Waiting and watching

Sometimes photography is a bit like a police stakeout, you have to spend a lot of time standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for somebody to do something.

I had spotted this large Panda trampoline ride from about 100 metres away, across a crowded area filled with people, rides and popcorn!

I could immediately see that the bright red, black and white would look great against the bright blue sky and green trees. Colour-wise it was exactly the territory I like to be in.

The trick was how to portray the ride so that you could actually tell what it was. I tried taking a shot from the front with the ride attendant helping kids in and out but that didn't really do it. Then I walked around to the side and noticed the big, round windows on the side.

The only problem I could see straight away was that all the little tykes were jumping around inside and you couldn't really see them in a photograph. I took a couple of shots just to confirm my suspicions and could tell straight away that it wasn't going to work.

What I really needed was for someone to come to the window and wave to Mum and Dad. Being the father of two young boys meant that I was pretty sure that was going to happen sooner or later - just hopefully sooner and at the right window!

Before the (often fleeting) moment occurs I always make sure I have everything set up. I pre-focussed the camera on the window to make sure I wouldn't have to suddenly focus. I made sure I had the right lens on for the framing I wanted, showing the entire front of the ride so people would know what it was. And, most importantly, I checked my histogram to make sure my exposure was right.

Then I just sat and waited. I must have looked very suspicious sitting there with a camera staring intently at a blank window! Good thing photography is a popular hobby in Japan and nobody thinks twice about photographers - unlike Australia where you can get beaten up if you're not careful!

Anyway after about five minutes this lovely little girl came to the window and very kindly held both hands up to the window. Perfect. Snap, snap, snap goes the motor drive and before I knew it she'd gone back to bouncing.

Good photography takes time. Sometimes that time is taken up with planning things, setting things up, researching things. But more often than not that time is taken up with just plain old waiting. Waiting for light, waiting for somebody perfect to walk into the frame, waiting for serendipity to happen along. It's always a balance between waiting for what you think will be the best shot ever, and the lure of the 100 other best photos ever that might be waiting around the corner.

What's the longest I've ever waited for a shot? I really couldn't really tell you. I'm usually just so busy enjoying myself that the time just flies by. If you gave me a choice of waiting somewhere beautiful for beautiful light for eight hours, or trying to create that light on the computer...well I'll take the waiting any day. :)

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How slow can you handhold your camera?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I tend to carry my tripod wherever I go. It sits over my shoulders a la Robin Hood arrow quiver, held there by a strap.

But I realise that for many of you the idea of carrying a tripod around would be akin to having your fingernails pulled out one by one!

So how slow can you handhold your camera before you will start getting blurry photos?

The photo here was handheld. But there were three things in my favour. One - it's the entertainment district of a major Japanese city and is wall-to-wall neon. It's nearly as bright as day. Two - I'm lying down on the ground with my elbows resting on the footpath. And three - it was taken with my widest wide-angle lens. The shorter the lens the easier it is to hand hold. This was taken at ISO 100 and my shutter speed was 1/15th second with a 10-22mm lens.

The general rule for hand holding your camera is not to go below 1 over the focal length of your lens. So if you have a 28-80mm zoom you would stick to 1/30th second at the wide end and 1/125th second at the long end (because there isn't such a thing as a 1/28th second or 1/80th second shutter speed so you go to the next fastest one).

But that was how it worked with film. If you have a crop digital camera (any of them except the top of the line in each camera brand) then you need to multiply the focal length of your camera by about 1.5. So on a digital your 28-80mm zoom becomes a 42-120mm zoom. So your hand holdable shutter speeds are actually 1/60th second at the wide end and still 1/125th second at the long end.

So you can see that the longer your lens the faster a shutter speed you're going to need to hand hold your camera. In order to give yourself faster shutter speeds you can also up the ISO on your camera. Every jump from say 100 to 200, 200 to 400 and so on will give you an extra stop of shutter speed. So if you had 1/15th second at ISO 100, swapping to ISO 200 will give you 1/30ths second. 1/60th second at ISO 400 and so on. The only trade-off is that the higher your ISO the noisier the picture and that's not always something you're willing to trade-off.

So assuming we want to keep our ISO as low as possible but our shutter speeds are really slow, there are ways you can get around these limitations. But they all involve you getting flexible! Look for things to lean against. Walls, trees, cars, the ground. If you can give yourself a bit more stability you'll be able to hold your camera a bit more steady. Barring that try resting your camera on something steady. Use a little pebble or something to prop up the front of the lens. When you use this technique you want to use the self-timer so you don't get camera shake from pushing the shutter button.

A little table-top tripod can really help stabilise your camera. Apart from its obvious use you can also use it while hand holding your camera. With the little tripod attached to your camera dig all three legs into your chest so your camera has somewhere to rest. You'll find you can get an extra stop or so of shutter speed.

And if none of those options are available? Head to the gym more and be prepared to carry your tripod!

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Fun with photography

Who the hell knows what I was thinking here? It seemed like a good idea at the time!

Photography can be a pretty intense hobby at any time, but when you've paid thousands of dollars to fly somewhere exotic and you know you're not likely to be back there in a long time... Well don't we all get a little too serious about our pictures.

A little angry when somebody gets in the way of our perfect landscape. A little too disheartened when we get turned down for yet another portrait.

