The Discerning Photographer

Six ways to improve your landscape photography

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:00:19 +0000

Sometimes we just need to be inspired. Today is one of those days: here are some great links to material I’ve dug up online for you, all focused on landscape photography. Even if this isn’t your primary interest, you should check it out: I promise you’ll find some interesting things and learn something to boot!

Landscape photography from the air: how to shoot aerials of the landscape, by Neil Rantoul at The Luminous Landscape. This is a really nice beginner’s look at shooting aerials: how to find the plane and pilot, minimum shutter speeds to use, etc.

Landscape Photography Tips from National Geographic. This is an old article that’s still useful.

Building a Filter System for Digital Landscape Photography at Nature Photographers Online Magazine. This is a good breakdown of what you’ll eventually need if you want to get serious about nature/landscape shooting. The filters are expensive but necessary and this lays out the basics.

Why You Need a Telephoto Zoom Lens for Landscape Photography at Digital Photography School. Landscape shooting is not all wide angle perspective; some interesting points about how much telephotos should factor into your kit when shooting landscapes here.

Recent Prints from one of my favorite landscape photographers, Michael Kenna. Click your way through this gallery of new prints, most from China, South Korea and Japan, and you’ll see why Kenna remains one of my favorite image makers.

Josef Hoflehner “Shorelines” portfolio.
You could pick any of the portfolios at Hoflehner’s website and be awestruck; I have chosen ‘Shorelines’ because it speaks to me so powerfully. Check it out.

Hi, I’m Andrew Boyd, a.k.a. The Discerning Photographer, and I hope this post has been interesting and informative. Please leave me a comment about it, let me know what you’d like to see more of on the site! You can also sign up for email delivery of all future articles or my RSS feed. Or subscribe to our Facebook page or our Twitter feed. Thanks!–DiscerningPhotog

How to Become a Better Photographer

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:00:50 +0000

THE BACK STORY

So you’ve bought that third camera lens, or maybe second camera body. You’re spending WAY too much time thinking about photo gear and planning shooting trips. You’re definitely hooked on photography–but do you have a plan to get better?

Photography is both art and craft. Like most art forms, it’s always been a melding of these two seemingly disparate elements, one artistic and ethereal, the other mundane and very much nuts-and-bolts. But to improve as a photographer, you can’t leave it to happenstance. You need a plan. What follows sounds deceptively simple, but I guarantee that if you try it faithfully for three months, you’ll be surprised at how much you’ve improved as a photographic artist.

1. Build Your Photographic Library

Invest in photo books. I remember vividly as a young photographer standing in a bookstore, agonizing over whether to purchase books or equipment! Usually, once you have your basic kit purchased, books will be the smarter choice. We all need inspiration and instruction; more gear won’t help you improve but will drain your wallet. A library of books you can pull down and really study is an essential, vital piece of your plan if you want to really, really become a decent photographer.

2. Study the work of photographers you admire

Pine barrens, Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge. Canon 70-200mm lens @70mm, 1/320ths sec, f2.8 @ ISO 100. I kept the aperture wide open to keep the distant tree trunks out of focus and thus ‘foggier.’ (Copyright 2011 / Andrew Boyd)

Quick: write a list of 5 photographers you really love. Now google them one at a time and see what comes up. Organize some bookmarks of the best sites you find, so you can go back and study them later. This is one of the places where the internet has transformed photography and learning: years ago, it was a struggle to really research a photographer. Now it’s all a few mouse clicks away.

3. Join a photography club

Critique selects from our March submissions to The Discerning Photographer’s Flickr group pool.

See what’s available in your area, and then check out what’s probably a monthly meeting. This may sound a bit corny and unappealing at first, but I promise it’s worth checking out if you really want to improve. You’ll meet a lot of like-minded people and probably find you have a lot to discuss. If it’s a decent club, they’ll have guest speakers, occasional shooting trips and group critiques–all things you’ll find interesting as you pursue your passion.

