The Edit

A complete guide to commercial photography

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:53:12 Z

When it comes to professional photography, there are numerous fields you can pursue to earn good money. However, it can be challenging to make a living as a full-time professional photographer.

With digital cameras making it much more accessible and the Internet and social media allowing people to easily show and even sell their photos, companies, magazines, and newspapers have a much larger pool to dip into.

The days of making a living from stock and editorial photography are all but gone. Selling your work as wall art prints is still a viable avenue, but again won't pay the rent. However, one genre of photography that still has the potential to bring in the bread is commercial photography.

What is Commercial Photography?

Essentially, commercial photography involves shooting imagery designed to promote and sell a product, service, or idea. Unlike other genres, commercial photography is not purely a creative outlet but is more linked to commerce, advertising, and marketing. The main aim of each image is to convince the viewer to buy something.

As a commercial photographer, you are not shooting for yourself or what you love. You are shooting purely for the client and will be guided by the client's requirements and brief. While you do, of course, have some scope for your own creative ideas, they must align with the client's needs and ideas. Ultimately, the client will have the final say.

Commercial photography is probably the most lucrative genre of professional photography today. Land the big ones, and they will definitely pay well, so long as you deliver the results and quality they are looking for.

Different Types of Commercial Photography

Commercial photography covers a variety of specialties, each catering to specific niches and client needs. Here are some of the most common types:

Advertising

Advertising is the most prominent form of commercial photography and offers the highest chance of finding a client. Advertising is everywhere, and everyone selling a product or service will have to advertise or promote it in some way.

Advertising and photography go hand in hand, and it's here that you are most likely to find clients willing, or at least accepting, to pay good money for high-quality photography to showcase their brand.

Advertising photography often involves elaborate productions, creative concepts, and meticulous attention to detail. Advertising photographers collaborate closely with art directors, copywriters, and marketing teams to bring campaigns to life across various mediums, including print, digital, and outdoor advertising.

Products

Product photography is in very high demand, especially these days, with e-commerce, online promotion and marketing going through the roof.

With more and more businesses selling via the Internet, the need for high-quality product imagery is increasing yearly. However, not all product photography will be used online. Consider printed media, such as brochures, catalogues, and billboards.

A product photographer must skilfully highlight the features, textures, and details of the items they are photographing. Clean backgrounds, strategic lighting, and attention to composition are key elements in product photography. The aim is to showcase the items in their best light and make them compelling to potential buyers.

The upside is that you can easily set up a home studio, and in many cases, your clients will send you the products to photograph. For others, you will likely have to visit the company and shoot onsite.

In this case, you would need to invest in some portable lighting equipment and backdrops. If you really want to make a go of it and get enough regular high-paying clients, you could even build a mobile studio.

Fashion

Fashion photography is yet another lucrative avenue to pursue as a commercial photographer. Like product photography, you are trying to create images that will entice the viewer to buy those clothes.

Whether it's high-end fashion editorials, catalogues, or e-commerce imagery, fashion photographers capture the essence of brands and designers while accentuating the aesthetics and narratives behind each collection.

Unlike product photography, where you often shoot inanimate objects, you will work closely with stylists, makeup artists, and models to achieve the desired look and feel. So, you will need to be a people person with a good eye for style and fashion.

Food

Food photography usually involves the combined input of the photographer, art director, food stylist and more. Whether it's menus for restaurants, cookbooks, or food styling for advertising campaigns, your job will be to create an image that will evoke cravings and convey the taste, and texture of dishes.

Lighting, composition, and styling, along with a few little tricks such as a wide-angle to make the food look larger than life, play pivotal roles in capturing the essence of a dish to make it look simply irresistible.

Corporate

Corporate photography is a great option if you love photographing people. It can also pay well if you bag some of the larger companies. Businesses use corporate photography for branding and marketing.

Examples include corporate headshots, event coverage, and corporate lifestyle. Corporate photographers collaborate with companies to convey their company culture, values, and achievements through compelling images that will influence clients or business partners.

Architectural and Interiors

Architectural and interior photography focuses on capturing the design, aesthetics, and spatial qualities of buildings, homes, and interiors. Options include photographing properties for real estate agents trying to sell or rent, architectural landmarks, or interior designs.

Architectural photographers often collaborate with architects, interior designers, and real estate professionals to capture spaces in their best possible light.

Cars

Car photography, or automotive photography in general, can also be a lucrative avenue to pursue. Whether it's adverts, editorial spreads, or showroom imagery, car photographers capture the beauty, performance, and craftsmanship of vehicles.

You can employ various techniques such as motion blur, lighting effects, and creative compositions to convey the excitement and allure of driving the car in question. Your clients can be car makers or car dealers.

How to get into commercial photography

Being a professional photographer is about more than just your photography skills. It also requires a combination of artistic talent, technical proficiency, business acumen, marketing, and networking skills. Here are some steps to help you get started:

1. Get your skills up to par

This is a no-brainer, really, but start by honing your skills, not only as a photographer but also in the genre of photography you plan to pursue. Be sure to master camera operation, exposure, composition, and lighting techniques so you will be able to work fast and produce the best results. Without the skill and talent, you won't even get your foot in the door.

2. Education and Training

While a degree in photography is not necessary, attending courses or workshops can provide valuable knowledge and hands-on experience. Get plenty of practice in the field you plan to pursue. One of the best ways is to get a job as a photographer's assistant. Learn from the pros, then build a great portfolio of your own that you can show to potential clients.

3. Develop a Unique Style

Developing a distinctive style can help distinguish you from other photographers in the industry. This can be particularly important when trying to break into more competitive areas of commercial photography. Your uniqueness will be your selling point.

4. Network and Collaborate

Networking is paramount in the competitive world of commercial photography. Attend events related to the industry you are targeting, and reach out to potential clients. Building relationships with art directors, marketing professionals, and fellow creatives can lead to valuable opportunities and recommendations.

5. Market Yourself

These days a lot of potential clients will search the Internet looking for commercial photographers. So it's important to create a professional website that shows your portfolio, bio, and contact information.

Make sure it is well-optimised for SEO. Utilise social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to promote your work and connect with potential clients.

Make a full-time living from photography

Commercial photography is a multifaceted genre that combines artistic creativity with commercial objectives. Whether you're capturing the allure of fashion, the tantalising flavours of food, or the sleek design of motor cars, commercial photography offers endless possibilities for creative expression. It is also the best way to earn a decent living as a full-time photographer.

Specialist photography insurance through Ripe

Commercial photography is a great way to build a lucrative career in the photography industry. Once you’ve got all of the equipment you need, investing in photography insurance can be a good way to protect your equipment should the worst happen.

At Ripe, we arrange bespoke cover that can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only ever pay for what you need. Insurance through Ripe protects your equipment from theft and accidental damage, so you can continue your shoots with peace of mind.

Learn more about specialist photography insurance or get an quick online quote today.

The ultimate guide to family photography

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:28:15 Z

Family photography may not always be as easy as you imagine, but with some planning, you can capture those treasured moments much better than if you try and grab shots on the fly.

This guide is not only for serious photographers shooting with a DSLR or Mirrorless. It applies to anyone with a camera, albeit a bridge, compact or even a smartphone.

You’ve probably heard the old mantra, “you are not a photographer with a smartphone!”. But quite frankly, a photographer is anyone with a camera who plans and puts a concerted effort into making a photograph (notice we said making, not taking).

The fact is, it’s not the camera that makes you a photographer. It’s the difference between just snapping a shot on the fly and taking time to carefully craft a photo.

So with that in mind, grab whatever camera you have and read our ultimate guide to family photography.

1. Know your equipment well

What we mean by this is to know what your camera is and isn’t capable of. Good photographers understand the limitation of their cameras and work within them.

For example, smartphones and compacts can take great photos, often resulting in great images when used within their capabilities.

One such limitation is focusing on fast-moving subjects. In most cases, the autofocus could be faster, and you will struggle to focus on your children if they’re running around.

If it does lock on, then the lag between successfully finding the focus point and clicking the shutter will also mean that the subject, one of the children, will have moved away from the focal point and be out of focus, especially if they move further away or close to you.

So in cases like this, try to keep the children still for your shot, or wait until they have stopped moving if taking candids.

This is less of a problem for higher-end cameras, but again, know how well your camera performs in these conditions. Practice in situations that are less important if you make mistakes.

Many cameras have a continuous autofocus feature, which tracks the subjects as it moves. How fast and accurate it tracks also depends on your lens quality.

It would help if you also kept the focus on the subject, meaning you must pay close attention to your composition because the subject is moving around as you track.

One trick is having the child run away from you or towards you in a straight line. This makes it easier to maintain your composition while keeping the focus point centred on the child.

You should also plan your shot in advance. In this case, you can plan a composition by watching how the children and adults are playing and running. Then you can decide where you want the person you are focusing on to be in the frame when you shoot.

Once done, you can select and move your focus point into that position and wait for the child to run into it, then rapidly focus and fire the shutter.

2. Keep an eye on your shutter speed

When photographing people, another thing to ensure is that your shutter speed is fast enough. How often have you looked at your photos and kicked yourself because the person is blurred?

This is especially true in the example above. Even when people are posing, it is hard to keep completely still.

When photographing candids of people talking or interacting, you need to ensure you freeze the action. The less people are moving, the slower the shutter speed you can get away with.

We recommend at least 1/125 sec or 1/250 for most posed shots for that fidgety relative. If you use a longer, heavier lens, more is needed. The rule of thumb for handheld is to shoot a shutter speed closest to your focal length if above 125mm. So for a 400mm, shoot at 1/400.

For people moving around or running, a much faster shutter speed is needed. Generally, the faster they move, the faster you need to expose them.

But it is not just about how fast they are moving, but more to do with how fast they appear to be moving in your frame. A person moving horizontally across the frame will appear to be moving faster than one moving directly towards or away from you in a straight line. So, a faster exposure would be needed with the former.

Be aware of the light when shooting fast exposures. Achieving this in good light is relatively easy, but always monitor your settings when the light is low or changeable.

Ideally, shoot in full manual mode if the light is consistent. If the light is changeable, shoot in shutter priority to ensure you maintain control over the exposure time while still exposing correctly.

If you can’t manually control the shutter speed, keep an eye out, avoid taking the picture if you can’t achieve a fast enough exposure, and find areas with good available light.

3. Avoid direct light

People often ask me why I move them into the shade and not in the sun. There are two reasons for this—shadows and squinty faces. The problem with direct light is that it is harsh, and secondly, it comes from a small source that creates harsh shadows.

Ideally, you need to shoot in diffused light. Diffused light comes from a larger light source and falls more evenly over your subject, reducing or eliminating shadows.

A great example is on an overcast day. Instead of light coming directly from the small source (the sun), the sky becomes your light source.

The clouds act as a massive diffuser. Look around you next time you are out on a cloudy day, and you will notice the almost complete absence of shadows.

So try to photograph your family outside on a cloudy or overcast day. Alternatively, take them into the shade of a building or tree, and watch to ensure the background isn’t too bright.

4. Use natural light indoors

If photographing indoors, place your family members near a large window. Large windows also act as a softbox, especially if you have net curtains.

Remember to position them facing the window. The window will diffuse the light, but unlike being outside in the shade, you can still get some shadows, albeit softer. So watch out for this.

5. Shoot early or late in the day

When the sun is low in the sky, its intensity diminishes, which presents a perfect time to photograph your family members. It’s especially great when mist or haze is on the horizon.

Again, watch out for shadows. But in this case, shadows can often be long, so you could use them creatively. If you want to use the sun as a backdrop, then use a fill-in flash to avoid the person being silhouetted.

6. Use a natural environment

Don’t just take your family to a beautiful location and line them up like mannequins to be photographed. It will make them feel uncomfortable, which will show in the photo.

Photograph your family in all the regular places you visit or simply at home. Children especially need to feel safe and relaxed and want to have fun. You will capture a person’s best and most natural look when they are having fun.

Forests or countryside walks are great for this. Take the family there and photograph the kids as they indulge their curiosity, play and climb the trees. If you often go walking as a family in a specific location, use this.

Don’t always go in close. Pull back with a wider angle to include the environment too. Get down low and shoot upwards with the child climbing the tree or on top of you for you a fun shot!

Try not to shout at the kids to smile or look at you, as this often results in an awkward pose or smile. Instead, have another family member there to just talk and engage them while you shoot. This way, you will capture the smiles and emotions more naturally.

7. Try different angles and focal lengths

We often find it hard to crouch down when taking photos and want to do it standing up.

However, this creates photos that look directly at adults or down on children. Children also look dwarfed next to adults or older children.

Get down to the child’s eye level, or even lower sometimes, to make them look taller.

When photographing siblings, for example, you could place the older one next to or between the younger ones and then get lower and shoot upwards to make the older one look like the proud, protective bigger brother or sister.

If a child is climbing a tree, shoot from directly underneath with a wide angle to emphasise the enormity of the climb. Have your child stand on something to make them look big.

8. Blur the background

For portrait shots, use a large aperture to blur the background and make the person or people stand out more in the photo.

A large aperture reduces the depth of field, which is the distance in front and behind, which remains acceptably sharp.

It’s not only this that affects depth of field, though. The closer you stand to your subject, and thus the closer your point of focus, the more the background will be blurred.

Additionally, you can also move back and use a long focal length. Longer focal lengths also reduce the depth of field, so moving back and zooming in can really throw that background out of focus.

This is ideal when you have a messy background that you want to reduce to a complete blur.

When photographing a group of people, be careful with the depth of field and how they are standing.

Usually, they won’t be standing in a single line, but some will be a little in front or behind. If your aperture is too wide, people behind could be out of focus.

Always focus on the person closest to the camera, as the depth of field in front is narrower than behind, and then select the appropriate aperture.

If your camera has one, use the depth of field preview button to check. Alternatively, take a test shot first, then zoom in on your screen to check.

9. Capture all emotions

“Stop pulling faces, smile!” How many times have you heard this being told to a child when having their photo taken?

Yes, we all want beautiful photos of our children. However, childhood is a wonderful time full of all emotions: fun, smiles, tears, anger and, our favourite, pulling funny faces.

So be sure to capture all those special, funny moments so you can look back one day and laugh at those great memories.

10. Don’t forget to include yourself

We’re often told off for not being in our family photos. Don’t forget to include yourself too. If you don’t trust someone else to take the photo, then this is easily done by using a tripod and setting your camera’s timer. Even smartphones can now be attached to a tripod with a special clamp, and many high-end phones have a timer option.

So there you have it, the ultimate guide to family photography. A few tips to help you capture those treasured family memories in the best way possible.

About the author:

Ian Middleton is a travel and landscape photographer and writer. He is the author of several books, including a practical guide to photography. His photography has been used in numerous publications worldwide and is sold as high-quality wall art online.

Visit his website for more info.

Specialist camera insurance through Ripe Photography

If you're heading out to master our family photography ideas, you may also want to protect your camera and accessories through specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe, we arrange theft and accidental damage cover up to the value of £30,000 for portable equipment you use when shooting on location and up to £60,000 in total.

You can also choose to insure your smartphone and tablet if you use them as part of your photography.

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When to use a telephoto lens (and its effects)

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 11:40:33 Z

You might not know it, but anyone with a camera has, without a doubt, used a telephoto lens at some point—even without realising it.

It's not just the professional cameras with telephoto lenses—the camera on your Smartphone also has one. You may have heard it more commonly called the ‘zoom’.

In a nutshell, a telephoto lens brings everything closer. However, there is far more to it than pure magnification.

We've outlined key tips for when and how to use a telephoto lens, as well as its advantages and the effects it produces.

What is a telephoto lens?

Before we jump into using a telephoto lens, let's consider what one is.

As previously mentioned, you've likely heard the term ‘zoom lens’ rather than ‘telephoto lens’, but what is the difference? Well, there isn’t one.

A zoom lens is simply a telephoto lens that can be adjusted for different magnification strengths. Telephoto refers to anything magnified beyond the standard field of view equal to the human eye.

To fully understand this, first, we need to delve into the realm of focal lengths.

While most compact and bridge cameras will quote you magnifications by a times factor, such as 4 x zoom, Single-lens Reflex (SLR), and modern mirrorless cameras will come with lenses that quote a focal length in millimetres. The focal length is the distance between the main lens glass and the focal plane (i.e. the film or sensor).

What focal length is telephoto?

The focal length that equates to the naked eye will vary according to the film or sensor size relative to the lens size. However, for a 35mm film SLR camera and full-frame digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR), this focal length is 50mm.

Anything above 50mm is considered to be magnifying the scene and thus becomes a telephoto lens. Conversely, anything below 50mm is considered a wide angle because it stretches the scene to a wider view than the naked eye.

As your focal length gets longer, the field of view narrows, and thus it begins to crop out the wider part of your scene, only allowing part of it to pass through the lens and onto your sensor. So less of the scene falls onto the sensor and is cropped out.

The crop factor

Many DSLRs are not full-frame and have what is known as a crop factor.

A cropped sensor is smaller and therefore doesn't capture the whole scene that passes through the lens. Essentially, the image is then cropped by a factor of, for example, 1.5, depending on the sensor size. It is like cropping some of the image off in your post-processing software. So, for example, on a 1.5 crop sensor, a 50mm focal length becomes 75mm, thus turning your standard field of view into a telephoto one.

It’s all an illusion

It's all, in fact, just an illusion.

The narrow field of view magnifies your subject and brings it closer, but in reality, it just crops out the surrounding parts, so you only see the subject. Effectively, it isolates a subject, making it the only thing you record, so it will appear big in your picture.

You may have also heard the term ‘digital zoom’. This crops the digital image recorded on the sensor, which also crops out the pixels and results in a loss of quality.

However, because an optical zoom or telephoto narrows the field of view, the whole scene within that field is recorded using the full resolution of the sensor and thus results in a higher-quality image.

Telephoto lens effects

Apart from the obvious effect of magnifying a subject, telephoto lenses have many other effects and reasons for using one.

Narrower depth of field

Depth of field is the distance in front of and behind your point of focus. Anything inside this depth of field is sharp, and anything outside is blurry.

The smaller your aperture is, the larger the depth of field (so the background is sharper). The larger your aperture is, the smaller the depth of field (so the background is more blurry).

Aperture is measured in f-stops. F16 is small, and F5.6 is large. However, the physical sizes are not fixed—they depend on the focal length.

The physical size of the hole is calculated by dividing the focal length by the f-stop. For example, f16 at 50mm - 50/16 = 3.12mm. So, the physical size of an f16 aperture at 50mm is 3.12mm.

However, increase that focal length to 100mm, then 100/16 = 6.25mm. A larger hole will result in a shorter depth of field—meaning the background of a photo taken at 100mm focal length will be more blurry than one taken at 50mm.

Bringing background objects closer to the foreground

Another useful telephoto lens effect is compressing the scene to give the illusion of the foreground, making background objects much larger and closer to each other.

By cutting out the wider parts of a scene, everything seems much larger. Moving back and focussing on something from further away rather than up close changes the whole dynamic of the scene.

The opposite is true for a wide angle.

Using a wide-angle lens and focusing on something close to you makes foreground objects much larger and background objects smaller and seemingly further away.

35mm focal length – in front of the long grass

105mm focal length – standing further back

In these two photos, you can see the difference.

The first image was shot at 35mm while standing in front of the tall grass. I moved back across the road for the second image and zoomed in to 105mm.

You can see in the image shot with the telephoto how the church appears much closer to the grass and also larger in the photo overall. In the first, the wide-angle and closer position to the foreground has shrunk the church in the scene, and now it appears much further away.

When to use a telephoto lens

So now we have looked at telephoto lens effects and how it all works, let's look at when to use a telephoto lens.

Portraits of people or animals

The most obvious reason for this is to ensure you're not too close to the subject.

You don't want to spook animals, of course, and for people, it can be quite daunting to have a photographer in their faces. Moving further away makes a person feel less uncomfortable, resulting in a better photo. Naturally, we can then use the telephoto to go in close and frame our subject fully in the image.

When shooting portraits of people or animals, we also want to blur the background in most cases to make the subject stand out. This can be especially useful when busy, distracting elements are behind it.

Blurring that background can be done by opening the aperture to reduce the depth of the field. However, sometimes it is not enough.

Setting the lens to its widest aperture—for example, f4—can be the limit. But what if you want more?

Moving physically closer to blur the background is an option, but as mentioned, this would make our subject more uneasy. Therefore, it is better to move back and use a telephoto. The longer focal length will increase the physical size of our widest aperture and result in blurrier background.

260mm – F7.1 – bushes behind

400mm – F7.1 – grass behind

Wildlife Photography

Super telephoto ranges can photograph wildlife—particularly birds and wildfowl that are easily spooked and must be photographed from within a hide. Additionally, we can use it to photograph more dangerous wild animals, as you certainly don’t want to get close to them.

Photographing Mountains

They say you can’t move a mountain, but a telephoto lens can.

Telephoto lenses are perfect for getting close to mountains, especially mountain peaks. They are ideal for picking out the detail.

In most cases, you would need a good-quality lens to ensure clear and accurate details. If shooting handheld, be sure to have a fast enough shutter speed, especially if using a big, heavy lens.

A tripod is needed in most cases to ensure a nice sharp image. Plus, mountains are often best photographed at sunrise or sunset and with dramatic clouds swirling around, so you might also want to use a long exposure.

Subjects against mountains (sense of scale)

A telephoto lens can be used to emphasise scale.

If you stand in front of something like a church or a castle with a mountain behind, then the church will seem bigger than the mountain. However, if you move further back and zoom in, it all looks different.

Standing back and zooming in lets you see the mountain background much larger against the smaller building.

Photographing the sunrise or sunset

A telephoto lens is great for getting close to the sun as it rises or sets.

Using the super telephoto to zoom, you can get right up to the sun on the horizon as it appears or disappears, especially over the ocean.

It is also great for capturing a sunset over mountain peaks or when it rises behind specific landmarks.

Including some foreground, features is a plus—and that is where the zoom is useful. You can vary our focal length to get one shot right up close, then pull back to include something else in the scene, such as interesting clouds.

Photographing the moon

You might use a telephoto lens to photograph the moon up close. Still, it is also useful for photographing the moon as part of the landscape as it rises or sets, just like the sun or behind landmarks.

Making the best of a bad sunrise

We all love those amazing flaming sunrises when the whole sky lights up. However, it doesn’t always turn out that way. All is not always lost, however. Often there is some colour on the horizon, particularly where the sun has gone down. A telephoto lens can be used here to isolate the colourful part of the scene itself.

What kind of telephoto lens do you need?

There are, of course, many more uses for a telephoto lens. So, when you consider adding one to your kit, consider what you will use it for.

There are many to choose from, but like with any lens, quality is important. Remember that the lens is the first entry point for your image, so having a cheap budget lens on a high-quality camera body will cheapen your camera.

Consider what you will use it for and, of course, what your budget is. A higher quality lens would be necessary for distant landscapes to ensure sharpness where there is a lot of detail. However, for people and portraits, there is less small detail, so that you could get away with a lower budget lens.

Also, consider what you will use the photos for. You don't need high quality if you are a hobbyist or part-time pro. But quality and sharpness are paramount if you are a serious professional and want to sell your images, especially as large prints.

So, get out there and embrace the power of the telephoto lens.

About the author:

Visit his website for more info.

Specialist camera insurance through Ripe Photography

Photography is a hugely rewarding activity, but it doesn't come without risks to your equipment. This is why you may want to protect your camera and accessories through specialist photography insurance.

At Ripe, we arrange bespoke cover that can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only ever pay for what you need. You can cover up to £60,000 of equipment for theft and accidental damage, so you can continue your shoots with peace of mind.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an online quote today.

Fog photography: a step-by-step guide

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:54:19 Z

It's amazing how many photographers put their cameras away the moment the fog descends. While the sun is lost and there's minimal visibility, photography in fog can provide some fantastic results.

The fog paints our world in a new way, providing a completely different interpretation of the structures surrounding us and a rather rare opportunity to photographically record the world in fog's hues.

Fog-draped scenes can make for some of the moodiest landscape photography, whether urban, rural or coastal. Details and clutter are all removed, and the scene is reduced to a simple monochromatic outline, often changing what was previously a crowded over-complicated view into something quite simple and magical.

Fog photography works in a rather different way from normal, to see and interpret the world differently and to visualise and capture scenes with techniques they may only use a little in other lighting conditions.

Here you'll find plenty of fog photography tips and ideas to help you create some wonderful images.

Getting started with fog photography

So what are the main things to look out for in fog? What main features can we use to our advantage to create stunning and unique photography?

Although the infinitely variable nature of fog will support or hinder certain types of composition, it is certainly possible to make some generalisations about what to expect and to look for in any fog.

These include:

Colour will be lost or at least greatly reduced, so most images shot in fog will be monochromatic, or at least close to it
Surface details will usually be removed, so photography of any structure will be largely about its outline, its shape, and not its details
The background will be lost, or at least greatly reduced, doing away with a lot of clutter that might otherwise be distracting and thus hugely simplifying what might otherwise be a crowded and complicated scene
Visibility will be greatly reduced, making long-distance views impossible, but opening up—especially in combination with the minimal background—great possibilities for photography of close and (possibly) middle-distance subjects
Lighting will be quite flat and even, so there will be few, if any, shadows and highlights

In short, much of the photography that works well in fog is minimalist, concentrating on simple close subjects that stand out from the blank background through their wonderfully striking outline shapes.

Some general foggy weather techniques

There's no requirement for specialised equipment for photography in the fog: your camera body and a couple of zoom lenses will do the job.

Light levels will often be low, so a tripod is a good idea, and you may find it essential in many situations. With lighting often flat and even, you will probably not need to use neutral-density graduated filters (ND grads) to reduce the contrast range across the scene.

However, if some sunlight is visible filtering through the fog, then an ND grad filter may come in handy to darken the brighter upper part of the scene.

With no horizon likely visible through the fog, a soft ND-grad, with its gradual transition from clear to dark, is more effective than a sharp transitioning hard filter.

With much of the scene enveloped in a grey or off-white translucent blanket, the in-camera exposure meter is likely to under-expose the images somewhat due to its tendency to want to produce everything in mid-tones.

Although modern meters are less inclined to do this than used to be the case, it is still something to look out for, and if you find this happening, then correct it simply by over-exposing a little.

If shooting in a fully or semi-automatic mode, you can use the camera's exposure compensation feature to increase exposure above that recommended by the in-camera meter.

Anyone shooting in fully manual mode must select either a slower shutter speed or a wider lens aperture. It shouldn't be necessary to increase exposure by more than one stop, for example, reducing shutter speed from 1/60 sec to 1/30 sec or increasing lens aperture from, say, f/11 to f/8. Such changes represent a doubling of the amount of light coming through to the camera's sensor.

Different subjects in different types of fog

Of course, fog comes in several forms and with numerous causes. Without wanting to get bogged down in detail, some differences are useful in understanding some of the subject matter that should be possible with each type of fog.

The different types of fog range from the light gossamer veil typical of morning ground mist, through estuary or sea fog, to simply low cloud—often accompanied by wind and rain—typically found blanketing the hilly country.

Besides the latter, fog is usually (though not always) present in windless conditions, which greatly helps with any fog photography that includes vegetation, particularly when long exposure times are needed.

In a thick fog of any sort, the absence of sunlight results in even lighting in whichever direction the camera is pointing. Landscape features (or urban scenes) may look extremely muted, if not simply dull, but you should overcome any temptation to let that put you off.

Seek out great close compositions: the outline of a tree, a single, angular branch, or a big jagged rock, for example, subjects that by themselves and set against the blank foggy canvas create a superb two-dimensional outline shape and image composition.

In such images, there will be a little background to worry about and a little foreground to create any sense of depth and three dimensions. This is just about a two-dimensional shape.

Things change somewhat in situations where some sun is visible, filtering through the fog. The view and the light will be quite different depending on which way the camera is pointing, with some possible shadows and muted colours.

With the sun heavily filtered and greatly reduced in strength, some superb images can be created shooting towards the sunlight, the sun visible as a soft white disc in a grey sky, and foreground subjects highlighted as silhouettes.

Because the fog is likely to be relatively thin, there is some visibility into a moderate distance, allowing for some sense of depth.

The foreground silhouetted image subjects are set against not only the sun but also more distant and often barely visible background components. These will help set the scene and context while being sufficiently muted, and they don't compete for attention.

The beauty of ground mist

The above scenario is typical of early morning ground mist (or river valley mist), a scenario that often lends itself to some truly beautiful photography.

Since ground mist or fog, by its nature, sits close to the ground, photography can become even more wonderful if you can get yourself above the mist blanket and shoot across a literal 'sea' of cloud.

The result will be a stunning view of muted landscape features, much of it at least partially hidden, with the taller elements rising above the fog, lit by the sun above.

The traditional way to achieve views from above-ground fog has always been to find a conveniently placed hill to climb. Still, today those with a drone can fly their camera above it just about anywhere, provided the uppermost level of the fog is below the legal maximum height they can fly at.

The big problem with ground mist is that it is often quite fleeting, generally found early in the morning, dissipating quickly once the warming sun is up.

