Food vendor in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown, Malaysia

How do you get that one great shot, particularly when you don’t have time to set it up or when you have constantly changing situations or a dynamic subject? One solution is to shoot a lot of frames one after the after to ensure that you capture the perfect shot.

Before we go any further, let me remind you that my eBook Tips, Tricks and Pics is available to purchase for $5.

As long as you have a decent-sized memory card, there is no reason why you can’t take multiple versions of a scene. You might simply press and hold the shutter button down and let the camera’s high-speed motor drive do the work. At 5 frames per second (or whatever your camera is capable of) it’s a quick and easy method of getting a lot of images.

Alternatively, you could be more deliberate and take the images singularly but all as variations on the same theme. The photo above is a good example of this. The vendor’s smiling face and busy movements caught my eye from across the street, so I crossed over, positioned myself in front of the stand and took a number of frames one after the other. Later, I simply imported them all into Adobe Lightroom and selected the one I liked best. Here’s a couple that didn’t quite work.

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Sequences

Chinese New Year shopping, Dihua St, Taipei

Every culture and country has its own series of traditional festivals and holidays. For the photographer, these can provide some great opportunities to shoot a diverse range of subjects.

Before we go any further, let me remind you that my eBook Tips, Tricks and Pics is available to purchase for $5.

As the holiday approaches, people are often busy with preparations and there is an air of excitement and anticipation. Depending on what is being celebrated, you may find these preparations involve buying special holiday food and gifts, cleaning and decorating homes and offices or setting up special public activities. A trip to the local market can yield a wealth of imagery. Here in Asia, the lunar new year is less than a week away. This is the most important holiday of the year so people are busy buying food, candy and the like.

A holiday is often a good time for families to reunite and gather together. Family members are often more tolerant of repeated attempts at photography so this is a good chance to practice your portrait photography skills. You could even start (or continue) a tradition of a yearly family portrait.

The days following are often relaxed, particularly if no one needs to go to work or school. Public events often take place, people are relaxed and usually open to having their pictures taken. Take advantage of this and get out there with your camera.

Traditional holidays to keep in mind include but are not limited to Christmas, Easter, Chinese New Year, Tet, Diwali, Holi, Eid Al-Fitr, Eid Al-Adha, Hannukah, various national or independence days and so forth.

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Traditional Holidays

Public Art

Public art installations and displays can provide good photographic opportunities. Unlike art galleries and museums where photography is often restricted or prohibited, outdoor public displays usually encourage photos. It’s quite common for these creations to be a little edgier, conceptual or just plain weirder than what’s found in a gallery.

Finding the installations can sometimes be tricky, particularly if you’re not connected into the art world. The picture here is from a public display on the grounds of a fine art museum. Locations such as this, or the grounds of a contemporary art museum often have works on display that are freely able to be photographed. Other places to try are universities and other areas where students congregate, redeveloped inner city communities, trendy cafe districts and even outside government buildings and community centers. Keep an eye on the entertainment supplements of newspapers or the street press to find out about any new exhibitions.

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Public Art

Toned version of an electicity power grid.

When was the last time you looked up? As photographers, we usually find ourselves looking out on an even plane with the camera held to our eye and our head straight. Occasionally we might squat, sit or lie down to focus on something at ground level but rarely do we point the camera up.

Think of the types of subjects that normally require you to look up to see, things such as the moon, birds or tall buildings. Now bring to mind any photographs of them you’ve taken or seen and you’ll probably realize that they are taken on a relatively flat aspect. We often see photos of the moon is the distance over something, or birds flying low, or a tall building as part of a cityscape. Much less common is the photograph that looks directly up.

The image that accompanies this tip is of an electricity pylon that forms part of Taiwan’s electricity grid. By standing almost directly under it, using a wide angle lens (19mm in this case on a full frame camera) and looking up, I’m able to create a sense of domination. The tower has an imposing feel to it, a real sense of power.

Try this technique next time you’re wandering around the city, or in a forest of tall trees. Remember to look up and photograph what you see. There are plenty of photo opportunities waiting for you.

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Looking Up

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, my grandparents took a trip to Britain. I remember they came back with lots of slides and it became a regular feature of trips to their place during school holidays and so forth to have a slide show. Even though I’d seen the photos numerous times, as a kid I was always keen to see them again.