4. Put together your photography ‘portfolio’

Limit this to twelve images. Go through everything you’ve shot in the past year and find the 12 best. Crop, tone and caption these 12. Now load them into a slide program on your computer and show them to your friends and interested associates. Judge their reactions to your photographs.

5. Make a commitment to shoot something, anything, every day

This one sounds easy but is actually hard. Let’s take this a step further and say these images must be taken with your ‘real’ camera, not your smart phone. Shooting every day it critical if you want to improve because it will help you transcend your equipment: you’ll be able to finally forget about the gear and concentrate simply on the image-making process. Again, this sounds easy but is hard. But it’s also key: you need to shoot thousands and thousands of photographs to improve.

That’s it: my prescription to measureable improvement in your shooting. If you do these 5 things for 3 months, you’ll be a better photographer. Now get started, and let me know what I’ve left out of this list! Ideas? Questions? Let me know.

A Pawleys Island Photo Sketchbook

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:30:43 +0000

Water is the key to so much of my creative process as a photographer. It’s a huge factor in the work I find myself doing in my home surroundings of south Louisiana, and here it shows up again as the dominant force on Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

I had a wonderful week of exploration and photography. Pawleys Island is rich in history and beauty and I know I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Here are some color photographs from my trip–think of this as pages out of a photographer’s sketchbook–that I wanted to share. Some of these may eventually end up as fully-realized split-toned black and white images, others only work as color photos. See what you think.

Photographing a Simple Still Life

DiscerningPhotog — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:04:16 +0000

Do you ever ‘see’ a photograph in your head and then try and go out and shoot it? Or to say it differently, how much does your preconceived notion end up looking like your finished photographic product? How much do things change from the moment you raise your camera to the final, finished print? I think it’s useful to consider these questions; the answers you come up with may have an impact upon your creative process. Here I’ll take you through my thought process from one simple shooting situation.

AN IRIS IN BLOOM

I’ve wanted to shoot some studio images of these flowers in my area for the last couple of years, something simple, elegant and spare: the irises are one of my favorite spring blossoms and I’ve never done them justice. Last weekend I noticed the very first bloom of the season and decided to stop what I was doing and set up a simple still life.

THE SETUP

1 piece of 32″ x 40″ black mat board

1 light stand

1 clamp

1 iris in a glass vase

1 north-facing window

1 white card (for fill light)

1 Canon EOS Mark IV with 50mm f2.5 macro lens

1 tripod

PROCESS

I clamped the black mat board to the light stand and set it up behind the vase which was positioned about 5 feet from a north-facing window. It was midmorning and the light was sufficient for my purpose. I mounted the camera on the tripod and stopped the lens down to achieve enough depth of field. (This meant I had to use a corresponding long shutter speed.) I used the white card as a ‘fill light’, bouncing some light back into the darker side of the exposure.

So what happens now? How did I come to the compositions shown here? Although I had previsualized something spare and elegant, I didn’t know what I would shoot exactly–I tried to really ‘see’ the blossom for the first time, looking for angles and compositions that I found interesting. The blooms themselves are surprisingly translucent and I wanted that quality to come through in the finished images.

I did know in advance that I wanted to end up with black and white images–this will fit into a larger flora project that I’m working on. So that part was known and I made my black and white conversion using Photoshop’s Adjustment Layers. That and the sharpening technique that I prefer are illustrated here:

Using the Adjustment Layers palette while converting the image to black and white. I increased the yellow tones and decreased the greens in the conversion to brighten up the flower and add more depth to the stem. (Copyright 2013 / Andrew Boyd)

Here’s my basic Smart Sharpen starting point: Amount 100%, Radius 1.3 pixels, Remove Gaussian Blur. This does a nice job on most images that need sharpening. Notice how the image appears in color in the Smart Sharpen window because my Adjustment Layer is a ‘non destructive’ edit until flattened. (Copyright 2013 / Andrew Boyd).