So, it is the early bird that catches this one. It will linger in very cold weather, especially if the temperature remains below freezing.

Of course, this then opens up the possibility of photography in fog and the world coated in a white frost, hopefully glittering if sunlight is also able to filter through.

Predicting the fog

One final important skill in fog photography is knowing how to predict when and where fog is likely to form. It is an imprecise science, at least from the photographer's perspective, but anything you can do to help get you in the right place at the right time has to help.

When it comes to a fog that consists largely of low clouds blanketing higher hills, it is not difficult to predict. Just watch the weather forecast for the approach of a low-pressure system and then head for some high hills.

Unfortunately, this approach comes with rain and wind, so photography is only sometimes convenient.

Most other forms of fog, usually without wind and rain, resulting from the collision of warm with cold; often in both instances air, but sometimes warm air over cold water, or vice versa.

Warm air can hold a lot more water vapour than cold air can manage, with the result that, at the boundary where the two meet, warm air adjacent to cold cools down, releasing its water vapour. And voilà, you have fog!

The same can happen with a water/air boundary, whether the surface of the sea, a river or a lake. Warm air coming in over really cold water can result in a layer of fog across the water's surface as the warm air in contact with the water cools down, releasing its water vapour.

The reverse can also happen, with warm water releasing the vapour into a layer of cold air, resulting in a blanket of fog.

When it comes to early morning ground mist, this is usually formed as a result of water vapour rising off the extremely wet ground and then condensing as it hits very cold air over it.

The ideal conditions for creating this include heavy rain the day before, followed by a very cold, cloudless and still night. The subsequent dawn should produce some stunning ground mist views, though it's a very imprecise science.

Nevertheless, being aware of this kind of guideline should help you get into the right place in time to catch what can often be quite fleeting views.

Capturing those foggy scenes

Half the battle to successful fog photography is knowing how to put yourself in the right place at the right time and then knowing what to look out for by way of subject matter and compositions.

Being fore-armed in this way will help you avoid wasting precious time searching out locations and compositions, which results in missing the moment.

Admittedly, you will still need to scout out good locations even once you've learned everything about the creation of great fog photography within it.

These places contain what you think will form great compositions and are likely to be subject to fog in the right conditions. Do this in clear weather as far as possible, and then be ready to head for them the moment the fog descends. Be ready, be prepared, and then get shooting!

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

The ultimate guide to night city photography

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:26:09 Z

Urban night photography can be hugely exciting. When done well, the resulting images often yield stunning patterns of colourful, swirling streaks and hotspots of light.

Unfortunately, when done badly—as it often is—the results can be rather depressing dark streaks, with here and there an occasional flare of colour and light.

So how do we get it right? That's what this article is going to be all about: making the most of opportunities to photograph city nightlights. Let's get stuck in and get you on the road to producing some stunning images.

Setting the scene for city photography at night

Let's start by defining what we mean by city nightlight photography.

The techniques described in this article cover almost everything with photography of streets and buildings at night, from views of entire city skylines down to close-ups of single lighting displays or even less.

So, it has quite a wide remit, just as long as it's urban, the sun is below the horizon, and the main focus of attention is on the lights.

Having established what we're aiming to shoot, several basic techniques and tools will be with you through most, if not all, of your city nightlight photography. These are:

a tripod
a flashgun
shooting with some natural light in the sky

Let's look at each of these in a bit more detail.

1. A tripod is essential

Light levels are quite low during nighttime, even in an urban setting bathed in artificial lights.

As a result, exposure times will be long (and hence shutter speeds slow) even if the lens aperture is wide open. If the latter is closed down to any degree (to increase the depth of field), the shutter speeds will quickly become even longer.

The only way to reduce those long exposure times is to increase the ISO or sensor's sensitivity, but doing so greatly reduces image quality, making it self-defeating.

It will also make some creative techniques (described below) impossible to achieve, reducing the quality of your photography.

So, stick with a low ISO (about 100), enjoy the use of long exposure times, and embrace the power of a good tripod.

2. Shooting night city photography with natural light in the sky

If you're photographing a close-up view of a single lighting system, say an advertisement or nightclub sign, then this doesn't apply.

However, for any wider shot that includes even just a fraction of the sky, it is far more effective to shoot while there is still some light in the sky, i.e. in the later stages of dusk, before it gets completely dark.

Many people new to this kind of photography wait for total nightfall before starting to shoot, but it is not a good way to go for several reasons.

Firstly, having some light in the sky will generally put in an additional splash of colour, perhaps some pink or violet, which further increases the interest in the image.

Waiting until it is completely dark will render any sky almost completely black, except for any artificial lighting that radiates upwards, rendering an important chunk of the image blank and lifeless.

Secondly, having some light in the sky helps to make the shapes and outlines of buildings, and any natural landscape features visible. This gives substance and context to all the lighting.

If you wait until it is completely dark, there is a good chance that all those outlines will be invisible. This weakens the sense of an urban setting and leaves all that artificial lighting simply 'floating' in the enveloping darkness, devoid of its architectural context.

This latter point is particularly important when photographing in small towns and cities. Waiting for full nightfall in such a place will quickly demonstrate just how little artificial lighting of interest there is.

However, picking on a particular building or set of buildings at dusk can often result in something quite dramatic and effective, even when there is only a limited amount of artificial lighting around.

3. Keep the flashgun in your bag

There is often a temptation to use a flashgun extensively in city nightlight photography, thinking it will add a crucial bit of extra light. Most of the time, it is useless and may have a harmful effect on your images.

It is particularly pointless when shooting distant views of large urban skylines.

Many people make the mistake of firing a flash whilst pressing the shutter button as they're pointing their camera at a brightly lit nocturnal urban skyline.

The little flashgun on hand-held cameras can't illuminate an entire skyline, some of which may be a couple of miles away. It's especially difficult to achieve this with a shutter speed that is fast enough to hand-hold the camera.

Even a quality flashgun struggles to fire its light more than 15 metres into the darkness. Instead, get that tripod out for skyline shots, mount the camera, put the flashgun away, and use a long exposure that grabs all the light available from those buildings.

Even when shooting street scenes, it is usually not worthwhile using a flashgun for the same distance reason. If you come close to some lighting, they may need to be more powerful for the flashgun to compete, rendering it pointless.

A flashgun is useful when you need to throw some light onto elements within a scene that are not getting any light (or not enough) from the street lights.

This may include foreground cars (parked or moving), people on the street, or in markets or festivals. This is particularly so if they are backlit by all that lighting but have no light falling on the side facing the camera. In this situation, a flashgun is needed.

Subject matter, composition and exposure

As already mentioned, the subject matter for city photography at night can range from wide vistas of urban skylines to close-ups of single-light displays, with everything in between.

Urban night photography down in the streets may or may not include people. Still, when taking photos of cities at night, they are usually simply part of the urban scene, adding context and activity to the street view and its lights.

Remember that shutter speeds are generally quite slow, so they blur moving people, which can help add a dynamic atmosphere.

Furthermore, they will generally appear lighter than the lighting if they are really close to and fully bathed in the lighting. Adding a fill-in flash will allow some people in the scene to be captured sharply and well-exposed, which can sometimes be useful.

However, because of how our brains are wired, those caught by the flash tend to become the subject of the image rather than the nightlights around them.

Photography of traffic, both moving and static, can be extremely effective. Static vehicles, composed in the best way, can give superb reflections of any nearby lights, greatly enhancing the dynamic life of a street scene and simultaneously hiding the generally unattractive tarmac road surface.

Moving traffic produces images containing wonderful streaks of light, something that we'll cover in the next section.

Water is also a very useful component in photos of cities at night, both for street scenes and wider urban skylines.

For the former, it is remarkable just how effective it can be to catch the reflection of nightlights in a well-placed puddle, again greatly increasing the area of the image covered by colourful lights and minimising the unattractive tarmac.

For cities that sit beside a large body of water, whether a lake, a large river, a harbour or a beach, viewpoints that show not only the buildings and their lights but also their reflections in the water can give stunning results. Always look out for these possibilities.

Exposing correctly for all this lighting can be challenging and is often a delicate compromise when photographing cities at night.

Assuming that the city nightlights themselves dominate the scene within your image frame, then, in general, the camera's exposure meter will expose those lights more or less correctly. Any small unlit areas within the frame will be very dark in the final image, which is often desirable as you want to focus attention on the lights.

However, suppose your image frame contains large unlit areas, such as the sky after total nightfall or unlit buildings. In that case, the exposure meter will start for them, giving them longer exposures to lighten those dark patches.

As a result, the nightlights will be over-exposed, often resulting in parts of the image burning out. To compensate for this, under-expose the image, over-riding the camera's exposure meter to give a shorter exposure time or narrower lens aperture than the meter wants to set. If shooting in automatic or semi-automatic mode, do this using your camera's exposure compensation facility.

Even when the camera does expose correctly, there is often such a vast range in the intensity of lights in a scene that a small amount of burnout occurs in those areas affected by the brightest lights.

This is sometimes a necessary compromise to ensure less bright lights are exposed correctly, giving an overall lively, vibrant and colourful image.

The lights within a scene may also vary significantly in colour temperature, something the eye may not notice but could have an important impact on the images.

Mostly, today's cameras handle this well, provided the white balance control is set to automatic (AWB). The one area that might cause trouble is when a scene contains a large amount of old-style fluorescent lighting.

These are usually rich in a green light, which can look awful in your images. You can correct this in most image editing programmes by adding in some magenta. However, remember that this will also affect the colour temperature of all the other lights in the image, so tread carefully.

Creative techniques for night city photography

There are several beautifully effective creative techniques applicable to city nightlights photography, and these are:

1. Light streaks of moving traffic

This is the most commonly used special nighttime technique. Light trails created by moving traffic can turn a fairly uninteresting road view into a magnificent, dynamic stream of colour and light.

It's most effective with traffic moving away from the camera. Since it reveals the red taillights, you need to set the camera up on a tripod at a good vantage point, usually (though not necessarily) higher than the road, and use exposure times of several seconds as traffic flows past. A single vehicle passing during the exposure can generate a useful image, though it's often a lot more effective with a stream of vehicles.

2. Rotating a zoom

You can create a dramatic and abstract image simply by using a wide-angle zoom lens and then turning the zoom ring during the exposure.

The result is an image containing streaks of light zooming in while retaining the original scene's basic appearance and structure. It's essential to turn the zoom ring very carefully to avoid camera shake.

3. Total defocus

Completely defocusing the camera on the scene will turn a literal view of the nightlights into an abstract artistic image consisting solely of a mix of soft 'blobs' of colour. Clearly, you need to turn the autofocus off first for this to work!

4. Time-lapse photography

Finally, a mention of time-lapse photography, which can apply to a wide range of photographic genres and subjects. In city nightlights photography, it can result in a much sped-up view of an urban scene, with traffic moving fast, lights going on and off, and colour/light in the sky changing.

The results can be truly dramatic. Make sure to set the camera up on a sturdy, stable tripod in a location free from traffic vibration. Remember that a 10-second time-lapse clip will need 250 exposures, so allow plenty of time!

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

The ultimate guide to using patterns in photography

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 10:16:19 Z

In a world that sometimes seems full of chaos, it can be reassuring to see that there are also many patterns, sometimes repetitive, sometimes simply one-off, to be picked out from the melee of the world around us.

One of photography's great challenges is to spot those patterns in the natural and artificial worlds and then frame and capture them in a single image.

Therein immediately lies the problem for the photographer. Knowing how to spot such patterns can be difficult, requiring a certain eye that looks beyond the literal scene that lies before us and into the details within that scene, picking out artistic, graphic or repetitive elements.

It's a skill that takes practice and experience, and this article aims to pick out some of the techniques needed, giving pointers for the kinds of things to look out for and then how to frame them in the final images.

So let's dive into the world of patterns in photography.

Patterns in photography: working with chaos

It is a central plank of just about all forms of photography that most of the world—no matter how good it might look—doesn't lend itself to great photography.

We almost always aim to pick out those little vignettes in the world around us that either fall into a great composition or can somehow be 'massaged' by the photographer into a great image.

This is even more true in the world of patterns, where almost inevitably, we're homing in on and picking out details from our environment, focussing the viewer's attention on just that pattern and nothing else.

The implication is that such patterns make up only small portions of the scene in front of us, but this isn't necessarily the case—they can be quite large. Still, they may be barely noticeable as a pattern until separated and isolated from the surrounding world by the photographer's frame.

Examples of such large patterns in photography include a spiral staircase, windows in a large building, or a collection of tall tree trunks in a forest, to name a few.

Before going any further, we need to consider what the term 'pattern' means.

Although the word implies multiple repetitions of the same thing, such as you might have with the windows already mentioned, it can also be a one-off single artistic detail.

This could include the pattern created by oil spreading across water or the ripples and gullies cut by water across the wet sand. These are still patterns, but almost inevitably, every component is unique, with little or no repetition.

Then there is the matter of abstract versus 'real'. Of course, with many patterns, it's perfectly possible to see what that pattern consists of, and that's what we mean by 'real'.

Patterns like the spiral staircase, multiple windows, or forest tree trunks fall within this category. But equally, there are many occasions where a pattern can become just a pattern, with the actual content quite hard to decipher, rendering it abstract.

This can be particularly so for repetitive patterns, where the same thing is reproduced repeatedly—such as with patterns of light and shadow on a building or bristles on the surface of a plant.

Of course, there are occasions when a pattern becomes abstract to many viewers simply because it shows something with which they're unfamiliar, such as the close-up details of a butterfly's wings, making it impossible for them to interpret what they're seeing.

However we define these patterns in photography, whether real or abstract, looking for them in the world around us can be quite challenging. Those photographers who naturally have an artistic or graphic eye will find it easier to spot these patterns than those who see things more literally.

The eye of the artist or designer will almost automatically be drawn to these patterns, almost effortlessly (or so it sometimes seems) isolating them from the chaos and framing them to perfect intent.

But much of what these people do by instinct can be learned by developing an ability to focus on one's vision and then by endless practice.

By this, we mean a lot of study to determine what kinds of environments one is likely to see certain patterns and learning to see potential photographic subjects as a series of juxtaposed and interconnected shapes and lines rather than literal structures. For example—buildings, beaches, feathers, or even a reflection.

And then there is practice, practice, practice. One can read about these things all you want, but it only becomes easier with lots of practice. And that, of course, also means lots of failures.

You often learn more from those images that don't quite work than you do from the truly successful images, provided you're paying attention.

Patterns in the natural world

The most important source of patterns for photography lies in the natural world, and by that, we mean everything created by nature, ranging from the weather, through natural landscapes, to plants and animals.

Just about everything contains the possibility for a pattern somewhere in it, ranging from huge river deltas down to the bristles on an insect's legs. Pattern lies everywhere: it's just a matter of spotting it and then being able to isolate and frame it in some images.

The search for patterns certainly keeps you on your toes, and with quite a wide range of kit needed, ranging from a drone to very wide-angle lenses, to strong telephoto lenses down to macro equipment, all depending on the scale of your pattern.

Drones have come into their own in recent years, enabling aerial photography to pick up on landscape patterns that can be seen only from the air. Check out our guide to drone photography here.

Some of the most dramatic drone-captured patterns include views shot directly downward onto river deltas cutting across the sand in a myriad network of breaking and rejoining channels.

At ground level and using purely standard photographic gear, more patterns in the sand can include expanses of ripples created in wet sand by a combination of waves and tide. This results in wonderful diagonal patterns, most especially visible when shot back-lit by a low sun.

In the forest, parallel lines of tree trunks can create a marvellous pattern, particularly when photographed in still, foggy conditions, when all details are lost, clutter is removed, and the trunks are rendered as simple silhouette outlines.

It's perfectly possible to obtain a great composition by pointing the camera horizontally and having the tree trunks completely vertical and parallel in the frame. But one of the most dramatic compositions can be created by standing right at the foot of the trees and pointing the camera straight up.

Using this technique, the camera points towards a patch of open sky directly above, surrounded by a host of diagonal trees pointing towards that open sky from 360 degrees all around. It's a pattern that doesn't exist in the world but is created artificially using a wide-angle lens.

Still looking upwards, but without the trees to obstruct things, cloud patterns in the sky can be incredibly effective, especially at sunset or sunrise when the clouds may well be coloured.

Depending on the magnitude of the pattern created and the effect you're trying to capture, cloud patterns can be shot with either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens.

One rule to always obey here: photograph only the sky's pattern; don't include any horizon or landscape feature, natural or manufactured.

Macro photographic techniques become important in plant photography, for instance, when homing in on patterns like the hairs on a plant's stem or repeating patterns in a flower's petals.

Another popular subject revolves around water droplets on a leaf surface. Although this does not always show itself as a pattern, this can become so if you pull the camera away from the leaf to reveal a network of water droplets spread across the one leaf.

The animal world abounds with patterns to capture in photography. Although, one can struggle here due to the subject's propensity to run or fly away just as you're about to press the shutter button.

Some well-known animal patterns include the markings on butterfly wings, the colours or light sheen on feathers, and close-ups of a zebra's stripes, which cover a range from macro through to telephoto lens use.

Patterns in the manufactured world

Patterns in the manufactured world tend to be like those in the natural landscape: they're usually relatively static, though they may change (and perhaps disappear altogether) at different times depending on lighting angle and weather.

Such patterns often involve buildings, with some of the most well-known including the already-mentioned multiple windows across a large building, and patterns of light and shadow across a wall, perhaps created by nearby pillars.

Success depends on the photographer resisting the temptation to photograph the whole building and homing in on the one part where the pattern is at its strongest.

Success also depends on a strong contrast between the 'opposing' parts of the pattern, which is usually obvious in the example of sunlight and shadow across a wall. It is also vital in the windows example—they usually need to be quite dark, set against a much lighter wall, or vice versa.

Diagonals are frequently a vital component, as including a coordinated set of such lines adds drama and dynamic energy to what could otherwise feel like a rather static scene.

I use the term 'coordinated set' advisedly as a mass of crisscrossing diagonals results in confusing and distracting clutter. You need a set of diagonals that are either completely parallel or converge towards one point that can be either inside or outside the image frame.

Finally, a few manufactured patterns can be seen as a hybrid between truly manufactured and partially natural. Here I include such things as the shimmering and amazingly colourful pattern created by oil spreading across the water (it's incredible what can be achieved with a bit of pollution) and that created by a reflection, perhaps of a colourful boat, in gently rippling water.

In both examples, I would not photograph the whole scene but would home in on just one facet of the oil or reflection, that part which produces the most artistic or graphic effect.

You may need some trial and error to come up with just the right composition, but what we're aiming for here is a highly abstract and rather fluid (excuse the pun!) merging combination of colours and shapes.

These are just a few examples of what can be possible photographically when you start hunting for patterns within our environment, both natural and manufactured.

Now it's up to you to get out there and practise using the examples we've covered here, and then go on the hunt for others in and around your environment.

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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The ultimate guide to panoramic photography

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:43:44 Z

The creation of panoramic photography has seen quite a surge in popularity in recent years, largely due to improvements in technology and software to make it possible.

The process can be beneficial in several photographic genres, especially landscape photography. Still, there are plenty of pitfalls that make it not always easy and which ensure that success is only sometimes guaranteed.

Here you'll find the main steps towards creating fantastic panoramic images, starting with the photography itself, and finishing with the in-computer processing needed to create the final image.

The techniques described here are for use with a DSLR or mirrorless camera and don't apply to the automatic panoramic feature found in many phone cameras.

Once you've read this, you should be all set to take some fantastic panoramic shots!

What is panoramic photography?

Panoramic photography is the creation of images that usually have an extended rectangular shape, relatively wider than the usual 35mm-type format image we normally get from photography.

Panoramic shots can be created simply by cropping a single standard horizontally framed image, taking a slice off the top and bottom of the image.

However, the more usual method, and one which yields true panoramic images, involves shooting a series of sequential, overlapping images in a sweep across a view and then assembling them into a single image in the computer.

The advantage of the first method is that it is simple and quick and requires no special skill. The downside, however, is that a lot of pixel data is thrown away, resulting in an image file significantly smaller than the original standard image.

On the other hand, the 'full' panoramic technique—because it results from a combination of images—is significantly larger than a single image could ever be, often five to six times larger, hugely increasing its scope for use.

Furthermore, capturing a view in a series of overlapping images will usually make it possible to encapsulate in a single panoramic a much wider view than could ever be possible for a single image, regardless of the type of lens used.

Before digital photography was developed, you could only achieve panoramic photography through the use of film in a specially designed (and hence rather expensive) camera dedicated purely to panoramic shots.

In recent years, however, post-photography processing software has improved so much that you can assemble a series of images shot on a standard digital camera into a flawless panoramic image in which it is impossible to see 'the joins'. It has become a single image for all intents and purposes, rendering dedicated panoramic cameras redundant.

Basic in-camera techniques

The first step in panoramic photography is identifying scenes that lend themselves to this format.

Not all scenes work well, but typically those that are long (as in left-to-right) and perhaps low-lying, at least relative to their left-right length, creating a long, 'rectangular' kind of overall composition, are the classic panoramic subjects.

Having identified your scene, you can then line up the camera and take a sequence of overlapping images, panning the camera from left to right or vice versa.

The first impulse in doing this is often to hold the camera in the horizontal position. Many novices start their panoramic life this way, but it has several drawbacks.

Firstly, it is better to hold the camera vertically. Holding the camera horizontally ensures that the vertical height of the final image will be quite limited, something that can become even worse if slight misalignments of successive images result in the need for significant cropping of the final panoramic.

Secondly, hand-holding the camera almost guarantees there will be misalignments between successive images, increasing the amount of final stage cropping.

It is also very hard to hold the camera perfectly level throughout a series of successive shots, resulting in such issues as horizons sloping at slightly different angles in each image.

At best, corrections will have to be made to each image post-photography before attempting to merge them. At worst, the software may need help to merge the images into a sensible panoramic.

So, always shoot your panoramic base images with the camera held vertically to maximise the image height. Doing this will mean you'll need to take more images in your sweep across the scene, but that is fine.

If you feel you have to hold the camera, make sure it (and hence any horizon) is level before you take each successive shot. Better still, mount the camera vertically on a tripod.

When doing this, ensure the tripod itself and its head are level, and that the camera is completely level on its mount. Once set up, it should be possible to rotate the camera across the scene without it budging even one degree from the level.

Having your camera set up and ready to go, go through the following steps.

1. Use a lens with a focal length of no less than about 35mm. Using a shorter focal length lens (and hence with a wider angle of view) than this is likely to result in distortion in the corners of each image, making it hard for the computer software to subsequently merge the images accurately.

2. Set the focus point to the part of the scene where you want it to be, and then turn the autofocus off. The camera will now keep the focus at the same distance through every image in the sequence.

3. Measure the lighting and the exposure somewhere in the middle of the scene, ensuring the camera is in shutter-priority or aperture-priority mode. Then switch the camera to manual and manually set the measured lens aperture and shutter speed. The camera will now shoot the same exposure for every image.

4. Do a series of practice sweeps to ensure everything is lined up correctly. Make sure to include extra space left and right, and top and bottom, to allow for cropping of the final image.

5. Execute your sweep of images, with about a 30% overlap between each successive image. This ensures the computer has plenty of duplicate material to match up when working out how to merge the images.

You can shoot in either Jpeg or Raw formats.

Objects near and far

The method described above works well for subjects where everything is at an optical infinity distance from the camera. In other words, everything is more than about 30 metres away.

When you start photographing subjects with elements closer than this—they create a foreground—you may have to work in a rather more exacting way.

The problem is that as the camera rotates around either the tripod head or your body (if you're holding the camera), the relative juxtapositions of elements in the foreground change.

This means that objects close to the camera will be in slightly different positions relative to each other in each successive image of your sequence. This is called parallax error, and it can create serious problems for the panoramic software, making it difficult for it to stitch the images together.

The solution is to work on how the lens—not the camera body—rotates. In the method described in the last section, the lens rotates around the camera if mounted on a tripod directly above the tripod head, or around you if you're holding it.

You must mount the camera on a tripod to remove the parallax error and rotate the lens-camera combination around the lens's nodal point.

This is the optical centre of the lens, not necessarily the physical centre. It requires the lens-camera combination to be mounted on a sliding rail to slide the whole lot back and forth to have the right point of the lens directly above the rotating centre of the tripod head.

Every lens has its own nodal point. Before starting any panoramic photography that includes elements in a foreground less than 30 metres away, you'll need to experiment to establish the nodal point for each lens you are likely to use.

As already mentioned, when a lens rotates around a point that is not its nodal point, the relative positions of nearby elements in the scene will change.

Once you've moved the lens-camera combination back on the rail to the right spot, all those nearby elements in the foreground will stay in one position no matter how much you rotate the camera. You've found the nodal point!

If all this sounds way too complicated and time-consuming, I sympathise. It is perfectly possible to concentrate on shooting only views with no foreground elements where the entire scene is more than 30 metres away.

Furthermore, as panoramic software continuously improves, it is worth experimenting to see whether it copes with parallax error and then stitches the images together correctly without all the nodal point hassle!

Post-photography image processing

The post-photography processing of the images is now quite straightforward, thanks to huge advances in the software.

The method described here assumes Adobe Photoshop (with or without Lightroom), though other image processing programs also have panoramic software.

The first step is downloading the images from the camera to a computer and then preparing them.

You'll need to convert the images to Tiff or Jpeg format if you shot in Raw format. If you make any changes to the images, such as colour temperature, contrast, saturation, sharpening etc., make the same changes to all the images.

To do this, select one of the images—probably one in the middle of the sequence—make the desired changes to that image, and then apply the changes in one go to all the images.

If you shot the images in Jpeg, you may not need to make any changes, but if you do, then again, make sure you apply the same changes to every image.

To start the process in Photoshop, click on 'File' (top left of the screen), then in the dropdown menu 'Automate', then 'Photomerge'. This will open the Photomerge dialogue box.

Click 'Browse', find your image sequence on the computer, and select them. They will now appear listed in the dialogue box. You can use either Tiff or Jpeg images.

On the left of the dialogue box is a list of different styles of Photomerge. Just stick with the default 'Auto'. At the bottom of the box are several tick boxes. The only one that must be ticked is 'Blend Images Together'.

You should also tick 'Vignette Removal' as this will remove any darkening that might be present in the corners of each image. 'Content Aware Fill Transparent Areas' can also be useful.

In merging the images, there will always be a little mismatching, resulting in a ragged edge to the assembling panoramic and some empty peripheral blank areas.

Ticking this latter box tells the software to fill these blank patches with what it believes would be appropriate, and since such peripheral areas are often sky, grass or rock, it more often than not does a good job.

Once you've made your selections, hit 'OK' and sit back.

The photo merging/panoramic assembly can take some time, depending on the number of images, file sizes and the power of your computer. Eventually, it'll produce a draft image, in which all the separate images can be seen as components of the final panoramic, each arranged in a separate layer.

Often you can see 'cracks' where the separate image components meet, and unless you ticked 'Content Aware Fill Transparent Areas', the edges of the panoramic will appear quite ragged.

If you're happy with the general appearance of this draft image, flatten the layers into a single background layer by clicking on 'Layer', then 'Flatten Image'.

This will flatten all those image components into a single layer, making any white 'cracks' disappear. The final job is to crop off the panoramic's ragged edges.

Congratulations! You've finished processing your first panoramic image.

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

If you're heading out to take some landscape panorama shots, you may also want to protect your camera and accessories through specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe, we arrange bespoke cover that can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an online quote today.

The essential features of every digital camera

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 10:20:28 Z

Today's digital camera features allow us to perform tasks we could only dream of a few years ago. And they're all within a very neat, ergonomically designed little package.

Unfortunately, that's where the trouble starts because today, even the 'simplest' digital camera comes loaded with so many features, functions and gimmicks that anyone but the most tech-savvy camera geek is likely to be overwhelmed.

Remarkably, most photographers—even professionals—will never touch many of these digital camera features. The majority will only be used once when the camera is brand new and needs to be set up.

A further collection will be used from time to time, in special situations or for unusual subjects or lighting.

There are only a handful of functions that you will use throughout a typical session, which lie at the real heart of the photographic (and sometimes creative) process.

They are almost universal to every digital camera type on the market, including:

compact
bridge
mirrorless
DSLR

All that varies from one camera model to another is how you access and use those features.

Here you'll find everything you need to know about the essential digital camera features and how to use them. You'll just need to figure out how to access them on your particular camera—with the camera's manual's help if necessary.

ISO: the sensor's sensitivity

This much-used acronym stands for the International Organization for Standardization, and in photography, it refers to a measurement of the sensitivity of the camera's sensor to light.

This is measured along an arbitrary scale, usually with a range of about 100-5600 on consumer camera models, up to several thousand more for professional models.

The higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor is and the less light it needs to capture an image. It might seem a good idea to keep the camera set permanently on a high ISO setting, but this is not so. As the ISO setting rises, image quality deteriorates due to increasing graininess, usually called 'noise'.

On the vast majority of cameras today, from smartphone cameras right up to professional-level DSLRs, the camera is set by default at 'Auto ISO', which means that the camera automatically chooses what it considers the best ISO for the lighting conditions.

