Photography Advice
I began edging into photography when I was twelve or so...that's 50+
years ago now. The cameras I've used are below at the bottom
Camera & Lens Review
Sites
It is my considered opinion that unless you have image stabilization
and more than, say, 35 MP resolution that you won't really see
the real image quality delivered by 1st line (i.e. Nikon) optics.
The cheaper lenses are Good Enough for most everything. I am a large format
(piece of film 8" by 10", 750 MP resolution) person (though I cannot
afford itt these days...), so I went for extreme DSLR resolution...as
shown in my super33
sharp Flickr album where you see what a really good high-res DSLR
can deliver.
But so many people get hung up in hangar flying photography
technicalities, when most good images are the result of a sense of
vision and getting 2/3rds of the details right. You do not take
pictures like doing a lab experiment nor by having The Best Equipment
Perfection is a delusion, go for Good Enough.
A reputable dealer with good support
My two cent lecture on improving your photography.
- If it's people you're taking pictures of, get close,
uncomfortably close so you are right
in the action
- Consciously See what you are shooting.
- Not like a lab experiment, recorded and done step by
step, but like the Zen thing of really tasting the food, really
hearing, really seeing. And. It's like shooting a gun: nothing
exists but your sight picture. See it. And most important: feel
the seeing of it. You are making love to a vision. Play
with it, dance with it. God bless digital, it doesn't cost to take a
mess of images. A camera is like a gun: neither is a magic wand
that you can just wave around and expect hit bulls-eyes. You have
to see the target, make a visceral connection with it.
You can't just flinch/blink/jerk the shutter release.
- When you get the picture up later (I use a big flatscreem TV
connected to the HDMI output of my camera to triage the clankers out)),
again look deeply at the image....ask yourself, did I get what
I was looking for? Or if you were shooting blind and hoping for a hit,
what worked and didn't. You are creating the imagic equivalent of
an athlete's muscle memory, but here a gut sense about images.
- Next time you shoot do a feedback loop with that imagic memory
until is is visceral and demanding, until images call out to you and
demand attention. As my master once said, in the dawn of my young
adulthood, when you really make love, the Marine Corps Band could
strike up besides the bed and You Would Not Hear Them.
- Look at other people's work to see things you think would work
for you.
- The technicalities of photography shouldn't be much in your mind
when you doing the above. I'm reminded of my father's advice
about dressing: put on the suit and the tie, look at yourself in the
mirror, make sure you look good as may be, then forget about your
clothes. Similarly, photographic technicalities: mess with them,
test some stuff to see What Works, but when you're really dancing with
imagery, don't let them ruin/interrupt the visceral connection with
imagery. When
you have to shoot...Shoot! Don't talk
- Do the above and you will be developing your eye. Don't pay
attention to the showboating or ego of others. Be in the work for
yourself. Properly done, photography is a sort of prayer....the
surrender that is at the heart of all spirituality: to see, you put
your ego aside. Or so I think it should be.
(contra dance in my case, but widely applicable. Much of what I
say is applicable only to Canon gear)
- 1/80 is probably enough to slow most motion, 1/125 to almost
freeze it. Use less if you want blur, as low as a 1/30
- Use AI Servo autofocus mode, UDMA 7 CF card
- For lower light, use the 35mm IS lense. Don't open it wide,
you may have too little depth of field
- Use 24-105 zoom during the day
- How to help you autofocus
- Pick dancers with clothes with lines in the fabrics
- Consider the backdrop
- A back drop with crisp detail may suck in the autofocus when
the dance spin apart
- a bland backdrop without detail will bias the autofocus
towards your dancers
- A very bright backdrop will cause under exposure, make it
hard for the autofocus to have enough light and may suck the AF to lock
on it.
Examples:
- shooting in the pavilion when there is bright daylight out
towards the field
- shooting at night towards the stage
- One of those blue tarps may upset the color balance; check it.
- Tell the dancers
- Give talk:
- will be getting close...it's the way to get shots that are
alive.
- just be yourself and ignore me.