Finally, sometimes the most interesting image may be a detail, a part of the whole. This last version is an attempt at seeing things that way. I liked the squared-off format that this approached yielded.

So while I knew I wanted black and white, spare and elegant results, I really had no concrete idea about how I would shoot this flower. That part of the process–the discovery and problem solving that takes place during a shooting session–is one of the chief joys of photography to me, and this was no exception.

So what do you think? Do any of these images work for you? How would you approach this differently? Let me know in the Comments below.

How to make an instant photo tripod counterweight

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:43:43 +0000

I was out shooting in the very, very early morning today on the Atlantic shoreline here at Pawleys Island, S.C., and a big wind and rain storm was blowing in. And the wind was truly howling–20 to 25 knots steady with higher gusts. The rain was just beginning to splatter and I had a Fotosharp rain cover over my camera, but the force of the wind reminded me of an old and useful trick: hang your heavy camera bag off your tripod’s center control arms to gain needed stability.

I carry a big Domke F2 canvas camera bag, and it’s heavy. In these conditions that’s a good thing–the thought of my expensive Canon gear taking a hard dive into wet sand is a terrifying thought! Holding tightly to my Tiltall tripod, I got my shot composed and then slung the Domke bag off one of my center pan/tilt arms. Presto! Instant peace of mind.

When the wind is really howling, your camera bag can make an excellent counterweight. Here my Domke F2 canvas bag is doing a great job in an early-morning blow. That’s a 12″ Fotosharp rain cover over the rig. (Copyright 2013 / Andrew Boyd)

Photo shooting trip to Pawleys Island, S.C.

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:57:26 +0000

It’s been an extremely intense winter for me. My employer, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune newspaper and website, has struck out in a bold new direction, going to a 24/7 online news cycle and reverse publishing back into the print edition on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. This has been a challenging transition for all of us involved but I can say that we are moving forward with confidence and resolve as we continue to publish the very best journalism in our area. It’s meant many new responsibilities for me and this site has been a (hopefully) temporary casualty of the change.

Right now I’m on a much-needed break, photographing on the shoreline of South Carolina for this week in the Pawleys Island area, right on the Atlantic Ocean. Regular readers may remember a trip up here last summer. I was captivated by the darkness of the sand and how hard-packed it can be as it gets pounded by the ocean surf, not at all like the soft, white beaches we have along the Gulf of Mexico closer to home.

These are images from the first day of shooting. I hope to post more later in the week.

Landscape Photography Details

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:03:57 +0000

Sometimes the best landscape photographs are there in tiny, up-close moments.

Work demands have kept me away from this site far too much these past few months. We’ve gone through a corporate reorganization and are just now completing a move to new offices; all of this has required most of my creativity and attention.

I realized this morning that I was overdue for a landscape walkabout. I grabbed my Canon EOS 1DX and my favorite lens, the Canon 50mm f2.5 macro, and headed out onto our 2-acre property in south Louisiana.

It’s a confusing time in this landscape right now. We’ve had almost no winter at all—just a handful of nights that have dipped below freezing—so plants that shouldn’t begin blooming for at least another month have gone ahead and burst forth with their spring blossoms. Other things that bloom in our winter landscape, like camellias, are paying no attention, blooming at their normal pace and time. So who’s correct? I suppose we’ll find out if a big hard freeze should descend from the north, wiping out these early, optimistic creations. Right now I’m siding with the pro-spring crowd, since it would make for a beautiful and prolonged season.

On walks such as this, nothing is obvious to me in a big, overall view: it’s still a drab landscape from a distance. But forgetting about that and consciously slowing down, I start to see wonderful things: tiny, delicate and wispy cobwebs are hanging in the bare branches of our crepe myrtle trees. What spiders are these? I have never spotted the architects of these nets. But beautiful they certainly are!

The Purple Dawn camellia is my very favorite, and we have a specimen on our land that’s close to 100 years old. Each year it brings forth the most beautiful blossoms, a magenta flower with blushes of purple on each petal, seemingly airbrushed in place. Is anything more stunning than this?