Take some silly photos. Like this one here. Remind yourself that it's all meant to be fun. And if you're so busy trying to get that perfect angle do what I do, put the camera down.

That's right. Here I am the professional travel photographer telling you not to take any photos. Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to get a great shot that we miss the actual event. We're so busy looking through the viewfinder that we don't actually see a thing. And when we see the pictures later we often have no personal memories of what happened.

I can sometimes go for hours just snapping away and at the end of the day I might come away with some memorable shots but I haven't really seen anything. And then at other times I have just put the camera down and sat and watched things unfold and those memories are etched deep into my mind.

This photo above was at the end of a particularly amazing session photographing not one, not two but five giraffes all drinking at the same time. Just as they were finishing up two cheetah brothers came down to drink at the same waterhole and this giraffe ended up having a staring competition with a tiny cheetah. I took quite a few shots but often just sat there for ten minutes or more without even touching the shutter, just watching and taking it all in.

And decided to take a silly shot just for the hell of it. So if the photography action gets a bit intense remember that it's all meant to be fun, and at the end of the day if you don't come away with the photograph you were really looking for, at least you'll remember the experience.

Tropical Writers' Festival

For those of you lucky enough to live up here in far north Queensland I just wanted to let you know about the upcoming Tropical Writers' Festival. Happening over the weekend of the 30th and 31st August it's sure to be a great event for those of you who are just as interested in writing as you are photography. There's a free panel discussion with various journalists, including yours truly, on the Saturday from 12.30pm. I'll be there to answer questions about the business of travel writing so if you have any curly questions get them ready! It will be held at the Shangri-La Hotel and you can find out more details here. Get along if you have the time and come and say hello.

An Instant..

is sometimes all the time you get to make a portrait. A fleeting glance of an elegant woman dressed in red and white as she flitters through your peripheral vision.

I was actually looking in the complete opposite direction, photographing cherry blossom trees. In the corner of my eye I saw a flash of colour and whirled around.

A female shrine attendant at Hokkaido Jingu (Hokkaido's main shrine) had just come out the main entrance and was heading down the stairs to do something.

I had missed her, but wait, she's turning around to go back again. I think she must have been quite startled to see this foreigner bundled up in warm clothes and photo vest come bounding up to her for a photo.

She politely agreed and posed on the steps for me. When somebody is this co-operative and obviously in a hurry how long can you hold them up? All my bravery was eaten up by asking her to pose and I took just one shot. I think it's a lovely portrait but when I got back home a colleague rightly pointed out the top step running through her head. Oh well, try again another day. I still like the shot.

It was taken with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens on Fuji Velvia with the camera on a tripod.

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Crocodiles like warm water...or do they?

There can often be danger associated with getting photos and you don't have to be in a war zone. Cape York is notorious crocodile territory. They're everywhere up here and it's a pretty brave (or stupid!) photographer who would even think about getting in the water.

OK, so I've been known to throw common sense out the window every so often in the search for a great shot. And when an aboriginal elder of the Wik tribe tells you he's going to go out and spear a stingray...well who am I to say no?

So there I was standing next to him with a wide-angle lens on so as I could really show the environment we were in. And the whole scene was so amazing and primordial and very photogenic. When I got back to shore I asked about the chances of being chomped on (probably would have been a good idea to ask beforehand!)

One of the local girls said to me, "You know if there's crocodiles near when the water's warm. If the water's cold there's no crocs". I just assumed she meant that crocodiles didn't like cold water. "No", she corrected me," if you're standing in the water and it suddenly goes warm it means that crocodile take a piss." And she broke into hysterical laughter. Thoughts of being so close to a giant dinosaur that I could feel it weeing on my leg made my knees tremble.

Oh well, at least I got the shot without getting eaten. :)

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Frogs, flash and frivolity

As I've mentioned before, the last six months or so I've been working on a big project for Lonely Planet Images photographing all of north Queensland.

One of the places on my list was the Iron Bar in beautiful Port Douglas. The Iron Bar is famous for its nightly cane toad races.

Competitors are each allocated a toad, which they can choose to kiss (or not!) for good luck. They place the toads in the middle of the table and then blow on them with straws in order to get the little beasties to jump to the edge of the table.

A competition can be over in less than ten seconds so you have to be really quick. The first thing is to get yourself in an empty space with no competitors in front of you. The second thing is that it's really dark in there so natural light isn't going to work. So you have to use flash and direct flash is really, really ugly! We're talking turning Miss Universe into Godzilla here.

So to make your flash nice and soft you need to bounce it off something (assuming you have an accessory flash on top of your camera). In this particular case I pointed my flash up at the roof which was a convenient shade of white and not too high. This meant that my ugly flash light hit the roof, which acted like a giant soft box and spread lovely soft light down below over my scene.

If you don't have a convenient roof then you can rubber band a piece of white card to the top of your flash head and bounce your flash off that. Or if you only have a little camera with a built-in flash you could also try putting a bit of tissue in front of the flash to diffuse the light from it. Just be warned that all of these techniques reduce the power of your flash so you'll need to be nice and close to your subject.

Anything you can do to soften the harsh, horrible light put out from your camera's flash is a bonus. If you really want to learn about the intricacies of using your flash head here.

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