As a result, the ISO will rise significantly in low light situations, enabling you to keep shooting with the camera hand-held (rather than on a tripod), but with the trade-off that the images will be of much lower quality due to the rising level of high ISO noise.

This auto-ISO is fine if all you want is photographic snaps, but if you want to be able to shoot high-quality creative photography, you must be in control of your photography, not the camera.

It's important to take the camera off auto-ISO and set it to one of the lowest ISO settings available—usually 100.

To maximise both image quality and your options for creative photography, I recommend that the ISO stays fixed at this low number.

It's a good idea to place the camera onto a tripod when light levels drop, only raising the ISO when there is no other way to obtain useful images—such as for sport and wildlife photography. You decide when the ISO needs to be raised, not the camera.

Shutter speed and lens aperture: the shooting programmes

With the ISO set at a fixed point, the amount of light needed to correctly expose the sensor is pretty much fixed regardless of the lighting conditions.

You then need a system that controls the amount of light passing from the outside world through the lens and shutter to the sensor. In bright, sunny conditions, this will greatly restrict the amount of light coming through to stop the sensor from being overwhelmed with too much light, while at night, it will do what it can to gather as much light as possible.

That system is the job of the lens aperture and shutter. The former is the variable hole in the lens that controls the light that can pass through at any given moment.

The shutter is the screen that normally closes the sensor off from the world and opens only for a brief moment whenever the shutter button is pressed. This allows light to pass through the sensor for anything from a fraction of a second to 30 minutes or more.

The lens aperture and shutter must work together to ensure that the right amount of light gets through to the sensor, and controlling this is the job of the shooting programmes. This system typically comes with a choice of such settings as Auto (or P), S (Tv on Canon cameras), A, M and Bulb.

The Auto/P mode is a fully automatic system that chooses what it considers to be the right combination of lens aperture and shutter speed for the situation.

This is fine for simply shooting snaps, but again it puts control of your photography in the camera's hands, not yours. So it's better to use one of the semi-automatic modes, namely A or S/Tv.

The former stands for 'aperture priority'; in this mode, you can choose the lens aperture, and the camera works out the correct shutter speed. Conversely, S or Tv represents 'shutter priority', meaning that you choose the shutter speed, and the camera works out the corresponding correct lens aperture.

Each of these semi-automatic modes has separate uses. Shutter priority is important, for example, if you want to ensure that the camera uses a fast enough shutter speed to freeze fast action. Aperture priority comes into its own when the shutter speed is less important but when the depth of field—the amount of an image that is sharply in focus—is critical.

With the M (manual) option, you can choose both shutter speed and lens aperture. This doesn't mean you can choose whatever you want—you must balance the two to ensure that the sensor receives the right amount of light.

Have the lens aperture too wide open or the shutter speed too slow, for example, and the sensor will receive too much light, resulting in an over-exposed image.

All the above modes usually allow for shutter speeds of up to 30 seconds. What happens if you need a longer exposure? This is where the Bulb mode comes in.

Setting the camera to Bulb allows you to leave the shutter open as long as you like—up to several hours if necessary. This is one of the few functions in this article that is not quite universal to all digital cameras: many compact cameras do not have this function, though most others do.

Understanding and using the histogram

The histogram is a hugely underrated feature that many photographers run away from, frightened by its resemblance to school maths. But it's wonderfully simple to understand and use and is my go-to tool to check with virtually every image whether or not it has been correctly exposed.

Every image you shoot comes with its own histogram or graph, which you can view on your camera's LCD screen within seconds of pressing the shutter. It can also be seen on your computer monitor once the images have been downloaded.

It records the range of tonal gradations across the image, i.e. shades of grey (even if the image doesn't appear to contain any grey as such), NOT colours.

These range along the horizontal axis from completely black on the left, through lightening shades of grey in the middle, to completely white on the right of the graph, representing respectively completely dark shadow areas and brilliantly white highlights, both containing no image detail. The graph's height at any point indicates the proportion of pixels with a particular tonal value.

The histogram is important in determining if an image is well-exposed and should be looked at on the camera's LCD screen every time an image is shot. It is the best way of determining whether an image has been well exposed. Simply looking at the image on the LCD screen is not an accurate assessment.

The histogram for a well-exposed image stretches across the horizontal axis, indicating a range of tonal values and hence a good contrast range. Still, without spilling into either the black or white ends—nothing in the image is lost in completely black shadow areas or burned-out white highlights. All possible image detail has been captured.

When an image is under-exposed, the histogram will show a spike at the lefthand, black end of the scale. It is said to be 'clipped' at the shadow end, meaning that some of the image has been lost in black shadows and cannot be rescued.

Conversely, when an image is over-exposed, there will be a spike at the righthand, highlights, and end of the scale. The histogram is clipped in the highlights, with no detail captured in the burned-out whites.

The image histogram is available in just about all cameras. However, in some models—particularly those aimed at the more basic end—it may be buried deep in the menus and may be quite a trial to find and activate.

Some cameras also come with a 'live' histogram, showing the tonal range of the actual scene before shooting. This is useful as it lets you check for correct exposure before pressing the shutter button.

Exposure compensation

It's quite common to generate an image in which the histogram indicates the image is either under-exposed or over-exposed. In the former, the histogram is too far to the left, while in the latter, it's too far to the right.

In either case, the result is that the affected pixels have captured no image data and so will be blank black in an under-exposed image, or blank white in an over-exposed image, no matter what you do to the image in the computer post-photography.

This was caused by the camera's exposure meter being fooled into giving an incorrect exposure reading by either some very dark or very bright area in the scene.

This problem can be overcome using the exposure compensation facility, a tool found in all digital cameras. Almost all camera models have a horizontal scale ranging (usually) from -3 to +3, with the default setting in the middle, at zero.

When set at zero, the camera will shoot the scene using whatever shutter speed and lens aperture combination its exposure meter decides will give the correct exposure.

The plus and minus numbers refer to the number of 'stops' by which the exposure can be over or under-exposed: +1 means that the image will be over-exposed by one stop, i.e. the amount of light entering the camera will be doubled. -2 means that the image will be under-exposed by two stops; i.e. it will reduce the amount of light entering the camera four-fold. You do not have to over or under-expose by whole stops—the scale does allow for fractions of a stop.

If the camera's exposure meter is inaccurate, resulting in an over- or under-exposed image, you can change the setting on the exposure compensation scale. This usually involves turning a dial on the camera body.

Suppose an image is over-exposed, resulting in burned-out highlights. In that case, you need to under-expose the image relative to what the camera's exposure meter says the correct exposure should be.

First, get an exposure reading from the camera's exposure meter and set the exposure compensation scale to a minus figure. This will under-expose the image relative to the camera's exposure meter reading and shift the histogram to the left, reducing the number of pixels burning out.

Conversely, to over-expose an image that is too dark, take an exposure reading and set the exposure compensation scale to a plus figure. This will shift the histogram to the right, reducing the number of black pixels.

Finally, note that the exposure compensation facility is for use if you're shooting in fully or partially automatic exposure modes. If you're shooting fully manual, you set whatever shutter speed and lens aperture you believe to be correct for the scene being photographed without using the exposure compensation facility.

Controlling white balance

For a digital camera to accurately register colours and represent them the same way we see them, it must know what the light source is so it can set a 'white balance'.

This series of settings ensures that white will always look white to us regardless of the 'colour temperature' of the light source. Once the white setting is correct, all other colours will be rendered accurately.

All digital cameras come with a white balance tool that includes a range of white balance settings appropriate for different light sources, enabling it to read the correct colour temperatures. There is also an auto white balance setting, which automatically detects the light source's colour temperature and sets the white balance accordingly. This is generally accurate for outdoor photography but less for indoor shooting.

Generally, we recommend photographers use the auto white balance setting when shooting outdoors. It saves remembering to change every time the sun goes behind a cloud.

So, these are the most universally important digital camera tools. Having a firm grasp of how to use these will see any photographer a long way down the road towards using their camera to its fullest potential.

There are, of course, a few other tools used by many photographers, but some are found only in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. This is particularly so with focussing points and metering modes.

The former enables you to select different numbers and combinations of focussing squares within the scene to control what part(s) of the scene the lens will focus on. The latter gives options to meter the light across the whole scene, just a central portion, or simply the very centre.

While potentially useful, I keep these set by default on a central cluster of focussing points and 'whole scene' (or evaluative) light metering. I rarely move off these for the simple reason that rather than helping with the photography, fiddling with these often wastes time.

Never be distracted from the essentials of the photographic process, but have fun playing with different digital camera settings!

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

If you're heading out to master these essential digital camera features, you may also want to protect your camera and accessories through specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe, we arrange bespoke cover that can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an online quote today.

How to become a professional photographer

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:00:00 Z

It is a widely held dream among many amateur photographers to turn their passion into something much more by learning how to become a professional photographer.

What could be better than making a living from what you love most in life, achieved while working as your boss and to your own rules?

There is good and bad news for those wanting to make that leap. The good news is, firstly, that with our lives filled with imagery, there appears to be an almost insatiable demand for photography.

Secondly, in the UK, photography is a completely unregulated business. Anyone with or without training can declare themselves a professional photographer and start promoting their services. There is no requirement for any initial time-consuming and expensive training and qualifications.

The bad news is that professional photography has become a hugely popular area to move into, making it an extremely competitive field that is difficult to succeed in. For those that do manage it, however, it is a hugely rewarding field to work in, providing very flexible work and personal lifestyle.

Let's look at some steps you can take to make it happen.

Choosing photographic genres

Before making any significant moves towards becoming a professional photographer, you must decide exactly which form or forms of photography you want to specialise in. Photography is a wide-ranging field, and it is just about impossible to be skilled in all of them – or enjoy all of them.

Decide what areas of photography you're best at and which you most enjoy (the two usually coincide), and opt to focus mostly on those.

Do you like to photograph people? Do weddings appeal? How about product photography for advertising projects? Or maybe buildings, both inside and outside, for architects or estate agents.

Or perhaps you'd rather cover some international destinations, whether tropical beaches or icy fjords? Or maybe you want to capture the beauty and diversity of the world's wildlife? Or you might fancy the adrenaline rush of breaking news photography, whether close to home or far away?

The type(s) of photography you decide to move into will greatly impact the types of clients you'll appeal to. They generally fall into two broad categories: the public and business.

For example, most of your clients will be the public if you opt to become a wedding photographer. In contrast, if you go into product photography, they'll be almost exclusively businesses.

In some genres, you're likely to attract a mix of both: a social or portrait photographer, for example, may be of interest to both members of the public and certain types of business.

Who buys photography?

The genre(s) of photography you decide to specialise in will have a huge influence on the types of clients you market yourself to.

If you intend to be a wedding photographer then, of course, your clients will be not only members of the public, but most especially younger people. At the other end of the scale, a news photographer will deal mainly with news outlets, agencies, newspapers and magazines (both print and digital).

The lesson is to ensure that as you make your photographic genre choices, you understand what your probable market will look like, how it functions and how you can insert yourself into it. Understanding how to make those first steps and who to is critical to maximising your chances of success.

As already mentioned, wedding photographers will be of greatest interest to younger members of the adult public. This will overlap to some extent with portrait/social photographers, who, of course, can be of interest to a wide range of adult age groups and corporate bodies looking to have staff portraits and publicity shots.

Suppose you decide to head for fashion or advertising. In that case, your clients will be businesses, not just those companies producing or importing products or services, but also the advertising and design agencies representing them.

It can sometimes be difficult to know who to market yourself to in this field: some manufacturing or service companies source photography themselves, and others leave it to the advertising or design companies they outsource to. The obvious answer then is to approach both sides of this equation.

Travel photographers may find themselves in a similar situation, wanting to directly promote themselves to travel companies (including hotels, airlines and tour companies) and their advertising/design agencies.

Quite often, however, travel, landscape, nature and news photographers will need to approach publishers (magazines, books and newspapers – both print and online) and photo agencies/libraries as some of their main outlets.

I have to say here that, unfortunately, magazines and newspapers have declined in recent years. The number of publications and the pay rates available has dropped significantly due to an oversupply of images, high competition and a drop in demand for publications (particularly print).

Selling through photo libraries

One of the most popular professional or semi-professional photography routes for those working in the travel, lifestyle, landscape, wildlife and news photography fields is to supply photo agencies/libraries.

These work as a resource for photography buyers by holding a photographer's images and then licensing their use to those buyers, who can include a huge range of clients, including magazines, newspapers, advertisers, designers, travel companies and academic institutions.

It can be a huge boon to photographers who want to photograph and not be bothered with the hassle of marketing to an enormous body of potential clients. In contrast, a library allows clients to source a huge selection of off-the-shelf images in just one place.

Some popular online libraries include:

Any photographer thinking of going down this route must remember that making headway with any library requires thousands of images. Having just a few dozen images to offer up won't even get you in the door, and to become visible on most libraries' websites requires at least 500 images. To start making reasonable sales requires at least a couple of thousand.

Each time an image is licensed, the client receives a license to use it (with or without certain conditions on the image's usage), while copyright remains with the photographer. Depending on the type of license granted, any given image can be licensed many times over, resulting in the potential for some good earnings.

Those earnings are shared between the library and the photographer. A few years ago, that was almost universally a fair 50-50 split. But, recently, the libraries have become increasingly greedy, repeatedly cutting the photographer's share. It is as little as 20% with some of them.

They cite their high costs as justification for this, conveniently overlooking the fact that the photographers have high costs too!

Furthermore, although demand for photography is extremely high, supply has become even higher, resulting in a major decline in fees available from this kind of library licensing model, making it – for the time being at least – a difficult area to make a workable income.

Important considerations when becoming a professional photographer

Before taking the plunge, there are a couple of general points that you need to bear in mind so that you're well prepared in advance.

#1 - A step-by-step transition

No matter what genre(s) of photography you decide to specialise in or who your clients are likely to be, your transition from amateur to professional photographer is unlikely to happen overnight. Don't give up the day job too quickly!

You'll need to build an attractive portfolio and body of work and increase your profile and visibility with a range of possible clients. To achieve the former, you may need to undertake some personal projects or do a few jobs for free for friends and relatives.

Hopefully, you'll also be able to start doing a few jobs that earn some money as a sideline to your daytime job but increasingly become more significant as you work towards being a full-time professional.

#2 - The professional mindset

It is often assumed that the way you go about your photography is the same whether you're an amateur or a professional, but nothing could be further from the truth.

I have seen many amateur photographers labour endlessly and exhaustively to ensure they get their subject's perfect composition and exposure. This is fantastic if you want a single perfect, stunning image.

However, while this might also apply to some forms of professional photography some of the time, more often than not, there isn't the time to labour over a single image.

Shooting professional projects often requires collecting a wide range and number of high-quality, though not necessarily perfect images, shot to a tight deadline and an even tighter budget.

They'll often be designed around a client's brief, not your own personal tastes. Much of the time, you don't have the luxury of being able to indulge yourself in creating the perfect image of a single subject. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but it is essential in the drive to please clients, pay one's bills and make a profit.

For this reason, many professional photographers will run their own personal projects on the side, ones in which they do spend the time to create the perfect single image.

Such images usually don't contribute directly to the income stream, but posted in the right places can help get the photographer noticed among the hordes of professionals, helping – in theory at least – to attract further clients.

#3 - Being a business

The great majority of professional photographers work by themselves in self-employment. No matter how much you consider photography a vocational or artistic calling, this is a business, and you'll need to present yourself as such.

Quite apart from the public window kind of material, such as websites, logo, letter heading, branding and so on, there are also all the legal and financial things such as accounting, tax and professional insurance that have to be put in place then managed.

It can be time-consuming stuff that takes you away from the very thing that got you into this in the first place, but it has to be done.

The work to get noticed and attract clients is even more time-consuming, potentially. Multiple social media accounts all have an important role to play, but exactly which ones work for you will depend on who your clients are (e.g. public versus business).

Then there is the labour of making direct approaches to potential clients, especially business clients, all of which can be time-consuming and stressful.

Linked to all this is the need for a tip-top website, one that showcases the best of your work and acts as your universal portfolio to which you can direct would-be clients. You must have a website (preferably with your own domain name) that you have complete control over and can fully update at any time as new, better and more up-to-date photography comes on hand.

Hopefully, as you become more established and well known, you'll be able to reduce the amount of promotion needed, freeing up more time for actual photography.

But it will always be there as an ongoing part of your business. Best to try to enjoy it – especially the social media aspects that involve posting your latest photography.

#4 - Training

It is quite common to come to professional photography as a self-taught photographer, but increasing numbers arrive via various academic photography courses.

These are hugely useful in rapidly learning techniques, often done using equipment and facilities that the lone photographer would struggle to afford. However, just how good many of these courses are at really preparing someone for life in the business of photography is open to question.

Training is not something you do just while preparing to become a professional photographer. As in many walks of life, there is a need for training to continue long after you've entered the professional world.

There are always new techniques and equipment to learn about, and alternative possibilities for ways to get noticed.

Membership in professional photography bodies can give access to certain types of courses. However, many one-day and evening workshops are still available even if you don't join any of these.

It should be borne in mind that those courses put on by equipment manufacturers aim primarily at persuading you to buy their latest kit, which is not necessarily the right avenue for you. They may, however, contain nuggets of important information that make them worthwhile.

Remember that many of the most useful workshops are not specifically about photography but about how to run and promote a business, which local government bodies may put on.

#5 - Motivation and persistence

Finally, a word about the drive you need to succeed and keep going no matter how difficult things might sometimes be.

As already mentioned, most professional photographers are self-employed and work mostly alone. This works well often, but it can sometimes be hard even for a true loner.

Success doesn't always come easily; even when you achieve success, it is not guaranteed to continue all the time.

There will be ups and downs, and through it all, it is essential for you to believe in your work and creativity, to have confidence that you are producing top-quality imaging and that success is simply a matter of finding the right clients for your style of work.

Motivation, persistence and self-belief can greatly benefit from getting access to a network of supporters, people like you who believe in photography and your work in particular.

Quite apart from friends and family, that should also mean other photographers. Membership in one of the professional photography bodies can help greatly with this, as can some online social media groups or loose affiliations with fellow photographers in your neighbourhood.

Professional photography bodies in the UK include:

So if you want to make that step from amateur to professional photographer, get stuck in.

Don't expect it to happen overnight or to be plain sailing, but if you're good at what you do and believe in yourself, then the right preparation, steps, and a positive outlook will carry you through to success.

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To learn more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance with Ripe Photography

Becoming a professional photographer is exciting, but the unthinkable can happen when you're constantly using your equipment on the go. That's why you may want to protect it with specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe Photography, we arrange theft and accidental damage cover up to the value of £30,000 for portable equipment you use when shooting on location and up to £60,000 in total.

You'll also benefit from EU or Worldwide cover as an optional extra, so your equipment is covered against theft and accidental damage while travelling.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an instant online quote today.

Get an instant quote today

Drone photography: shooting from the sky

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 14:53:57 Z

In recent years, drone photography has really taken off. The entire field of aerial photography has been revolutionised by the advent of camera-equipped drones, turning what was once a very niche form of photography into something available to a wide range of photographers.

Gone is the dependence on aeroplanes and helicopters, replaced by these small pilotless aircraft, easily controlled by a single person on the ground.

Today, obtaining unusual viewpoints of familiar subjects is perfectly feasible, ranging from a raised angle, as if looking from a hillside, to direct downward views that can result in extremely effective, if slightly disconcerting, compositions.

Moreover, many structures that cannot be seen in their entirety at ground level suddenly become perfectly viewable and wholly more understandable when seen from the air.

In short, a new host of possibilities have opened up with the dawn of the drone age. Exciting new compositions have been created for landscape and travel photographers, as well as commercial options for such people as estate agents, architects, land surveyors and farmers, not to mention movie and advertisement makers.

Drones come in at quite a range of prices, starting at a few hundred pounds and reaching up to several tens of thousands. It all depends on what you want to do with it and how deep your pockets are. Let's start by considering some drone photography basics.

What is a drone?

At its most basic, a drone is any unmanned, remotely controlled aircraft, which can vary in size from just a few centimetres across to several metres. However, we're looking at devices about 12-100 cm across for photographic purposes.

They are generally powered by several vertically mounted motors that drive horizontal propellers, usually four in smaller drones. These are sometimes known as quadcopters.

An essential adjunct is a remote controller, which communicates with the drone to control its flight path. The distance over which the two can communicate with one other is critical. In the past, some of the cheapest drones had communication distances of only a few hundred metres, but today even the simplest generally stretch to several kilometres.

Although many controllers have no screen to show you what the drone is seeing, they usually have a mobile phone or tablet connection, which you can use for this purpose.

When it comes to drone photography, it is tempting to want to buy a drone without a camera and then mount it on your DSLR or mirrorless device. However, this comes with several problems, the most significant of which is weight, plus the resulting additional power needed to lift the drone and camera off the ground.

Then there is, of course, the risk of losing your precious camera should the drone crash.

Although such powerful, camera-free drones are available, they come at quite a cost premium, so for most of us with a tight budget, it makes a lot more sense to go with a drone with a built-in camera.

This option reduces weight and cost significantly, and although it does come with a few photographic compromises, it is by far the best option for the great majority of photographers. More on the cameras later.

What to look for in a drone

Whilst it is generally true that the more you pay, the more features you get, there is also some variation in price around models with seemingly similar specifications.

Not surprisingly, various features are emphasised to different degrees in different models, which often determines the price. It would help if you looked at these closely and decided what is important to you. Here are a few of the most important points to look at:

1. Build quality versus weight

While you don't want a drone built like a tank, neither do you want one that is flimsy and will fall apart the first time you give it a rough landing.

One feature to consider is whether or not there are integral propeller guards that will protect the blades from damage during a bad landing. Going against sturdy construction is overall weight, as this is important when it comes to the regulations for the use of drones (see below).

Those weighing less than 250g are subject to less stringent rules, so it is interesting to see the number of models coming in just a scratch less than this magic number.

2. Battery power

Drones use rechargeable Lithium batteries, which provide a relatively long-lasting power supply. That said, most can still manage only 30-40 minutes in the air, some less than this. So flight time on a single charge is a major issue and one that needs to be closely considered when looking at what drone to buy, along with the availability of spare batteries and charging times.

3. Communication and control

Every drone is supplied with a remote controller, the two of which communicate via radio signals, with a range of several kilometres.

Of course, a great fear is always the potential of losing control over the drone or losing power while in flight. Still, in today's drones, these are greatly minimised, not only by the long communication distances possible but also by some specific safety features, especially the Return to Home (RTH) feature found on most.

Through this, the drone monitors its power consumption, and when it gets too low, it will automatically direct the drone to return to its take-off point. Many remote controllers also come fitted with an RTH button: hit this, and the drone will immediately return to you.

As already mentioned, the lack of a monitor on most remote controllers is overcome by a facility to plug in a smartphone that will connect to the drone's camera, enabling the operator to see exactly what the drone's camera is looking at. It is also often possible to plug in a tablet for a larger view.

This ability to see what the drone's camera is seeing is called First Person View, and you can enhance it by plugging into the controller a virtual reality headset. Doing this puts the operator right there with the drone, hugely enhancing the flying experience.

Unfortunately, it is also not an entirely safe thing to do, as the view is inevitably only two-dimensional and provides no view beyond the limits of the camera's field of vision.

4. GPS control

Many control features are enabled through the advanced global positioning systems (GPS) and are now installed in just about all drones.

The RTH feature, of course, relies totally on this, as does a drone's ability to hover with such incredible precision that photography, even with exposure times of several seconds, is perfectly feasible.

The Follow Me feature in some drones is also tied to the GPS systems. Set this up, and the drone will follow the operator wherever they go, keeping the camera fixed on them.

This feature has been effectively used in several fields, especially sports, including skateboarding, cycling and skiing. The resulting imagery of the athletes in action can be quite dramatic.

5. Useful phone apps

Control of the drone can be further extended by a plethora of smartphone apps, which can give control of both the flight and the camera to the smartphone. However, not all apps are equal, and not all apps will work on all phones or drones, so it is important to access the right apps.

Additional apps are available to provide maps, weather details, and information on no-fly zones and flight plans, to name a few.

6. Camera mounting

How the camera is mounted to the drone is critical for safety, security, and stability. Vibration is an inevitable issue, both from the motors and any wind, and if this reaches the camera, it will manifest itself in poorer quality images.

The only solution is a good quality gimbal, a mount that includes a gyroscopic head, something that will keep the camera rock steady regardless of any vibration.

7. The camera

With the weight at an absolute premium, not surprisingly, a drone's camera typically makes several compromises on versatility and features.

Most have a fixed focal-length lens, usually set at a wide-angle view roughly equivalent to 20-24 mm on a full-frame DSLR. A few do have a zoom facility, but this is usually at the expense of image quality.

Sensor size is also reduced, but today's sensors offer up large pixel counts, often over 40 megapixels (MP), though many still come in at just around 20 MP. Despite the limitations, stills and video quality can be extremely good.

Drone technology is pushing the latter's boundaries, most offering good quality 4K video, and some providing 5K or even 6K video output. Onboard image storage is usually via microSD cards, with transmission back to a mobile phone also possible for some models and at some resolutions.

Apart from the limitations, the cameras offer features that would be standard on most DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, including variable ISO, the ability to shoot in Jpeg and RAW formats, auto-bracketing of exposures and high-speed shooting bursts.

Some also offer high dynamic range (HDR) photography, making it possible to shoot high contrast scenes without any of the highlights burning out.

Drone photography techniques

With so many things to think about simultaneously when undertaking drone photography, starting with ensuring that it stays in the air, it's not surprising that there might be a temptation to forget basic photographic skills.

However, all the usual photographic rules of exposure, lighting and composition still apply. This includes things such as 'less is more', simplicity in composition, and the rule of two-thirds, to name the most obvious.

The raised viewpoint gained through the use of a drone is still novel. Coupled with the usual wide-angle view of a drone camera, it fits in well with the generation of stunning images that can use such landscape features as:

diagonal walls
roads
streams
hedges
fences

They can all be used to huge effect from this raised viewpoint.

Also important is the view that looks directly downward, resulting in some truly stunning compositions. These are views we never normally see, and the results can sometimes be a little disconcerting to the human brain used at most to some downward angle that provides a certain amount of depth and clarity as to which way is up and which down. The directly downward view provides none of that.

With the drone's hover facility made steady by the GPS, time-lapse sequences are now possible, with the images perfectly aligned.

Similarly, long exposures, such as at dusk and dawn, generating moody images and previously possible using only a camera firmly anchored to the ground on a tripod, are now perfectly possible. This technology has become a complete game changer for atmospheric landscape photography.

Drone photography rules and regulations

No discussion of drone photography would be complete without a look at the host of regulations that cover drone usage.

Across the world, virtually every country has regulations governing the use of drones. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulates all aircraft movements in British airspace in the UK.

Being such a new field, the regulations are still evolving, but a complete revamp in 2020 clarified things and greatly reduced the distinction between professional and amateur usage.

The most fundamental rule is that – with a few exceptions - anyone flying anything but the smallest of drones must have a Flyer ID. Everyone responsible for maintaining a drone must have an Operator ID, both obtainable from the CAA. Of course, the flyer and the operator will often be the same person, requiring them to have two IDs.

There are then three different categories of usage, the most important one from the perspective of amateur photographers being the Open category. Drones and their flyers able to fly in this category do not need to obtain flight approval from the CAA for each flight. Though there is a list of rules to obey, and it may require some qualifications.

The Open category is subdivided into A1, A2 and A3. A1 covers toy drones and those under the magic weight of 250g, allowing them to be flown directly over people for short periods.

A2 and A3 cover larger drones and requires them to stay a certain horizontal distance away from people and built-up zones. Those distances can be reduced for those flyers willing to take a short course to obtain a Certificate of Competency.

The CAA has also announced a classification system for drones, ranging from C0 to C4. The smallest drones will fall into the C0 and C1 categories and be allowed to fly in the A1 division of the Open category. C3 and C4 drones will be limited to A2 and A3.

The system comes into effect in January 2023, so if buying a drone before then, it is important to check that it already has a C classification.

Apart from these specific categories and classifications, there are several general rules that all drone flyers and operators are expected to obey. These include the need to fly safely and responsibly, respect people's privacy on the ground, maintain a direct line of sight to the drone at all times, and absolutely no flights higher than 120 metres (400 ft).

Finally, anyone flying a drone has to stay well away from no-fly zones. Not surprisingly, these include the space around any form of airport, no matter how small, military zones, nuclear sites, and parts of some national parks.

Becoming a drone photographer

So armed with all this information, it is now possible to launch off into this revolutionary field of drone photography and the exciting new horizons it offers.

Huge advances in technology in recent years, along with simplification of the regulations, now make it accessible to a wide swathe of amateur and professional photographers and videographers. Far from being a flash-in-the-pan fad, drone photography is here to stay as a significant arm of the photography world.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To learn more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance with Ripe Photography

Drone photography is exciting, but the unthinkable can happen when you use your equipment on the go. That's why you may want to consider specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe Photography, we arrange theft and accidental damage cover up to the value of £30,000 for portable equipment you use when shooting on location and up to £60,000 in total.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an instant online quote today.

