Remember this - telephoto lenses make things big!

A pleasant surprise on this trip was the outdoor concerts being held underneath the giant statues. Well it was pleasant for those of us who went along to see it, but it looked bloody uncomfortable for those trying to play instruments in the freezing temperatures. I could hardly get my hands back in my gloves quick enough after pushing the shutter button, I dread to think what it was like trying to play a barre chord on an electric guitar!

The first concert I came across was a nice little quartet playing jazzy numbers underneath a big Olympics statue. My first impulse was to grab the wide-angle lens and fit everything in but after looking at the image on the LCD I realised it wasn't doing it for me. Everything was just too small. Yes the musicians were small underneath the statues, but the statues themselves didn't look as giant as they were in real life. I mean these things are huge but the wide-angle just makes them look big.

So I walked backwards away from the stage. That's right. When you use the telephoto lens you need to walk away from your subject to get it all in. The other trick with telephoto lenses in crowded places is that because you're walking farther away from the action (in this case the stage) you're going to be behind a whole bunch of people. And unless you're 7 foot tall you're going to be looking at the back of a bunch of heads!

So as I was walking away from the stage I kept on looking behind me for breaks in the crowd, and in front of me for anywhere where I could stand to get a bit of height. I didn't manage to find any mounds, steps or anything like that but I did notice something about the crowds. The number of people watching would swell just as the nearby traffic lights turned green, and then when the traffic lights turned red again the numbers would drop away as people moved on to the next event.



So I found a good angle and just sat and waited until the crowds thinned out and I could shoot between the heads. And this is what I got.

Now doesn't that statue look huge! That's pretty much how it appeared to the naked eye - just this giant snow judo competitor towering over this small singer on stage.

But to give the impression of size I had to use the telephoto lens. In this case it was a smidge over 200mm and I'm about 50 metres away from the stage.

Down to the action

As you probably noticed from yesterday's photo looking down along Odori Park, the Snow Festival stretches over a few city blocks. Twelve to be exact, with different sculptures and events on each block.

At the very foot of TV tower was my first stop - the skate rink. One of the wonders of digital photography is the ability to change your ISO on the fly depending on the light levels.

As soon as I got down here I needed a faster shutter speed to stop the skaters and so that required a faster ISO. In this case I got away with ISO 400 which gave me a shutter speed of 1/15 second. Not particularly fast you might say, but plenty for stumbling skaters.

That and a bit of flash. When you use a flash with a slow shutter speed you get a really interesting effect. The slow shutter speed gives you movement blur while the flash freezes movement. Many flashes have what's called second curtain sync. What this means is that the flash fires at the end of the exposure, rather than at the start which is standard.

So what happens is you push the shutter and the camera takes the photo (and the subject is blurred) and then just before the shutter closes again the flash goes off freezing the moving person. So you get a lovely combination of blur and frozen movement. By having the flash fire at the end of the exposure you ensure that the blur happens behind the clear, frozen part meaning that it's clear and easy to see. If you fire the flash at the start of the exposure your clear, frozen person gets covered over by blurry person making it very hard to see.

The other technique here is very technical - orange cellophane. The lights I was shooting under were a kind of halogen type which record an orangey colour in the camera. By putting a bit of orange cellophane over the flash you ensure that the flash fires at a similar colour temperature and doesn't look too out of place. If you don't gel the flash you get a big, ugly white light on the person and it just looks really weird.

The other point to look out for is the tree with the lights on it. The lights were flashing on and off and running through different sequences. It was really important to try and take a shot when the tree was well lit, hoping that that coincided with somebody photogenic coming in to the frame who moved at just the right speed to give a nice effect with the slow sync flash.

Who said documentary photography is just pointing and shooting?

Journey through an evening

As I mentioned last week my trip to Japan was pretty much all fun and frivolity. But there was some work going on - well to be exact there was about one night! The second last night of the snow festival - and the first night that hadn't been a total blizzard.

So I thought it might be fun to see what's involved in planning a night of photography in a foreign city trying to capture as much of a festival as possible.