- Understand that all the shots I take will be publicly
available
- tell me now or later if you don't want pix taken of yourself
or your kids or if you don't feel an image I've made is
appropriate....I want to know and will readily respond to your wishes.
- If you want pictures taken of yourself, and I haven't done so
yet, ask me at the dance or whenever! Them what asks,
gets.
- Ask me what you can do to best present your self
- Things they can do to best present themselves
- better to do things so that you face the camers (don't
present your backs)
- present yourself in a line perpendicular to the camera so
that both of you are in ffocus
- don't be stone-faced however de rigueur cool
that may be
- clothes with lines/patterns are good
- Remember:
- take pix of the little unflashy people
Cameras I Have Known
- Dad was an ophthalmologist, and he used to get the neatest
Christmas presents
from the optical companies and optometrists he referred patients to (he
was scrupulous in his business dealings as with everything else, so I'm
sure he was even handed). Sometime in the late '50's or very
early
'60's, we were gifted with a Polaroid camera. These were
relatively
new, but far enough along that Polaroid had come out with ASA 3000
(very
fast, very good for low light) film, and I, at age 13 and up, took
pictures of my parents'
madcap parties
- A lovely little folding camera from around 1910 or 20, a Kodak Duo 620,
that had been Dad's in
college and in WWII, when he was in a MASH in
the African and Italian campaigns
- A Kodak 35mm camera, not very good
- My
first real quality 35mm camera, a Zeiss-Ikon Contax, which I took with
me on a youth hostel trip to Europe the summer when I was a rising
senior. A rangefinder camera
- A Nikon S2 which was a high quality knock-off of the Contax...and
I got an 135 mm telephoto for it.
...and finally the SLR revolution, which was Nikon and Olympus for me.
- first a Nikkormat (in Japan it was the Nikomat),
- then
(through my brother who was in the Peace Corps in SE Asia
and could get Nikon CHEAP) a Nikon F with fitted case, plus a 35 mm
Auto-Nikkor wideangle and a 200mm Telephoto. Heaven. I used
it one college summer for a photographic internship at the Louisville Courier-Journal
and Times,
in the glory days of the late 60s when it consistently rated in the top
10 U.S. newpapers and won Pulitizers (including for photography).
I took the image here
doing a photo essay of Louisville's Haymarket, a wonderful, messy,
rowdy place that was being closed down for 'urban renewal' <sigh>.
- But
Olympus ate Nikon's lunch with a smaller, lighter, less expensive and
ever bit as good OM series. I even had a motor drive.
- For a while, I drifted away from Photography...in the days of
film, you really had to have a darkroom and you could have one or have
a family. I chose a family
Digital came along. I didn't need a darkroom. Riding on the
belief
that Olympus, having made such a superlative, elegantly simple 35mm
film SLR, would make a good DSLR, I bought their E10. It was
awful,
slow to boot, took forever to focus (or didn't). Gave it up as a bad job
Finally Canon. A friend had a 5D. It worked! I got a
MkII, upgraded
to MkIII and then to the super high res variant the 5D SR, which I now
shoot with and whose output you can see here and here.
Since then I've been all Canon....though you can take interesting
pictures with any camera.
What digital can do is not where my deepest interest lies,
but with large format: the sort of gear that Ansel Adams used for his
archtypal images of the American West. I have used adapted antique
wooden cameras, like the ratty old (probably 100
years) wooden Gundlach below on the left, but they are too
unstable, cranky and unable to handle telephoto large format
lenses (which have a focal length, the distance from lens to film of
three feet. So I have a metal Sinar camera now. On the
right is me "under the hood" focusing a
shot.
The Sinar is Swiss made and very
fine. I am using Schneider wide-angle (210mm Angulon and 165mm
Super Angulon) and normal (300mm Symmar-S) lenses and a lovely Nikon
large format telephoto with focal lengths of 600/800/1200mms.
You can see what these cameras can do
here
and
here....
They
produce an 8"x10" slide that makes 4'x5' enlargement like 35mm does an
8x10 print. Alas it is horrendously expensive and I cannot afford
it.