Month: September 2024

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What You Find

Snow, wind, cold - all the ingredients for a great photo shoot.

This is heresy, but I recommend most of the time we work with what we find rather than planning extensively and expecting everything to be “perfect”.

Planning

It is common these days for photographers to research locations is detail before ever going into the field. And there are lots of tools to help us do it.

For any given location we can find what time of the year is “optimum”, what time of day is best, even where to stand for the best view. We can research the weather we should be able to expect, the temperature, exactly when sunrise or sunset is if that is important to the shot.

Then, of course, we can work back to where to stay, what time to get up, where the beat eating places are, etc.

Basically, then, we can just show up at the right time, set up and take the shot we want, and leave.

Trophies

A well planned shot like that can lead to some excellent pictures. If you are a National Geographic photographer out on a 6 month assignment to get a certain picture, that is a great approach.

I have 2 problems with it

  1. It is collecting trophies.
  2. What about the experience?

Much of photography these days seems to revolve around collecting trophies. We have to get that signature picture of Half Dome or the Eiffel Tower to post on social media to impress our peers.

That’s not me. I usually avoid places where dozens of other photographers are lined up shoulder to shoulder, fighting for tripod placements. Those sights are well covered. I do not plan to contribute yet another photo of Half Dome to the world, unless I am able to capture something unique. That is less and less likely when millions of shots are taken of it every year by good photographers.

I fully realize this is a personal value. It also is rooted in my personality type. I derive satisfaction from creating fresh, creative images that represent my vision. Whether or not anyone else likes them. Some other people need to bag trophies. Checking off the bucket list items is more important than actually having the image.

It would be foolish for me to criticize them. We are different. I do not agree with them, but I recognize that this behavior is true for many people. You have to do what is right for you.

What you find

Taking a good photograph is an emotional encounter for me. Talking about the experience you get is subtle and harder to describe. It is intensely personal.

If you are the meticulous planner I described earlier and you show up at your target location, what happens if things go wrong? What if the weather is too stormy to get out? Perhaps there are forest fires around and it is closed or obscured by smoke. Maybe a road is slowed down by construction and you get to the location “too late” for the planned shot.

If things like this happen and you can’t get the shot you planned, is it a failure? Are you disappointed with the outing? Was it a wasted trip?

I’m not usually so disappointed. I am there to see, feel, internalize – and, oh by the way, make images I am proud of. A sunny day may not inherently be better than a rainy day. Why is a snow storm worse than a warm summer day? It all depends on my reaction and attitude and what I am able to do with what I find.

How good are you?

I believe the attitude of accepting what we find and using our skill to work with it is healthy and mature. We cannot control what we will encounter. But we can control our attitude.

So whether I am at the Eiffel Tower or in my neighborhood, I try to make excellent images in whatever conditions I find. OK, allow 2 seconds feeling sorry for yourself, then put it out of your mind, enjoy yourself, and attack the photo problem.

For example, recently I went out locally to shoot some pictures of trees. A favorite subject of mine. But it turned into an extremely windy day. Did that make it a waste? No. Have you ever tried to shoot pictures of the wind? It was challenging and interesting after I reframed the problem. I enjoyed it and I like some of the images.

Making good pictures in unexpected conditions is a test of our craft and our character. Loosen your rigid expectations. Roll with the punches. Make lemonade out of lemons. Insert your own cliche.

But cliche or not, try it. Be flexible. It surprises me that unexpected pictures in bad conditions are sometimes the most memorable to me.

Today’s image

This wasn’t taken on the windy day I described. But it was a much worse day. It was in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO. It is not the conditions I came for, but it was what I found. HIgh wind funneling through the rock formations, blowing snow starting to pile up, bitter cold in Colorado in the winter. Sounds like a great day to be out.

Actually, after I kicked myself out into it and started seeing images, it was great. It turned out to be a very enjoyable experience. I went crazy shooting, when I could keep the snow cleared off my lens. Of course, it took a while later for my hands to thaw out and I was soaking wet and shivering. But I did not notice that very much at the time. All in all, I look back on it as a good time. And I like the image.

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Diffraction

High DOF at f/22. Hang the diffraction.

Today I would like to try to help us understand a little about what diffraction is. Not getting too deep in the theory. Just enough to demystify it a bit.

Scary

Diffraction is probably a scary word to most of us. Even if we don’t know what it really means, we have heard of it and have been taught that it is a “bad thing”.

Have you been taught to avoid using apertures smaller than f/11? Note that when I say a “small” aperture I am referring to the physical size. Remember that as the aperture numbers get bigger the actual opening in the lens gets smaller. This simple graphic illustrates that:

Progression of physical f-stop sizes

The lore is that very small apertures (large f-numbers, like f/22) make an image too blurry to be useful. Don’t believe everything you hear without testing it.

