gradation of the transition will be different depending on the extent that the three factors above come into play. At some point the different subject layers in a photograph both in the foreground and in the background, reach a point where they are no longer visually sharp. Let’s use the line of soldiers again as an example. Regardless of the depth of field of your final shot, once you identify the soldier who is most in focus, the area behind this soldier that remains at an acceptable level of focus will be twice as far back as the area forward of that soldier. Clear?
The Art of Photography
At a gallery reception where I was featured artist, I was asked by several people how I achieved some of the effects in the photographs that were on display. I indicated that I used Photoshop. One of the people who heard my response was a bit surprised. She pointed to one photo in particular and asked what I had done. I said that I had added clouds to that shot and erased some people that, in the original, were off to one side. She asked me, “isn’t that cheating?” I then asked her, if she was painting a landscape that she was looking at, and decided to add clouds on the horizon, and, perhaps a small boat on the water, wouldn’t that be cheating? She said that was different because she was creating the painting. To me this is the difference between the techniques of photography and the art of photography.
If your goal is to capture a moment in history, to record an event, or to document a second in time, then, yes: altering the photograph would be cheating, because you’re trying to present something that has been modified as if it actually looked and happened the way it appears. But even so-called historical photographs are altered. Lighter areas are burned in, darker areas are dodged out, and images are cropped. Why? To make the photograph have a greater impact, or to make the image sharper, or to make a specific statement. On the other hand, if your goal is to create something that is beautiful, that stirs emotion or captures someone’s imagination, then in that respect, a photograph is no different than a painting.
In the section I’ve labeled, “Artistic Renditions” I’ve included some photographs that are not intended to record an event for posterity. They are intended to stir imagination, to evoke an emotional response, or to just be nice to look at. And, if you can’t tell – none of these images originally looked like they are presented here.