Using reflectors

When you're out on location like this the last thing you want to be lugging around is a couple of light stands and big flashes. Yesterday I talked a little about small flashes but even those guys sometimes detract from the effect you're trying to create.

No right or wrong, just whatever suits your creative vision. In this case I was in a bit of a pickle.

I was doing a shoot for Tim and Gwyneth Nevard of their glorious property - the Mareeba Wetlands. This amazing area of savanna an hour or so west of Cairns is a haven for wild birds. Jabirus, brolgas, Gouldian Finches and too many others to mention flock to the man made lagoons built by the Nevards. Mornings are a once in a lifetime experience.

We were doing some shots for their brochures and they particularly wanted a shot from this hill overlooking the reserve. Only problem was the sun was right behind us. That means two things - one the sun is shining right into the lens of the camera, and two the people are in shadow.

First thing I needed to do was hide the sun! That was the easy part of the equation. I just moved left and right until it was hidden behind a tree. Sun problem solved!

Now the problem was the faces in shadow. I originally tried a small flash but I was shooting film and it was a bit hard to guage what the effect would be. When your butt's on the line you like to be safe! No LCDs on this shoot so for a lighting effect I could see and control I pulled out my trusty reflector.

One of the most common configurations of reflectors is a circular one that comes with big circular sleeves that fit over a collapsible frame. You have the option of a white reflector, a silver one, a gold one or a black one. If you don't put the sleeve over the frame it is a translucent piece of material that is great for filtering harsh sunlight.

The trick is to catch the rays of the sun and bounce them back into exactly the right space. The hard bit when there's only one of you is to look through the viewfinder while trying to manipulate the damn thing into the right place on a windy afternoon!

I must have looked quite funny as I shifted my position left and right. moved my left hand (holding the reflector) up and down and this way and that. Flattening it out, curling it over. Eventually I managed to get it into a pretty good position rested against the legs of my tripod and start shooting.

You can see the nice orange light on the face of the guide pointing into the distance as well as on Gwyneth's face with the binoculars held up to her face. Tim is a bit farther back and is not lit as well but has a nice backlit halo around his head.

As photographers we tend to collect stuff. Kind of like nesting bowerbirds only not everything's blue! Put your hand up if you've got more camera bags than you know what to do with. Just when you think you don't need that doovelacky that's been sitting in the back of the cupboard for six months you might just find a use for it. That's why on commercial travel jobs particularly I tend to take everything and pick and choose what will do the job.

Little flashes and travel photography

One of the students doing my weekend photography course in a few days (still a couple of places left if anybody's keen!) asked me whether she should invest in an external flash to add to her camera.

Without a doubt I would say yes, yes and double yes. This photo at the left shows you exactly what can be done with little flashes.

Does it look like it was shot in a studio with big softboxes and expensive equipment? Not on your nelly. It was done in my kitchen with no studio equipment at all.

All I needed was a couple of speedlight flashes and a big white wall - well two actually. My wife is standing next to our kitchen table and my youngest son Keyra is standing on one of the kitchen table chairs next to her. They're about 10cm (yep you read that right!) in front of the wall of the kitchen.

I'm leaning over the kitchen table and pointing a 28-70mm zoom at them. Now it was quite dark because it was nearly bath time so my ambient exposure was about 1/15 second at f2.8 - way too slow to hand hold let alone stop any movement.

So I brought in a couple of little Speedlight flashes. I put one on the table next to me (just to my right hand side) and one on the floor at my feet (just to my left hand side). Now here's the trick to this lovely soft light. If I had pointed the flashes directly at my wife and son the light would have been harsh and horrible - just like you get from all direct flash.

So what to do? I turned the heads off the flash around so they were pointing AWAY from my subjects but at a white wall about 20cm behind me. So the light from the flash was bouncing off the white wall at my subjects. In effect the wall becomes the light, not the flash itself. So now you have a great big area providing the light, hence the softness.

All that extra light from the flash meant that my shutter speed was now 1/125 second and I could close my aperture down to f7.1 for a bigger depth of field. The lights were fired with a little infrared transmitter - which you'll need if you're shooting Canon. If you're shooting Nikon then many of their cameras have built-in transmitters so you don't need to buy a triggering device.

So should you buy an external flash (plus a transmitter if you need one) ? If you like the look of this light then without a doubt I would say yes. I set this shot up in about two seconds. Once it was set up I could just shoot away until I got something I like. No red eye, no harsh shadows. Just beautiful studio quality light. An easy decision if you ask me.