Light theory

I’m going very light on theory (yes, pun intended). We’re just going to graze the surface without taking a deep dive in. (Here is a source to start at if you want to go deeper. Abandon all hope ye who enter…)

Light behaves as waves (most of the time). Actually, a number of things are waves: light, water waves, sound waves, gravity waves. Quantum mechanics theorizes that even matter is waves. Too deep for me.

We tend to visualize light going through our lens as rays. That is, straight lines. Yes and no. That is one useful model of looking at it. But light also behaves as waves. An interesting and important property of waves is that every point on a wave is a wave. So if the wave is blocked by a small opening, the wave spreads on the other side of the opening.

This picture by Verbcatcher does a marvelous job of illustrating that for waves in water:

Diffraction in water waves

See how the waves spread after going through the small opening to the sea? The smaller the opening (aperture) the more pronounced the effect. That is, a small aperture opening causes waves to spread out more.

What does it really mean

This is the basis of the recommendation to use physically large apertures (small f-numbers). Apertures that are large relative to the wavelengths of light do not cause much “bend” of the waves. Small apertures (large f-numbers) “bend” the light more.

What we can actually see in practice is that using small apertures causes our images to have a mildly “fuzzy” look. Because the waves spread more after going through a small aperture, the individual waves cover a larger pixel area. This slight spreading of the light causes the image to appear less sharp.

The best discussion of diffraction for photographers I have found is from this article by Spencer Cox. But even this gets too deep into theory.

I borrowed this image from it to illustrate the practical effects of diffraction as we change aperture:

Effects of diffraction with aperture

See how the larger apertures (small f-numbers) are sharper than the smaller ones?

This illustration below, also from Spencer Cox) gives a great conceptual representation of what is happening. Take that the grid represents pixels in your sensor. At f/4, the point of light only strikes one pixel. It will be seen as very sharp. But at small apertures, the waves spread some onto adjacent pixels and create a kind of fog.

Should you fear it?

Should you fear it and always shun small apertures? No, it is just a reality of physics. It is no more to be feared than gravity. As one of my sons would say, it is what it is. Be aware of what is going to happen and consciously decide how far you need to go.

All of the exposure determinations we make daily are tradeoffs. How much to stop motion? How much depth of field do we need? Is there enough light for a good exposure? What ISO setting should I use? All of these things and more have to be balanced in the moment of shooting, besides composition and esthetic issues.

Each setting costs something. As experienced photographers we must understand the tradeoffs and be able to judge what is right for us at the moment.

Diffraction is one of those tradeoffs. Know what it is going to do and how to use it or avoid it.

Sometimes you need more

But why would we ever intentionally make our image less sharp? We seldom actually choose to make it less sharp, but sometimes we need other things. I can give 2 easy examples.

The first and most common one is to increase depth of field (DOF). It is counter intuitive, but making the aperture smaller increases the perceived depth of field. So on the one hand we are making the image less sharp, but on the other hand we are making it appear sharper throughout. When we need to make a certain range of the field of view acceptably sharp we stop down the aperture until we achieve our goal. A tradeoff.

Depth of field with small aperture© Ed Schlotzhauer

The second case that comes to mind is to reduce the shutter speed. I often intentionally shoot motion blur. But I usually forget to bring a neutral density filter for the lens I am using at the time. I can generally achieve the effect I want by using my polarizer, reducing the ISO to the lowest setting, and cranking the aperture down to the smallest possible one. This will probably give me a shutter speed in the range I want to use. Yes, the small aperture increases diffraction and makes the image less sharp. But it is handheld at a long shutter speed. It is already intentionally blurred.

Intentional blurring based on small aperture.© Ed Schlotzhauer

But maybe more importantly, in a great video on Lumminous Landscape, Charles Cramer said “sharpness is something we have to get over.” He explained that if we take a picture just because it is sharp, it probably won’t be very interesting. We have to forget about how sharp is it and instead react to the scene before us on an emotional level.

Shoot the picture

Diffraction is a side effect of physics and our photographic technology. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t blindly follow some rule you learned in the past about what you can or can’t do. Understand enough about it to recognize it and know how to use it to your advantage.

Look at the image above of the woman’s face. Even at f/32 – an extreme case – it is acceptable. Extra sharpening can be applied in your editing tool to compensate for it.

So diffraction is just there. Allow it to happen if that is the tradeoff you need to make. Just like using a high ISO adds noise, that is acceptable most of the time and better than missing the shot.

I know many of us don’t want to deal with what we perceive as increased complexity or too much technical detail. We just want to go take great pictures. My hope is that topics like this will actually make your photography life simpler by providing some grounding for information you may have heard in the past. Rather than trying to remember rules for how to use your equipment, you now have a model for what diffraction is doing and how strong its effect is. I hope you will be able to stop fearing it and accept it is just part of the tradeoffs of the technology.

