Photographic religion

They say in polite circles you should never talk about politics or religion. Politicians don't do much for me but I love photographing religion in all its forms.

I find it fascinating to be a witness to ceremonies and beliefs that have been a part of a culture for thousands of years. For me it really helps to establish a certain people and tie them to a way of life and tradition, something that I never really had in my own upbringing.

One of the biggest challenges about photographing religious events is being respectful, and overcoming the inherent shyness of photographing people. If your knees quiver at the thought of pointing your camera at a living, breathing person then the thought is probably multiplied tenfold when that person is involved in something so serious and important.

You know what the trick is? To be seen. Let people know that you're there and photographing. Have that camera wide out and in the open. Sit for a while and observe what's going on. Show an interest. When people can see that you are honestly interested in what's going on, they then understand that you would like to make an honest picture of them.

If you rush in like a bull at a gate and just start snapping away well...put yourself in the reverse situation. How would you like it if somebody rushed into your place of worship and just started photographing willy-nilly?

I had been sitting in front of this cauldron for about 10 minutes or so just waiting and watching as people came and went. I wanted to see what they did and to understand a little bit about the significance of the actions. I could see that they would place themselves in line of the smoke and then use their hands to wave the smoke over themselves, before heading off to pray at the temple.

So I knew my photo was going to need to show the hands in a reverent position with a hint of temple in the background to give a sense of place. So I had the correct lens on, the right aperture set and all I needed was the right subject and to bring the camera up quietly to my eye and take a photo. This gentleman came up to the cauldron and we made eye contact and smiled - a very important people photography tool and not as expensive as a new lens! He knew I was going to take a photo because he could see the great big camera around my neck, and his smile meant that he was OK with it.

And that's how an image taken in the blink of an eye actually takes quite a bit of time to set up. Time to digest what's happening. Time to work out what you want to convey. Time to work out how you're going to convey it. And then time to give a smile, a nod or a hand wave just to let everybody know your intentions.

Try these simple tricks and you'll find photographing religious events one of the most interesting and rewarding subjects in the world.

The early bird...

catches the photographic opportunity. This image was featured in the Australian Society of Travel Writers' book One Foot Forward.

It was taken with quite a bit of reluctance on my part. I wasn't reluctant to push the shutter, it was nearly impossible to get me out of the door in the first place.

You see it was early, and I'm really not a morning person by nature. In fact I'd probably be a lot happier soul if the best light happened between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon!

It was my last day in Nepal, my flight was due to leave Kathmandu that afternoon and I was planning to spend the morning sleeping in, maybe a leisurely breakfast, a stroll down to my favourite bookstore. You get the picture.

Well my wife had other ideas as she forced me out of bed at some ungodly hour to go and have a look at the city of Patan, on the other side of the Kathmandu Valley. In particular she wanted to go to Durbar Square. When we got there there was this gorgeous mist covering the whole square and locals were out and about doing their shopping, taking a walk and just going about their business.

It was literally photographic paradise. There were no other tourists there (one of my favoured ways of getting unique images as you know), life was going on as it had for thousands of years and there was this gorgeous mist over everything. These women above were doing their fruit and vegetable shopping and putting the produce in these large wicker baskets. The blue cast is caused by the pre-dawn light and the mist combined.

I always knew that getting up early led to better pictures but this case just reinforced that belief. That and the fact that your travel photography is never over until you're actually on the plane! And even then there might be a nice view out the window. :) I can thank my wife Chiharu for this pic.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

This is one of those situations where I already had the image in my head and just had to wait a little while for it to happen in reality.

This combines a few of the things we've been talking about over the last few weeks. The first is to always look back. This scene was behind me and I wouldn't have noticed how amazing it was if I hadn't bothered to turn around every so often while trudging along the path.

When I did turn around this view took my breath away. As anybody who's been up high in the Himalayas will tell you, everything about it takes your breath away.

What it was about this scene that really inspired me was the way this path was so close to the edge of a huge cliff, with the towering mountains in the background. I firstly chose the telephoto lens to compress the perspective and have the background mountains appear nice and big and close.

Once I had my composition all sorted out I just had to wait for somebody to walk around the corner. I know it's hard to sit in one place and wait for any length of time when you're with other people. I've lost a fair few shots because I just couldn't sit around and wait for a good shot to present itself but if you can increase the number of times you wait for something special to happen you'll increase the number of memorable shots you come back with.