Monday's Link

I wanted to point you to a really interesting podcast I found the other day. It features travel photographer David Sanger and he talks about how his business works and the changes it's going through. On the other side of the coin is Rich Legg, also a stock photographer but working within a different field and business structure - microstock. It's interesting to hear the two parties talk very cordially about what are very different photography models. You can find the link to it on David's site here.

Kirk Tuck wrote a great book called Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography. It's a really handy reference for those of you starting out in the world of using small flashes off-camera. He's also got a blog and I wanted to send you to his latest post which I found really thought provoking.

And finally a nice article about preparing yourself to become a professional photographer. There's some really great points here.

Anyway they're all a bit business oriented today. That's because I'm giving a talk to the AIPP (Australian Institute of Professional Photography) NQ chapter tonight, talking a bit about what I do and how I do it. So I guess I'm kind of in a business type of mood!

seeya

Paul

Telephoto lenses and shallow depth of field

The other thing we haven't talked about yet is telephoto lenses and their use in portraiture. Now it's pretty well known that they're a favourite with portrait photographers because they flatten the facial features making them look more appealing.

But another reason they're so popular is because of the way they really blur everything in front of and behind the point of focus. Now to get this effect the first thing you need is a wide open aperture (small f number say f2.8, f1.4 etc). And a full frame SLR camera is going to give you a shallower depth of field than a crop dSLR or a point and shoot.

All that being said, if you like to have blurry backgrounds the longer the lens you use the better it is. Take this shot here above. While the light on my aboriginal guide Vera isn't too bad for the time of day (middle of a sunny day in Aurukun, Cape York) the background is a mess.

Look at the light and shadows, gnarly branches and tree trunk, burnt out rocks on the ground. Just a really big mess that would relegate this picture to the junk pile. It was taken at a reasonably wide angle setting - 34mm on my zoom. Yuck.

Now look at what happens when I walk back a few paces and stick a longer zoom lens on and dial in 100mm.


Instantly that messy background of burnt out ground, jumbled branches and tree roots is a blurry, insignificant nothing. There are a couple of branches up in the top right hand corner that are a bit distracting but nothing as bad as the shot above.

So here the telephoto lens has done a couple of things. The narrower angle of view has cropped out the burnt out ground just behind Vera's body. The messy branches way off in the background appear closer but because they're so blurry they're not anywhere near as intrusive as the shot above.

And by having Vera larger in the frame she actually becomes the dominant feature. Plus the flattening effect of the telephoto lens makes her appear more natural.

Usually I like to move myself around to find a cleaner background but in this case we were in the middle of the forest and it was all as bad everywhere I looked. So I took the lesser evil and looked for trees that were far enough away to be blurred by the shallow depth of field. Just one more way that the background becomes really important in using your telephoto lenses.

Well that's covered the differences between wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses which should keep you lens fiends busy for a little while. Please if anybody has any questions or would like me to post on a particular topic write your comments after this post and I will help out where I can.

Have a great weekend and see you next week.

Telephoto lenses - when your foreground is boring!

People often ask me when they should use a telephoto lens for landscape photography. In fact it's a common misconception that you should only use your widest angle lens for landscapes - particularly those from famous lookouts.

There's a problem with that. Do you remember last week when we talked about how wide angle lenses really emphasise the foreground? What happens when your foreground is really, really boring? Or worse still what happens if it's ugly?

Take this shot here. Taken on the picturesque Mt Moiwa in the centre of Sapporo, it's looking from a cablecar down to the city. Now I could just as easily have waited until the cable car in the frame got closer to me and photographed it with a wide angle lens.

The only problem was that everything in the foreground (ie directly below me) was a boring, neverending forest. Sure it was quite pretty in a monotone green kind of, wrong time of day kind of way. I didn't need to show lots of it to let the viewer know that it was there. In fact by just showing a bit it lets the viewer imagine how much might be there.

So the foreground had to go. It would only take away from the impact of the picture. So I waited until the cablecar had gone whizzing past me and was headed down the mountain and waited with a long telephoto lens.

Firstly it had the effect of bringing the background city in nice and close to show that the cable car went over the forest from the city - no need to show acres of forest to get that effect. It also made the cable car nice and big as well. The narrow view meant I got rid of not-so attractive features to the left and right of the frame (which would have appeared in a wide angle shot) and, most importantly, I got rid of the boring foreground.