Today’s image

This is a great old WWII era truck I found in my town. It is a Coleman. This was actually a Colorado company. It was designed and manufactured in the Denver area.

I needed enough depth of field to span from the great rust and paint patterns on the near outside through most of the cab. So it is shot at f/22. Diffraction? Works for me.

What do you think?

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Seeing the Unseen

Time shift, ICM, intentional blur

Photography is unique in the arts. It can record things we cannot see or imagine. Photography can be an adventure in seeing the unseen.

Unique

Photographers are sometimes made to feel inferior. Usually by proponents of the “real” arts, like painters or sculptors. Get over it. Photography has qualities that go beyond any other arts. Qualities that make them envious.

Photography is a technology-based art. That technology can be used along with our artistic vision to capture and create things regular art cannot. We can peer into things the human eye cannot see. We can freeze time to examine events the human eye cannot show us. Likewise, we can extend time to show the effects of movement in new ways.

Exposure

The human eye is amazing. But it has limits. Even though it can see a huge range of light, photographic sensors can push beyond our eye’s limits.

When you look at the stars, for instance, we can see what seem to be an immense number. But I have astronomer friends who have a process of taking hundreds of frames of 1 point in the sky. Then they use special stacking software to combine them and sharpen them to create levels of detail far beyond what the eye can see. Even my amateur astronomer friends routinely show me pictures they have taken of distant galaxies that cannot be detected at all with the eye.

Those same astronomer friends have solar filters – essentially completely black glass – that let them view the surface of the sun! They can see and photograph sun spots and the corona. Things that would destroy our eye if we tried to look directly at them.

The technology and practice of photography allows these things.

Light range

And “normal” (non-photographic) art is all done in the visible light range. Makes sense, That is all we can see.

But most of us have seen infrared imaging. This is done using a special dark red filter that excludes most light we can see. What is left is what we would consider heat – the world of longer wavelengths beneath the red response of our eye. It gives us a subtly different perception of the world around us. A paint artist could not do that without taking an infrared image of the scene then painting from the photograph.

Similar filtering can be done to see the ultraviolet world beyond the highest violets we can perceive. And have you had an X-Ray? That is just imaging done in another range of “light” we cannot see well beyond the ultraviolet.

These are somewhat niche capabilities, but they can bring us information that is exclusive to the photographic world.

Time

Time is one of my favorite variables that is unique to photography. One of the three legs of the exposure triad is shutter speed. By varying the shutter speed we can effectively slow down or speed up time!

People have developed flash systems that can freeze movement in slices of 1 millionth of a second. Even the fastest bullets are frozen in midair. Explosions can be captured as they start. You’ve probably seen pictures of a drop of liquid falling into a dish. The splash patterns are beautiful and interesting. Not many things we come in contact with in our lives are not frozen at this kind of speed.

At less extremes, a waterfall at a fast shutter speed can look like a cascade of diamonds . A bird in flight is completely frozen at about 1/1000th of a second. Every feather is crisp and sharp. We cannot see it this way with our eye.

At the other end, long exposures capture movement over time. This is the area I like to work. Not super long. Just long enough to change our perception of what is happening.

We have all seen long exposure pictures of waterfalls or cascades, where the water is smooth and silky. It is so common that it is in danger of being cliche. But the reason you see it a lot is because it is a pleasing effect. Some photographers make exposures of minutes. This makes clouds streak and water blur to a milky texture. Not really my thing, but I appreciate the reality distortion caused by the time shift.

Movement

A subset of this idea of time is where the camera is moving relative to the subject or the subject is moving relative to the camera. The camera motion side has become popular as Intentional Camera Motion (ICM).

Like many techniques in photography, it is easy to do but hard to do excellently. Anyone can take a blurry picture because the shutter speed was too long to stop the action. Most of us have to work to overcome this. ICM deliberately pushes this “fault” to a point of art. I do ICM for some projects and I have seen a lot of ICM that I consider excellent art. And I have seen a lot more where I have to think, “yep; that’s your standard ICM”. That’s OK. Most experiments in doing something new and creative fail.

One interesting aspect of techniques that involve movement and time is that it is almost impossible to take the same picture twice. There is always variation. The variation often leads to pleasant surprises.

Stretch the notion of reality

So photography is unique in giving us alternate views of “reality”. With conventional arts, like painting, nothing can be created that the artist does not first see or imagine. Photography can show us worlds or effects we did not imagine. This sometimes opens up new creative paths to explore. And the exciting thing is it is actually reality. If the camera captures it out in the “real world” (whatever that is), it is reality. What we get may be a complete surprise, but that is part of the exhilaration.