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Boat photography: how to explore harbours with your camera

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 17:44:59 Z

So it's summer, and many of us are heading for the coast, hoping for some sun, sand and surf. There's also the photography, and boat photography is one subject that often gets overlooked, particularly in the large number of heavily visited traditional harbours.

These can be lively places, with plenty of varied subject matter, angles, views and details that can be worthy of the camera's attention. For those who love boats and boating, such photography is pure joy. But harbours are places filled with possibilities, from wide views of the harbour itself to seaweed details, even for those who are not so enthusiastic.

All those jostling boats don't have to be photographed as boats, but as potentially graphic juxtapositions of triangles, squares, and other shapes, along with diagonally intersecting lines. We're looking at one great big graphic pattern and colour photo challenge, repeated regularly throughout our coast.

So whenever you find yourself near a harbour – whether large and workaday or tiny and quaint – get the camera out and get the creative photo juices going. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Setting the harbour scene

I'll readily confess that I'm a great lover of harbours, boats, and all that goes on in and around them. But I'll also be the first to agree that not every harbour easily lends itself to great photography. The larger commercial ports, in particular, are fairly dire places where inspiration can be hard to find.

So my love for this kind of photography revolves around the mostly small traditional fishing harbours, places of rough stone walls, colourful boats, piles of fishing tackle and lobster pots, surrounded if at all possible by crowds of ramshackle cottages. They're the places that are crammed with photographic possibilities.

You'll likely want to start with some general harbour views and images that set the scene with an overview of the location and its layout. That doesn't necessarily mean wide-angle lenses or views that take in the entire harbour, but those that give an overall sense of it.

You may still use a telephoto lens to shoot just a slice, a cameo of the harbour. Still, it'll be a slice that encompasses many of the harbour's features, from moored boats to the harbour wall, to cottages and other buildings crowding around and perhaps a hillside that encloses the scene.

Such a description inevitably suggests the risk of ending up with images that are just chaotic and cluttered, containing lots of different elements but nothing strong enough to be the image's main subject for the viewer's eye to latch onto. That is a danger, but that's where the photographer's skill comes in: finding that overall view that simultaneously contains an element that works as the image's photographic subject, hooking the viewer's attention.

Such an element might be a single, particularly dominant boat, for example, or perhaps a crane, a harbourside building, or even just the harbour's water constrained between walls but leading the eye into the scene. These subject elements mustn't fill the frame but must dominate it enough to grab attention.

The best times of day for such photography are usually very early in the morning or the late evening sunlight. These are times at which not only is the sun nice and golden but also at which you have the greatest chance of there being no wind and hence smooth, calm water.

Photography under cloudy skies is possible, particularly if you can minimise the amount of sky visible in the images. Still, quite often, a combination of grey sky, grey water and grey stone walls results in rather dull and depressing images. However, this is not always the case, particularly if breaks in the clouds allow for shafts of sunlight, which can introduce a sense of drama.

Moving in: scenes within the scene

Most photography will consist of more detailed shots within the overall harbour scene, ranging from views along the harbour walls to clusters or lines of moored boats to human activity such as boat repair work or fish off-loading.

Admittedly, photography of a harbour wall does not sound especially enthralling, but you might be surprised. Many such walls and breakwaters come with some interesting curved or zigzag outlines that have been effectively made the subject centrepiece of many a dramatic image.

Particularly effective here is to put the camera on a tripod and use a long exposure (at least several seconds). The wall is, of course, rock-solid, whereas the sea and clouds are constantly moving, which can result in atmospheric images. To get this effect, either shoot at dawn or dusk or use a neutral density filter on your lens.

This technique can be particularly effective on a cloudy, windy day when exposure of just a couple of seconds can result in a truly agitated image that captures or even exaggerates the roughness of the weather. A longer exposure of 30 seconds or more will completely blur out the moving waters and clouds, resulting in a rather calming, ethereal, other-worldly scene.

Inevitably, at some point, you're going to home in on boats, either alone or in groups. A random cluster of boats may not make a great photographic composition, so try to find arrangements that somehow come together into a workable composition. This might include, for example, a set of boats moored side-by-side, forming a line leading the eye into the scene and off towards the background.

Unless the first boat is very close, such a shot may need a telephoto lens, firstly to compress the grouping and the distance to enhance the sense of a crowd, and secondly to minimise the amount of featureless water between yourself and the first boat. A certain amount of water is fine – indeed desirable – but too much (as you could get if you used a wide-angle lens) results in too much space between you and the subject.

That said, wide-angle lenses can hugely effectively exaggerate diagonals, hence adding some sense of drama. One of my favourites here is to come down very low and close to a quayside mooring bollard attached to a bunch of mooring lines. I'll use a wide-angle lens to shoot along those lines towards the moored boats, something that—provided I've got myself down low enough—enables those lines to create some strong diagonals. Because I'm using a wide-angle lens, the boats will appear to be further away than they are, so there will be some water in the foreground, but hopefully not too much. There is, however, likely to be quite a lot of sky, so make sure it's an interesting one!

Another point to remember when shooting with the harbour's water in view is that the amount of light bouncing back off the water and towards the camera is much less than that coming off other subjects or directly from the sky. To the eye, it may all look fine, but the camera's sensor is sensitive to this difference, and in the final images, the water will often look significantly darker than the rest of the scene.

The resulting imbalance can mar the image somewhat, but you can correct it by using a neutral density graduated filter (or ND-grad) on your lens. Putting the filter's light/dark transition line along the water's edge (say, where the water meets the harbour wall) will help to lighten the water and darken the rest of the scene, balancing everything up and resulting in an image that looks much closer to what your eyes see.

All this, of course, assumes that there is water in the harbour. Many smaller fishing harbours are empty at low tide, a time when they generally don't look especially photogenic. So be aware of local tide times, and try to tie your photography in with those occasions when high tide coincides with early morning or late evening sunlight.

Capturing details and getting abstract

The final and most 'intimate' phase of any harbour photography is to home in on close details, both around the harbour and on the boats.

Quayside piles of gear ranging from fishing nets to floats, to chains, to lobster pots may look like a chaotic, rotting, rusting mess to the untrained eye. But to the keen-eyed photographer, it should represent a treasure trove of potential detailed images. A dumped nylon net can generate some remarkable close-ups. With various colours and a collection of knots, triangular or square meshes, and the occasional lurid float, a photographer could be in heaven for quite some time.

With the boats themselves, there can be an array of possibilities. Admittedly, modern, sleek white glass fibre boats are generally less appealing for this kind of detail photography than older traditional craft with their multiple colours and tangles of ropes. Still, much can be done with either.

At its simplest, there is just the bow of a boat (i.e. the front end). If you're able to look straight down onto a boat, you can get a nice triangle created by the bow and the area immediately behind it, set against the plain backdrop of the water. If you're lower down and looking side-on to the boat, then you might be able to get something a little curvier as the hull sweeps back from the bow.

Beyond that, close details can include a coil of rope on the deck, a line passing through a pulley, or a close-up of a compass or wheel. Even knots can make for some fascinating detail shots and, if incorporated with a mooring line, can be a remarkably simple image, especially if the backdrop is just plain out-of-focus water. Mooring lines can result in excellent abstract images, especially as a set of crisscrossing lines against plain water as the backdrop.

The most abstract of all, dare I say it, is oil on water. Yes, engine oil still gets spilt into our harbours. Although it is not a good thing, an oily sheen can be used under the right lighting angles to generate some wonderful, kaleidoscopic oil-on-water abstract images. Keep an eye out for oil lit by the sun, and zoom in with a telephoto lens to capture the best of the patterns.

Last but not least, there are reflections. Boats sitting in calm water, especially colourful boats, can create fantastic reflections that deserve to be photographed. The water must be very calm: the slightest breeze of wind cutting across the water will ruin any reflection very quickly. Once again, early morning or evening are the best times, especially the former, when the wind is likely to be at its weakest.

You can, of course, photograph both boat and reflection together in the same image, which often works extremely well. As mentioned already, however, you may find that using an ND-grad filter here helps to balance the exposure for the boat with that of the reflection, generating a very evenly balanced image.

You can also zoom in on the reflection, or even a part of it, creating something quite abstract and not wholly predictable. To do this, you'll probably need a fairly strong telephoto lens – at least 300mm – to reach right into the reflection and be sure of cutting out any part of the actual boat.

To become abstract, you can zoom in on wobbly reflections of something as simple as a group of masts or rigging, perhaps juxtaposed against something sitting on the water, such as a mooring buoy.

Not surprisingly, photography of reflections needs a certain specific set of conditions to be successful, which include:

high tide, or at least lots of water in the harbour
good quality light, preferably early morning or evening sunlight
flat calm water
use of a reasonably strong telephoto lens

If you have all these together, then you're in reflection business.

Having fun with harbour photography

Even for someone not wildly enthusiastic about boats, harbour photography can be a lot of fun. A plethora of shapes, colours, angles, lighting and reflections can be used and played with to create some wonderful compositions, many of which might not seem to have a great deal to do with a harbour or boats. If you're at the seaside this summer, give it a try. You might be surprised by what you find.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To learn more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance with Ripe Photography

Harbours are great for capturing exceptional boat photography, but the unthinkable can happen when you use your camera around water. That's why you may consider specialist camera insurance.

At Ripe Photography, we arrange theft and accidental damage cover up to the value of £30,000 for portable equipment you use when shooting on location and up to £60,000 in total.

Click here to learn more about specialist camera insurance, or hit the button below to get an instant online quote today.

Get an instant quote today

6 best Dorset photography locations to visit with your camera

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:49:11 Z

Summer is just about here, so more and more people will be flooding into many of the UK's most popular visitor areas.

It's time, then, to look at some of the best photo locations in one such area, the beautiful county of Dorset in southwest England.

This article will introduce some of my favourite spots across the county to shoot in, providing a mix of coast, country and town locations. I'll start with Dorset's stunning coastline, especially within the world-famous Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.

1. In and around Lyme Regis harbour

This lovely seaside town sits right on Dorset's border with Devon, the steep coastal hillside on which the town sits, dropping down to a beach and a neat little fishing harbour.

Although the town is historic and quite attractive, I always find myself drawn to the harbour for photography. It's not so much for the boats that I like to shoot here, but more for the harbour's famous curving stone wall, the Cobb, and the mountains of fishing equipment piled up in one particular part of the harbour.

In itself, the Cobb is not immediately a photogenic subject. Yet, its simple, minimalist curving outline and sloping top surface work a certain magic against almost any kind of sea and sky.

On the other hand, the fishing gear confronts the photographer with a chaotic but colourful jumble of nets, ropes and marker buoys that (for me at least!) beg to be photographed. Such a tangle challenges the photographer to pick out details and patterns, homing in on the interplay of the shapes created by the mass of knots, net mesh, lines and spheres. I can and have spent hours there!

There is pebbly and boulder-strewn Monmouth Beach, moving away from the harbour itself and heading westwards. Best explored at low tide, this is the place for gigantic fossils embedded in rocks that thankfully are just too firmly rooted to be taken away. Most of the fossils consist of circular, spiral ammonites, though a few Nautilus fossils are recognizable by their obvious snail shell outlines.

However, one of the most fascinating and photogenic areas has been dubbed a fossil garden, consisting of a flat table expanse of rock littered with the marks of hundreds of smaller ammonite fossils.

To photograph any of these fossils, one can take the easy option of simply standing over them and shooting straight downwards, producing a good record shot. However, I prefer to produce something more creative, crouching down as low as possible and shooting across the fossil, illustrating its three-dimensional relief above and below the rock's general surface and showing off the seaside context as the background.

2. Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove

Sitting almost side-by-side in the eastern part of Dorset's Jurassic Coast, these two locations are perhaps among the county's most iconic sights. Lulworth Cove is famous for its almost perfect circular shape, just a relatively narrow outlet giving access to and from the open sea.

Photographically, Lulworth Cove is not easy to capture. A wide-angle lens is needed to fit the entire view into a single frame, though it would work well as a panoramic. The best view is from the top of the high cliffs that tower over the central part of the cove, though take care if attempting to do this: it is a steep hike up, and it's a precipitous view once you're up there. For example, there are many other interesting angles from the low cliffs on either side of the seaward mouth.

Barely a mile west, Durdle Door is a magnificent – and much-photographed – rock arch that points out into the sea, set alongside a golden beach and gleaming white cliffs. The arch can be photographed well from various angles at any time of the day or night and at any state of the tide. The side of the arch visible from the shore does face northwest, so don't expect to have the sun shining on its face, except perhaps very late on a summer's day. Any shots taken in the morning are likely to show the arch in silhouette.

The most commonly shot angles are those taken from the beach or cliff immediately in front of the arch, but to obtain something a little more creative, head further west along the clifftop to obtain a high view looking eastwards along the coast. You then obtain images of Durdle Door in context as a part of this wonderful coast. This walk also allows shooting the beach and white cliffs without the arch, simply capturing some lesser-known parts of the Jurassic Coast.

3. Corfe Castle

Incorporating a ruined castle and an adjacent village of the same name, this is one of Dorset's most well-known historic inland sights. The castle, destroyed during the Civil War, is the quintessential castle ruin of shattered walls and towers, sitting on a low hill in the middle of a valley between two much larger hills. The village, mostly of medieval stone cottages, crowds around the southern base of the castle hill, creating a highly atmospheric would-be real-life movie set.

Although that atmosphere is ruined by the very busy main road that runs right through the village, several back lanes are lined with cottages that make for some wonderful photography. The castle is easily reached from the village and is a treasure trove of classic ruined castle images.

However, the most well-known views are shot from outside the castle, on the slopes of the two hills that rise on either side, to the west and east. The positioning of the two hills makes for great sunset and sunrise viewpoints, either illuminating the castle in silhouette or frontal lighting, depending on which hill you choose for the time of day.

Perhaps the most iconic views of this castle are taken from the west hill at dawn, with the valley filled with mist and the castle rising above. A tough one to get, but on the right morning... Second to this is perhaps silhouettes of the castle at sunset, shot from the eastern hill.

4. Abbotsbury

This attractive little village, sitting just inland from the western part of the Jurassic Coast, is very much a Ye Olde English Village, consisting almost entirely of honey-coloured stone-walled thatch-roofed cottages. Although rather marred in summer by the enormous amount of traffic that squeezes through its main street, there is still some attractive village photography to be done here.

More importantly, however, Abbotsbury is renowned for two beautiful locations: the Abbotsbury Swannery and the Sub-Tropical Gardens. The former is the UK's only breeding centre for mute swans and has been in place here since medieval times, originally as part of an abbey. This is the place to visit hundreds of swans paddling around at the western end of the Fleet, the UK's only tidal lagoon, and photographically is quite a spectacle.

The Sub-Tropical Garden sits outside the western end of the village, a truly beautiful oasis of greenery consisting of a series of different garden settings arranged around a wooded valley. While to call it 'Sub-Tropical' might be more a selling point than the truth, it is nevertheless a very sheltered and lush spot, worthy of some great photographic attention.

A short distance along the same road, you come to Chesil Beach, a huge shingle bank that runs for 27 km along the Jurassic Coast, and the far western end of the Fleet, close to the Swannery. As a vast open space, photography here is a challenge, but it's always worth a go!

A mile or so west of Abbotsbury, the road climbs steeply uphill to a viewpoint with magnificent views eastwards along the coast, taking in the full length of the Fleet and most of Chesil Beach, all the way to their eastern limits at Portland and Weymouth.

It's a wonderfully photogenic view, made all the more so by the very well-placed hilltop of St Catherine's Chapel, acting as a very convenient point of interest in any photograph's foreground. This view is best photographed during evening sunlight at any time of year. In the morning, you'd be looking straight into the light.

The chapel itself is easily reached on foot from the centre of the village, its hilltop location giving great views across Abbotsbury to the north and east and over the Fleet and Chesil Beach to the south.

5. Morden Bog National Nature Reserve

A series of heathlands characterize the landscape around the town of Wareham, most of them protected as nature reserves, largely because they are home to all six of the UK's reptile species.

One of the most photogenic is Morden Bog, a national nature reserve north of Wareham. Here, the landscape slopes gently downhill from north to south and is a mix of pine woodland, heathland and marshy ponds. It is at its most colourful when the heathers (of which there are four species here) are in flower, from mid-July to mid-September. This is a great time to photograph the heath and the ponds and some of its reptiles with any luck, most likely the common sand lizards. It's also a good spot to see and photograph Dartford Warblers, a rare bird at home on this Dorset heath.

Other heathland nature reserves around Wareham that are also worth photographing include Stoborough Heath, Hartland Moor and Arne, all south of the town. Arne lies on the western shore of Poole Harbour and so can be a good place to see wading birds. It is also home to a very tame and photogenic herd of Sika deer, a species introduced from Japan in the 19th century.

6. Hambledon Hill National Nature Reserve

Standing a few miles north of Blandford Forum, Hambledon Hill is most well known as the site of a large prehistoric hill fort. However, it also benefits from being a national nature reserve, giving its slopes protection that ensures it is never ploughed and subject only to limited grazing.

The result is a rare example of truly healthy chalk grassland, which in June and July is a mass of chalk-loving wildflowers, along with the mass of butterflies and other insects that rely on them. The diversity of flowers and insects found here during the summer months greatly outstrips that of the heaths around Wareham but is generally much less well known. This is the place for lovers of macro nature photography.

There is still the hill fort to shoot for those not so keen on the small things in life, and all photography outside the flowering season. None of the original wooden structures remains, of course, but what can be seen is the series of defensive dykes and ditches carved into the ground surrounding the hilltop. Together, they can be used to create some interesting compositions and wonderful views across the surrounding countryside.

Exploring and photographing Dorset

These are just a few of my favourite photo locations in Dorset: there are many more, and while I've highlighted these six places, other photographers will have wholly different lists of favourite sites.

However, this list will hopefully give you some pointers on where to head in the county, both on the coast and inland.

With the whole of summer still ahead of us, there is plenty of time to get out photographing in many of these places, hopefully in some fine, warm weather. Happy shooting!

This article was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel has written this article to coincide with the start of summer and to link in with the launch of his latest book, Beautiful Dorset.

Presented as a series of photo essays, this book takes the reader on a photographic tour around the best that Dorset has to offer. Beautiful Dorset is available from all good book shops, high street and online, and directly from Nigel.

See sample pages and images, and buy copies at https://www.nigelhicks.com/editorial-photography-writing/books/beautiful-dorset/.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

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The ultimate guide to woodland photography

Thu, 05 May 2022 13:43:55 Z

So spring is moving on, and the natural world has come to life.

We're well into the usual springtime sequence of wildflowers, woodlands are starting to leaf out with growing swathes of vibrantly green foliage, and animal young are starting to appear.

Now is the time for woodland photography, capturing an expanding swathe of forest floor flowers under a rapidly developing canopy of leaves. But what are the best ways to get great results?

After all, amid woodland, it is often almost impossible, quite literally, to see the wood for the trees. All is a bit of a jumble, and it can be very hard to pull together a meaningful and effective composition.

All too often, the resulting images are just a two-dimensional representation of the worst that can happen in the real world – simply a scene of tangled chaos!

This article aims to break down the chaos, tease out some threads of sense among that tangle, put together some techniques for what to look for in a woodland scene, and bring those scenes together into great photographic compositions using good camera and aesthetic skills.

What to expect in our springtime woodlands

Now is very much the time for springtime woodland photography, with almost everything bursting into vibrantly colourful life.

Carpets of bluebells are just about at their peak in many places right now, and in the coming weeks, they'll be joined by – and then replaced by – the likes of wild garlic, red campion and many more.

However, as the tree canopy closes with new leaves, light levels on the forest floor will drop, and flower numbers will greatly decrease, except perhaps in areas where sunlight remains. So if woodland flowers are on your list of subjects for this year, you'd better get moving right now!

Of course, all that fresh green vegetation, whether it be the leaves above, or the likes of ferns and shrubs closer to the ground, presents some vibrantly green photogenic subject matter. May is the time to capture these new leaves at their finest, while all that chlorophyll is fresh and at high concentrations, and before the rain, fungi and insects have a chance to cause any damage.

In addition to so much plant life, animals are another thing to think about, especially woodland birds and insects. These are covered in some of my other articles, so here I'm concentrating on the woodlands themselves.

Woodland photography techniques

In any form of photography, composition and light are critical to creating great images. But in the context of woodland photography, both suffer from special constraints and complications that make such photography significantly more complex. Let's look at composition first.

Looking for woodland compositions

The art of a great composition consists of putting together an image that contains a single strong subject that dominates the image frame, free from any cluttering, distraction or competition for secondary elements.

Not surprisingly, in most woodland scenes, this is virtually impossible. Everywhere you look is cluttered at best, if not outright chaos. And very often, the vegetation is so dense that you can't even step back to open up the scene and create some space.

The inevitable conclusion is that, no matter how beautiful a scene may look to the eye, most of it won't make for a great photographic subject. You need to find those few views and woodland elements that fall together into a composition. Or at least can be 'massaged' into a good composition through the appropriate use of lens focal length, depth of field and just the right perspective/angle of view. You're looking for the atypical to shoot something that you hope will give a representative idea of the woodland.

To help achieve this, we need some space; a clearing or glade in the woodland can be ideal, or (something I use a lot) is a river cutting a natural clearing through the trees.

The ribbon of water provides some space around the trees. Also, it generates a naturally attractive photogenic element that can lead the eye through your image frame, giving a sense of order and beauty to the walls of trees all around.

Another solution is to find a viewpoint that gives you a truly wide view of the woodland, something that sets the woodland scene as a whole. For this, we need ideally somewhere outside and perhaps above the main body of the woods. Again a clearing of some sort, but perhaps a rocky outcrop standing clear of the treetops. Or perhaps a hilltop or ridge above (though not too distant from) the trees.

Close-up compositions

Things are slightly different when photographing smaller plants, such as ferns or wildflowers. Of course, you're deliberately coming in a lot closer to a much smaller subject, so lack of space is usually not an issue. Clutter, however, certainly is, but there are several things we can do to reduce this, part of which inevitably involves choosing our physical position and hence perspective on the subject.

When photographing a carpet of woodland flowers, such as bluebells or wild garlic, it is often tempting to use a wide-angle lens to show as much of the flower carpet as possible. However, this increases the risk of clutter creeping into the frame and exaggerating the spaces between the flowers, in the final image reducing that carpet to just a smattering.

You can solve both by reducing the field of view, such as with a short telephoto lens, which will crowd the flowers together, enhancing the sense of a dense carpet and reducing the risk of background clutter appearing.

One of the worst mistakes I see photographers make when shooting plants close to the ground is simply standing over it/them and pointing the camera downwards.

This may be a convenient method of photographing a plant, but it rarely results in a truly worthwhile image. It's much better to get yourself down to the plant's level, see the world from its perspective, and allow it to dominate the image frame.

You may still shoot it with the camera looking downwards if that is genuinely the best angle to photograph the plant. But getting down low does open up the possibility of other options, especially looking sideways-on to the plant, looking along the ground to the plant, and perhaps towards a background view of the surrounding woodland.

When shooting any plant, whether looking downwards or sideways-on or when shooting wider woodland scenes, one of the most critical compositional issues is the depth of field and the amount of the image that is sharply in focus.

You'll want to have the subject plant(s) sharp, but how much of the background needs to be sharp depends on what you're trying to achieve. Using a very narrow lens aperture (i.e. a high f-number) will ensure that much of your view will be sharp, including your subject, but this can make it harder for your subject to stand out from the background and increase the sense of clutter.

It is often better to use a wider lens aperture (lower f-number) to reduce the depth of field, keeping the subject sharp but throwing the background out of focus. This will help the subject stand out, keep attention on that subject, and reduce the level of distraction from background elements.

A knock-on effect of this depth of field control is the shutter speed that is likely to be possible. A narrow lens aperture will inevitably result in a slow shutter speed, hence the need to put the camera on a tripod. A wide-open lens aperture (i.e. a low f-number) may give you a shutter speed fast enough to enable hand-held photography but will result in a depth of field too small even to get the whole of your subject in focus. Always play safe, and use a tripod.

Making use of woodland light

It's tempting to photograph as much as possible during bright shiny sunlight if only to maximise the amount of light available for woodland photography. This is particularly so when you're shooting under a dense woodland's shady, light-reducing canopy. Anything that can deliver more light into that forest environment has to be good, right?

Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Bright sunlight filtering down through a dense canopy will result in patches of brightly lit highlights and deep shadows on the woodland floor, resulting in a patchwork of light and shadow that completely breaks up any composition you may have spotted into a completely incomprehensible mishmash.

Your eye and brain working together and seeing everything in three dimensions may be able to make sense of it all, but your poor camera - seeing the world only in two dimensions and unable to cope with the huge contrast range - will most likely flounder. It is an example that amply illustrates that a camera does not interpret the world in the same way that we do.

So I would generally recommend woodland photography during cloudy conditions or even – which can result in some truly moody images – in fog. Cloudy weather results in a nice soft light falling on the forest floor, giving a reasonably even illumination across the trees and ground vegetation.

The result is images where the composition rules supreme, unimpeded by highlights and shadows, with the vibrant vegetative greens and rich flower colours brought out to their fullest.

Woodland photographed in fog is another matter altogether, the water vapour reducing detail and depth, generating ethereal, moody images where the outline shapes of trees and other plants are paramount. Success here depends more than ever on seeking out those simple compositions, such as a single branch or trunk, that work brilliantly in outline, unbroken by confusing clutter from surrounding vegetation.

All this again brings us back to the need to use a tripod. Light levels under a dense forest canopy will always be low, even on a sunny day. In cloudy weather, especially in fog, it can be quite gloomy, making a tripod an absolute must, even if you intend to shoot with the lens aperture wide open (which I don't recommend).

This is not to say that you should never do woodland photography in sunlight. There are certain situations where you can make it work brilliantly. The most obvious example would be those views of the outside woodland, from that rocky outcrop or hilltop already mentioned. In this situation, it can be very effective to have the trees lit up by the sunlight, especially during the golden hour of early morning or late afternoon.

For views within the woodland, the most effective use of the sunlight is when it is very low in the sky and is managing to shine through the trees.

In this situation, it can be very worthwhile to point the camera towards the sun and then create a starburst effect as the sun shines past and around the tree trunks. The trunks and branches of those trees closest to the sun will be rendered in silhouette, but foliage further away will retain its details and green colour.

This technique can be further enhanced on misty mornings when the sun shines through the tree trunks, and the mist results in stunningly beautiful sunbeams radiating down through the trees.

Related to this technique but somewhat different is the photography of leaves backlit by the sun at just about any time of day. More likely to work with trees on the edge of a woodland and so well exposed to the sun, you can achieve some fantastic results by simply using a telephoto lens to home in on small groups of leaves with the sun behind them.

This can result in beautifully backlit leaves, with the sun also creating starburst effects around their edges. This generally works best when shooting just a single layer of leaves: the images are likely to become too cluttered if multiple layers become involved in your image frame.

Putting it all together

Coming up with some great woodland images is a delicate balancing act between finding workable compositions within the chaos of woodland and the need for useable but effective lighting.

There are multiple factors to consider at any given moment, any one of which can make many a location fantastic under certain conditions but useless under others. It can change from one to the other in minutes with the weather and time of day.

Even once you've worked out the compositional and lighting needs, there is still one more element that can be wholly unpredictable: the wind. Low light levels and the need for a reasonably narrow lens aperture to ensure a large image depth of field inevitably mean a slow shutter speed.

As a result, you will need windless conditions to ensure all the leaves, stems and branches stay in place and don't give you some potentially distracting movement blurs. Achieving this can be a bit of a trial requiring some patience to shoot during a lull in the wind.

A little blur in some leaves here and there can add a bit of dynamism and drama to an image, so it is not always a bad thing – try to shoot both types of image and see which you prefer. Things can start to break down if the wind-induced movement becomes too much. However, when things get crazy, you can go with the flow and generate some wonderfully abstract movement blur images! They can be remarkably effective.

So get out there to those woodlands and get stuck into some wonderful spring woodland photography. I hope you'll enjoy it.

This blog was written by a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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Plant Photography: a complete guide

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 13:02:11 Z

So, spring has sprung, and the world's plants are bursting into new life, sending out shoots, leaves and flowers en masse, regreening the environment after the long winter sleep. Now is a great time to set to work photographing much of this new life, as it's a time when many of the natural world's colours are at their most stunning. Fresh new leaves are vibrantly green, almost iridescent in their bright verdant hues, while clusters of flowers provide bursts of colour among the foliage.

Of course, plants vary enormously in size, from huge, dizzyingly high trees to the tiniest mosses, so an equally wide range of photographic skill is needed to capture this diversity. Techniques can vary from the use of very wide-angle lenses aiming to capture the grandeur of the biggest trees to the most powerful macro equipment to hone in on the smallest mosses and plant details. And as that last point implies, we may very well not intend to photograph a plant in its entirety but instead concentrate on certain details, whether that be a flower, a detail in the bark, or the pattern of veins in a leaf.

