Foreground frames for more information

I've talked a little bit about foreground frames before. I have to admit it's a technique I don't tend to use that much but every so often it comes in handy, and sometimes it's absolutely vital.

The main reason I don't use them all that much is because often the frames can tend to detract from the story telling part of the image.

They don't necessarily contribute anything to the picture and are often used just because the photographer can't think of an interesting way to frame the image.

In terms of travel photography the frame needs to say something about where you are. So for example if you're in the tropics there's no point having a frame of some indiscriminate plant just for the sake of it - you need a silhouetted tropical plant to put the viewer in the right part of the globe.

Take this shot above. This is Singapore going ahead full steam. The construction of a new resort and lots of shipping containers in the background tell a story of the modern Singapore. But, like yesterday's post, it doesn't tell you where I am. Which isn't always important, but in this case really is.

You see I'm looking out through the wide open mouth of a giant statue of Singapore's symbol - the Merlion. I'm peering out through sharpened fangs to the city beyond. But you wouldn't know it from this picture.

But you would from this one.

Again you have the construction cranes and the buildings beyond (albeit a lot smaller) but you also have those gleaming fangs as a foreground frame.

For those people who don't know the Merlion on Sentosa Island their first thought is going to be - where the hell is the photographer and what are those teeth?

And that's what I'm always trying to aim for. An image that will make the viewer sit up and take notice for more than a fraction of a second and take a bit of interest in the picture before them.

Of course the first shot is a telephoto lens and the second one is a wide-angle. Both of them are of different things - one is a modern Singapore, the other the view of modern Singapore from inside the mouth of a lion. Neither is right or wrong, they're just different. And as foreground frames go these canines really contribute to that sense of where I am.

Wide angle lenses fit a lot in!

I guess by the name of the lens that's a pretty obvious statement. From the foreground to the background, left to right, you can get a lot in the frame when you're shooting with a wide angle lens.

But compositionally how does that help or hinder us? Take this shot here for example. I'm standing on top of my hotel in Singapore looking out over the city. You can see out over all the buildings and the street below but you don't really get a sense of where exactly it is that I'm standing.

Yes you can see from the angle of view that I'm high but that's about all you can tell. So this then becomes a photograph of the city seen from above but it isn't a photo of the view from my hotel per se because you can't see the hotel. In actual fact I'm leaning quite far out over the edge of the railing to ensure the hotel doesn't appear in the shot because my lens was so wide.

So how do we go about putting our position back into the frame? By ensuring we have a foreground of note.

Insert one co-operative little boy to do a flying leap into the spa for you and you instantly create a relationship between where you are and its relationship to the city below.

You can see in this image that you can't see as much of the city and it's a slightly different angle. But there's enough there to tell you that you're very high and looking down over a large number of buildings.

More importantly you're showing a relationship between what you can do on top of this building and putting it into a perspective looking out over the city. Both images were shot at 10mm on a crop-frame digital SLR. I had a small aperture to maximise depth of field and still managed to retain quite a fast shutter speed because it was so sunny. The trick was to get my son right in the corner of the frame and capture the peak of the action just as he was soaring through the air. Good thing for me he was happy to do it a million or so times until I was happy with the result!

So remember if you're using that wide angle lens and you want to show the relationship between where you are and what's going on out there - include an interesting foreground.

Shooting from above

One of the things I always try to do is get up above the streets of a city. It allows me to look down on things and see juxtapositions that just aren't visible from street level.

The easiest way to do this is to get up on to the roof of your hotel. On this trip to Singapore I stayed in a hotel that had a pool and spa up on the roof. Needless to say my kids were in it as much as possible so I had plenty of time to photograph the street below while avoiding splashes!

My favourite lens for this kind of photography is a longer telephoto zoom - in this case a 70-200mm. It's still light enough to handhold and not so long that you get too close to everything. Having too much magnification often means that you can only see tiny details which don't give an overall sense of a place.

Anyway in this case I liked the way the washing hanging out to dry was so close to the one-way street in the background with a dirty roof in between. I took a couple of shots without a car but it just lacked that contrast I was looking for. So I just waited for a few minutes and sure enough a little car came into view.

I already had a few shots of the clean, pristine metropolis of Singapore so wanted a few shots to show that it's like any other city around the world and has it's more 'realistic' sides.

So the next time you find yourself in a high rise hotel see if you can't get up on to the roof for an overview of the city below.

Photography at the zoo

One of the great things about modern zoos is the fact that you can get amazing pictures of animals that look like they were taken in the wild. Can't take off a month to go hiking through the wilds of Sumatra looking for orang-utans? No worries, head to the wonderful Singapore zoo and you can photograph friendly ones real close.

Here's the thing though. As a travel photographer your job is to capture not just the animals - although they're an integral part of it - but the zoo itself.

Wildlife photographers can ignore any and all signs of human existence, although hopefully they don't try and tell the world that their captured beasties were photographed in the wild.

The travel photographer on the other hand is there to capture nice portraits of the animals, but perhaps more importantly the feeling of being at the zoo itself.

To do this we need to take a step back and have a bit of a think of how the zoo affects the visitor, how they interact with it. And when I say take a step back, I mean literally a step back.