Photographers, never feel inferior in the arts. Know that what we do is as valid as any other kind of art. And try not not to be smug knowing we have the option of being more creative than most other forms of art.

Go explore the unseen and enjoy your discoveries.

Live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundaries of the unknown. – J. Robert Oppenheimer

Today’s image

This is part of a series I did fairly recently. It combines ICM and time and subject motion and some secret sauce optical techniques to create this look. I consider it a creative view on a reality that happens around us all the time, but only photographers can see.

Is it “real”? Yes, absolutely. It is a minimally modified shot of a real, physical subject. It is a subject most of us can find right around our town.

To find out more about what it is, go to my web site and find a similar looking image in Projects.

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It Doesn’t Have To Be a Portfolio Shot

Car wash. Wet color.

Of course we want to build a great portfolio, but don’t stress too much. Sometimes it is best to just go shoot and see what happens. In other words, not every shot has to be a portfolio shot.

A portfolio shot?

We all probably have one or more “portfolios” we maintain. Maybe you don’t formally build a physical portfolio box or book. Now days it is probably one or more Lightroom collections (or albums, depending on which flavor you use). That is a separate discussion.

The portfolio represents our best work. Typically there will be multiple ones for categories like landscapes or portraits or street photography, etc.

It should be a very limited set. A maximum of 20 works well. If you have 200, either you are a truly exceptional artist or you haven’t edited enough yet. Editing hurts. It is painful to take out a favorite. But the reality is that every one removed makes the remaining set stronger. It is healthy to constantly challenge our portfolio. Test to see if new images are better than existing ones. If they are, replace the old one.

So my point here is that it is easy to get in our head and not take a picture of a scene unless we are sure it is superior to anything already in our portfolio. This freezes us into fear and indecision.

Be mindful

Photography should be a process of mindfulness. We should be present and open wherever we are. This helps us to actually see the possibilities in what is around us at the moment. Being there and being in the moment lets us make the most of whatever situation we find.

Self-censoring fights against mindfulness. When we pass opportunities because they will probably not make portfolio images, we are building a mental wall to exclude things. It constricts our thinking and leads us to miss great shots that come unexpectedly.

Practice the craft

If you are a musician you practice hours a day. Even simple scales train the musical senses. If you are a gymnast you practice hours a day. Strength and flexibility exercise is as important as working on routines.

Why should it be different in the arts? Our art is part craft. Practice makes us better. We need to be very fluid in handling our equipment. Exposure decisions should be quick. Composition should be almost automatic because we have built such a large base of experience.

So we need to spend a lot of time just taking pictures. For the practice, if nothing else, even if we discard most of them. It makes us a more virtuoso photographer. The great majority of this practice does not produce portfolio shots. But it sets us up to skillfully make the great shot when we find it.

Get in the flow

A lot gets written about flow states. here are reasons for this. One is that it is a simple concept most of us can relate to. Another is that it is a powerful and compelling experience. Everybody seems to understand the basic concept, so I will not define it.

It is hard to force a flow state. You kind of fall into it and don’t realize it until later. To get there you have to be working – hard. Not working on getting into a flow. Working hard on our craft. That means being out doing it. Not just dabbling in it, but spending significant time and attention. As we immerse ourselves in it for an extended time we may find that we have hit a groove. Time seems to stand still. The stars align, so to speak, and everything seems to work better; ideas come freely; we are on a creative high. We feel good about what we are doing and the results are above normal. It seems to flow.

Looking back on it with a warm glow we may realize we were in a flow. It is important to realize that the flow is not the goal. The experience we feel and the work we produce is. Flow helps enable that.

Be surprised

And by being out and shooting freely with less self-censoring, I often am surprised by what I get. Maybe it is from being more mindful. Perhaps it is when I am in a flow. But regardless of why, I am frequently pleased with images that I thought at the time would be boring. And I am glad I shot them.

The famous Wayne Gretsky said “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” I think there is application to our photography. Just thinking about a shot does not create an image. Thinking about a shot and deciding not to take it means no image. But when something tickles your subconscious and you go ahead and grab the shot, you might find gold. Even when you are relatively sure it will not make it into your portfolio, it might trigger another thought. Which might trigger another thought. And so on. It can bring you to a better way to see the subject. We can surprise ourselves.

So don’t be quite so picky. Be very picky in the excellence we demand in our craft. But be careful in prejudging our shots. Do your best with what is there and see where it leads. It could be that it is not a weak subject that is at fault. It could be that we aren’t letting our self think about it very well.

Today’s image

I’m a sucker for these. I love shooting them. You never know precisely what you will get, but the surprise can be fun. I really like this one. It is also a great exercise for working on timing. Being able to recognize a shot and execute it. It fascinates me that a few tenths of a second or a slight movement of the frame can make all the difference.