The photographer's skill in shooting all this is down to at least three main components:

being able to spot photogenic compositions, not only of entire plants but also of details within a plant
knowing the best kinds of light with which to shoot each of the many possible compositions
having a command of the techniques and equipment needed to photographically capture those compositions

Having a firm grasp of all three components will enable the photographer to execute and fulfil their photographic inspiration among the vegetation they're able to explore. Success with this kind of photography (as with all photography) should rely mainly on reproducible skill rather than luck, though we will always need a little of the latter!

Finding ways to maximise one's skill in these three factors is the subject of this article. Let’s start with compositions.

Seeking out photographic compositions

The key to great photography is to seek out simple but strong compositions, images that contain a single strong subject that dominates (but doesn't necessarily fill) the image frame. Clutter, competing elements, and any kind of confusion or chaos all work to weaken an image. Not surprisingly, clutter, competition, and confusion are all completely the norm in the natural world, so in seeking out strong, simple compositions, we are very much going against this norm, looking for the atypical.

The inevitable conclusion is that, no matter how beautiful a scene or an individual plant may look to our eyes, much of it will not make for great photography. We simply have to find a way to pluck out those little cameos within the chaos and confusion that either just happen to come together in a great composition or which can be manipulated somehow through our skill with the camera to result in a fantastic image. Spotting and extracting those cameos photographically is arguably the greatest skill a photographer can have: and one of the hardest to learn or teach!

Blurred backgrounds with macro photography: One of the most effective ways to ensure that your chosen subject dominates the frame is to let everything else blur. This is not difficult to achieve when shooting macro photography of, say, a flower. In the macro situation, the depth of field (i.e. the amount of the image that is sharp) is so small that the entire background will inevitably be blurred out.

When it comes to macro photography of plants growing close to the ground, such as flowers in a woodland, meadow, or on the coast, I often see people simply stand above the plant and shoot straight downward. Perhaps this is sometimes the best composition, but it often suggests laziness and an unwillingness to check out alternative perspectives. In my experience, it’s nearly always much better to get down to the plant's height, see the world from their angle and sort out the best, most flattering composition. After all, they're not about to run away, so you can take your time to check out several perspectives.

Photography with a wide-angle or telephoto lens: There is no such blurred-background option when shooting an entire tree with a wide-angle lens. In this scenario, most, if not all, of the image will be sharp simply because such lenses naturally give a large depth of field. So it's important to photograph only trees that can be made to stand out from their background in other ways, largely through highly selective composition and perspective.

One obvious example of a solution would be to shoot a solitary tree standing alone in a field with no background other than the sky. This is a common way to photograph trees, either with a wide-angle or telephoto lens, often made even more effective when shot on a misty day so that even the sky then becomes quite featureless.

Things become much harder when trying to shoot trees in a forest, if only due to the inevitable tangle of vegetation crowding in all around. The first step is to find an appropriate tree that at least has something of a clearing around it, enabling you to step back even just a little. There are then two possible options:

1. Come in very close to the tree and angle the camera sharply upwards, looking along the tree trunk towards the tree's crown. This can be a highly effective and dramatic composition, provided neighbouring trees have little or no visual interference.

It can also be possible to create a dramatic and graphic circular composition of trees leaning in towards an area of sky in the middle of the frame. It may be possible to have one tree in the circle dominate the composition, or, the overall pattern created by the trees can become the image's subject. This can be a particularly effective technique in conifer plantations, where the trees are all more or less identical and have few – if any – long side branches to mess up a composition.

2. An alternative approach is to simply step back a little from your chosen tree and point the camera horizontally, shooting just the lower portion of the tree's trunk, including an expanse of the forest floor with some background trees. This does risk creating a rather cluttered composition. Still, it can result in some very attractive woodland images, provided the trunk of your chosen subject tree really does dominate the frame (usually by being the largest element in the frame), and the forest floor contains interesting material that preferably includes something of a repeated pattern (for example, a swathe of bluebells in flower).

This type of composition most often works best when shot using a short telephoto lens – something that will enable you to reduce the depth of field and put at least some of the background partly out of focus.

Plant photography: making use of the light

Having sorted out some of the best ways to create good compositions, we now have to use light. There is often a tendency to want to shoot plants in bright sunlight to ensure that light levels are high and a picture can be taken without using a tripod. However, is this necessarily the best kind of light to shoot your plant images, and why not use a tripod?

More often than not, bright sunlight will put harsh highlights and deep shadows across your subject, which can damage your compositions. When photographing close-in macro subjects, the hard shadows and highlights will make up a significant percentage of the image frame. This can be particularly damaging to photography of a white flower, as those whites will just burn out, especially when set against relatively darker and less reflective background vegetation.

So, usually, plant photography is best done under soft light, either weak sunlight or cloudy weather. This is especially so when shooting macro compositions and when working inside a forest. If you do find yourself shooting plants on a bright sunny day, you may find it effective to concentrate your efforts on plants in the shade, or indeed use your own shade – either your own shadow or bring along a diffuser that you can hold overhead. Doing this will allow you to experiment, photographing the same plant with and without sunlight to see which provides the best images.

Backlighting and silhouettes: The one situation where plant photography in sunlight does work is when your subject can be backlit. Trees shot as a sunlit silhouette can be hugely effective, made even more so if the sun can be seen just poking out from behind a branch, resulting in a star-burst effect. This is most often achieved with solitary trees out in the open, but it can work inside woodland, especially when the sun is low, and also when pointing the camera upwards into a pattern of trees converging overhead.

Backlighting can also work well when photographing flowers, a composition created with the lens looking towards the sun. The light then diffuses through the petals and creates a wonderfully luminous effect.

Using a flashgun: A final word on light concerns the use of artificial lighting. While it's true that the carefully controlled use of artificial lighting in a studio setting can create some stunning plant images, generally speaking, when shooting in the field, the use of a flashgun does not give satisfying results.

If you're simply after record shots – such as for a botanical study – then for speed and convenience, a flash may well be effective. However, if you intend to create high-quality images, a flash is rarely the solution, usually resulting in bright highlights and deep shadows, often a slightly blue cast.

This is particularly so if you fire the flash directly at your subject plant and if you use the flash as the principal light source – a method that will result in the background going very dark, if not completely black. If the flash is fired indirectly, either bounced off a reflector or through a diffuser, and at an output that balances with the ambient light, many of those problems can be overcome, though the lighting may still be too harsh.

Having command of techniques and equipment

Finally, to fully execute your photographic vision, you will need to be in good command of the necessary technical steps and the equipment needed to carry them out. Suppose you’re photographing a lot inside woodlands, particularly under soft, flat lighting conditions. In that case, light levels will be quite low, making a tripod more or less essential, especially if you want to create images with a large depth of field.

In addition, for plants and flowers growing low to the ground, you'll need to use a sufficiently flexible tripod to allow the camera to come down low enough, something many tripods are rather poor at.

When shooting very close-up, compact and phone cameras can usually come in close without any additional help, but if you're using a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you’ll need specialised macro equipment. This is because the ordinary lenses used with such cameras have a certain minimum focusing distance within which they just won't focus. This distance is usually too far for effective macro photography, so you need some adaptations. The simplest is an extension tube, that fits between the camera body and lens, greatly shortening the lens’ minimum focusing distance, making macro photography possible.

A more flexible approach is to use a dedicated macro lens, a short telephoto lens specifically designed to have a very short minimum focusing distance for macro photography. With this lens, you can also do standard photography, making such a lens a highly versatile piece of equipment.

Focusing at the close distances needed for macro photography is very tricky and exact, and if you're using a zoom lens coupled to an extension tube, it can best be done by turning the zoom ring, not the focusing ring. However, this method changes the magnification, so if this is important, focusing can be greatly helped by having a focusing rail. This is a track that fits between the camera's base and the tripod head, which allows the camera to slide back and forth by tiny amounts to change the focus.

Executing the image: Once you've created your composition and have put the equipment in place, all that’s left to execute is the image. You may still want to fine-tune the depth of field, something you'll do using the lens aperture. The narrower the aperture (i.e., the higher the f-number), the larger the depth of field, and if shooting macro, more often than not, you’ll want to maximise that depth of field, thus making it necessary to close the lens aperture.

Inevitably, this will mean using a slow shutter speed (one of the reasons for the tripod). In this situation, pressing the shutter button to take the shot will usually result in some vibration, causing the image to blur. To avoid this, use either a remote trigger, allowing your hand to stay well away from the camera, or a two-second time delay on the shutter. If shooting with a DSLR, you'll also need to use the 'mirror-up' facility, which causes the mirror to lift shortly before the shutter fires, removing any risk of vibration creeping in.

Apart from all the technical steps, you’ll also need one more thing: lots of patience. You will usually find that, even on the stillest of days, when you have everything ready and are about to start shooting, a breeze will come in from nowhere, fluttering petals and leaves. The solution usually is to wait for that little breeze to pass, allowing you to shoot motionless vegetation.

On those days when there is a continuous breeze, you may need to make some compromises, aiming to use a faster shutter speed to freeze any movement in the vegetation. This will inevitably mean a wider lens aperture, which will reduce the depth of field. This can be partially reversed by putting the camera's ISO up to increase the sensor's sensitivity. However, one should be careful with this, as putting the ISO up too much will cause a loss of image quality. It's all a delicate balance.

Bringing it all together to create some stunning plant photography

From compositions and light to the more technical skills, there’s a lot to bring together simultaneously to create a great plant image, but this is very much the art of the creative plant photographer.

It can seem that there’s just too much to remember all at once and too many things that can go wrong. However, regular practice and a willingness to adapt the photographic plan and hence subject matter according to the season, habitat and weather will produce fantastic results.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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A Guide To Coastal and Seashore Photography

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:02:25 Z

With so much coast encircling our island, coastal photography is unsurprisingly a major subject for Britain's landscape photographers. Hugely variable, from sheltered estuaries to calm sandy beaches backed by sweeping dunes to wild, wind-swept and rugged cliffs, the coast offers endless photography opportunities. What's more, they remain photographable throughout the year, making the coast a massively viable landscape photography option regardless of the season.

Add in the infinite number of possibilities created by ever-changing weather and tides, and the photographic options are almost limitless. It’s almost impossible to run out of photographic inspiration. However, this can make it a little bewildering to know what to shoot. This article aims to provide pointers to inspire your seashore and coastal photography.

Where Sky, Sea and Land Collide

Coastal photography is, of course, photography of the point where marine waters meet the land, but within that definition, it can range from wide views of cliff, rock, sea and sky scenes all the way down to close details of patterns in rocks or wet sand.

So, you need to be flexible and versatile, adapting your choice of subject matter and the method of shooting quickly as conditions evolve. I'm going to dissect those subjects and the shooting methods to provide a guide to the options.

The Wide Coastal View

This is probably where most of us start with our coastal photography: wide sweeping views of a sunlit bay, perhaps the view leading along a golden sandy beach towards a distant headland. Such a view could well be shot in the light of a warm sunny summer's day, with the sun quite high and behind the photographer, rendering the sea a glorious blue, the sand blindingly yellow-white.

Such a shot conjures up something very beautiful and really captures the sense of summer beauty and warmth, but in terms of photographic technique, it’s deceptively straightforward and is often simply a record kind of shot. It's a worthwhile image to have in the collection, but generally, it's not creative or artistic.

Unfortunately, the apparent ease with which this kind of shot can be taken can be a pitfall in itself, making us lazy and sloppy in our technique. So here's a list of points to watch out for and to check before pressing the shutter button:

1. Assuming the image will contain a horizon, make absolutely certain it is level. A sloping horizon ruins so many coastal images.

2. If your image contains any foreground, you'd better be sure that it’s a really interesting one. So many images of great subjects are ruined by a bad foreground that hijacks the eye of the viewer and won't let them get past it to the main subject. We’re talking expanses of dull grass, tangled brambles, featureless shingle or rubble, or even an empty expanse of sand. If you can't find a viewpoint free of such interference, then you've not found the right viewpoint. Don't shoot. Keep searching. What’s needed in a foreground is something that, yes, takes the viewer's attention but then leads their eyes into the scene, directing them straight to the image's main subject. Here, we're talking about perhaps a triangular or diamond-shaped rock or pool of water, or the line of the cliff, or perhaps the leading edge of the surf as it peters out on the sand, all pointing diagonally, like an arrow directing the viewer's eyes towards the image's subject.

3. Even when both sea and sky are blue, the former is usually darker than the latter. The difference may seem negligible to the eye because it can accommodate a vast contrast range. However, the digital sensor is much less sophisticated, and the difference between a dark blue sea and a pale blue sky may be more than it can cope with. The result is an image where the sea is far too dark, and the sky is rather washed-out, cloud patterns barely visible. The solution is to use a neutral density graduated filter (ND-grad) in front of your lens. This half-dark, half-clear, rectangular filter aligns so that the dark part is over the brighter sky, resulting in the sea being lightened and the sky darkened.

This reduces the contrast range to something that the camera's sensor can cope with and results in a more evenly balanced image, in which more of the darker and paler details (such as white clouds) are clearly visible. In short, the resulting image better captures what you saw with your eyes.

4. With wide views of almost any landscape scene, not just coastal views, it’s usually important to have all of the image sharp, from shortly in front of the camera all the way to the horizon. In other words, you need to have a big depth of field. This is achieved in two ways: by using a wide-angle lens and a narrow lens aperture (i.e. a high f-number). Shooting in this way nearly always means quite a slow shutter speed, even in the middle of a sunny day. Hand-holding the camera in this situation risks camera shake, resulting in all the images being blurred, simply because it hasn't been possible to hold the camera steady. Image stabilisation/vibration reduction reduces this risk, but it’s still a major consideration. The solution is to put the camera on a tripod; then, it doesn't matter how slow your shutter speed is, as the camera will be steady. It will also help you ensure the horizon is completely level.

These four rules are fundamental to just about all coastal landscape photography. Once you've made them integral to your photography, then you can move on to more creative stuff.

Shooting the Beach Without Actually Shooting the Beach

This may seem like a rather strange thing to say, but it's about the mantra, 'less is more'. Don't try to show everything in the image; doing so will result in an image cluttered with too much stuff or with the main subject too small and insignificant. Instead, pick out a vignette of the scene – something that captures only a part of the view but tells a story about the whole scene.

It's a ploy I apply to just about any coastal photography that includes a large expanse of sand. When photographing a big beach, the last thing you should do is photograph a view of the whole beach. Doing so will result in an image of merely a large empty space, devoid of a firm subject and hence impact. Instead, what you need is a strong foreground composition, something that grabs the attention and becomes – photographically speaking - the main subject of the image.

Such foregrounds could be a sand dune, or more particularly a line or cluster of grass on the slope of a dune, or down on the beach itself, a pool of water, perhaps with a nice triangular set of rocks on the far side, all hooking the viewer's eye with the beach in the background.

Although I've described this technique in terms of shooting effectively on a large beach, it also applies to many other aspects of coastal photography. It's simply a matter of emphasis. In the above example, I wanted to photograph the beach, but I've honed in on a convenient foreground element to hook the eye, set up a great photographic composition, and shown the beach almost as an incidental.

Change the emphasis a little, and now that foreground element becomes your intended image subject, with the background sand, water or sky simply a very convenient backdrop free of confusing and competing clutter. Images of surf washing around rocks or rolling up onto a sandy beach, or the sweeping curves of a dune, all become the main compositions.

Moving in Close

Coming in closer brings us to photography of details: patterns in the surface of a rock or cliff or rippled sand revealed at low tide, for example. Such details are easily overlooked, but they’re the stuff of great photography.

Rippled wet sand and little rivulets of water carving mini-gorges through it can all come together to create stunning photography. This is particularly so when shot looking into the light, with the ripples and rivulets back-lit. If shooting with the sun behind you, these patterns are often barely visible. But, change your perspective by rotating yourself 180^o. Suddenly, those little banks and dips become mountains and gorges, with the surface texture clearly and starkly picked out by the contrast between the sunlit highlights and the deep shadow areas.

The Time of Day

Most coastal photography is done during the middle of the day during summer, when the sun is quite high. While images shot under these conditions can look very 'summery', giving us the idea of warmth and holidays, they rarely appear atmospheric or artistic. For that, we need a low sun either in the midst of winter, early in the morning, late in the afternoon/evening, before sunrise or after sunset.

A low sun will give a golden light richly reflected in sand and water, while shots taken with the sun below the horizon will give images either with pinks in the sky or a deep blue or violet hue if shot when it is close to darkness. Such shots can be extremely atmospheric, creating a strong mood and artistry.

A low sun also, of course, creates possibilities for photography of silhouettes. When applied to coastal photography, it can result in contrasting images; the sun sparkling brightly off the water and set against deep black silhouettes of boats, rocks and cliffs/headlands.

The success of a silhouette image is, of course, very much about the outline shape of the subject, not the detail within it, so you have to ensure that your subject silhouette has a great shape – a nice boat, some jagged rocks, or a finger-like headland, for example. You don't want is a big block of solid blackness in the image, whether that be a large hulk of a rock or an expanse of almost featureless sand.

Shutter Speed: Fast vs Slow

Anyone taking quick snaps of coastal views will almost certainly want to hand-hold the camera, and so for this reason, will shoot with a moderately fast shutter speed, say in the 1/60-1/250 second range. There’s also often the temptation to want to freeze any movement in the water, and so for this reason, too, you would use these shutter speeds.

However, images taken in this way can look static and lifeless, the water stationary and devoid of the dynamic energy you felt in real life.

For creative photography in which depth of field and mood are crucial, you will often want to use something much slower, something that captures the dynamism of the sea, putting over both mood and the sense of movement. Blurring the movement of the sea, particularly as it washes over and around rocks or rushes up a sandy beach, is the best way to put over the sense of dynamic energy and movement. For this, you need to use a slow shutter speed, anything from, say, 1/10 second to 30 seconds or even more. Obviously, the type of blur you get will vary significantly depending on the shutter speed - 1/10 second leaving the waves and spray still quite visible, but 30 seconds rendering the water as a smooth silken sheet.

Clearly, it’s easy enough to use as slow a shutter speed as you like at dawn or dusk, but it's quite another matter in the middle of a sunny day. At this time, there’s too much light to slow the shutter speed down enough without causing the images to be massively over-exposed. The solution is to use a neutral density filter, which reduces the amount of light reaching the sensor when placed in the front of the lens. These are available in several strengths and make it perfectly possible to use a very slow shutter speed even on a sunny day. They can also be combined with an ND-grad filter, one reducing the overall exposure, the other darkening a bright sky.

There are various occasions when a fast shutter speed (at least 1/500 second) may well be effective. For example, when you want to freeze the movement of water droplets mid-air as waves crash onto a beach or rocks. For this to work, however, you need large waves generating powerful surf and a strong telephoto lens to really hone in on those flying droplets.

Powerful waves breaking onto shore can look and feel very dramatic when watched, but if photographed with an ordinary lens, they’ll appear small, limp and disappointing in the final images. To make the photographs work, you need to really hone in on the waves and make them as big as possible in the frame. Hence the need for a strong telephoto lens.

Safety First

Finally, a word on safety. While there’s lots of fun to be had with coastal photography, we must never take the sea for granted, especially if shooting during winter. When photographing close to the sea's edge, always be aware and cautious of the movement of the waves: they do not come up to the shore with constant regularity. Instead, they show cyclic batches of small waves followed by bigger ones.

A series of small waves may tempt you to move closer to the water's edge, only for you suddenly to find yourself confronted by a series of large waves rushing towards you. Take great care with this.

Always make yourself aware of the tides, too. This should be part of your photographic planning, but it’s of enormous safety importance, too. Not only will surf come up the shore with a lot more energy on a rising tide, but you may also need to know what the risks are of being cut off.

Similarly, make sure you check the weather forecast before hitting the coast. Things can turn ugly very quickly, especially when you're trying to photograph in stormy conditions. Be well aware of what you might be letting yourself in for, and be prepared for it.

In other words, do your homework before heading to the coast, take care while you're there, but have an enormous amount of fun, and come home with some wonderful, creative, artistic photos!

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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Introducing Our Most Instagrammable Pet Competition—Win £350 Amazon Voucher!

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:29:42 Z

Winners announced

After much deliberation our judge, Specialist Pet Photographer Katrina Wilson, has picked our 'Most Instagrammable Pet' winners. Thank you and well done to everyone who entered! The competition was tough, but here is the list of our winners:

1st place: Martin the Sausage dog (@martin_the_sausage)

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2nd place: Betty the Pumi dog (@bettypumidog)

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3rd place: Smudge the cat (@_emlue)

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We all love our pets, that’s for sure. But have you ever taken a photo of them and thought “wow, you are a star and so photogenic”?

‘Instagram famous’ isn’t just for people anymore. There’s now an abundance of pet accounts, and it’s on the rise. Profiles such as Errol the Somali Cat 122k followers, Hector The Sausage Dog 64.4k followers and DJ Bunnypuff & The Puffery 28.9k followers, are taking the Instagram world by storm, do you think your pet could have what it takes to be Insta famous?

If you’re passionate about your pet, and think that they have the winning looks, attitude and personality that could shine through on the Instagram screen, our ‘Most Instagrammable Pet’ competition is for you.

Whether you’re a pro photographer or taking a quick snap on your phone we’d like you to share your most Instagrammable picture of your pet. We can’t promise instant Insta-fame, but you could be in with a chance of winning a £350 Amazon voucher.

What does the competition entail?

This competition is open to all pet owners and budding photographers alike. We’re asking you to enter exclusively via Instagram, by submitting the most ‘Insta-worthy’ picture of your pet.

The competition will be judged by Specialist Pet Photographer Katrina Wilson, who has more than 1.2k Instagram followers, and over eight years’ experience—during which time she has photographed thousands of pets.

We have £550 worth of Amazon vouchers up for grabs. The lucky winner of this competition will receive a £350 Amazon voucher, while the runner-up will receive a £150 Amazon voucher and third place a £50 Amazon voucher to spend on your pet or yourself—you decide.

What kind of pet picture are we looking for?

We want to see your pet shine in all their glory.

Whether they are grinning a big smile, captured doing a showstopping trick or just casually being candid, we want to see the side to your pet that you love the most.

As long as the picture includes your pet showing their personality, we want to see it!

How to enter

The competition will run from Tuesday 22^nd February 2022, to follow #nationalloveyourpetday.

To enter:

Share your most Instagrammable photograph of your pet as an Instagram grid post
Tag our Instagram page: @ripe_photography_
Include the hashtag #MyRipePet
Tell us in the caption what you love most about your pet

Please note, we will only accept submissions from the United Kingdom.

The ‘Most Instagrammable Pet’ competition will close for entries on Monday 14^th March 2022. Winners will also be announced on our Instagram and blog The Edit.

Good luck!

Full Terms & Conditions

The prize – 1^st place one £350 Amazon voucher. 2^nd place one £150 Amazon voucher. 3^rd place one £50 Amazon voucher.
Entries to the competition will be accepted from 22^nd February 2022 until midnight on 14^th March 2022.
The entrant must own the pet they are entering into the competition.
The Most Instagrammable Pet competition is open to anyone who is a UK resident and has completed a valid entry.
The entrant must be aged 18 or over.
To win, entrants must share an Instagram grid post of their pet, tag the Ripe Photography Instagram page @ripe_photography_, include the hashtag #MyRipePet and write what they love most about their pet in the caption.
Only one entry is allowed per individual.
The prize is non-negotiable, non-transferable and non-refundable.
5 finalists will be sent over to our Judge, Katrina Wilson, to make the decision on the winner within 14 working days after the closing date of the competition. The Judge’s decision is final. The 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place winners will then be contacted via direct message on Instagram within 2-4 working weeks (end date 10^th April 2022) after the judge has selected a winner.
The Amazon vouchers (1^st place £350, 2^nd place £150, or 3^rd place £50) will be sent via email of which we will ask the winners to provide once chosen. Failure to respond within three working days of being notified of the prize will see the winner forfeit the prize and it being offered to another valid competition entrant.
All entries are welcome and will be considered equally.
The winner will be selected based on the following criteria:
- Originality of the picture
- Cuteness of the pet
- Pet personality
- Heart-warming caption
Ripe Photography may use information relating to the prize draw for marketing or promotional purposes, including the use of the winner’s name and likeness if you have chosen to receive news and offers from the Ripe group. Personal information of entrants will always be used in accordance with the Ripe Privacy Policy, currently located at: https://www.ripeinsurance.co.uk/privacy-policy/.
The prize draw is not open to any Ripe employees or their relatives. Any contractors engaged with Ripe are also excluded from participating.
Ripe may terminate these terms and conditions if you do not comply with the rules as stated in this document.
Ripe reserves the right to withdraw the prize before any winner is notified, or thereafter if any circumstances beyond reasonable control prevent or restrict Ripe or any other person or party from providing the prize or any aspect of the prize.
The competition is free to enter.

Waterfall Photography: A Complete Guide

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 Z

There are few features in our natural landscapes as beautiful as a waterfall.

All that cascading white water tumbling downwards, bouncing over rocks, hissing or roaring as it lands in a pool or a river at the bottom of its fall is just so inspiring and often breathtaking too.

It’s no wonder landscape photographers from all over the world want to capture this magnificent natural phenomenon. However, doing so in such a way that does justice to the waterfall’s isn’t as straightforward as it may seem at first. Simply pointing the camera at the tumbling water and snapping away with what I would call a 'standard' shutter speed of, say, about 1/60 or 1/125 second gives a reasonable record shot, but it rarely captures the atmosphere of the falls or even results in a technically satisfying image.

What we need to achieve with waterfall photography is a set of images that capture the beauty of the subject waterfall, both artistically and in technically satisfying ways, which are both moody and timeless. This blog will give pointers on the techniques needed to achieve this.

Waterfall photography: considerations and challenges

Interestingly, many of the techniques needed to photograph a waterfall well are similar regardless of whether you're shooting a gigantic Niagara Falls-type of thunderous cascade or simply water splashing over rocks in a moorland stream.

Before we come to those universal considerations, let's first look at some of the differences between large and smaller waterfalls.

The first and most obvious is scale. With a small waterfall, you may want to make it look bigger and more dramatic than it is – turning David into Goliath, shall we say. It’s not easy, but it is possible to turn what could appear rather disappointingly small and insignificant in the final images into something far more strong and powerful.

For larger waterfalls, you have the opposite problem: capturing the scale, grandeur and might of a waterfall in a small, two-dimensional image frame. One of the biggest issues photographers often grapple with when photographing large waterfalls is simply finding a way to fit it all in. In fact, often, the best answer is simply not to bother. The best and most dramatic photography concentrates on certain parts of the waterfall, often not even attempting to show the whole thing.

Another major challenge for photographers snapping large waterfalls is the spray. Not surprisingly, the impact of tons of water continually falling onto a body of water beneath results in a LOT of spray. If you're shooting from the bottom of the waterfall, the spray may well become quite a serious issue, and the closer you move in, the worse it will get. It can reach a point where your lens simply becomes covered with water within a few seconds of it being pointed at the waterfall, making photography quite impossible. Even if you back away to a distance that seems to be beyond the spray, you should still check the lens front regularly, as any water droplets there will ruin the appearance of the final images.

The next thing to consider is wind. Not just weather system wind, but also wind created by all that falling water, which sends air currents swirling in all directions, widely distributing spray in unpredictable ways.

Shooting from the top of a large waterfall can generate magnificent and rather unusual shots, looking down along the column of water, which are rather different from the usual upward-looking views. However, take care when doing this. Stand only in a safe place and move away if there is any danger of vertigo or slipping.

While going the extra mile to get the perfect photography is to be commended and encouraged, going just the extra inch with a waterfall could be an inch too far!

Universal waterfall photography skills

Some techniques can be applied to any form of waterfall photography. However, it’s not always easy to work out the best way to proceed. You need to ask yourself:

Should I shoot the waterfall in sunshine or under flat light?
Do I need a fast or slow shutter speed?
Do I need to use a wide or narrow lens aperture?
Should I shoot with a wide-angle lens or telephoto?
Should I put the camera on a tripod?

It's almost impossible to separate some of these considerations from each other. Deciding on one will affect some of the others, so your answers will often differ.

That said, we’ll start with the first consideration. Decisions regarding most of the others will naturally follow this one.

There’s often a temptation to photograph a waterfall in sunlight simply to maximise the amount of light available, hence making it ‘easier’ to photograph with the camera hand-held. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is usually a mistake. Waterfalls normally contain a lot of white water, and in sunlight, such water is usually too bright for the camera's sensor to handle. Usually, you'll end up with far too much contrast, especially if the white water is set against dark vegetation or rock (which is usually the case). The eye can handle such a contrast range, but the camera sensor cannot, meaning all that white water will burn out and lose its detail.

It's far better and easier to photograph most waterfalls in flat light – either on a cloudy day, with the sun below the horizon, or hidden behind trees or the hill/mountain the waterfall is tumbling down. This will decrease the contrast in your shot massively, making it possible for the sensor to correctly expose both the white water and all the surrounding/background vegetation and rock.

Fast shutter speeds

A fast shutter speed will result in a greatly reduced amount of light.

Many photographers often use a fast shutter speed in an attempt to freeze the movement of the falling water, but that then begs the question: 'What is fast?'