Our Japanese magnolia and black cherry trees are both blooming ahead of schedule, the cherry so far along as to be about to leaf out (see above). These are two of my favorites in the landscape here and gratifying to capture.

Down at my feet, mystery awaits: more cobwebs (a different spider?) coat last year’s sweet gum leaves with a fine gossamer structure, adding depth and interest to this moment.

It’s not the time for big drama here today; rather, it’s quiet moments that are showing through. This walk through my bit of landscape has done me good, a photographic meditation.

Canon G15 vs. Nikon Coolpix P7700 Camera Review

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:45:26 +0000

The Canon G15 and Nikon Coolpix P7700 are both compact, non point-n-shoot digital cameras that offer a lot to like for the serious photo enthusiast. Although these are small form factor machines, they both offer serious controls for the shooter who knows a bit about what he’s doing: fast, high quality zoom lenses, full manual controls as well as the usual array of Program and Auto modes, plus real HD video. My friends at Bennett’s Camera thought these two would make a good comparison review and at under $500 each, worth a close look.

Like all of my camera reviews, I’ll try to give you a sense of what it’s like to actually go out and shoot with these two cameras: how they feel in your hands, how I found the controls to work, etc. I won’t put them through any scientific bench tests—just a real-world test drive by someone who makes his living shooting photographs. Then I’ll give you my recommendation for which one I think you should consider buying.

With that said, let’s get started!

Size Matters

First, let’s look at the size of these two machines. The Canon G15 follows in its own long ‘G’ tradition of small form factor cameras and has full manual controls, big 12 MP file size, an optical viewfinder that zooms with the lens and small enough to truly fit in your shirt pocket.

The Nikon has a 12.2 MP file size and is noticeably larger—a good 20% bigger—and won’t fit in your shirt pocket. It’s a bit beefier all round, and has no optical viewfinder—but the articulating screen is a feature I really like. Somehow, the feel of the Canon G15 reminds me more of an all-metal Leica M3 rangefinder film camera that I owned long ago, while the Nikon feels like a bulky point-n-shoot-which it definitely isn’t. Based upon how these cameras feel in my hands, the Canon is the winner.

But feel isn’t everything, is it? How do these cameras perform? How are the controls laid out? Are they easy to navigate? Easy to use?

Layout

Looking at the back of these two cameras you’re struck by how similar the layouts actually are—both use a combination of navigation wheels and dials to step you through their menu options. Both have standard blue triangle ‘review’ buttons. In fact, I found the cameras remarkably similar in how they’ve approached their basic navigation design.

Ease of use

The zooms of both cameras are easy to use and function as expected. The 200mm full zoom of the Nikon gets in a bit closer than the 140mm Canon zoom, but the difference didn’t seem big in practice. The Canon lens is a stop brighter (f1.8-2.8 vs f2-4 for the Nkon) and the Canon ISO range is much, much better on the low light end: top ISO speed of 12800 compared to only 1600 for the Nikon. (That’s 3 f-stops brighter for the Canon, a significant difference for low light shooting.)

Rear LCD display—is what-you-see-what-you-get?

I shoot a lot of my work using full manual control on my cameras. This allows me to fine-tune my exposure, shutter speed, etc., to get exactly what I’m after in each situation.

Both of these cameras display what looks like a ‘live view’ on the rear LCD screen, but in fact, this is not the case. With the Canon G15 in manual exposure, the screen gets brighter or darker as I make manual adjustments to the current exposure. This is exactly what you would expect to happen, right? But with the Nikon P7700, the rear LCD screen always displays what the camera deems to be a ‘correct’ exposure—even when you’ve manually changed that exposure, however dramatically! So the rear LCD is completely useless as a predicter of what your result will be! This is crazy bad, a huge irritant to me.

This is the type of thing that removes this camera from the ranks of a serious machine, in my opinion.