Put your finger over the man in the picture and see how boring it is without him in it. Anyway, as luck would happen, he actually walked along a few minutes after I turned around. To tell you the truth I have no idea if he noticed me standing there with a long lens on but he stopped right in the perfect place and posed brilliantly. Luck or a willing participant? I'm not sure but if I hadn't waited around to find out I never would have got the shot.

Absences and apologies

Apologies for the lack of posts this week. I've been flat out trying to get new images up on the web as well as look after my two young boys - who take great delight in making a huge mess straight after I've cleaned everything up!

Maybe I need to be stuck in one of these. This is a bona fide homemade electric chair! I found it for sale at a flea market in Japan.

Not any old flea market mind you but the biggest flea market in the whole of Hokkaido. And, for someone who's not the biggest shopper in the world, I was very tempted to go home with this little beauty. It would sure come in handy for those little brats of mine. :)



A good tip when you're travelling is to try and get yourself a copy of the local English newspaper. You can often find them at embassies and English language schools. The great thing about local newspapers is that they point you in the direction of events that may be great to photograph, but which the tourism people don't tell you about.

Tourism bodies often have an agenda to send you information about the products that pay to be members of their societies. As a result they often have a great knowledge of the major events and products but might not be up to date on the little things happening in town. By getting your information locally you can bypass this little problem and find some not often visited events to take pictures of.

This is the entire flea market inside the dome of a giant indoor sports stadium. I shot it from up high in the seating stands with a very wide-angle lens. There was such an exposure difference between the roof and the floor below that I had to choose which part I wanted to expose properly. I ended up deciding to let the market go a little bit dark and retain the detail in the roof.

Anyway I hope to be posting as normal real soon. The weather is gorgeous here in Cairns at the moment and it's just too tempting to be outside! :)

Keeping it all together

I thought you might like a little insight into my world. Well my world of stock photography. For those of you who don't know, stock photography is the licensing of photographs that already exist in your files. In other words not stuff that you do on assignment for people, but photography that you do on your own time and then hope to license down the track.

I say license here because you don't sell your pictures. You let people use them for certain uses and then charge them money according to what that usage is.

Anyway lately I've pulled my finger out (Australian slang for not being so lazy!) and decided to submit more images to one of my stock agencies. To do this I need to have a good record of what I have already submitted to them, what I have submitted to my other agencies (so I don't submit the samepicture to two different agencies) and what pictures I can't submit for various legal reasons.

This means that I need to keep a good track of all my pictures. As we all do. Now that the world has gone digital we fill up hard drive after hard drive, DVD after DVD and lose track of a lot of pictures. We end up spending more time looking for pictures than we did taking them. That's why I'm going to recommend that you all go out and buy some image cataloguing software. There are various types of software but the one I use and recommend started off with the name of iView MediaPro before it got bought by Microsoft and is now called Expression Media.

Here's one of the best things about it. From the picture above (click on it for a bigger version) you can see all the thumbnails there. Nothing unusual about that, lost of programmes give you thumbnails. But each one of those pictures lives in different folders in different hard drives. Most programmes only let you look at the pictures in one folder. This programme will let you look at ANY picture on ANY hard drive or DVD. How does it do it?

The thumbnails aren't the pictures themselves. They're just links to the pictures. If you look in the top left hand panel you can see it's called Catalog Sets. Four lines from the bottom you'll notice the Set called Blog Pics. And next to that title you'll see that the little circle is highlighted Green. This tells you that all the pictures you're looking at are ones I've posted to the blog. These virtual sets are the best thing since sliced bread. They enable you to group pictures in any way you like. You just drag and drop the thumbnails into these little Sets and that picture joins the group. But the actual original digital files themselves don't move! So that means one picture can live in as many virtual sets as you like without affecting the original picture.

What that means is - wait for it. If I want to burn a DVD with multiple images from multiple folders on multiple hard drives I just need to create one of these virtual Catalog Sets and drag and drop the thumbnails in there. The software will then let me burn a DVD and it will automatically grab all those pictures from their various homes on various hard drives and burn them all to one DVD for me! No more hunting for pictures, making copies and sticking them in a folder before you can burn a DVD. Now it's all drag and drop and Bob's your Uncle.

I have catalog sets for every country I've been to (so I can see all the images from one country in a single click), catalog sets for different regions within Australia and Japan (where I have the most images), and temporary Catalog Sets that I create when I'm putting together submissions for various clients. You can see I also have sets for the images published in a certain twelve month period.