Slideshows these days have evolved and we can now easily see them online everywhere, from news media to blogs, travel sites to You Tube. Putting them together can be as simple or as difficult as you like.

At the most basic level, a slideshow is a series of pictures automatically progressing to the next. From there you can move onto features such as adding transitions, captions, fades, animation, voiceovers and music. If you decide to add music to a slideshow, so remember to respect copyright – I have seen a lot of slideshows by both amateur and professional photographers that essentially contain pirated music.

The slideshow with this post is served automatically from my portfolio archive hosted at Photoshelter. Quick slideshows can be easily put together in Lightroom. In the past, I’ve used software such as Slideshow Pro, Proshow Gold, iMovie, Windows Moviemaker and more. There are plenty of other options available as well.

So give it a try. Select a series of photos, create a slideshow, share it via YouTube or Vimeo and share it with your friends.

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Slideshows

Taiwan Coast

I’m sure that everyone has heard the term “writer’s block” or the phrase “stuck in a rut”. It’s something that can cast a negative type of influence over a creative’s life from time to time. I have a friend who normally shoots some quite strong portraiture work yet lately his work seems to be lacking in passion. It’s technically sound but I don’t sense his soul shining through the work. For him, that’s not a big deal, as he takes photos strictly as a hobby and doesn’t have to rely on photography to make a living.

So what can you do if you find yourself in a similar situation? I think that this is a question that will provide as many answers as there are people answering. What works for one person may not work for another. Equally, what works for the hobbyist may not be possible for the professional.

One good method that may be useful to all is to simply take a break. Put the camera down for a day, a week, a month. Walk away from it and return with fresh fire. Easy enough for an amateur but how is a pro supposed to do that?

A month away from the camera could be a good opportunity for the working photographer to spend time on other areas. How about diving into video and experimenting with it? Or create a new and revamped marketing plan. Perhaps you could do some writing – if you are an editorial photographer, having writing skills could be a real plus. There are probably hundreds of other ways as well. What suggestions do you have?

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Time For A Break?

Something different at the Taj Mahal

It’s all too easy to pick up a travel magazine or coffee table style photo book and think that all it takes to create compelling imagery is the means and ability to travel to exotic locations. All too often though, after scrimping and saving, arranging the time off work, flights, vaccinations, visas, hotels and the latest security measures at airports, you get to the exotic destination only to take the same photo as everyone else.

The dreaded snapshot or postcard photo. I say dreaded with a touch of light humor because for probably the vast majority of tourists, a photo that looks like a postcard view is immensely satisfying. But to the enthusiastic photographer, the same shot can often conjure up feelings of disappointment.

Avoiding those feelings is often pretty easy to do. By all means take the postcard shot first. There’s a reason why that particular view features on untold thousands of postcards. Once that’s done though, spend a bit more time wandering around looking for some different images. Maybe you focus in on the details, or maybe you photograph other travelers. There are countless scenes and photographs just waiting to be captured wherever you are. All you need to do is look.

Finally remember that just as you are poring over photobooks and magazines dreaming of exotic locations, someone on the other side of the country or world is thinking that your town or city is an exotic location.

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Unconventional Views

30 second, handheld exposure.

Conventional wisdom says that you need to put the camera on a tripod if you’re going to make a long exposure photograph. The rule of thumb is 1/focal length is okay for handheld photography but anything longer needs some kind of support. Modern image stabilization (aka vibration reduction) technologies might give us an extra couple of stops leeway with this but if you really want a good image, you need to use a tripod.

Sometimes though, you want to be unconventional. The above photograph was shot hand held with a 30 second exposure time. That’s half a minute. To add to the experiment, I walked around a bit during that thirty seconds while holding the camera. The colors come from a few gelled speedlights that were on stands and fired by other photographers during the exposure however you don’t need to go that far. Any colored ambient light source can help. The particular location that this was taken in was pretty much completely dark with no ambient light filtering in.

The key is experimentation. Never be afraid to try new things. There’s really no downside to experimenting in photography and you may just stumble across something that works.

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A Different Kind of Long Exposure

Fishing boats at Guandu, Beitou, Taiwan. February calendar.