So if ever you end up looking at a beautiful landscape look down at your feet first. Is it interesting? Would it contribute to the story you want to tell? Grab the wide angle. Is it boring, lifeless or just plain ugly? Then reach for the telephoto lens and look out towards the horizon.

Telephoto lenses - the simplifying lens

Yesterday we talked about how a telephoto lens really brings the background in nice and close. As I mentioned that often means moving your camera position around until you find a nice, complementary background.

The other thing about telephoto backgrounds, and foregrounds as well for that matter, is that they happen on a very narrow angle of view. What you see is your subject and what is directly behind it in a straight line from your camera angle and nothing else.

That's why your camera position can have such an important effect on not only your background but also what appears to the left and right of your subject. And with a telephoto lens this is often nothing.

The telephoto is a great cleaner-upper (is that a word?) of the frame. Photography is the opposite of painting or drawing. Where those working on canvas start off with a blank sheet and fill in the important details, we start off with a busy mess of irrelevant stuff and have to get rid of most of it until all that's left is the important part of the picture.

The dancer above was on a tiny stage way off in the distance. Not only was the stage very tiny but it was cram packed with people dancing away and there were about ten heads between my head and the stage. From this picture to the right you can see what chaos it was.

Now this is the wide angle version of course. You can see how small and far away the stage looks. The shot above was taken from exactly the same position - mainly me sitting down while I ate my dinner and got off a picture every now and again.

You can see how the telephoto lens' narrow angle of view has highlighted the single dancer amongst a crowd of people. Anybody to the left and right of her are cut off by the edges of the frame.

The other thing working in my favour is the spotlight on the dancer. Because she is in such a bright area and the rest of the stage is so dark (relatively speaking) it fades to black, making it even more of a simple composition. In fact my eyes could see as much detail as you can see in the wide angle picture above but I knew the film wouldn't be able to record it. So the back of the stage would form a nice, clean, simple black background.

So remember that the telephoto lens will only see a narrow angle directly in line of sight of your camera position. Everything to the left and right of it will disappear like magic. So it's a great way of isolating a subject in the middle of a maelstrom.

Oh and just for the record, photographing the dancer without other people around her wasn't the hardest bit, it was keeping the foreground heads out of the frame as people moved left and right trying to get a better view!

Telephoto lenses and backgrounds meet New Delhi

One of the most important things to be aware of when using a telephoto lens is your background. Which isn't to say that backgrounds aren't important with wide angle lenses but the difference lies in what your background is.

Or more importantly how far away your background is. With the wide angle lens increasing the apparent distance between objects, things that are a long way away from the camera appear small and insignificant. They basically fade away into nothing.

When you use a telephoto lens, however, all the background elements become large, close and major elements of your composition. In other words you almost need to be looking at your backgrounds before you start framing your subject.

And to do this you need to be looking off in the distance behind your subject. The longer the telephoto lens the closer that background is going to appear, and the bigger it is going to be.

Just walking a few steps in one direction or the other won't affect the subject too much but can completely change the background. Take this image here. I wanted to show the contrast between the ancient steps of the Jantar Mantar astronomical observatory in New Delhi with the modern shapes of skyscrapers in the background.

The skyscrapers were a long way away so I knew straight away that there was no point in getting up and close with a wide angle lens because that would make the buildings small and insignificant in the background. Yes the ancient Jantar Mantar steps would be huge but I didn't want just the one element - I needed both to be large.

So it called for a telephoto lens. Then the problem was where I needed to stand to get the background buildings in the right place. A few feet to camera left and the only thing in the background would be other Jantar Mantar buildings. A few feet to the right would give me the same problem. Too low and my only background would be overcast Delhi sky. So I needed to be at about the same height as the little girl and pretty much right where I was to get the buildings in the background.

In this way I chose my background first. I scanned behind me to find a place where I might be able to get up reasonably high and at the right angle to get my background in the scene. After I'd done that the subject pretty much took care of itself.

When I started climbing up the stairs of another Jantar Mantar object (building?) in what seemed like a good position I found that going too high would bring too much of the street in the background into view, too low and I had too much sky. Just like goldilocks I found that the middle spot was just right.

Only problem was there was nobody in my picture. So I just sat down and waited until somebody walked into the frame. Luckily for me this little local girl wandered about half way up the steps, directly opposite me. Now I had my modern background, my ancient foreground for contrast and my bit of human element to make it interesting.

So remember the first golden rule of telephoto lenses - your background objects may be farther away than you think and may appear larger than in real life!