Photography Tips Guide

Posts Tagged ‘Tips’

My newt is seventeen years old and still appears to be in the prime of his life. I really only took pictures of him when I got him when I was ten. I would like to get more detail than blurry black and red like back then, does anyone have any tips for taking pictures of amphibians?

Digital photography has created a shift in the balance of art and technology. No matter how much you pride yourself on your traditional camera skills, you also need to know a lot more about software.
As a nature photographer who grew up with film, I like many others have been forced to change the way I see my role. In the past I knew that if chose the best light for a subject, and applied my camera skills, I would usually produce the photo I was after on film. More importantly, well-exposed film would always produce a high quality print, without the need for enhancement. If you weren’t happy with your photos, you didn’t try to rescue them with a computer; they were simply thrown away.
There are still many people of my era who see photography the same way. I have been surprised recently to find that there are also many new photographers who still want to produce their perfect image ‘in camera.They believe traditional skills should be sufficient for great photography; reliance on software shows a lack of ability.
Deep down, part of me applauds this philosophy. After all, if your photos are more the product of your skills with a computer than with a camera, can you really call yourself a good photographer?
But here is the problem.
Recently I was teaching a class that explained all the basics of good photography; aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, lighting etc. One member of the class took me aside during a break with a question about some of his photos. “I think there must be something wrong with my camera or my lens,” he told me. “I don’t think my photos are overexposed or underexposed. I don’t think I used the wrong ISO, and I think my photos are in focus. In fact I think I am doing everything right. But the photos look soft, they look flat…they have no life.”
I took a look at the images and I had to agree. The problem was, he wanted me to tell him what he was doing wrong with his camera. But if they weren’t poorly lit, out of focus or badly exposed, what could I tell him?
The problem certainly wasn’t with his DSLR camera. In a class of fifteen people and at least ten different camera models, his was the most advanced camera in the room.
We transferred one of his photos to my computer. I opened it in my editing software, and auto-adjusted the contrast and saturation levels for one of the images. The result was instant and dramatic. A photo that was flat and lifeless was suddenly rich and three-dimensional. The difference was even more apparent when we took another look at the original image. Now, by comparison, it looked like a poor quality photocopy.
Here was a digital file that contained all the information required to produce a perfect quality image. The information just need to be rearranged, using software, to make it happen.
Software has become one of the essential ingredients in modern photography. While it is understandable that old-school photographers view it with disdain, the truth is that to some extent, editing and enhancement are now simply part of the process.
I am not talking about using software to totally manufacture an image. This is certainly possible these days. You can take a sky from one photo, put it behind the foreground from another photo, move objects around and change the colours, all with the click of a mouse. It will always be a subject of debate as to whether this is real photography or not; I don’t think it is, but you may disagree and you are entitled to your point of view. There can be no doubt, however, that this is quite separate from capturing your photos using traditional camera skills alone.
No, what I am talking about here is using software just to ‘tweak’ an image, to bring it up to a standard that is comparable to film photography. You may often find this necessary to get the most out of your camera, and it is no reflection on your skills as a photographer.
For old-fashioned photographers like me, this may be hard to accept. But the sooner you swallow your pride and get to know your software a little better, the sooner you will start to produce the sort of photos you expect from your digital camera.

Digital photography has arrived, and it is the way of the future. You don’t need an old photographer like me to tell you that.
Forget the traditionalists who insist that film is better. In some ways it definitely is; it is simply not practical in the digital world to continue taking your photos on film. However, that doesn’t mean you should throw your old photos away.
It may come as a shock to some young people, but great photography has existed for many years, done by true artists who relied on camera skills, not computers, to produce their images. Some manipulation was possible in the darkroom by the few who knew how, but most great photography was captured ‘in camera.’
What a shame, then, that so many of these great images are now gathering dust in closets around the world.
Our rush to embrace digital technology was not gradual. Digital cameras made film almost obsolete in just a few short years. With the cameras came computer software, USB cards, online storage and social networking. Almost overnight, everything related to photography involved digital technology. You really could not do anything with a photo unless it was on your computer.
Of course, this is no problem for photos taken now and in the future. Most of us now have digital cameras and are becoming comfortable with software. My concern is, what has happened to all those great photos from the past, taken on film and now out of place in the modern world?
I have been taking photos to sell in my gallery for over twenty years. I appreciate all the benefits of digital photography, but for now I have chosen not to buy a digital camera. I have thousands of photos from my many travels, all taken on colour slides, which I am determined to put to good use.
I just know that when I buy a digital SLR camera and start snapping, all these old slides will be forgotten. They will gather dust, fade, and eventually be good for nothing but throwing away. So my decision to continue working with film is about making sure that doesn’t happen.
These days I am trawling through years of images, picking out the shots that deserve to be seen, and scanning them. As long as they remain on film, they may be out of date; but once converted to digital files they are every bit as good as anything taken on a modern camera. Some people would argue that for quality, they are even better.
Since I started scanning my slides, I have rediscovered a treasure trove of photos from years past. For every photo I have printed and sold, there are ten more photos just as good that have never seen the light of day. Some photos I always knew were there. Others I had forgotten I ever shot. Some of those photos are now on sale and proving more popular than photos I had been selling for all these years.
When you revisit photos after many years, you start to notice things about them that you may not have appreciated before. Sometimes the photo you chose to print first is not the best, although you may have thought so at the time. After admiring one photo of a waterfall for ten years, it is a real eye-opener to remember you also have ten other angles of the same waterfall, taken on the same roll of film but never printed, and each spectacular in its own way.
Scanning your negatives and colour slides does not have to be expensive. You can buy a film scanner for just a few hundred dollars which has the resolution and the software to get the job done. After that, the only thing you have to spend is time.
If scanning them yourself doesn’t appeal, you can pay to have it done professionally. This can cost as little as a few dollars a file, and should include all the colour correction and spot removal you need to make your photos ready for printing. It may be too costly to have all your photos scanned commercially, but you could make a selection of your top 100 to save for posterity.
Whichever way you choose to go about it, I encourage you to revisit your old photos. Don’t allow them to fade and deteriorate in a corner until you get around to throwing them out. Scanning can breathe new life into old memories, and I guarantee you will find some real gems that are worth preserving.