Even in quite a small waterfall, water moves incredibly quickly – much quicker than you think – so using a 'standard' type of shutter speed (say, 1/60, 1/125 or 1/250 second) is nowhere near fast enough to freeze the moving water. An image shot in such a way may look fine in the camera's LCD screen, but blow it up to a 100% view on a computer screen, and you'll see that the water is rather blurred, but not blurred in any attractive way – it simply isn't sharp.

Indeed, to freeze the movement of water in a waterfall, you'll generally need a shutter speed of at least 1/1000 second, but usually double or even four times this. Such a speed is impossible to achieve in flat lighting conditions without using a wide-open lens aperture and cranking the ISO up high. Unfortunately, the former will result in a rather small depth of field (i.e. the amount of the image that is sharp will be reduced), and the latter will cause the image to become grainy and have poorer colour quality.

Slow shutter speeds

In my view, the simplest solution that maintains high image quality and generates truly atmospheric images is to completely abandon any idea of trying to freeze the water and instead embrace the exact opposite. Use a slow shutter speed (slower than about 1/10 second) to really blur out that falling water, creating silky white ribbons that beautifully portray the feeling of movement and the natural flow of water.

Using such a slow shutter speed means you can keep the ISO low to ensure little noise and use a narrow lens aperture to maximise depth of field and ensure that everything in the scene, from water to background rock and vegetation, will be sharply in focus. It also means that the camera must be on a tripod; otherwise, everything will be blurred with camera shake.

So, how slow does the shutter speed need to be? As already mentioned, a rough rule of thumb would be any shutter speed slower than around 1/10 second, but a lot depends on how fast the water is moving. The slower the water, the slower the shutter speed needs to be to achieve an attractive blur.

It also depends on what kind of blur you'd like to have. With a faster shutter speed (say, between ¼ and 1/10 second), you’ll often see what I call a 'shards of glass' effect in the resulting images, where the moving water can be seen as streaks of parallel lines and splashes seen as arching lines of flying, jagged-looking arrows of water. This portrays a rather energy-packed restless sense of movement.

Use a slower exposure (say ½ second or slower, up to perhaps 20 seconds), and the water increasingly blurs out into a silky smooth whiteness containing less and less detail. The result can be a very moody image, one full of the sense of movement, and yet which at the same time can feel peaceful and soothing, even ethereal. A shutter speed slower than 20 seconds can blur the water out into a smooth white, silken sheet, which sometimes feels just a little too ethereal, though nevertheless highly artistic.

Furthermore, obtaining a very slow shutter (slower than, say, 10 seconds) can be quite a challenge during the daytime – there's a limit to how low you can set your ISO (and hence decrease the sensor's sensitivity) or how narrow you can have the lens aperture. To reduce the light reaching the sensor even further and create a longer exposure time, you’ll need to either put a neutral density filter over the lens or shoot at dusk or even at night. Night-time waterfall photography under starry skies can be stunning.

Choice of lens

My first reaction to questions about lenses is normally 'use just about all of them'.

My method of waterfall photography usually follows a routine starting with a wide-angle lens to shoot general scenes (though not necessarily of the entire waterfall), then honing in on finer details with an increasingly strong telephoto lens. The former gives a general sense of the waterfall's shape and size and may also include either the pool sitting at the fall's base or the river running away from it. The telephoto lens(es) hone in on details like water splashing off rocks, patterns created by water running down angled cliff-face rocks, and so on.

So, essentially, there’s no one single lens best for a waterfall. Instead, it’s a question of mix and match to get a series of images that set the wider scene and hone in on details. When dealing with smaller waterfalls, telephoto detail shots can capture images in which scale is difficult to grasp, often giving the illusion that smaller waterfalls are a lot bigger than they are.

In photographing details with a telephoto lens, I’ll sometimes go with the high shutter speed/high ISO technique to freeze the falling water. Shooting in this way enables the camera to capture individual water droplets flying through the air, creating dramatic, energy-filled scenes. A reasonably strong telephoto lens is needed for this technique to work, as only this will hone in close enough to those flying droplets to make them work as image subjects. It’s very unlikely to work with a wide-angle lens or even a short telephoto, for that matter.

The waterfall rainbow

We conclude with one of the few instances I might want to photograph a waterfall in sunlight.

Sunlight shining straight onto a waterfall with plenty of spray at or near its base will usually set up a rainbow in the said spray. It’s a spectacular sight and one that stays in place for as long as the sun is shining from the right angle (and you're standing in the right place to see it!)

When this happens, issues with high contrast in the white water areas become more of a secondary consideration, as that rainbow simply has to be photographed. Just do your best to cope with and minimise the contrast and any resulting white burnout. And, of course, keep checking your lens front for spray droplets.

All of this is part of the fun and the essence of the art and skill of waterfall photography. All that's left to say is get out there and start practising!

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

If you're a photographer, you need to protect your camera and accessories against theft, loss, and damage with our specialist camera insurance.

Our bespoke cover can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

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Somerset Photography: 8 Locations To Explore With Your Camera

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 13:53:02 Z

In the southwest of England, just south of Bristol, is Somerset. Lying somewhat in the shadows of its more famous neighbours, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall, Somerset is often overlooked for photography locations.

However, Somerset photography should by no means be overlooked – it's just that large parts of the region are perhaps not as 'in-your-face' as other nearby areas.

Somerset reveals its beauty slowly, as one fellow photographer once told me.

This blog will provide tips on where to find both Somerset's more famous places and some of its hidden gems, too. In doing so, we’ll cover not just today's county of Somerset, but the neighbouring North Somerset, Bath, and North East Somerset, too – regions that once all belonged to the same county.

Photography locations are both man-made and natural, ranging from architecture and street life to rural and coastal landscapes with wildlife.

As far as architecture is concerned, the beautiful Georgian city of Bath is undoubtedly number one on the list of photography locations in Somerset, closely followed by the much smaller, older cathedral city of Wells.

Natural landscapes worth photographing in Somerset include Exmoor National Park – the region’s leading wild area – but also the Quantock and Mendips Hills and the marshy, low-lying Somerset Levels.

Wildlife photography revolves around much of Exmoor, too, alongside several well-protected nature reserves in the Levels.

1. Bath
2. Wells
3. Cheddar Gorge
4. Avalon Marshes
5. Glastonbury
6. Dunster
7. Tarr Steps
8. Bossington Village and Hill

We’ll begin our tour in the great city of Bath.

The Georgian city of Bath

One of the UK's most famous cities, and the most visited location in Somerset, Bath is an architectural photographer's dream. Admittedly, there's not much in the way of modern architecture (at least, not that I’ve found), but for a lover of fine Georgian sandstone buildings, Bath is hugely inspiring.

At the city's heart sits the Abbey, alongside which stands the Roman Baths, both of which are among the city's most photographed structures – the former medieval, the latter mostly Georgian, though with Roman structures beneath.

All around Bath are streets, avenues and cobbled squares lined with refined Georgian buildings. Just wander at will to search out the most photogenic buildings, details and angles. To the northwest of the city centre is the famous Royal Crescent, a long curving three-storey terrace fronted by open parkland. Almost impossible to photograph well in its entirety, except perhaps as a panoramic, the Crescent is generally best tackled as a series of details, picking on the curves, columns, railings and doorways as photogenic elements.

The River Avon runs to the east of the city, itself quite attractive but made even more so by the stunning 18^th century Pulteney Bridge; the lower half a series of graceful arches and the upper level lined with shops. It’s said to be one of only a very few shop-lined bridges remaining in the world.

The cathedral city of Wells

Nestling at the southern foot of the Mendip Hills, southwest of Bath, Wells is a lovely historic gem. It is classed as a city, not in the sense of being a large urban area, but in the more traditional sense of having a cathedral. And what a cathedral it is, too: one of Britain's oldest and biggest, its western facade is both spectacular and imposing. Internally, its nave is truly magnificent, while its grounds still have an intact cloister. All of it makes for some fantastic photography.

Immediately around the cathedral, medieval almshouses make for gorgeous photo subjects, while just to the south, you’ll find the atmospheric, moat-ringed, ruined Bishop's Palace. The latter is arguably Well's most photogenic spot – for me, anyway.

In the adjoining city – separated from the cathedral simply by a high medieval wall – are many more examples of historic architecture, particularly around the Market Square. From here, the city's streets – though quite historic themselves – can become rather crowded and cluttered, resulting in fewer workable photographic opportunities.

If you’re photographing in Wells, instead concentrate your energy mostly on the area immediately in and around the cathedral and Bishop's Palace.

Cheddar Gorge

Arguably Somerset's premier natural landscape feature, Cheddar Gorge is an 11-mile gash in the southern flanks of the Mendip Hills, not too far from Wells. The gorge is usually accessed from the south, where both its mouth and the whole of the Mendip range fall away to meet the Somerset Levels.

The village of Cheddar sits just to the south of the gorge's mouth, while right in the mouth itself is the entrance to Cheddar Caves, a labyrinth of tunnels filled with stalactites and stalagmites, sadly closed at present.

From here, the narrow road twists and turns among towering cliffs before entering the gorge itself, after which it snakes its way steadily uphill towards the gorge's northern limit. Limestone cliffs tower all around to create some excellent photo opportunities. Those with an eye for macro photography will want to check out some of the wildflowers in spring and early summer, including the Cheddar Pink, a rare flower almost unique to the gorge.

The chasm peters out at the gorge’s northern limit, with the road passing through woodland before coming out onto open fields and moorland. The woodland area is a good place to stop, too, with footpaths heading south to give way to clifftop walks.

The clifftop walks provide truly stunning views across and along the gorge, and the photography on offer is significantly more dramatic than that possible from the gorge floor. In early summer, in particular, the grassland is littered with orchids, among other flowers, along with a smattering of a rare species of whitebeam tree.

The woodland walks and their beech trees are beautifully photogenic and are littered with wild garlic and bluebells in spring.

Avalon Marshes

Lying west of Glastonbury and in the heart of the Somerset Levels, Avalon Marshes is the collective name for six important marshland nature reserves, the most well-known of which are Shapwick Heath, Westhay Moor and Ham Wall.

All of the above are the flooded remains of old peat workings, whose marshy landscape gives us the closest window possible onto how the Levels must have looked 1000 years and more ago.

Generally speaking, landscape photography consists of lakeland, reed beds and marshy grassland against a backdrop of low hills. Vast skies and regular early morning mists also add timeless moods. Ham Wall Nature Reserve is particularly photogenic in this regard due to its backdrop views of Glastonbury Tor. This makes for beautiful compositions at any time of year.

All the reserves in Somerset are renowned for their wildlife, especially birds, and most especially in winter when thousands of migrants overwinter here. Birdwatchers and photographers themselves form flocks, particularly at Ham Wall, keen to spot and photograph a host of both common and rarer birds.

The former consist of a great array of ducks, such as wigeon, teal, pintail and tufted, while rarer birds include beauties like the Great White Egret, Marsh Harrier and the Eurasian Bittern, all of which are not commonly seen in the southwest.

Roe deer are sometimes seen in and around the woods and pastures at the Catcott Complex Nature Reserve, too.

Glastonbury

No Somerset list would be complete without a mention of Glastonbury. Sitting in the heart of the Somerset Levels, it’d be a rather unremarkable market town were it not for its associations with the legendary kingdom of Avalon and King Arthur, coupled with the atmospheric ruins of its Abbey and the omnipresent Glastonbury Tor.

And then there's that rather large music festival, held (almost) every June.

Photographically, of course, the Abbey and Tor are the ever-present attractions. The ruins are generally best photographed in low sunlight when warm colours and long shadows add to the drama and mystery of the buildings. The Tor is often photographed at dawn/sunrise and sunset/dusk – typically times of the day when the light can be either quite dramatic or very soft. At these times, the Tor's steep conical, church tower-topped slopes dominate the surrounding low-lying Levels, making for some dramatic landscape photography that shines a light on Glastonbury’s historic associations.

Not surprisingly, the views from the Tor's summit are rather magnificent, reaching across the Levels into the far distance, towards the Bristol Channel. Unfortunately, such a distant, low-lying view doesn't make for great photography, so successful photography here does entail including a strong foreground element, usually the summit tower, most often photographed at sunrise or sunset.

Dunster

On the north-eastern edge of Exmoor National Park and close to the seaside town of Minehead, Dunster heads the category of 'beautifully preserved historic village'.

There’s nothing modern here. In fact, every street is lined with historic buildings ranging from medieval to the 18^th century.

Dunster Castle is located over the village on a small hilltop at the main street’s southern end, with its origins dating back more than 1000 years, though today's building dates mostly to the 17^th century. There are several vantage points around this hilly village, providing good photogenic views of the castle and village, while down at street level, there are any number of buildings and street scenes worth shooting, along with a preserved watermill.

The surrounding hills and wooded countryside marks the real start of Exmoor, providing wonderful landscape photography opportunities with moorland views and woodland details. It’s also possible to find Red and Fallow Deer in this area, which is good for wildlife photography (if you can get close enough, that is!)

Tarr Steps

Nestled in a deep valley on Exmoor's southern slopes, Tarr Steps is the region's most well-known prehistoric remain, consisting of a long and rough stone footbridge across the fast-flowing, boulder-strewn River Barle. Both bridge and river are enveloped in dense ancient woodland, and with footpaths heading upstream from the bridge on both banks, there’s good access to both forest and river scenes.

The Steps themselves are quite photogenic, with views of the whole bridge and close details of its stones all worthy photo subjects. However, with it being a popular visitor attraction, it can get quite busy, making people-free bridge photography rather problematic at times.

For me, at least, the main photographic draw here is the woodland, especially where the trees crowd in along the river bank on both shores, leaning out over the water. Within easy walking distance of the bridge, there are multiple good compositions: a mix of water flowing around and over rocks, with verdant trees hanging over or standing close by. This is an ideal place to practise some woodland and river landscape photography at just about any time of year. The trees are a vibrant green through much of the spring and summer, while in October, beech trees (of which there are many) generate a superb array of colours.

Bossington Village and Hill

The village of Bossington is a highly scenic place, just inland from Exmoor's Bristol Channel coast, and backed by the huge rounded outline of Bossington Hill.

The village itself consists almost entirely of quaint, photogenic cottages, some thatched, many of them with distinctive tall, robust chimneys. Footpaths from here lead down to the pebbly shore, to nearby Porlock Marsh and the exposed and rugged Hurlstone Point – all good photography locations.

For me, the main attraction besides the village itself is the enormous coastal Bossington Hill. There’s a footpath from the village to the summit, but it's a long, steep climb, and there's a perfectly good road to the top. However, to take it, you have to backtrack by car to Minehead and take the hill road there, climbing Bossington Hill from the east.

The views from the westernmost of the hill's several summits are stupendous; out across the Bristol Channel towards Wales and westwards along Exmoor's hilly coastline. To the south, views reach across the village of Porlock to the hills of Exmoor, including Dunkery Beacon, the national park's highest point. The view is spectacular at any time of year, but even more so when the hill's heather and gorse bushes are in flower.

Getting the best out of Somerset photography

Hopefully, this introduction to Somerset photography gives you some inspiration to get out there and look around the county yourself.

Use these eight places as a starting point, and expand from there, adding some of your own favourite locations.

Happy shooting!

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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The Top 10 Photography Locations In Devon And Cornwall

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 17:49:59 Z

Devon and Cornwall are renowned for their beautiful landscapes, spectacular coastline, and impossibly quaint villages and harbours. So, trying to choose their top ten photo locations is no easy task.

However, I've pulled together my ten favourite sites, mostly for landscape photography, but also some travel photography. These sites aren't listed in some order of merit, but geographically, simply because I found it impossible to rank any better than the others: they're all just a bit different from each other.

I'm going to start in the far west of Cornwall and work my way eastwards. These are my top ten photography locations in Devon and Cornwall.

1. The Isles of Scilly

2. Gwennap Head

3. Botallack

4. Gwithian

5. Looe and Polperro

6. Bigbury-on-Sea and Burgh Island

7. Fingle Bridge

8. Hartland Quay

9. Watersmeet

10. Exmouth

Cornwall photo locations

1. The Isles of Scilly

OK, so you can hardly call this little archipelago 30 miles southwest of Cornwall's most westerly tip a single photo location. However, it's all so beautiful that I'm inclined to treat it as such.

From the harbour at Hugh Town on St Mary's, the main island, to the vast expanse of sandy beach in Pentle Bay on the island of Tresco, you'll hardly want to put your camera away.

As they're rather low-lying, the islands are short on magnificent cliff views. However, they're well endowed with granite boulder-lined coves, as well as wide-sweeping expanses of blindingly white sand, lapped by crystal clear aquamarine waters. Tresco is home to the beautiful Abbey Gardens, home to many Mediterranean plants, plus red squirrels.

However, the islands' ultimate photography challenge has to be the hundreds of grey seals and marine birds that call the Western Rocks home.

The Western Rocks are the Scillies' last rocky fragments, facing the open Atlantic to the west. They're also one of the UK's main concentrations of grey seals – this species is present throughout the year and is joined by puffins, guillemots, and razorbills in the summer months. None of the rocks can be landed on, so photography has to be done from a boat.

2. Gwennap Head

Largely ignored in favour of its much more famous and heavily visited near-neighbour Land's End, lying just a few miles to the northwest, Gwennap Head is – in my view, at least – much more spectacular than its cousin. It's also a hugely significant headland, as it's the point where Cornwall turns a corner from its English Channel-facing coast to the southeast to look towards the Atlantic out west.

As a result, both marine birds and migrating inland birds regularly use the headland as a navigation beacon, using it as landfall when arriving or a launchpad when leaving. Both whales and basking sharks also regularly pass by the headland, though spotting them can require sharp eyes, and they're unlikely to make the easiest or closest photo subjects.

Rather more reliable are the cliffs, some of the most spectacular in the whole of Cornwall. These are the main reason for visiting Gwennap Head. Although almost sheer, they're also broken into a series of granite columns standing as huge buttresses. The granite glows quite a golden colour in the evening sunlight, so this is the best time of day to photograph this stunning landscape.

During the spring and early summer, the clifftops are ablaze with the colours of wildflowers, including thrift, sea campion, birds-foot trefoil and stonecrop.

Another bonus is that – with almost zero light pollution – this is an excellent spot for night sky photography, with unobstructed views to the south for shots of the Milky Way and across the countryside to the north for the Plough and Pole Star.

3. Botallack

Another magnificent set of cliffs made famous by its now-iconic cliff-edge tin mine ruins, this is a place that has become a popular photography spot in recent years.

The main – and most famous – view is of the mine ruins seen from the opposite side of a steep and sharply curving cove. However, there's much else to photograph, including different angles of the same ruins and many other ruined mine workings.

These cliffs are also an excellent place in which to photograph kestrels and choughs, both of which are on constant patrol here.

4. Gwithian

Sitting at the northeast end of a vast beach that stretches several miles from the town of Hayle, this is one of the north coast's gems.

Gwithian is mostly a relatively low-lying site, consisting of sandy beaches, shoreline rocks, and a huge expanse of dunes.

Photography is best at low tide, with options ranging from rippling patterns in the wet sand to the vast numbers of mussels that cling to the rocks. In spring and early summer, these dunes are a trove of wildflowers, including yellow rattle, viper's bugloss, kidney vetch, and pyramidal orchid.

When you head along the shore beyond the beach, you'll notice the cliffs rise up high and vertical, giving great views across nearby Godrevy Island. Its white lighthouse is a frequently photographed landmark, particularly during stormy weather when it's frequently surrounded by surf.

5. Looe and Polperro

We now move completely away from landscape and nature photography, as my last Cornish site very much covers travel photography.

Consisting really of two sites, I've combined them into one as Looe and Polperro offer two sides of the same coin. Both are centres of fishing, but each presents very a different face.

On the one hand, Looe is a functioning town with a real community, its fishing harbour centred along the shore of the Looe River estuary, sitting in the bottom of a deep valley.

On the other hand, nearby Polperro is the quintessential ye olde Cornish fishing village. Ancient, white-washed cottages tumble down steep slopes that tower above a tight cove, in which sits a small harbour, itself in turn surrounded by tightly packed white cottages. Unfortunately, most of the cottages here are now holiday homes, so there's not a lot of community, though there are still fishing boats and there's much fishing activity.

Photography at both places – best done at high tide when both harbours are full of water – concentrates largely on colourful fishing boat scenes. At Looe, windless conditions allow for some wonderful reflections in the estuary's water.

A little upstream of Looe's harbour, steep forested hills bring trees right down to the water's edge, creating some attractive landscape photography opportunities. This sight is especially attractive early in the early morning when the water is often shrouded in fog.

Polperro's narrow, cottage-lined lanes present an endless succession of quaint historic views, particularly when you reach the cottages lining the harbour. One of the best-known views is shot from the outermost end of the harbour, on a lane above the harbour (towards the sea), looking back along the harbour and into the village.

Devon photo locations

6. Bigbury-on-Sea and Burgh Island

Lying on Devon's south coast, Bigbury-on-Sea is a beautiful beach location.

A wide sandy bar stretches seawards, connecting the rocky crag of Burgh Island to the mainland, at least for a few hours each day. Just to the east sits the also very sandy estuary of the River Avon (yes, yet another Avon), while on the opposite side of the estuary stretch, you have the sand and dunes of Bantham.

Don't even think of coming here for photography at the height of a summer's day – it's far too crowded. But it can be quite idyllic out of season and/or at either end of the day.

Although seen largely as a beach location, its photo subject matter is remarkably varied, though it mostly needs to be photographed at low tide. Subjects include beautiful sunlit ripple patterns in wet sand, reflections of Burgh Island in beach pools, and combinations of beach pools, rippled sand, and craggy rocks, particularly in the beach area just inside the estuary.

The seaward side of Burgh Island offers wonderfully rugged cliffs that just beg to be photographed in stormy autumnal weather. In spring and early summer, the clifftops are bedecked with maritime flowers, most especially thrift, sea campion, and bird's-foot trefoil. The island's eastern clifftops give magnificent view across Bigbury, Bantham, and up into the Avon estuary.

A final bonus is that on breezy days, mainly when the wind is onshore, the bay lined by Burgh Island, Bigbury, Bantham, and the Avon estuary is a major spot for surfing, windsurfing, and kite-surfing. As a result, you can capture some exhilarating photography, provided you have a reasonably powerful telephoto lens.

7. Fingle Bridge

Lying in the northeastern heart of Dartmoor National Park, Fingle Bridge is an intensely beautiful valley filled with ancient oak and beech forest, through which flows the River Teign.

Just a mile or two outside the village of Drewsteignton, but at the bottom of a very steep narrow hill, the site starts with an ancient packhorse bridge over the river, coupled with an adjacent pub. Forest closes in all around, clinging to the steep slopes.

Footpaths radiate out from close to the bridge, but my recommendation is to cross the bridge and then turn right, heading upstream along a well-laid track that follows close to the riverbank. This stretch is particularly beautiful in autumn when stands of beech trees put swathes of golden colour along the riverbank, but it's beautiful and highly photogenic at any time of year. During late autumn and winter, no sun reaches the valley floor, so at this time, the water and trees here will always be photographed in flat, even light.

The main photography subject matter is the forest and the river, particularly those trees leaning or hanging over the water. The Teign along this stretch is mostly quite fast-flowing and boulder-strewn, so it's a good place to photograph water swirling around and over rocks. Shoot with the camera on a tripod and use a long exposure (up to several seconds) to blur the movement of the water and hence transmit the sense of movement and energy in the final images.

8. Hartland Quay

In my view, this is Devon's most spectacular stretch of coastline. Hartland Quay itself is simply an old hotel and pub, coupled with a disused harbour, sitting on the shore at the bottom of a very steep hill and surrounded by rugged sheer cliffs.

The cliffs and rocks here face west, so they're best photographed late in the afternoon, at sunset, and at dusk. At these times, the cliffs can seem to glow with the golden sunlight. Many are also marked by ancient signs of huge upheavals, and the sediments within the cliffs are frozen into enormous waves and zigzag patterns, creating some wonderful, detailed pattern photo opportunities.

One of this site's biggest attractions lies about two miles south of Hartland Quay, where a sheer three-stage waterfall cascades down a cleft in the cliffs, crashing down onto a boulder beach. Most of the waterfall spends much of its time in the shadows, so it’s usually photographable with flat, even lighting. However, late in the afternoon, parts of the waterfall do catch the sun, making it difficult to shoot. The top part of the waterfall is easily seen from the clifftop, and the middle part is accessible with care down a steep and sometimes slippery path. The bottom section is accessible across the boulder beach, but only for about two hours either side of low tide.

9. Watersmeet

Watersmeet is a deep, forested valley in Exmoor National Park and close to Lynmouth on Devon's north coast.

As its name suggests, two rivers meet here – the East Lyn River and Hoar Oak Water. The former is a fast-moving, boulder-strewn river that heads on from Watersmeet northwards to Lynmouth, and its meeting places with first the West Lyn River and then the sea.

Hoar Oak Water is much smaller, but at the final point, before it joins the East Lyn, it's the most spectacular by some margin, the foaming waters crashing down a multi-stage waterfall that’s almost completely enveloped in over-arching trees.

The only workable viewpoint from which to photograph the waterfall is a narrow wooden footbridge that crosses the river, providing the main entry and exit point for Watersmeet. As it’s a very popular place, I would advise photographing the waterfall early or late in the day when there are few people. Remember to photograph with the camera on a tripod, using a long exposure to blur the moving water.

There are also many photo opportunities along the East Lyn River, particularly upstream, where it’s narrower and more enveloped with trees than further downstream. The footpath here sticks very close to the riverbank, giving access to views of the water swirling around and over rocks, with trees leaning or hanging overhead.

10. Exmouth

This seaside town on the southeast coast of Devon may seem like an unlikely inclusion in this list, but I find Exmouth to be a fun and highly varied place to photograph. Sitting at the mouth of the River Exe, Exmouth comes with quite a variety of photo subject matter, ranging from the estuary itself, its harbour and surrounding buildings to a vast beach and watersports.

Estuary views include photography of beached or floating moored boats (at low and high tide), shingle-bound pools giving reflections of Exmouth's harbour buildings (at low tide), and beautiful sunset views across the estuary to the Haldon Hills.

The harbour, though once a commercial port, is now a marina surrounded by modern luxury apartments, and, in its own way, has some attractive photogenic views, particularly at dusk. The apartment buildings are surprisingly interesting for modern architectural photography, especially in evening sunlight and at dusk, and produce some great reflections in the harbour's waters.

Finally, the beach is a vast stretch of white sand in the last part of the river's mouth and isn’t very photogenic. However, on a breezy Sunday, especially if the wind is onshore, this is one of the southwest's premier windsurfing and kite-surfing spots. So, there are opportunities aplenty to capture some exciting and colourful photography and get quite close to the action without getting wet.

I hope this list inspires you to do some great photography in the southwest. But just as a final word of caution: when photographing on the coast, you must know the local tide times, which you can easily find online. Several of the coastal sites described in this article involve places where you could easily be cut off by rising waters, so it’s important to do your research in order to stay safe.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. You can find out more about these here.

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What Is Motion Blur In Photography And How Should You Use It?

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 02:34:42 Z

When photographing a moving subject with a fast shutter speed, all that motion will likely be frozen in the final image. As a result, your image may appear flat and lifeless. All the excitement and energy created by that movement is lost, and the resulting image looks static and rather disappointing.

There is a relatively simple solution to this issue – allow some of the 'right' kind of movement into the image, allowing either the moving subject or (if possible) its background to blur. Occasionally, you could perhaps even enable both to blur.

This blog gives you the full lowdown on motion blur in photography and explains how you can achieve it.

1. The art of the blur

2. Blurring the moving subject

3. Blurring the background

4. How much blur?

5. Use of neutral density (ND) filters

6. Putting it all together

The art of the blur

The technique is particularly associated with landscape photography, especially in blurring the movement of water. For instance, the sea, with waves rolling into shore, or a fast-flowing river running over and around rocks.

However, blurred motion photography is used not just for landscapes but also for sport, wildlife, people, and street life (particularly traffic after dark), whereby all kinds of activities can be blurred to give the sense of movement. So, the beating wings of a bird, the movements of a working person, and the colourful lines of traffic tail-lights are all great examples of commonly blurred moving subjects.

These ideas largely reflect the blurring of the moving subject, but there’s another blurring technique you can use. Specifically, that of blurring the background, not through it being out of focus, but through panning the camera to keep up with a fast-moving subject. This is frequently used in the photography of flying birds, fast-running mammals, a running athlete, or a fast car or train.

The aim of allowing blur into your moving-subject photos is to prevent them from becoming static. Instead, you’re instilling a sense of movement, energy and dynamism, a fundamental part of conveying mood and excitement in photographs that capture moving action, from a waterfall to a Formula One race.

Blurring the moving subject

In essence, this is very simple. For a subject moving at a slow or moderate speed, just put the camera on a tripod and use a long exposure, thus ensuring that anything moving in the frame will be blurred. If your subject’s moving really fast, then it may be possible to handhold the camera, with a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/60 second slow enough to blur the movement.