The thing about zoos is, the animals are in cages. Sure they might be pretty ones with nice glass walls, moats etc but they're not out roaming around (all except the orang-utans who actually are!)

So you need to show the cages. Now in some zoos I've visited the cages are horrible, concrete monstrosities with thick steel bars. At Singapore zoo they're much more animal friendly and enable more interaction between the viewers and viewees.

With the baboon enclosure here I took a couple of shots of the monkeys themselves - close up portraits of them involved in various shenanigans. But it wasn't working for me. It wasn't where the photo was. So I backed away from the glass to take in the whole scene and that's when it occured to me that the actual picture was the enclosure itself. The fact that you had big glass panels where you could get up nice and close to the animals, the fact that they stretched in a big semi-circle to give a really wide view, and the fact that that was how the people experienced the baboons - and vice versa.

So whereas I would love to spend a day photographing close-ups of animals, as a travel photographer we need to take a wider view of what we're there to photograph. We're trying to create an image of a zoo as a destination for people to interact with animals and get to know them a little better.

Flash at night

I wanted to post a couple of photos here to show you how I use flash at night. This is a fire dancer show at the entrance to the Night Safari I was telling you about yesterday.

Now you can't use your flash inside but you certainly can outside! Only for this shot I didn't. This is all natural light. ISO 400 f9 at 1/5 second. I used a really slow shutter speed because of the guy in the background. Handheld by the way.

I was actually aiming for a full rotation of his flame sticks but you can see I just missed it by this much. A few things about this shot though that work for and against natural light in this situation.

The first is that because you have such a slow shutter speed you get a nice whirl in the background but the dancer in the foreground is quite blurry from movement - you can see it mostly in his right arm. At least for the ladies his hunky chest is pretty clear!

The other thing is that because the foreground guy's body is well exposed then the flames he's spouting out are so bright that they've gone off the histogram and are totally white. There's no detail there whatsoever. If I had exposed the picture to record the flames properly the guys would have been so dark you wouldn't have seen them. Can't get such a range of contrast in one frame. So natural light has its pluses and minuses.

Now here's the one with flash.

The first thing you notice is that the dancer is nice and clear. That's because he's completely lit by the flash and the flash alone - no ambient light. Remember that flash fires really, really fast so it stops all movement.

Even though my aperture is still the same, and my shutter speed a bit faster at 1/80 second, the flash has done all the hard work.

But how could it be flash if he's all orange you say? My old favourite - a CTO orange gel over the flash to match the colour of the fire. I wanted to have the same look as the natural light shot but the advantage of the flash to freeze the motion and get rid of dancer blur.

In this case there were no whirling background flame sticks so I wanted to go for a different effect.

You'll notice too that because I've got a faster shutter speed (making the overall picture darker) my flames are back in the land of the living. No more white, burnt out fire. My exposure is based on getting the flames right and letting the flash brighten up the darker parts of the picture. Because he's quite close to the background sign the flash has lit up that part as well and makes it look not such a dark gaping background flash shot.

So here's a couple of different alternatives to shooting night action. Natural light, slow shutter speeds and lots of blur or a bit of flash, frozen action and less blur. Or if you really wanted to mix it up you could try your slow shutter speed with a bit of flash thrown in as well. Experiment and see what works.

Pushing the limits of your equipment

One of the places I visited on my trip to Singapore was the Night Safari, a zoo with all nocturnal animals and no flash! The flash affects the animals' night vision so it's prohibited. Nobody wants to blind the little furries.

It's amazing how bright something appears to your eye, and how pitch black it appears when you look through your viewfinder!

This image is of an animal show that takes place in an ampitheatre. They paraded out otters and servals, raccoons and binturongs - just like this fellow here.

And it is really dark and difficult to photograph anything that moves. Just to show you how dark it is, this image was shot at ISO 1600 at f2.8. Even then my shutter speed was a dismal 1/25 second. And that was one of the faster shutter speeds I got! When the lighting was darker I was down to as low as 1/3 second - the lights have come up a bit here for the end-of-show introduction of the performers.

When the light is this low and your shutter speeds are this long there's nothing much to do but put yourself in the lap of the luck gods. You need to keep an eye on the action and look for slight lulls in the movement. In this case the performer was waving to the crowd but put his arm down to feed the hungry binturong. Click, click, click goes the motor drive. You need to shoot a lot of images in the hope that one (or hopefully more) will be clear.

I had the camera on a tripod so hand shake wasn't a worry - all the blur came from movement. Here I've not done too bad a job but you can see the binturong's head is slightly blurry where it's lunged for the food.

At ISO 1600 there's a worry about noise so you need to make sure your histogram is well up to the right to limit it as much as possible. Unfortunately doing this also gives you a slower shutter speed so it's more keeping the fingers crossed as you work the shutter. At least with digital you can shoot to your heart's content without worrying about the processing bills.

Monday's Link

For today's link I thought I might send you to 35 beautiful photography websites as voted for by Smashing Magazine. In there you'll find the gorgeous Burn magazine as well as David Gough's travel photography website. Not to mention the inimitable Steve McCurry and perennial favourites Chase Jarvis and Vincent Laforet. Ahh, the only problem with these sites are they remind me that mine looks terrible and is long overdue for an update.