The first shot that I knew I absolutely must have was this one. This is the view looking down Odori Park in Sapporo from the viewing deck of the TV Tower. This is the most photographed view in the whole of Sapporo - and getting an image of it with all the snow sculptures is compulsory. Go home without this one and you get fired straight away!

Now I've been up here many times before and the routine is always the same. Get to the prime position about half an hour before sunset (in this case about half past four in the afternoon), set up your tripod and shoot every few minutes as the light changes.

It takes a bit of gumption to set up a camera on a tripod in the prime viewing space for the whole city but usually when I go there it's not so crowded that I get in the way too much. Not this time! It was packed. I couldn't move for people but they were all so polite that nobody ever got angry with me or told me to shove it.

And for my part I would raise my camera out of the way so people could get past me to take a shot and then put the tripod back down when I wanted to get a shot. It's all about co-operation and most people only want to grab a quick snap with the mobile phone before moving on. Smiling a lot helps too. :)

The funny thing about photographing in Japan is I'm always surrounded by amateurs who have equipment that is so much newer and more expensive than mine that I'm almost ashamed to call myself professional!

In terms of technique there's a couple of things to look out for here. The first thing with night photography is that if your camera's on a tripod you don't need a high ISO. The shutter speed is pretty much irrelevant because the camera is sturdily held in position. So I tend to leave my ISO at 100 and drag the shutter speed - you can see the tell tale signs of the trails of car lights. You need to watch the traffic and open the shutter when you see the cars moving towards and away from you if you want this effect.

So you've got a slow shutter speed and your tripod means that you shouldn't get any blur there but there may be another culprit giving you less than sharp pictures. With SLR cameras there is a mirror inside that lets you see the image through your viewfinder. When you hit the shutter button the mirror slaps up and out of the way so the light can hit the sensor.

That mirror slap can actually cause the camera to vibrate causing picture blur at slower shutter speeds. So to get around that many cameras have a function called Mirror Lock-Up. And it does exactly that. You press the shutter button (or in most cases the cable release) once and the mirror locks up but you still haven't taken the photo - you've just moved the mirror out of the way. The trick is then to wait a couple of seconds (until the vibrating mirror has stopped moving) and then press the shutter button again to take the photo.

By doing this you can eliminate a lot of blurry pictures which are caused by this little devil inside your camera. The only problem with the mirror lock-up function is that it's often buried deep in some Menu Option somewhere only Einstein can find. So if your camera has an option to save certain settings as Custom Settings or Personal Settings or some such name then this is a good place to save that function so you can find it again easily.

Monday's link

Feel like learning something new? A new way of doing something in Photoshop maybe. Perhaps a great way to catalogue your images, or maybe learn how to use that button on the back of your new digital camera. Well have I got a link for you.

This site is called Photoworkshop and it has all these incredible articles and interviews on there, but even more amazing is the links it has to various instructional sites run by major photographic companies such as Adobe, Sandisk, Canon and iView. The Adobe tutorials alone will have you sitting in front of your computer screen for days on end muttering Wow continuously!

Being a Canon shooter I spend ages in the Canon Digital Learning Centre. Check out Art Wolfe's instructional TV shows. And I thought my job was pretty good!

Sometimes you gotta let it go

So here's a picture of my two little boys rugged up and playing coits. The snow festival in Sapporo has three different event sites and this is the one at a place called TsuDome - which is the giant indoor stadium you can see behind you.

Pretty much all the activities happen outside. Giant ice slides, make your own snowman facilities and this traditional game.

Now the first thing that you'll notice is that it's nice and bright and the snow is white and everything looks fine - in particular if you looked at it on the back of your camera it would look great.

The problem occurs when you look at the histogram (which is why you never want to use your camera's LCD to judge exposure - only the histogram)




Here's a shot of the histogram in camera RAW. The bits that show up in bright red are the bits that are overexposed - beyond 255, no detail whatsoever. And if you look at this photo you'll notice that the entire sky is burnt out. Pure white. In actual fact the detail is there in the RAW file, but I have chosen to sacrifice detail in the sky to have a brighter picture.