Generally, however, tripod-mounting the camera with a shutter speed of 1/10 second or slower (up to many seconds) is needed. Here are some common scenarios in which you might need this:

Waves coming onto a shore
Water flowing in a stream
Urban traffic at dusk
Leaves blowing in a breeze

Of course, this blur can only be achieved within the limits of how far the lens aperture can be stopped down and how low the camera's ISO (the sensor's sensitivity) can be set. The narrower you have the aperture (i.e., the higher the f-number), the less light that is allowed through to the sensor, and hence the longer the shutter needs to be open in order to compensate. Similarly, the lower the ISO, the lower the sensor's sensitivity and the more light it needs to be correctly exposed.

Of course, there’s a limit to how narrow the lens aperture can be and how low the ISO can go. Once you've reached those limits, any attempt to make the exposure time longer will just allow too much light in and result in over-exposure.

So, blurring movement in bright sunlight of anything other than a fast-moving subject often requires adding a neutral density filter to the front of the lens and a filter that cuts down the amount of light getting into the lens. You also need to mimic low-light conditions – this is particularly useful for landscape photography. The use of neutral density (or ND filters) is covered below.

Generally, however, without the use of ND filters, blurred motion photography in which you're blurring the moving subject works best in relatively low light conditions. Unsurprisingly, this type is, therefore, best suited to dull, overcast conditions, in deep shade (such as in a woodland), at dusk, dawn, and at night.

Blurring the background

This technique is commonly used in sport and, to a lesser extent, wildlife photography, generally when photographing fast-moving action with a telephoto lens. It involves panning the camera as the subject moves past in front of you, from left to right or vice versa. You always keep the subject firmly in the frame and the camera's focus locked onto it. The background will become blurred, partially due to being out of focus, but mainly due to the lens's panning movement.

This can, in principle, be done with the camera on a tripod, but handholding gives you much greater flexibility and freedom to move quickly, which is an essential feature of this method. If you decide to handhold the camera, make sure you use a fast shutter to prevent the whole image from blurring through camera shake. Preventing the whole image from blurring is especially important when you come to use long focal length telephoto lenses.

Panning does take practice, and it isn't easy to get perfect results the first few times you try it. A good way to maximise the chances of success is to set the camera to continuous rapid shooting. Doing this will result in multiple images each time you pan on your subject (assuming you get more than one opportunity!).

There’s a danger that the camera will lose focus at some point while you’re panning, and it won't regain focus until your subject is far off in the distance. If you know the distance between you and your subject, and if that remains reasonably constant as your subject moves past, you can try to overcome potentially losing focus by turning the lens's autofocus off and manually pre-setting the focus to the necessary distance.

Some cameras now have automatic tracking, meaning that once a lens has focused on your chosen subject, the camera will keep it locked on, tracking the subject as it moves through the frame. This piece of technology generally works quite well, but it takes a bit of practice for you to understand how to make the best of it.

It can be frustrating to start with, but once you've mastered the art of panning and how to make the best use of your camera and telephoto lens combination, you can achieve spectacular results. Racing cars and horses, for example, can be pin sharp, with the background blurred out as a mass of horizontal lines, the result of elements in the background flying past the camera as the lens pans with your subject.

How much blur?

Just how much blur you need with either motion blur technique will depend on the effect you're trying to generate and how fast your subject is moving. For example, in terms of blurring the moving subject, when you’re photographing surf rolling onto a beach or a mountain stream babbling around rocks, an exposure of several seconds will cause the water to completely blur out.

A wave will become quite invisible, and be replaced by a very soft, often white, smooth silken effect containing very little detail. Though still depicting movement, such a total blur is actually very calming and will isolate a static object in the frame (such as a rock) from the rest of the view. It also removes – or at least masks – any clutter, greatly increasing the impact of the image and directing attention to that static object.

Replace that very long exposure with a rather faster one – say, one-tenth of a second – and the blur will become rather jagged, producing what I call a 'shards of glass' effect whereby sprays of water are clearly visible. The effect now is very restless and dynamic and very different from the smooth 'white-out' of the long exposure.

It's a similar thing with photography of evening traffic. How long the exposure needs to be very much depends on the amount of traffic and how fast it's going. However, an exposure of several seconds will usually be enough for the individual vehicles to become quite invisible and be replaced by colourful, continuous red tail-light lines.

It's a highly effective way of illustrating the evening life of any urban district. In this scenario, using a shorter exposure – such as one-tenth of a second – is less effective, as the vehicles become visible and the tail-light streams broken up into dashes that don't link up into a continuous stream.

When it comes to background blur generated by panning the camera on a fast-moving subject, the amount of blur is determined almost entirely by your subject's speed, something you have no control over. The camera has to pan at a speed that keeps up with your subject, and the amount of blur will reflect that panning speed.

Reducing your shutter speed won't have any influence, beyond perhaps, on the one hand, increasing the depth of field and hence the amount of the image technically in focus, and on the other increasing the risk of camera shake rendering the entire image blurred.

Use of neutral density (ND) filters

Commonly used in landscape photography, neutral density (ND) filters make it possible to use a slow shutter speed to blur a moving subject, even in bright sunlight. Not to be confused with neutral density graduated filters (ND grads), which are used to darken just one part of a scene that would otherwise be too bright, ND filters darken the whole scene, greatly increasing the exposure needed to create a photo.

Since they darken the entire frame evenly, they don't need to be rectangular (unlike ND grads) but can instead be standard circular filters that screw onto the front of your lens. Such filters come, of course, in various grades, offering mostly a 2-4 stop (i.e., 2 to 16-fold) reduction in the amount of light passing through. This is quite enough to allow for a slow enough shutter speed to give a good blur to surf or a stream, for example, even in bright sunlight.

It’s also possible to use filters called 'stoppers' that block out far more light, resulting in really long exposures that’ll blur out even a slow-moving sea or river into a featureless, often misty, and ethereal sheet. These filters are generally square and fit onto the front of a lens using the same kind of mount as is normal for ND grad filters. Their edges are also usually backed by a thin layer of foam to prevent any light leaking around their edges.

Stoppers are generally available in two strengths – six-stops, and 10-stops. These achieve 128-fold and 2048-fold reductions in the amount of light passing through, respectively. They may be very useful in creating an enormous amount of blur in moving water, for example, but sometimes it’s an overkill (particularly for the 10-stop stopper), with all detail lost in the blurred parts.

Moreover, they're quite difficult to use, as once they are mounted on the lens, it's quite impossible to see anything through the viewfinder or LCD screen, making it essential to line up the composition beforehand.

Putting it all together

The techniques of motion blur photography are mostly quite straightforward. However, the art can also be quite subtle, and the results never entirely predictable.

Things are on the move, of course, creating uncertainty, and slightly different exposure times can result in remarkably different end results.

The rule, then, is just to get out there and play. Experiment, take lots of different kinds of photos, with different compositions, different exposures, and hence different degrees of blur. You'll be amazed by the variety of results you'll achieve.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. You can find out more about these here.

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An Expert Guide On How To Perfect Your Architectural Photography

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:59:21 Z

While the photographic skills needed for architectural photography have many parallels with other genres of photography, particularly when shooting landscapes, some aspects and challenges are specific to this area.

This article gives you a series of tips on how to hone your photographic skills specifically for the architectural field. I'll start by setting the scene: what is architectural photography?

1. What does architectural photography cover?

2. Styles of architectural photography

3. Technically correct photography

4. Creative photography

5. Details, details, details

6. Putting together an image set

What does architectural photography cover?

The simple answer is that it incorporates photography of all aspects of the design of the human-built environment. This ranges from views of entire city skylines (through photographs of individual buildings and the tiniest architectural details on those buildings) to their interiors.

External architectural and interior photography represent two sides of the same coin and should be considered together. However, in the interests of space, this article will look at only architectural photography of exteriors – I’ll save the interior photography tips for a later blog.

Architectural photography skills apply not just to spectacular modern buildings but also historic buildings and every kind of human-built structure, whether it be a world-famous palace or museum or an old and tumbledown cottage. They’re all architectural creations, although, admittedly, we might struggle to find much architectural or photographic merit in many!

Assuming, however, that we're only going to be drawn to point our cameras at those structures that do have some architectural – and hence photographic – merit, how do we go about capturing them?

Styles of architectural photography

In my view, there are, essentially, two broad styles or categories of architectural photography: technically correct and creative.

The two styles are quite distinct from one another and yet not mutually exclusive. Both are intended to deal with – in very different ways – one of the biggest challenges of architectural photography: converging parallels.

These styles are important throughout much of architectural photography, whether the subject is an entire skyline, a single building (or small cluster of buildings), or an interior, and whether the building(s) is/are modern or historic. The only area where there is sometimes less distinction between the two styles is in the photography of details.

One of the main features of many building photos is that the photographed building appears to be leaning backwards, with its walls slanting and converging towards the top. This is what is meant by converging parallels.

It’s an inevitable result of the frequent need – particularly when shooting tall buildings – to tip the camera backwards to fit the entire building into the image frame. Doing so means that the camera's digital sensor (or film) isn’t parallel to the building's walls, with its angle of tilt then reflected in those slanting walls in the final image.

Obviously, in the real world, those walls aren’t slanting at all – they’re vertical and parallel to one another. And yet, we’ve become so used to seeing photos of buildings with a slant that we largely accept it as normal. It’s vital that the photographer doesn’t accept this but rather does something about it, through either the technically correct style or a range of creative techniques, or a combination of both.

The technically correct style of photography aims to banish those converging parallels and to depict that building as it really is. In the creative style, however, just about anything goes, with those converging parallels frequently incorporated into – and often exaggerated – in a more artistic (though perhaps less realistic) representation of the architecture.

Technically correct photography

Keeping the walls of any building vertical and parallel in the final images can be quite a challenge – particularly if you’re taking a photograph of a tall building – but there are several ways to achieve this.

These can be summarised as the use of a shift lens, 'normal' wide-angle lenses with a displaced perspective, and post-photography software.

a) The shift lens

This is arguably the most important piece of kit for any professional architectural photographer. A shift lens is a very specialised kind of lens (usually with a short focal length, i.e., a wide-angle view) that fits onto the front of a camera in the normal way, but in which the lens part itself can then be slid up and down, or side-to-side, on a rail.

Sliding the lens upwards enables the photographer to keep the camera back (and hence the sensor or film) vertical and so parallel to the building's wall while at the same time looking upwards. If you follow this process correctly, the result is a technically correct image of the building, with all walls vertical and parallel.

b) Normal wide-angle lenses

Useful if the buildings you're photographing are only a couple of stories high, you can use a normal wide-angle lens (usually as short a focal length as you can get). Keeping the camera back vertical will, again, ensure that the building's walls are vertical and parallel. However, it’ll put the building firmly in the top half of the image frame, leaving an awful lot of foreground in the lower half.

So, if doing this, you need to make darned sure that the foreground is interesting – plain concrete, scruffy grass, or tangled brambles just won't cut it! A much more engaging foreground would be, for example, some calm water giving a nice reflection of the building. Or it could be a diagonal boulder, path, or stream pointing and leading the way towards the building.

Not surprisingly, this does limit the ability to shoot in this way – a reflective pool can’t go in front of every building. So, it’s important to be quite selective about what buildings you capture in this way. You may find it useful to move around quite a bit before shooting in order to find the best perspective, not so much from the point of view of the building but how to make the best use of the foreground.

A slightly different alternative (that’s sometimes possible) is for the photographer to get themselves in a raised viewpoint at least part way up the height of their subject building. This can enable a correct perspective to be possible and reduce the amount of inevitable foreground. Of course, unless you can carry around your own very tall ladder or crane, this option is only available occasionally, but it's always worth keeping an eye out for this possibility.

c) Post-photography software

These days Photoshop, and other photo editing programmes, have some very effective perspective-correcting tools that allow the photographer to shoot a building with converging parallels and correct them on the computer later.

This works well for images with only a modest amount of convergence, but when it starts to become extreme, it’s not quite so ideal. The reason for this issue is that, in correcting the perspective, the software has to stretch the top part of the image, creating new pixels, and in so doing, has to interpolate (or guess) what those pixels should contain. This is great for modest amounts of perspective correction, but it has the potential to cause loss of image quality if done to the extreme.

To avoid this risk, try to shoot using either of the first two techniques listed above (using a shift or normal wide-angle lens), and then fine-tune the image in-computer.

d) Optical illusions

As a final note about the technically correct style of photography, it’s worth mentioning one problem of an optical illusion that sometimes results.

We’ve become so used to images of buildings slanting backwards and becoming narrower towards the top that the upper parts of tall buildings can appear to be bulging outwards when these images are reproduced with the correct perspective! This is an optical illusion because when such an image is carefully examined, it becomes clear that the walls are parallel, not leaning outwards.

This problem is so distracting that many architectural photographers don't fully correct the converging parallels, at least in images of tall buildings. They leave just a little convergence in place to ensure that the photographed building looks correct.

Creative photography

The creative style of architectural photography is the very antithesis of the technically correct style. Gone is the strict discipline of ensuring that all the verticals are parallel and actually vertical. Now just about anything goes, provided it makes a great composition and has a visual impact.

This means, inevitably, that the process is quite fluid and, therefore, rather hard to define and describe. Many of the architecturally creative images that really work have a strong graphic element, incorporating diagonal, horizontal, vertical, and curving lines into a unifying composition and often setting this off against the interplay of light and colour.

One of the main processes is to take those converging parallels and make a virtue of them, incorporating them into the image's graphic composition, frequently exaggerating them to enhance their dramatic and dynamic impact.

The result is that, instead of being a pesky drain on the image's correctness, they now become one of the main driving forces in creating a strong, impactful image. In terms of architectural design, such an image will almost certainly be wholly incorrect, but as an artistic, creative piece of imagery, it’s likely to be stunning.

One of the most common features of the creative style is that – unlike technically correct photography – there’s often little attempt to photograph an entire building, particularly a tall one. Instead, one or perhaps a couple of the most interesting sections are selected, perhaps areas that contain particularly strong architectural features and/or which are receiving sunlight at an especially effective angle.

By doing the above, you get an image that cuts past any potentially distracting or photographically damaging intrusions (e.g., street lights, overhead cables, and satellite dishes). You also get an image that homes in specifically on the building's best design features, something that should delight the architect's inner artist!

In many ways, the creative style starts us down the road towards the photography of details, but of large portions of a building rather than just a tiny segment. That part comes next.

Details, details, details

Architectural photography should not be simply about the broader view of an entire building, a cluster of buildings, or an urban skyline. It’s important to delve a little deeper to examine some of the minutiae.

From those little embellishments that the architect deliberately included to make a statement to those serendipitous moments caused by the play of light on a window, or the shape and contrast caused by a juxtaposition of shadow and sunlight, every detail is important.

Embellishments are, of course, usually associated with historical buildings, such as cathedrals and stately homes. On such buildings an exuberance of gargoyles, statues, spires, and turrets can provide an inexhaustible, but sometimes rather cluttered, supply of possible detail subjects. In this situation, it’s important to be highly selective and photograph only the detail subjects that are well-lit and not interfered with by a clutter of adjacent figures.

By 'well-lit', when it comes to architectural embellishments, I generally mean a rather soft, almost flat lighting. It’s tempting to want to photograph everything in bright sunlight, and sometimes this works nicely.

However, when it comes to details, it can also mean an excess of bright highlights on one side and deep shadow on the other, disrupting the appearance of that detail. It’s often better to photograph such details either on a cloudy day or while in shadow.

In terms of modern buildings, details tend to take quite a different form. They tend to be the shapes of windows or the reflection of light off them, the structure of a steel framework, or the interplay of diagonals and curves within the overall shape of the building.

Whatever the kind of external detail, successful photography will require them to be isolated from the rest of the surrounding building and likely quite distant. In other words, a moderately strong telephoto lens will be needed, particularly if you’re shooting details on a tall structure.

Converging parallels will be much less of a concern in this kind of photography since you're photographing only very small components and from (usually) quite some distance with a telephoto lens. Occasionally, you may find that a window photographed from below will show some convergence in its frame, but this can easily be corrected on the computer if need be.

Putting together an image set

There are many occasions, of course, when you want to shoot just one or two views of any building that grabs your interest.

But, with the armoury of techniques described in this article, it should be possible – and hopefully more tempting – to go out and generate a series of images, a photo essay that tells something of a story about a chosen building.

Such a sequence of shots could range from a couple of technically correct images that show more or less the whole building, followed by a series of more creative images, that then as a final touch to complete the story blend with a few details, whether they be gargoyles or light on a steel-framed window.

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8 Photography Composition Guidelines You Need To Know

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 19:14:03 Z

If every photographer’s ultimate goal is to generate reproducible images with impact, atmosphere, and style, then the main avenue to that goal has to be via composition.

Composition is king – without good composition, you’ll produce a mediocre image, no matter how superb the lighting, how sharp the subject, or how exotic the location.

Acquiring the necessary compositional skills can be quite a struggle – a mystery, in fact.

Some photographers seem to have a natural ability to get it right, sometimes without knowing how or why. But the rest of us mere mortals have to learn composition, practise it again and again, and eventually hopefully absorb it into the way we shoot.

Below are eight steps to help guide you towards that goal.

1. Keep it simple

2. Less is more

3. The rule of unequal thirds

4. Controlling perspective

5. Selective focus

6. Guiding lines and shapes

7. Diagonals and energy

8. Light and colour

1. Keep it simple

The simplest compositions are undoubtedly the most effective.

Those images with a single, strong subject that dominates the frame, free from competition with conflicting, confusing secondary elements almost always make the strongest, most satisfying images.

The more elements or components you allow into the frame, the more complex the image becomes and the more the viewer’s eye will skip restlessly from one element to another. The viewer will be unable to settle on any one part of the image, even when it’s clear what the main subject is meant to be.

Such an image can become so complex and confused that it’s no longer possible to identify that all-important main subject. Clutter is enemy number one when it comes to creating great compositions!

Of course, achieving a simple, clutter-free composition is easier said than done.

Arguably the most straightforward way of ensuring that your intended main subject dominates the final image is to ensure that it fills the frame and doesn’t allow anything else to creep into view. That, however, does not usually make a great overall composition.

It’s quite unusual for the subject to fill the frame, even when it truly dominates the final image. It’s usually surrounded by a certain amount of ‘negative space’ – everything in the image that isn’t the main subject – that often makes up over half of the final image.

The trick, then, is to stop that negative space from becoming as important to the viewer’s eye as the main subject. Make it fade away into the background and either become virtually unnoticeable or actually help lead the viewer's attention to the main subject and even keep it there.

2. Less is more

This is a hugely important concept that’s often overlooked. You can say more about a subject by showing just a slice of it in the final image than you can by trying to fit the whole of it into the frame.

Shooting a wide view of an entire mountain or moorland scene, for example, though usually effective in setting the scene, can result in an image in which the landscape elements are tiny and lack impact.

Concentrate on one small part of the landscape instead. Doing so will help you capture the ruggedness, harshness, scale, and raw beauty of your surroundings much more successfully than a wide view of the entire scene ever could.

So, we're usually trying to seek out those little cameos/vignettes within a much larger scene that either naturally fall into a perfect composition or can somehow be moulded into one through an appropriate choice of viewpoint, perspective, and lens.

The inevitable conclusion of all this is that no matter how wonderful a general scene may appear to the human eye, most of it won't make a great photographic composition. It's the role of the photographer to pick out those little parts of the scene that will. It's the essential execution of the ‘less is more’ principle.

Being beautiful is one thing; being a great photographic composition is another.

3. The rule of unequal thirds: off-centre placement

One of the most widely known compositional 'rules' is the off-centre placement of the main subject.

Placing the subject off to one side of the frame (though not too close to the edge) often improves an image’s aesthetic appearance. This approach ties in with the much-touted ‘Rule of Unequal Thirds’, which states that the most effective images can be roughly divided into three unequally-sized intersecting parts, with the main subject sitting right where the thirds intersect.

Whilst this is simple enough to explain in theory, you’d be surprised by just how difficult it can be to spot in many real-world images! It should be used as a guiding principle, not a hard and fast rule.

Inevitably, there are times when having the subject right in the middle of the frame works well. In my experience, this is often when the subject is symmetrical along its vertical axis (i.e., its right and left halves are identical). This is particularly so when the negative space to left and right are also identical, usually due to being either empty (e.g., blue sky) or blurred.

4. Controlling perspective

The angle from which you photograph a subject will greatly affect how it appears in the final image. It’ll probably look stunning from one or more angles but completely unphotogenic from another.

So, unless it’s about to run or fly away, don’t be tempted to rush into photographing a subject the moment you see it. Take the time to walk around it as much as possible, changing both your angle and (if possible) your height.

The assessment here is not just about the subject’s overall shape but also about that critical negative space. Look carefully to see what’s behind and in front of the subject, assessing how anything in those areas will either distract from or enhance the main subject.

Unsightly structures such as wires, rubbish, and ugly building developments need to be spotted before the shutter is pressed, and you need to find a way for them to be screened out.

For this reason, don’t think this process doesn’t apply to distant views of mountain ranges. While walking back and forth is not going to affect the mountain view itself, it can radically alter any foreground and have a dramatic impact on the final image.

The final perspective you come up with may, if you’re lucky, be absolutely the best angle for photographing the subject you have in mind. Its shape, combined with any interesting features and the frame’s negative space, may all come together to create a great composition.

Frequently, however, there will be a compromise, such as some distracting element in the foreground or background. These distracting elements may force you to opt for a slightly less than perfect angle on the subject.

5. Selective focus

One of the simplest ways to ensure that your main subject is not competing against any clutter is to have it surrounded by or set against a completely featureless negative space. For example, calm water, a clear sky, or an expanse of sand or grass.

Taking things a step further, if there are some competing elements in the background, you could lessen their impact (or even make them quite invisible) by having the background completely blurred.

If you have a static subject such as a landscape or a portrait, you can achieve this by using selective focus and a shallow depth of field. Using a lens with the aperture wide open, the camera focuses on the subject. But because of the wide aperture, the background – and usually any foreground too – will be out of focus and, therefore, blurred.

This works most effectively with telephoto lenses. Wide-angle lenses tend to naturally generate images with a depth of field that renders most of the image at least reasonably sharp.

That doesn't mean that wide-angle lenses are harder to use than telephotos in creating great compositions – they just work in very different ways.

Telephoto lenses are great for minimising the amount of negative space visible and ensuring that much of it can be rendered out of focus. However, they generally lack drama and energy, two vital components of many great images. That's the role of the wide-angle lenses, as described below.

An additional means to render the background blurred comes when you’re attempting to photograph a fast-moving subject, such as wildlife, traffic, or a sporting event.

Panning the camera to keep up with the subject as it moves past helps the camera focus on that moving subject while creating movement blur in the negative space. The subject appears to be static, but the background is blurred out with movement.

Again, telephoto lenses are usually used for this objective, but it can be achieved with wide-angle lenses, too, especially if you're photographing a large moving subject that you're quite close to.

6. Guiding lines and shapes

It’s impossible to isolate your subject against a completely plain or blurred-out background in most real-world situations. This is because varying numbers of secondary elements creep into the frame, resulting in varying degrees of clutter and distraction.

Of course, when that clutter becomes too much, you have to accept that this particular subject can’t be turned into a great photographic composition. But there are also many occasions when a certain number of secondary elements can be turned to your advantage. These elements can help lead the eye into the scene and guide it straight to the main subject, where it comes to rest.

In such a scenario, the negative space's secondary elements are no longer competing for dominance but instead are supporting your chosen subject, reinforcing that subject, and directing attention towards it.

Thus, roads, rivers, rocks, landscape contours, and even clouds can be used to literally point the way to the main subject. This doesn’t happen by accident, and sorting out these kinds of arrangements when composing an image is a critical part of perspective and lens choice.

What I've just written might lead you to think that using these secondary elements is just making the best of a bad situation (i.e., a scene containing clutter). But there are many occasions when you’ll actively seek out such structures to enliven at least part of the frame, if not the whole image.

Too many photographers include far too much flat, lifeless foreground and dead space that might be best left out if possible. If there’s no alternative but to include it, then choose a perspective that incorporates some interesting foreground element that supports and leads the viewer’s eye to the main subject, such as a well-angled rock or stream.

7. Diagonals and energy

Those guiding lines tend to be diagonal, something that has a critical impact on an image’s mood. Diagonals add a sense of energy and dynamic movement to an image, changing what could otherwise be a very static and even dull view into something full of life and vitality.

Used carefully – and with a limited number either all running pretty much in one direction across the image or converging from different parts of the frame directly towards the main subject – diagonals can result in a powerful, lively image, with all the attention focused on the main subject.

However, fill the frame with a host of diagonals criss-crossing the frame in conflicting directions, and the image will be ruined, rendering it complex, confused, and short of impact.

Again, getting those diagonals right is a combination of perspective and lens choice, especially wide-angle lenses.

At first glance, many a view may appear to be rather short on diagonal lines. But if you look at it through a wide-angle lens, you’ll find it’s suddenly full of superbly energetic angles, triangles, and lines. You’ll then need to fine-tune your perspective to get them running in the right direction.

Not surprisingly, this is likely to work less well with telephoto lenses, as they tend to reduce diagonals. The aforementioned elements that can be used to guide the eye towards the main subject will still be there and still valuable in their guiding role. However, the diagonals will be less dramatic or powerful, less able to generate a dynamic mood in the image.

Instead, the mood in an image shot using a telephoto lens is likely to revolve more around vertical and horizontal lines.

More subtle than diagonal lines, verticals – provided they’re well-spaced – tend to increase the sense of solidity and strength. They’re great for those images that home in on slices of mountains or cliffs.

As for horizontal lines, they tend to emphasise peace and calmness, so they’re useful in still, restful water images.

8. Light and colour

Lighting and colour are also crucial in controlling the complexity of a composition, the dominance of the subject within it, and the mood of the whole image.

Inevitably, strong side-lighting onto a scene filled with a wide variety of bright colours is likely to result in a very complex image filled with clashing saturated colours, bright highlights, and deep shadows.

If kept under control, it can result in a strong, vibrant image. But too often, it generates a whole new set of secondary elements that compete both with each other and the main subject.

In the most effective images, the strength of the lighting is often toned down a little. So, too, is the range of colours, and this goes a long way to explaining the beauty of images shot at dawn and dusk.

Many are virtually monochromatic, dominated by a very limited range of colours and hues, perhaps blue in the shadow areas at dawn or dusk or pink in those areas receiving direct light at the same time of day. This is another example of ‘less-is-more’, cutting back on complexity, and providing a simplified view of the world to capture its innate beauty.

Putting it all together

The overall message, then, is to keep it simple in terms of composition, colour, and light.

Don’t try to cram the whole world into the frame because less is often more. Choose a single main subject to dominate the image, and make sure that anything in the negative space either fades away into insignificance or supports that main subject, directing attention towards it.

Complexity in an image is usually just a muddle and often suggests that the photographer could not decide what the main subject should be!

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Wildlife Photography: What To Look For When Choosing Equipment

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 22:19:46 Z

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Choosing the right combination of camera and lenses plays a huge part in improving one's chances of photographic success. This is the case for wildlife photography perhaps more than any other genre.

In this blog, I'll explain the most critical features you need to look for in camera and lens equipment for one field of wildlife photography; that of mammals and birds.

1. The principal wildlife photography challenges

2. Shooting from a distance

3. Coping with low light levels

4. Putting it all together

The principal wildlife photography challenges

When choosing wildlife photography equipment, you need to think of the camera and lens together – both must be able to work in unison to produce the desired results.

Let’s look at the main challenges that face the photographer and which, to a large extent, control our equipment choices:

- It’s usually difficult to get close to your bird or mammal subject due to either their shyness or because we simply cannot climb or fly into their environment. So, we need to be able to shoot from a distance.

- Much wildlife activity occurs either very early in the morning or late in the evening when light levels are low. So, both your camera body and lenses need to be able to perform as well at dawn and dusk as they do in the middle of the day.

- Quick reactions are often needed, as milliseconds make the difference between success and failure. Your camera and lens need to work together to produce fast, accurate exposure measurements, focusing and shutter firing in the blink of an eye.

These three challenges push camera and lens technology to the limit. As a result, they have been instrumental in some dramatic improvements over the past 20 years.

The upshot is that the equipment needs to be quite special – sadly, you're not going to manage this kind of photography with a compact or phone camera. This is very much the preserve of the DSLRs and top-level mirrorless cameras, coupled with some of the best lenses.

Of all the challenges you’ll face, the need to be able to shoot from a distance is the biggest by some margin. Finding ways to make it possible will take up most of this blog.

Shooting from a distance

Good fieldcraft, an understanding of your subject's behaviour, and the use of hides can all be critical in allowing you to cut the photographer-to-animal distance. But in the end, your camera equipment will always be central to finally closing that gap to allow for at least a moderately close shot.

Below are the main features we need to look for in camera equipment, especially the lenses.

1. The role of telephoto lenses

Bridging the distance is mostly the domain of the lenses – specifically telephoto lenses, ones with a long focal length, enabling them to reach out over the distance and bring your animal subject closer.

The minimum focal length I would consider useful is 300mm, but much more is desirable for many scenarios.

