Slow shutter speeds and dancers

Can you tell I'm having a slow week?

This image was taken at the Laura Dance Festival which is an aboriginal dance and cultural festival which happens up on Cape York at the tip of Australia every couple of years.

Laura is a great festival but a bugger to photograph. The dancers are all in a small arena so they're nice and close - no need for really long lenses. But when it's sunny it is just so contrasty that your whole picture turns to big, black shadows and blown-out highlights.

So all the regular folk pray for sunny skies and the photographers pray for clouds! Anyway I had an idea for a way to get around the high contrast, and that was to use it. To create a picture that was all about light and shadow and movement -as opposed to simply a record of the faces of the dancers.

So I decided to give myself a really slow shutter speed to blur the movement and create an abstract picture. I looked for a time when the dancers were out in the sun and their bright, colourful costumes were highlighted and took a series of shots.

And then when the sun went back behind the clouds I took a picture of the same Laura festival dancers only this time without the slow shutter speeds and blur.

Slow shutter speeds and fire

Now surely a fire is one of those times that you need a fast shutter speed? After all you have to capture all those sparks firing out of the top.

That's what I thought and had the shutter speed cranked up to 1/1000th second and you know what I got?

A whole bunch of pin pricks of light coming out of the top of the fire and no volume to the flames. Hmmm time to put the thinking cap on.

The shutter speed was so fast that it wasn't recording the fact that the sparks were moving on erratic paths out of the top of the fire, it was only recording them in a brief moment of that passage. In other words it was freezing the motion when in actual fact what I wanted to do was show the motion. And the shutter wasn't open long enough for the big flames to record properly in the picture.

So I put my shutter speed down to 1/15th second or thereabouts and suddenly my flames were creating paths and patterns through the night sky out the top of my sugar cane fire and my flames were full.

There was only one problem - or in my case lucky observation. This picture was shot on film. I had no idea what was happening at the time. It was all a lucky guess basically, although I like to think there was a bit of skill involved!

After taking 10 or so shots at the faster shutter speed I suddenly realised I was doing things the wrong way. So I backed off on the shutter speed. How did I know to try for 1/15th second? I didn't. And that's the beauty of those slow shutter speeds. It's all a guess. At least with digital you can adjust things on the spot if you're too slow or fast.

Mixing moving and static subjects

Here's another example of photography at a fair to complement yesterday's post. As you can see we've got two different groups of people. In the foreground is the little girl and her father waiting for the dodgem cars.

In the background is the two girls in dodgem car #5. One group is moving, one isn't and slow shutter speeds are a great way of contrasting these two elements within the one frame.

The trick is to have just the right shutter speed - too fast and the dodgem car will be frozen still and you won't be able to tell if it's moving. Too slow and the static people in the foreground might move, or your hand might shake if you're hand-holding the camera (which I am here). Or the dodgem will be too blurred to know what it is. It really is a fine photographic balancing act.

For this image I used a shutter speed of about 1/8th second. Because I'm shooting with a shorter focal length wide angle lens I'm more easily able to hold the camera at slower shutter speeds so if you haven't got a tripod with you reach for your shortest lens. Telephoto lenses are a bugger to hold at longer shutter speeds even with image stabilisation.

Using the wide angle lens means you have to get up nice and close to the people in the foreground. I don't think they knew I was there which is a bit out of the norm for my style of people photography but when I saw this shot I couldn't resist the great interaction between the father and daughter.

So my aim for this shot was to make the dodgem cars looks quite fast so I wanted to blur them just that little bit. Then I imagined the little girl being a little pensive about such a fast ride and that's why she was holding on tightly to her father's hand. Whether this was the case or not I have no idea, this is what was going through my head as I was constructing the picture.

Slow shutter speeds subjects at night

One of the things I really enjoy about photography is its unpredictability. With film it was even more the case, but even with digital there are times when you just aren't sure what you're going to get.

Any time there's a bit of uncertainly in a photographic result the heart beats a little bit faster as you change this and that to experiment, not really knowing what it will effect.

Nowhere is this more the case than when using slow shutter speeds. The slower the shutter speed the more moving objects will blur - but just how much and what the result will be is purely hit-and-miss. Gotta love that!

This image was shot at the annual Cairns Show. Night fairs are a great place to try out this technique, just remember the tripod! As soon as the sun goes down people tend to bump up their ISO so they can get faster shutter speeds. For this kind of image that's exactly the opposite of what we want to do so you can safely leave your camera on its base ISO of 100 (or whatever your camera's base ISO is).

We want a slower shutter speed so that the rides will be blurry while (hopefully) the people won't be too blurry. I set my tripod up in a relatively out of the way place and pointed it up at these two rides. I wanted lots of blur in the right hand side ride and not too much in the left hand one. But more importantly I didn't want the guy in the ticket booth to be blurred.

The who you say? The guy in the ticket booth, who is actually the subject of my picture. I saw him and he looked like the most bored person on the entire planet and wanted to show a picture of him with all this moving excitement around him but him just staying there in the one spot, rooted to his boredom if you will.

So I went with a shutter speed of about 2 seconds. I put the camera into Shutter Priority and took a shot with the self-timer cable. I took a few shots just to be sure and was amazed to find that nobody in the picture seemed to have moved over those two seconds! Sure there was a little blur in some of the figures but pretty much everybody was totally still while the shutter was open, looking up the the whirling rides.