Motor Drive

A gripe I have about both cameras is where they’ve buried the motor drive burst capability. The Nikon advertises 8 frames-per-second burst speed and the Canon a whopping 10 frames-per-second, but to turn this feature on in either machine, you’re forced to pick your way deep down into the rear LCD menu settings. I’m sure that, with practice, you’d learn to do this fairly quickly, but it wasn’t obvious or easy with either camera.

Video

I shot some video with each camera and both do a decent job of shooting full HD quality 1080p video. A big gripe I have with the Nikon camera was that, once you started shooting a video scene, you lost the ability to zoom the camera! That’s right: once you were filming, you were stuck with that zoom position. This seems crazy, right? But it’s true, this camera does not zoom during filming. No such problem with the Canon. [Note: see Comments below. Apparently I'm in error on this feature of the Nikon, although I don't have the camera handy to confirm.]

On the plus side for the Nikon, it has a dedicated accessory jack for an external microphone. Fantastic! This is a feature that I think all cameras should include. Those who’ve read any of my other camera reviews know what a big fan I am of external mics, since audio quality is so extremely important to your video projects. My personal external video mic is the Sennheiser MKE 400 , a great little device that delivers great results and jacks right into the hot shoe on the cameras.

Canon G15 vs. Nikon P7700 Video Test Comparison from Andrew Boyd on Vimeo.

Conclusion

These are both functional, pretty little cameras. I love the external mic jack and the articulating screen on the Nikon P7700, but in every other aspect, the Canon G15 wins out. The ergonomics in your hands, the ‘serious’ full manual controls, the ability to zoom during video shooting, the faster lens and the much better ISO capability all make it the better camera for any serious photographer. Like its predecessors in the G-series line of small digital cameras, I think the G15 will be a hit with many, many shooters.

Scott Strazzante’s Instagram success

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:13:01 +0000

Chicago Tribune photographer Scott Strazzante has become, like many newspaper photographers, a big fan of Instagram. A social networking site that’s based around photography, he’s found Instagram to be a wonderful creative outlet for his personal passion, street photography. In a recent video on the Trib’s website, Strazzante talks about his use of Instagram and what happened when his Instagram account became a ‘suggested’ feed by Instagram.

Although I enjoyed watching Strazzante’s video, as a photojournalist, I was left with several questions I was hoping Scott would answer. I emailed Scott and he was gracious enough to provide the following responses:

How did you get started with Instagram?

Strazzante: Last November, I traveled to Washington, DC with my daughter Betsy to visit colleges. At the time, she had an iPhone and I didn’t. As we walked around the city, I borrowed her phone, downloaded the Hipstamatic app and did some street photography. I loved the look of Hipstamatic and when I returned to Chicago, I went out and got an iPhone for myself.
Once that happened, I started using Instagram.

Was it ever for the paper or was is simply a personal project?

Strazzante: My Instagram account is my own personal stream and the majority of the photos that I share are street photography. I also will occasionally post photos of my family life and sometimes, a frame or two before a sports event that I am covering for the Tribune. In addition, I have done a handful of iPhone essays- Cubs’ spring training, Lincoln Highway, Chicago neighborhoods, Maywood Park harness racing- that I shot with the iPhone because I like the look and feel of the images.

How often do you submit? Any rhythm to it?

Strazzante: I Instagram in spurts. I try to spend thirty minutes each day I am in Chicago doing Instagram street photography and, I also carve out time when I am in other cities on assignment to wander around.
I post about 8-10 images per session while I am out shooting.

Do you ever shoot anything with the iPhone and then wish you’d shot it with a ‘real’ camera?

Strazzante: I only wish I used a pro camera when the technical limitations of the iPhone don’t allow me to capture an image in low light situations. However, I am not hung up on what type of camera an image is shot with. If a photo is compelling, it is compelling because of the content- the moment, the composition, the light, etc., not because it was shot with a Hasselblad or a Leica or a Barbie toy camera or an iPhone. I think people should get over the whole iPhone thing. I think photographers should concentrate on making better photos and not worrying what other photographers are doing. In a year or so, this camera phone controversy will blow over and the haters will find something else to pull their hair out about.