Unfortunately, problems start to arise once you go beyond about 400mm, especially if you're aiming to use lenses that will continue to work well in low light conditions and have top-quality optics. Such problems include:

- A burgeoning size and weight.

- A mounting price tag.

- Difficulties focusing on your subject.

To mitigate these issues, you probably want to stick with a physically smaller lens. This usually means either one with a focal length shorter than might be ideal (say, about 300mm) but with top-quality optics, or a lens with a long focal length (say 500-600mm) with less quality.

Cutting down on lens optical quality will save a lot of lens weight, size, and price. However, the likely result is lower image quality.

So, before making a choice when buying lenses, you should ask yourself: How good does good need to be?

If you're supplying some of the world's best photo agencies and publishers, then, of course, 'good' needs to be pretty damn good. But if you're shooting simply for your own pleasure – perhaps you’re displaying your images online or making modestly-sized prints – then final image quality may be less critical.

2. Zoom or prime lens?

One of the questions I'm most frequently asked in relation to wildlife photography is whether it’s best to use a zoom or prime (i.e., fixed focal length) lens.

Zoom lenses offer a great degree of versatility that prime lenses cannot give. However, there’s a general sense that the zoom lenses tend to suffer from rather inferior optics at long focal lengths, leading most professional wildlife photographers to work with prime lenses. Again, the choice comes down to a balance between versatility, price, and convenience versus the best optical quality available.

3. Slipping in a teleconverter

Telephoto reach without the use of massive lenses can be further helped with teleconverters (also sometimes called extenders).

These are a lens that fits between the camera body and the main telephoto lens (whether prime or zoom), which increases the lens's effective focal length. Teleconverters usually come with one of two magnifications: x1.4 and x2. The latter doubles the effective focal length (and thus converts a 300mm lens to a 600mm, for example).

This makes teleconverters hugely useful, but they come at a price – principally, a loss of light and a potential loss of image quality.

An x1.4 teleconverter halves the amount of light passing through, while an x2 reduces it fourfold. This effect can be quite restricting if you're already shooting in low light conditions.

The potential loss of image quality can be minimised by using only the very best available. Don't skimp on price or quality, and don't be tempted to use third-party teleconverters. Doing so can result in loss of image quality and functionality transmission between camera body and lens.

Finally, teleconverters/extenders should not be confused with extension tubes. The latter is a glassless tube fitted between the camera and lens to enable macro – or close-up – photography. This is the opposite end of the scale of wildlife photography!

4. A little help from the camera body

Your choice of camera body can help boost your effective focal length, so this is also worth considering.

Camera bodies essentially come in two forms: full-frame or cropped-sensor. The terminology refers to the size of the sensor within the camera – full-frame means that the sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film. Such cameras are usually the more expensive models, targeted at professional photographers and very serious amateurs.

Most camera models have a cropped sensor, smaller than a 35mm frame of film – just how much smaller varies among different manufacturers. For example, with Canon cameras, the crop is x1.6, whereas with Nikon, it’s x1.5, and with Olympus Four-Thirds, it’s x2.

Lens focal lengths are always calculated and advertised according to their behaviour with a full-frame camera. But when they’re coupled with a cropped-sensor camera, they can’t make use of the lens's full field of view. As a result, the effective focal length of a lens, when coupled with a cropped-sensor camera, has to be recalculated according to the camera's magnification factor: x1.6 for Canon, x1.5 for Nikon, etc.

This is great news for wildlife photography as it effectively magnifies a lens's focal length, with a 300mm lens becoming 480mm on a Canon camera or 450mm on a Nikon. You can further increase the magnification when a teleconverter is applied, giving you two magnification factors to apply to your lens's original focal length.

This help can be a major factor in swaying the choice of a camera for wildlife photography, perhaps making a good quality cropped sensor camera preferable to an equally good full-frame camera.

However, cropped sensor cameras come with a couple of possible downsides:

1.They usually produce rather smaller files than full-frame cameras.

2. When used in strong light conditions where contrast is high, they’re more likely to produce burned-out highlights in the images.

Coping with low light levels

Perhaps the greatest advance in photography technology in recent years has been in the ability to function well in low light conditions, namely at dawn and dusk.

The improvement comes in two main areas:

1. The ability of a camera to continue to produce high-quality images even when shooting at high ISO.

2. The effectiveness of image stabilisation/vibration reduction to allow for the use of much slower shutter speeds than would otherwise be possible.

Less revolutionary, but nevertheless every bit as important in lens design and a lens’ ability to function in low light, is the widest aperture that a lens can attain. This impacts the maximum amount of light that can pass through it at any given moment. Let’s look at this first.

1. Working with lens aperture

The amount of light that can pass through the lens and on to the sensor is critical to how long the exposure time needs to be, and hence your ability to work in low light conditions. Controlling this is the function of the variable lens aperture, measured on the f-scale, with f22 being a very small aperture, and f2.8 a very wide-open aperture.

Not surprisingly, whether you're using a zoom or prime lens, the wider a lens's maximum aperture, the better able it is to function in low light levels, with a wide aperture enabling the camera to use a faster shutter speed.

Such a lens is said to be fast, the fastest available currently being f2.8. Unfortunately, this comes at quite a cost – financially, in weight and in bulkiness.

At the other end of the scale, cheaper lenses usually have a less wide maximum aperture, often f5.6, a fourfold reduction in the amount of light allowed through compared to an f2.8 lens.

The f5.6 lenses are significantly cheaper, lighter, and less bulky, although they’re less able to function in low light conditions. With a few exceptions, they also usually have lower optical quality, though this doesn't have to be so.

A common compromise between the f2.8 and f5.6 lenses are those with a maximum aperture of f4. Such lenses usually provide the image quality needed by professionals, without the massive cost or weight of an f2.8 lens.

2. Working at high ISO

The ISO is a linear scale that measures a camera sensor's sensitivity to light. The higher the number, the greater the sensitivity, and the less light you need to correctly expose the sensor.

You might think, then, that we should always shoot at a high ISO for convenience. But unfortunately, as ISO increases, image quality decreases, with general noise, grain, and loss of colour quality all mounting to drain away the quality. For this reason, we normally shoot at as low an ISO as possible – a setting of 100 is the standard working ISO for general photography.

A setting of 100 works well in good light and with lenses of short focal length. However, if you're hand-holding the camera, then as focal length increases so faster shutter speeds are needed to avoid camera shake (the blurring of your photos due to an unsteady hand, something that becomes magnified with long focal length lenses).

You can, of course, solve this by mounting the camera on a tripod, though this may greatly restrict your movements at times when quick reactions are needed.

Unfortunately, as most wildlife activity happens when light levels are low, there quickly comes a point where you just cannot put the shutter speed up without greatly under-exposing the images. This will happen much sooner and to a greater degree with an f5.6 maximum aperture lens than it will with an f2.8 lens.

The only solution here is to put the camera's ISO up. Until quite recently, this would just result in very grainy, unusable images. Now, however, it’s perfectly possible to obtain great images when using ISOs up to several thousand, levels unheard of several years ago.

For this to work, however, it’s essential that a facility in the camera, usually called 'High ISO noise reduction', is switched on. This can be found buried in the menus of just about any good-quality DSLR or mirrorless camera. Make sure you use only a camera that has this facility and that you have it activated.

3. The miracle of image stabilisation

Also called 'vibration reduction', image stabilisation is usually built into the lenses, but with some manufacturers, it’s incorporated into the camera body.

Mostly useful when the camera is hand-held, this facility consists of a set of motors that can micro-move the lens elements (if built into the lens) or the sensor (if built into the camera body) to counter movements caused by an unsteady hand.

If you’re using a lens without image stabilisation, a neat little calculation makes it possible to work out the minimum shutter speed you can hand-hold at. It’s simply the reciprocal of the lens's focal length.

In other words, if you're using a 30mm lens, the slowest shutter speed you can hand-hold the camera at is 1/30^th second, but with a 300mm lens that leaps to 1/300^th second. Put in image stabilisation, and you can reduce this minimum shutter speed by about three stops, bringing it down to roughly 1/40^th second.

This is clearly a huge improvement, making such a lens far more useable in low light conditions.

4. Doing it all at the speed of light!

When you’re photographing wildlife, you may only have a window of a couple of seconds in which to capture your subject – so speed is essential.

Make sure your camera and lens work seamlessly together to shave off those milliseconds of reaction time. At the very least, you need a telephoto lens that has some pretty snappy focusing. It needs to be fast, decisive and accurate, even in poor light.

Unfortunately, autofocus mechanisms don't always work well in the low light/low contrast light of dawn and dusk. They function by identifying lines of contrast – for example, those that separate an animal body from the background vegetation.

This generally works well enough in good sunlight, even with an economy lens, but the real test comes during those low light/low contrast situations when it’s difficult for many lenses to distinguish the animal from the background.

This can result in the lenses focus mechanism hunting back and forth, unable to lock onto anything. This wastes valuable time and often results in poorly focused images. That’s why it’s worthwhile trying to find a lens that isn’t affected much by this.

Putting it all together

As you can see from this summary, bird and mammal wildlife photography can be quite a challenge – not only from the perspective of the techniques needed, but also of simply being able to put together a set of equipment that works well for you.

However, the rewards can be quite enormous, ranging from the thrill of the 'hunt' to the rush of excitement when you pull off a major success.

The key to getting there is honing both your personal skills and the effectiveness of your equipment 'team'.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, take a tour of his website.

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If you're a portrait photographer, you need to protect your camera against theft, loss, and damage with our specialist camera insurance.

Our bespoke cover can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

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7 Outdoor Portrait Photography Tips You Need To Follow

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 02:30:45 Z

From the cheapest phone cameras right up to the most expensive DSLRs, a camera’s greatest use undoubtedly comes from capturing people. Family and friends, in particular, are regularly lined up for the camera, though colleagues, clients, and even complete strangers are also captured on a million digital sensors.

To help you make the most of your portrait photography, here are seven tips to hopefully bring your photography to the next level.

1. Think about the type of photograph

2. Wide-angle or telephoto views?

3. The best of the natural light

4. To flash or not to flash?

5. Focus, focus, focus

6. Look at the camera or not?

7. Relaxation is key

1. Think about the type of photograph you want to capture before you even start

This tip may seem obvious, but it's worth considering before the camera even comes out of its bag.

Do you want to compose the photo(s) with your subject arranged in a static composition? Or do you want something a little looser, a bit more spontaneous? Perhaps you want to be a fly on the wall, simply snapping away as you follow some form of activity in a reportage style?

To some extent, your creative choices may depend on your subject. To make a composed, static portrait, you need a subject who is willing and able to cooperate completely.

You also need to be able to give clear, intelligible directions that your subject can understand and act on. For this to work well, you should choose your subject carefully. They should either be someone you know well, or someone who’s very comfortable in front of a camera and perhaps used to following instructions.

If you're aiming for something more spontaneous then, of course, you're not going to exert as much control or give out as many instructions. Your photo will be more dependent on what your subject(s) decide to do, and you may only provide some occasional input.

When you get to be the fly on the wall, you should aim to sink into the background, leaving the subject(s) to do their own thing. Perhaps they’ll be getting on with something in their daily life, more or less ignoring you, and hopefully almost forgetting that you're even present.

This is the kind of photography that you might do with strangers – or indeed small children – when you're aiming to record some aspect of their life.

It’s up to you, the photographer, to recognise and grab momentary great compositions from an endlessly flowing sequence of movements.

The subject does little to help consciously create those compositions, besides responding to the occasional plea to 'Hold it there for a second!'.

Not surprisingly, the static portrait and fly-on-the-wall styles are very different techniques, requiring quite different photographic skills. They are both equally valid, but generally applicable in different scenarios. You should decide in advance which approach is best for each situation.

2. Wide-angle or telephoto views for the best portrait photos?

The type of lens you choose to use (or the degree of zoom you select, if using a compact or phone camera) will have a dramatic impact on the type(s) of photos you obtain.

In much portrait photography – particularly the more formal forms – a short telephoto lens (i.e., a moderate amount of zoom) is typically used. By shooting with this type of lens, you’re ensuring that the camera homes in on the subject's face, while the background is completely blurred.

This lens is perfect for the kind of portrait photography where you want to direct attention simply to the subject's face. This is the classic kind of portrait photography.

That said, there are risks attached to this approach – the subject’s face becomes contextless, divorced from its surroundings and whatever might be going on around the subject.

If you want to show a person, or people, in their surroundings, perhaps engaged in some activity, then you're much more likely to want to use a wide-angle lens (or zoom right out on your compact or phone camera).

This then enables you to put your subject really in context, to show them in their environment. Although this is a big plus, there are several potential pitfalls to try to avoid.

Perhaps the most significant potential pitfall is that the subject's face will become significantly smaller in the frame, and so is likely to not command as much of the viewer's attention as it would in a classic kind of portrait. You can combat this by moving much closer to the subject than you might otherwise think usual.

3. The best of the natural light

Light is, of course, critical to the success of any portrait photography shoot. And I'm not talking about the amount of light, but rather its quality, intensity, and angle.

In general, a soft flat light – such as that obtained on a bright but lightly overcast day – is considered the best kind of natural light for outdoor portrait photography. Under these conditions, light is evenly spread across the face, with few (if any) deep shadows or bright highlights disrupting facial features. Strong jaws and sharp noses tend to become softened, and blemishes minimised.

In bright sunlight, by contrast, the face may be marked by strong nose, jawline, and brow shadows (the last of these resulting in the eyes often being lost in shadow). This is particularly the case if the sunlight is side-on, and many kinds of marks can become quite visible.

So, if you find yourself taking part in portrait photography on a sunny day, the best option is to move your subject into some shade, either under a tree or in the shadow of a building. However, if you do this, you must ensure there’s no bright sunlit area in your background, as this will distract attention away from the subject's softly lit face.

One way to produce beautiful portraits in bright sunlight is to arrange your subject with the sunlight shining from behind and above them.

The sun will, of course, be shining at the camera, so it’s best to make sure the sun isn’t visible in the image. It needs to either be out of the frame or at least hidden behind the subject's head.

This prevents the camera from being flooded with too much light, while ensuring that the face – which is effectively in shadow – receives an even, soft illumination.

The result is a photo in which not only is the subject evenly lit, but the head is surrounded by a bright halo, particularly in their hair.

However, because the face is in shadow, while the light is shining very brightly towards the camera, there’s a tendency for the camera to under-expose the face. If this happens, you can lighten the face either by positioning a reflector to bounce light back into the face, or simply over-exposing the image a little.

4. To flash or not to flash?

So far, I've concentrated on portrait photography using only natural light. There are occasions, however, when you might want to use a flashgun to provide a little extra light.

It would be wrong to think of flash as something you use as your main source of light. In outdoor (and often indoor) portrait photography, the flashgun is rarely the main source. Instead, it’s used in a supporting role, its output balanced against the natural light.

It can often be used to fill in shadows, particularly if you're having to shoot in bright sunlight, a time when the face might otherwise be spoiled by strong shadows lying across it.

Indeed, fill-in flash can be very useful with the back-lighting method described above, to throw some light into what might otherwise be an under-exposed face.

Of course, if you're shooting at night, then you may well have to use a flashgun as the dominant source of light. But even if there are significant amounts of ambient artificial light, the flash may still end up supporting and balanced against the latter, rather than being truly dominant.

Whatever way you're using a flashgun, avoid firing it directly at your subject. The light from a flashgun is quite harsh and can result in bright highlights and deep shadows across your subject's face.

So, always fire it indirectly, either bouncing it off a reflector (a white sheet of some sort) before it then heads to your subject, or sending it through a white diffuser to soften and 'break up' its rays.

A final note concerns red-eye. A flash fired directly and unsoftened at a subject looking straight at the camera will result in unsightly red-eye – the light literally bounces back towards the camera off the retinas in the subject's eyes, making them appear red. Don't allow this to happen to your portrait photography!

5. Focus, focus, focus

Another blindingly obvious point to make is that your image must be sharply in focus.

Inevitably, however, there’s a lot more to this issue than initially meets the eye. Yes, of course, for most forms of portrait photography your subject needs to be sharply focussed, but actually how much of the subject? All of them or just part? And what about the rest of the image?

The golden rule of focus in portrait photography is that you should always focus on the subject's eyes.

This is simply a reflection of the way we, as humans, are hard-wired to see people. We always look at their eyes and if they are not sharp in a photo, this will weaken our interaction with the subject and hence with the photo.

Beyond that, ideally the whole face should be sharp, but sometimes low light levels make this difficult to achieve.

If you're taking a classic portrait photo, shooting with a short telephoto lens (about 80-150mm focal length) and homing in mainly on the subject's face, you should ensure that the face is clearly separated from the background.

This is usually achieved by making the background completely blurred. We do this by limiting the depth of field, the depth of the image that is sharp, from a point nearest the camera to the furthest. This can be controlled and varied according to the type of lens and the lens aperture being used.

In this kind of portrait photography, we want to have quite a shallow depth of field – perhaps no more than a metre, maybe less – which is convenient as telephoto lenses tend to naturally do this, and we can further control it by changing the lens aperture. By this, I mean the diameter of the lens's internal diaphragm, which controls the amount of light passing through the lens. This is measured by the f-number, and having a wide-open aperture, or small f-number, such as f4 or 5.6, will guarantee a shallow depth of field.

If you need to make your depth of field even shallower to ensure a blurred background, simply move closer to your subject. The shorter your camera-to-subject distance, the smaller your depth of field will be.

On the other hand, if you're taking a wider view to include either the subject's environment or an aspect of their work, for example, then you'll be using some kind of wide-angle lens, and you'll want to have a lot more of the scene sharp.

Again, we're in luck here, because wide-angle lenses naturally give a much deeper depth of field than is possible with a telephoto lens, and this can be further increased by making the lens aperture narrower – i.e., a higher f-number such as f11.

6. Looking at the camera, or looking away?

It can be a difficult decision as to whether or not your subject should be looking at the camera.

In a classic posed portrait photo, you’d normally want them to be looking straight at the lens, providing direct eye contact with anyone that views your photos, and providing a warm person-to-person interaction.

On the downside, the image can end up looking a little too staged and unnatural, particularly if the subject combines a stare with a cheesy grin, something we usually don’t want!

Where you might not want the subject looking at the camera is when they’re engaged in some kind of activity, even if it's only chatting with another person (whether in or out of the frame). This weakens the interaction with the viewer, but conversely, it can help direct attention towards whatever activity the subject is engaged in and make the image feel more spontaneous and less staged.

Whatever kind of portrait photography you're doing, you almost always need to have the eyes visible and open, regardless of whether or not they're looking at the camera.

Eyes that are closed (or appear to be) are rarely a good thing in portrait photography, so there are occasions when I will ask a subject engaged in an activity to hold what they're doing and to briefly look at the camera. This can be very useful when your subject is looking down to concentrate on their activity (which is quite common), making their eyes appear closed – even though they're not.

7. Relaxation is key

Always try to ensure that your subject is relaxed in front of your camera – a tense subject always transmits that sense in the final photos.

It’s remarkable just how differently people react when placed in front of a camera. Some discover their inner model, actor/actress or film star, while others completely freeze into a wooden block. It can be remarkably difficult to predict how anyone will react until they’re put to the test.

Just how well – or badly – your subject relaxes in front of the camera can have a huge impact on the success of your portrait photography. Someone at ease will naturally help you create superbly engaging, natural photography, while a nervous, tense subject will probably make the resulting images look wooden and contrived.

Of course, if you're photographing close friends or family, people who know you well, it’s quite likely they’ll perform well in front of the camera. Difficulties are more likely to arise if you're photographing strangers, particularly those people not used to being in front of a lens.

As the photographer, you need to remain calm and relaxed, so that you’re able to transmit this sense of calm to your subject.

When faced with a tense subject, it is often worth the time – if at all possible – to engage in long general conversations about almost anything before taking any photos, to help your subject relax and to start to become comfortable with you and your camera.

Some of the world's best portrait photographers are known to spend many hours chatting with their subject(s) before the camera even comes out of its bag, let alone gets used.

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer who works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

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Our bespoke cover can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

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What Are The Best 360 Cameras On The Market In 2021?

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 12:50:47 Z

A 360 camera is, simply put, a camera that can take an image spanning 360-degrees. A 360 camera can capture an entire scene. These images are not flat like those a regular camera would take but are rounded like inside of a sphere.

360 cameras use two back-to-back fisheye lenses, each of which captures a 180-degree view. A 360 camera merges two hemispherical images to create the spherical view you see when using this type of camera.

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Put simply, a 360 camera can completely transform your portfolio. Let’s take a look at some of the best 360 cameras and what you can use them for.

1. Best 360 camera for beginners

2. Best 360 camera for shooting video

3. Best 360 camera for durability

4. Best 360 camera for iPhone

5. Best 360 camera for underwater use

6. Best 360 camera for 2021

7. Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

Best 360 camera for beginners: GoPro Fusion

The GoPro Fusion is an excellent entry-level choice for beginners looking to get into 360 photography.

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It includes two ultra-wide-angle lenses and shoots in 5.2K video. There are four built-in microphones that capture spatial audio for immersive sound. It also has smooth stabilisation technology and in-camera stitching for seamless and professional-looking videos.

The OverCapture feature allows you to frame your perfect shot from any angle to capture traditional, flat footage on your smartphone. Download the GoPro app to preview, playback, and edit your footage. As well as standard 360 shooting modes, you can also record in Timelapse.

The Fusion is small and portable, measuring approximately 24 x 10 x 14cm and weighing 226g. It’s also waterproof up to 5m.

One of the main advantages the Fusion has over other 360 cameras is its removable battery – this can easily be swapped over when you’re out and about. This camera offers approximately 80 minutes of recording time from a single charge, so bear this in mind if you’re heading out on a long shoot.

The GoPro Fusion is available to purchase at Argos for £330.

Best 360 camera for shooting video: Insta360 One X2

If you’re a videographer or photographer wanting to capture the best 360-degree videos, then the Insta360 One X2 is the camera for you.

It comes with a wide range of features to ensure your 360-video footage is the best it can be. The One X2 is one of the most capable 360 cameras on the market and is considered GoPro’s main competition in 2021. It’s also waterproof up to 10m.

In terms of key features, the Insta360 One X2 has plenty to go at. The SteadyCam feature allows you to capture ultra-wide footage using a single lens, while MultiView creates a widescreen, flat video from one lens while adding a small box of footage from the other lens. This feature is particularly useful for vloggers.

ShotLab is the One X2’s digital studio, containing a selection of filters and special effects templates found in the Insta360 app. The One X2 has 11 innovative effects in total, including Colour Plus, Subject Tracking, Fly Lapse, and Clone Trail. You can read more about these features here.

The Insta360 One X2 is lightweight and compact, weighing 149g, and it measures 46 x 113 x 29cm.

It has a large, spherical touchscreen which previews your content – this touchscreen is where you can change camera modes, too.

Video modes include Standard, HDR, Timelapse, TimeShift, Bullet Time, and SteadyCam. It has a resolution of 5.7K at 30 frames per second.

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This camera does a lot. It might take some time to familiarise yourself with all of its features, but your persistence will pay off when you’re capturing incredible and immersive 360 video content.

The Insta360 One X2 is available to buy from Apple for £429.95.

Best 360 camera for durability: Garmin VIRB 360

The Garmin VIRB 360 is a great choice for adventurers who need a rugged camera when filming outdoors.

This is Garmin’s first 360 camera – the company is better known for producing sat navs and sports watches – but it delivers on performance.

Designed for photographers on the go, it automatically stitches your 4K footage and stabilises your film with one simple click. You can also edit and share your videos wherever you are with the VIRB mobile app on a smartphone.

The VIRB has three modes of 4K spherical stabilisation to ensure your videos run as smoothly as possible, regardless of camera movement. There are also four built-in microphones to create immersive videos with sound from all angles.

Garmin’s VIRB 360 is built for adventure and can endure a lot. It’s waterproof to 10m and features strengthened glass lenses with a sunlight-readable display. This rugged 360 camera also has built-in sensors, including GPS, GLONASS, barometer, and accelerometer. These features provide ongoing, customisable G-Metrix data overlays in 360-degree augmented reality.

Readily designed templates make it easy to retell your story in-depth with the data points you want.

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The VIRB also features voice control technology, meaning you can still capture 360 footage hands-free. So, if you’re mountain biking, kayaking, or climbing, you don’t need to reach out and press the record button. You just need to say, ‘OK Garmin, start recording’, and you’re good to go.

The Garmin VIRB 360 costs £599.

Best 360 camera for iPhones: Insta360 Nano S

The Insta360 Nano S is an ideal choice for casual 360 shooters and those starting out. It’s a great addition for smartphone photographers and transforms your iPhone into a 360 camera.

Simply plug it into the lightning port on your iPhone to capture a 360-degree view right from your phone. The camera will automatically activate upon connection with an iPhone, so it’s perfect for impromptu shooting.

With its dual fisheye lenses, the Nano captures 360 footage with real-time stitching that seamlessly merges the two images. This feature also enables users to livestream 360 footage to YouTube or Facebook straight from an iPhone, making the Insta360 Nano S an ideal choice for vloggers.

This camera also supports other popular iPhone apps like Instagram and Twitter, so it’s easy to share content across your social channels.

The Nano S also comes with a video chat feature, so you can share your video with whoever you like. You can also shoot in multiview to record in every direction and see the best bits on your iPhone screen.

The Nano S works as a standalone camera and does not require an iPhone to record footage. To use the Nano without an iPhone, press the shutter button once to capture an image and double-click to begin recording video.

This camera is available on Amazon for £149.

Best 360 camera for underwater use: Nikon Keymission 360

The Nikon Keymission 360 is currently the only 360 camera that can be used underwater without an external case or housing. It’s one of the best options for photographers who want to film underwater 360 footage without needing external housing and accessories.

With the Keymission 360, you can literally dive right in. The camera’s regular lens is waterproof up to 20m. To use the camera up to depths of 30m without housing, attach the protective underwater lens cover. This cover is designed to correct any underwater refraction and is sealed on tight with a double-locking door.

The Nikon Keymission 360 is one of the best choices for shooting underwater 360 footage. Capturing 360 footage in 4K, it’s built for adventure and on-the-go filming.

It’s not just incredibly hard-wearing and durable, it’s both shockproof and freezeproof. It can handle drops from up to 2m and can withstand temperatures as low as -10 degrees Celsius.

Check out the below video to see this camera in action.

The Keymission 360 captures video and still images with respective buttons. To begin recording video, use the rectangular button on top of the camera, or to capture still photos, press a smaller square button at the side. These buttons are also recognisable when wearing gloves, which is ideal considering the climates this camera might be used in.

The Keymission weighs just under 200g and has dimensions of 65.7 x 60.6 x 61.1 mm.

One of this camera’s best qualities is its removable battery and memory card functions. The Keymission’s battery and memory card can be removed and swapped as needed, so you don’t need to call it a day when the camera needs charging or when your storage is full.

The Keymission 360 from Nikon is, without doubt, one of the best options for shooting 360 footage underwater. At the time of writing, it’s available for £249.

Best 360 camera for 2021: GoPro Max

GoPro is already well-known for its quality range of 360 cameras, but the GoPro Max is a real winner for the brand in 2021.

The GoPro brand produces some of the best 360 cameras in the game, and the GoPro Max is no exception.

The GoPro Max features three cameras, in effect. You can shoot with a single lens in HERO-style, capture 360 video in 6K⁴, or easily create vlogs using the front-facing screen.

There’s a selection of four digital lenses on the GoPro Max to ensure you snap the perfect shot every time. Choose from Narrow, Distortion-free Linear, Wide, or Max SuperView – GoPro’s widest ever lens.

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The GoPro Max also introduces Max HyperSmooth, which is essential if you’re shooting video on the go.

For seamless camera stabilisation, the innovative Max HyperSmooth technology means that your videos are smoother than ever. You can even level out the horizon on your content if you wish.

This incredible gadget is small enough to fit right in your pocket, so you can be ready for action wherever you go. It measures 69mm in height, about twice the size of a paperclip, and is just 25mm wide. It’s also super lightweight, weighing 163g.

Another reason that the GoPro Max is among the best 360 cameras is its rugged and hardwearing design that’s built for adventure. The camera comes with protective lenses, and it’s waterproof down to 16ft.

One reviewer said: ‘The Max has been perfect in use, handling, and picture quality. The stabilisation is unreal, and flicking between 360 and hero mode at the click of a button is a great feature. The beauty of this camera is you never miss anything, as it sees everything around you.’

Another exceptional feature of the GoPro Max is its 360 audio. This camera has six built-in microphones to capture immersive audio with 360 video and directional audio for vlogging. It also contains wind-noise reduction technology and GoPro’s best stereo sound yet. You can also create the smoothest timelapse videos with Max TimeWarp and easily edit your content with the GoPro Max.

The Quik app enables photographers to easily reframe 360 footage into traditional, flat videos and images. Users can also download the GoPro app to capture, share, and edit content all from a smartphone.

The GoPro Max is available from £379.98 on the GoPro website.

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

It goes without saying that action cameras need protection.

You can protect your 360 camera against theft, loss, and damage with our specialist camera insurance.

Our bespoke cover can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

Get an instant online quote in minutes here.