Now that's a bonus that was totally unplanned for. And that's why I love using slow shutter speeds at night.

Avoiding travel photo cliches takes research

We've all seen the iconic travel destinations photographed from the same angle, with the same focal length lens a million times. Hell there's probably tripod pock marks in the spot where a plethora of travel photographers have set up to take a photo before us.

Take this shot above. It's the eyes of Buddha at the Swayambunath Stupa on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal and it is decidedly a cliche. The exact same eyes have been photographed from the exact same angle countless times before, and surely will continue to be for as long as it is beautiful. And how do I know? Just do an internet search for Swayambunath Stupa and see how often this picture comes up. No wonder it's never been licensed!

So before you go somewhere on holiday (or on assignment) you need to find out what has been done before. The internet makes this easier than ever. Just type in a famous location from your upcoming holiday destination into your favourite search engine and you'll come up with pictures galore. If you don't find out what else is out there the chances are the cliche shot is the first one you yourself would grab. Why? Because we're all so unoriginal? No, because often the cliche shot is taken from the best angle so we naturally fall into that trap. Unless we get on the internet and see a trillion examples of what not to photograph.

Firstly take a walk around and see if there is another angle you can shoot it from. Whether it's a better angle or not is kind of irrelevant in this particular mission. Remember you're looking for something different. Chances are that the cliche shot is taken from the best angle but it ceases to be your best option when everybody else has photographed it before.

So walk around and see what you can see. In the case of Swayambunath the cliche shot is the one which is closely focussed on the eyes so I switched to a wide angle and then to a vertical format to show the surroundings of the stupa.

By including the shadow of a pagoda in the foreground I wanted to show that there are other buildings around it. The quintessential Asian pagoda style also gives a feeling for the Buddhist culture that is represented in this Tibetan enclave.

After I tried the vertical I then switched back to a horizontal format. Again this is similar to the shot at the top but I have gone a little wider to show that the eyes of Buddha are not just on the one side but all four sides of the golden, square part of the stupa.

Also by coming around to the side and getting some side light I have brought out the texture of the surface, as opposed to just the golden colours.

Are these images better than the cliche? Depends on your taste I guess but whether they're better per se or not the main thing is that they present a different view of a popular place. They're the shots where people will say to you 'oh I always wondered what it was like on the other side of that monument' or 'I've never seen it photographed from that angle before.'

In a world where millions of people with millions of cameras travel everywhere on the planet and photograph the hell out of it standing out is a hard task. One way to do it is to find out what everybody else is photographing and still photograph the same thing but in a totally unique way. To be able to do that you firstly need to find out how everybody else has photographed it and then do something unique and interesting. When you start doing that you'll become known as the go-to person for unique images of popular destinations.

Monday's links moved to Twitter

Hi there everybody,

I just wanted to let you know that our regular Monday Links post has been shifted over to Twitter. Only it doesn't just happen on a Monday but pretty much every day. As soon as I stumble across a site I think you'd all like I put it up. So if you want to come and follow me just click here and you'll get those links. And it will automatically let you know when I update my blog as well.

Just today I've put up a couple of links - one to an article on what to look for when hiring a wedding photographer ( I know a bit OT but I thought it was a great piece) and another on the value of Copyright and the Licensing of images.

Go click on the Twitter link and join in.

People and wide angle lenses - you gotta get close!

I went to a photographic exhibition last Friday night. It was a great chance to get out and see some work by some amateur photographers from various places around the world. There were some really nice pictures but one thing really jumped up and bit me in the butt.

The vast majority of pictures with people in them - as in pretty much all of them except for a couple - looked like this one above.

In other words they were shot with a wide angle lens where the people were a long way away from the camera and there was absolutely no interaction whatsoever between the people and the photographer. Indeed there was no sense that the people even knew the photographer was there.

Which is all fine and good but the majority of the captions indicated that they were supposed to be photographs of people, which they weren't. They were photographs of a scene in which there happened to be some (tiny) people somewhere in the frame.

Now when I say that there needs to be some interaction between the subject and the photographer I'm not asking you to get people to look at the camera, smile and give you the proverbial peace sign. But I like to look at an image and know that there was some connection between the subject and the photographer.

Take this shot here. Now none of these people are looking at the camera. But you just know that they know that I'm there.

How do you know? Because I'm so close to them with a wide angle lens that they couldn't help but know I'm there. But it's still an environmental portrait because you can see the beach and everything around them.

Now granted both shots were taken for a commercial photo shoot (for Quicksilver cruises in Port Douglas) but you'll have to forgive me because it was the only two images I could find where they were both taken of the same group of people, in the same place, within a few minutes of each other but illustrate the point I wanted to make!

The point being this. If you really want to get over the shyness of photographing people then you have to make it fun. The subject of your photos has to feel honoured to be photographed. And they're not going to feel that way if you photograph them from a long way away with a wide angle lens so that they're hardly visible in the picture.

So get in close to people and say hello. Make some connections, break down some barriers. Once you've got past the smile and peace symbol stage they'll ignore you and then you can take some intimate, engaging portraits that will resonate with your viewers, and will make your subjects happy that they agreed to be photographed.

And if all that sounds a bit hard? Stick to landscapes. No need to have to interact with anyone. :)