You can also do a search for all the metadata in the pictures. Metadata is all the information you enter about the location you took the picture and the content of the image. You can do a search for file type (jpeg, tiff etc), the date you took the photo. You name it you can search for it.

This metadata is the future of image searching. No longer do you have to give your pictures a file name which includes information about the contents of the picture. As long as you have put some information into the metadata of the file you can find anything you want. Need a picture of an elephant? Type elephant into the search engine and all your elephant pictures will come up! Need to find out which pictures you've already posted to your blog? Just click on your Blog Pics catalog set and they'll all come up.

This software has literally changed my life. If you want to learn how to organise your files get a copy of The Dam book and Expression Media and prepare for your life to change!

Fill the frame

Probably the most important compositional rule you can learn (and probably the one I should have mentioned first! D'oh as my son would say) is to fill the frame.

Photography is a subtractive process, as opposed to something like painting which is an additive process. With a painting you gradually add things to a blank canvas. With photography you start off with a canvas that has way too much stuff in it and you have to crop out the unwanted so that all is left is the subject of your picture.

The famous photographer Robert Capa once said that if you don't like your photos get closer. Part of the photographic process is to really think about what it is you're photographing before you press the shutter. And then to get rid of everything else in the frame that isn't what you're photographing. If you can list four or five things that you want to put in the picture chances are you've got too many. Narrow it down to one, two or three at the very most.

But we don't all own $10,000 1200mm telephoto lenses and sometimes we can't get close enough to fill the frame, and sometimes we don't want to use a telephoto but want a wider view.

Take this picture here. This is the night view looking out over Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan. From where the lookout was I could get a great view looking along the coast of the peninsula. I tried a couple of long telephoto shots concentrating on certain areas but I wanted a wider shot which showed the long stretch of coastline.

The only problem was when I did that I suddenly had a big black patch in the bottom of the frame where the mountain got in the way (what idiot put a mountain there anyway! :) ). I needed to fill that black with something. And then that something came along in the shape of a bus. I could see it moving up the mountain quite slowly and just sat there and waited until it came around the bend. A slow shutter speed ensured that you got the streaking lights, and it being a curved road means you get a nice shape and voila I've filled my frame with city skyline, and my blackness with bus lights.

Take a look at the photos you really admire and look at how the photographer has filled the frame and what with. Sometimes they deliberately walk up to something to get closer, or zoom into it. That's a really great way of ensuring you fill the frame. Or sometimes they have sat and waited until something has come into the frame to fill a blank part of a wide-angle shot. Either way works.

Leading you along

There's an often used compositonal tool called Leading Lines. They're called that because they are lines that lead your eye into the composition, to where the photographer wants you to look.

Take this example here. This pic was taken in the deep, humid jungles of central Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo to be exact. And these dilapidated bridges were an hourly event on our crossing of this huge country.

The road was in such a bad state that we could often only travel less than 4 kilometres in a day - a day mind you, not an hour!

We came across a lot of small log bridges but only a few really substantial metal ones built by the Belgians. All of them had been looted for their wooden coverings meaning that you could see through to the river far below.

In this particular case I had a couple of choices. I could have chosen to look down through the bars to the river below, or I could do what I did. And that is to take the reader on a journey across the bridge to the rainforest on the other side.

The rails on which I put the viewer's eyes are the metal skeleton poles of the bridge. Because they are prominent in the foreground (a feature of the wide-angle lens) your eye looks straight at them and then follows them up the frame until you get to a part of the bridge where there is more substantial covering.

The other leading lines are those at the top of the bridge railings on either side. They focus your view even more to the very end point of the bridge, right at the base of the treeline. Having a couple of people in the frame shows how precarious the crossing is and by having a lot of empty space in the foreground (ie no bridge coverings) I have not only emphasised the leading lines but also how dangerous the bridge is.

So keep your eyes out for various lines that you can use to lead your viewer's eye through a photo. Just remember that one of the most important things about a leading line is it has to lead to SOMETHING. In other words you need something at the point where the viewer's eye will head to or else they'll feel ripped off having looked all that way to find nothing to look at.

Oh and if you're wondering how we got across the bridge...very slowly. We would creep forward in the truck, placing logs under the wheels. As the truck went over the logs we would take them from the back of the tyres and put them back in front of the tyres again. It was a very slow, arduous process. I really feel for the locals who have to cross these bridges every day.