If I had decided to keep all the detail in the sky, meaning the rest of the picture would be darker, this is what I would get. As you can see the sky is a pretty ordinary grey with a few wispy clouds. If I follow the rules I now have a picture where everything is within the histogram boundaries and nothing is too overexposed.

But it's a crap photo! So in times like this you need to make a judgement call as to whether you can afford to lose the highlights. Remember that the camera doesn't have the ability to retain as much detail as you can see with your eye. You're limited to only a few f-stops so you have to decide what to lose and what to keep.

Of course if I really wanted to avoid the problem I could just compose the picture so there wasn't any sky in it in the first place - a closeup. Often I do do that to avoid this problem but in this case I wanted to show where the coit toss was happening so chose to keep the sky.

So just remember to keep an eye on that histogram and try as much as possible to avoid having blown-out highlights. But be pragmatic and realise that it's not always possible. Sometimes keeping the highlights will mean the rest of the picture will be too dark. In those cases either crop the highlight parts out by re-composing the picture, or be prepared to lose them.

When you get a blow-out

No I'm not talking about an economic one, or even one of your back tyre. I'm talking about a blow-out of the highlights kind.

What does this mean? Ever since the time of the dinosaurs (well at least before digital came along) we all took pictures on film.

Professionals used slide film and a technique called exposing for the highlights. What this term meant was that you had to calculate your exposure so that the brightest parts of the picture weren't so bright that they would be lost.

With film, too bright highlights would just turn into clear film - nothing recorded whatsoever. With digital it's pretty much the same - the histogram reaches Level 155 and anything beyond that means there are no details whatsoever.

So why should you, or even should you, care? Because sometimes you want to retain detail in those highlights. Take the image of snow men above. This was taken on my recent trip to the snow festival in Sapporo. As you can see they are all very, very white. Indeed I intended it that way.

But more importantly if you look at this histogram in the top right hand corner of the picture you can see that it is buffering up against the right hand edge, but not falling off it. In other words if you zoom into any of those pieces of snow you can actually see the texture in the snow.

If I had tried to make the snow look even more brilliantly white (by making the picture brighter) I would have ended up losing detail in the brightest parts of the picture, and when the picture is printed on paper you would just get bare paper - no ink being laid down - in those too bright areas. Not a good look.

So this is an example of where you want to keep an eye on your histogram while you're photographing. It's a good idea to set your camera so that the histogram appears after every image, that way you can keep an eye on it. If your picture is too bright (histogram too far to the right) or too dark (histogram too far to the left) you can use your exposure compensation button to fix it.

Of course that's assuming you want to keep the highlights. Many photography books tell you to keep the histogram within limits at all costs - but sometimes that's just not possible or desirable. Tomorrow I'll show you an example of when you can let highlights go.

Still alive and kicking!

Hi there everybody,

I'm back from the frozen wilds of Japan! Actually I think my kids were the wildest things there but that's another story. :)

I photographed the amazing snow festival and will roll out some pictures over the next week or so to show you how it turned out. The weather nearly ruined everything as we had snow storms and blizzards every day the festival was on. I finally managed to get a clear night the final night of the festival.

Another major hiccup was batteries. My battery charger wouldn't work on Japanese power! It came complete with a transformer which I was assured would work on anything from 100V to 240V but alas that was just wishful thinking.

So I managed to survive on just two batteries - which don't last very long in freezing cold temperatures. So I would take a shot and then put the battery in my jacket pocket to warm it up and hope it kept on going. Of course being Japan meant that I could always drop into a mega-super camera store and pick up an extra couple of batteries but the way the Aussie peso is diving free fall against the Japanese yen I wanted to avoid it if I could.

Anyway this trip pretty much turned into an actual holiday. One thing you don't tend to appreciate as a travel photographer is a real holiday. You always tend to end up spending heaps of time photographing and fretting about getting the right light that you sometimes forget about the ones who love you the most.

So this 3 weeks was a chance to spend a lot of time with the wife and kids and not so much time working. So don't expect a glut of Sapporo photos (I've been too lazy to process any yet!) but there are certainly a few gems in there.