Or to say it another way, is there ever a conflict between the two? How do you balance this out?

Strazzante: Instagram/ iPhone photography is my hobby. I don’t use it to shoot spot news or while I should be making images for the Chicago Tribune while on assignment. The Tribune gives me a lot of room to shoot with my iPhone for my “Shooting from the Hip” blog, so, I feel it is a win/win situation.

Does everyone in Photo have an account? Is the Trib involved officially at this point?

Strazzante: Five or six Tribune shooters have Instagram accounts, but they are all personal. The Chicago Tribune doesn’t have a staff account, but, then again, most of us have company issued Blackberry phones, so, they would probably have to get us all smart phones to start a photo department Instagram account..

Do you have a favorite Instagram photo that you’ve shot?

Strazzante: I have many that I like, but my current fav is from before a Louis Farrakhan speech at Chicago’s Mosque Maryam. I made this photo while sitting in my car awaiting approval to photograph the event. I eventually was denied access, but I came away with a moody black and white photo of a member of Nation of Islam on the front steps of the mosque.

“Land of the Free”
From sea to shining sea, the United States of America is the land of the free. / Chicago, Illinois (Copyright 2012 / Scott Strazzante)

A Photographer Photographing a Photographer?!

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 03:58:21 +0000

The New York Times’ Fred Conrad on photographing photographer Joel Meyerowitz, the ultimate intimidating assignment.

I was thrilled the other day to see a wonderful piece on The New York Times’ ‘The Lens’ blog about a dire, intimidating photo assignment: a photographer having to go photograph another photographer!

In the piece, New York Times photographer Fred Conrad gets the job of going to shoot Joel Meyerowitz, a renowned photographic artist whose 50-year career as a photographer is being commemorated by a two-volume book and an exhibition. The story is presented on the Times’ site as a video, shot in this case by Elaisha Stokes, a freelance videographer for the Times, who really deserves the credit for how nicely this turned out.

I was immediately reminded of a time many years back when I was given a similar intimidating assignment. One of my very favorite photographic artists, Aaron Siskin, was having a big exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art and was in town to give a lecture and attend to the hanging of the show. Siskind was an original member of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York back in the 1950s—maybe the only recognized photographer member—and his compositions had been inspirations to me for a long time. The thought of shooting him was a bit scary—I didn’t want to embarrass myself and I wanted my portrait to be reflective of his work as well as my own sensibilities.

What I came up with was simple,and ultimately, I think, successful. Sauly’s Hardware store in an old part of the New Orleans French Quarter had exterior walls that were a beautiful pastiche of many layered attempts at replastering and repainting, all mixed and blended into an Old World look of disrepair that I thought would appeal to Siskind: just the kind of surface that he himself would like to photograph. One of the places I took him during our two-hour walkabout was to Saulny’s, and that’s where I ended up making this photograph:

After the article was published in our Sunday magazine at the paper, I got a call from Siskind’s assistant: would I be willing to trade prints? Wow! Of course I would! I got to work immediately, setting up my archival trays to make a proper fiber-based print. I signed and matted it and mailed it off, wondering what I would get in return.

Well, then nothing happened. I wondered if it had all been a waste of time. Did he forget about our deal, or not like the print? I slowly forgot about the whole thing as time and other work took over….

Then one day a shipping envelope arrived. Inside were two beautiful black and white prints and a note from Siskind, thanking me for my print and saying how much he had enjoyed our portrait session together. The prints, signed on the back au verso, were from his Mount Vesuvius series, and now hang proudly in my home.

So shooting another artist can be tricky and tough, but ultimately rewarding, if you find a way to make a portrait make sense. Really it’s no different from any other portrait you attempt: you want the work to not only be a statement of your vision, but also revealing of the individual you are shooting.