Since the beginning of 2009 I’ve been making available a monthly desktop calendar that is free for anyone to download from this website for their own personal use. For me, it’s a good exercise each month that involves choosing a suitable image, overlaying dates onto it and then making a variety of different sizes for different monitor resolutions from large desktop down to iPhone.

The links here lead to the various sizes where you can download a desktop calendar for February. Since the beginning of 2009 I’ve been making available a monthly desktop calendar that is free for anyone to download from this website for their own personal use. For me, it’s a good exercise each month that involves choosing a suitable image, overlaying dates onto it and then making a variety of different sizes for different monitor resolutions from large desktop down to iPhone. For the first time, this month also a new resolution custom designed for the Google Nexus One phone.

The links here lead to the various sizes where you can download a desktop calendar for February. Cmd click (Mac) or right click (Win) on the size you want and save it to your desktop

2560×1600 1920×1200 1680×1050 1600×1200

1440×900 1280×1024 1024×768 iPhone Google phone

I find creating these has been a good way to share my work and helps with keeping others informed about some of my latest images. Here’s how I make them.

• Open the photo is Adobe Photoshop.

• Select the type tool and type the name of the month. This will be on a new layer.

• Adjust the position using the move tool and the opacity in the Layer palette until you’re happy with it.

• Repeat this for the dates. You could have one long line with all the dates across an edge or down the side. Alternatively, you could make a separate text layer for each week.

• Save the resulting calendar as a PSD file preserving the layer structure.

• Merge or flatten the layers and resize to whatever dimensions you’d like. The sizes I offer above are some common desktop sizes.

• Save the final, resized calendar as a jpg.

Give this a try and start creating your own monthly calendars to share with family, friends and clients.

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Desktop Calendars – February

Kite surfing at Sizhiwan, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

For most people, the main objective after the picture has been taken is to either have it look good for posting on Flickr or sending as email, or to make an inkjet print at home, or a print at a photolab. The first thing you need to do is to adjust the tonal range so that the photo has a good, full contrast. In general, the biggest concern will be how light or dark the photo is – are the blacks black and the whites white? And for that, we can look at Levels in Photoshop. So lets start with an image that needs some adjustment.

Kite surfing at Sizhiwan, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Image as shown before Levels adjustment.

We can see that this shot is a little underexposed and lacks contrast. If we look at the histogram display, we see that all the values are over towards the left. The histogram is a graph that displays the tonal levels from dark (black) on the left to light (white) on the right. The graph will look different for every different photo – there’s no such thing as an ideal, one-size-fits-all histogram. In general though, we want to see our graph spaced over the entire histogram, not bunched to the left like the following screenshot.

The histogram palette in Photoshop.

To fix things, we want to go to our Layers palette (F7) and create a Levels adjustment layer, as shown below. We can make the same adjustments directly onto the image without using Layers, but this is destructive – we permanently change the pixels. Using Layers means that we can non-destructively adjust the image without permanently changing pixels. This allows us to revisit the image in the future and make further adjustments as we desire without degrading the image. Non-destructive editing is always a better choice than destructive editing – it’s one of the reasons why we shoot RAW instead of jpg, assuming our camera is capable of it.

Creating a Levels Adjustment Layer in Photoshop

This will bring up the Levels dialog. To improve the tonal range, we want to use the highlight slider (shown below) and drag it to the left. For finer control, hold down the option/alt (Mac/PC) key while you click on the slider to see exactly where the highlights pop out. You want to drag it closer to where the tonal values are on the histogram. Then do the same with the shadow slider, located on the left, but drag it to the right.

Levels before and after highligt adjustment.

Once things look good, click ok in the Levels dialog. Notice the difference in both the image and the resulting histogram. You can now save the file as a TIFF or PSD which allows you to preserve the layer structure. As mentioned above, this lets us revisit the file in the future. To make changes it’s simply a matter of double-clicking the adjustment layer icon in the Levels layer. To save it as a jpg for print or the web, simply flatten or merge the layers (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-E) or choose the option from the Layer menu at the top of the screen.

That was the 31st Daily PhotoTip rounding out the first month. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.

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Levels – Basic Adjustment Layer Tutorial