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No subject?

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Can you take a photograph without a subject?

That’s the challenge I set the participants in the first session of my latest Through The Lens photo-class.

Some of the participants looked at me as though I’ve gone off my head. Is he crazy or what? Others sat in silence. There were those who protested that it is impossible to take a photograph with no subject. Later in the week, after having thought about it, one participant wrote to me …

Because we live in a physical world and because our brains are programmed to seek out meaning, I do not  think it is possible to take a photo without a subject.

Even if we take a photo of the blue sky, the blueness of the sky is still a subject that we can see and discuss and compare.

Even a photo taken with the lens cap on has a subject … darkness … which is a very interesting subject because darkness can be compared with light.

Anything we frame in our viewfinder is a subject.

Is that right?

Here’s an image that one of the participants produced as a result of my challenge.


Abstract photographic image

© Jose Bucheli


Does it have a subject?

Some would say the colours … or the shapes … or the play of the light, which seems to be coming from one side … is the subject.

Maybe. But let’s be frank about this – a debate about whether it is possible to take a photograph without a subject is pointless. It’s one of those arguments that can go on and on forever, going round and round and getting nowhere.

So why did I set the exercise?

I  did it to encourage the course participants to focus on the importance of subject in a photograph. I hoped that by approaching it from the other direction – deliberately trying to avoid a subject (which is not easy) – they will be encouraged to think about the content of future photographs.

In another form of image creation – painting – the artist starts out with a blank canvas and builds up from nothing. This slow and painstaking process encourages the creator to think carefully about what he or she is painting … its importance … its placement in the image … how well-defined it is … and so on.

By contrast, a photograph can be created in 1/100th of a second with a simple push of a button. It’s too easy. This encourages carelessness and, as a result, it is easy to overlook the importance of the subject. The human eye is very good at picking out a subject from its background. Cameras are not good at this and subjects can get lost. They can be in the wrong position or badly lit.

A second objective of the exercise was to encourage the skill of ‘seeing’. The ability to ‘see’ rather than just ‘look’ is an essential skill in photography. I hope that, in taking on this challenge, my course  participants have been ‘seeing’ new things all around them.

Jose Bucheli certainly has captured some unexpected beauty in her ‘subject-less’  photograph.

Filed Under: abstract, advice, opinion, pattern, technical, tips Tagged With: , , ,

Photo-frittering – 15 Ways to waste time with photography

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A clock face at ten past ten

Photography is a wonderful way to waste time. You can even spend money doing so. Here are some great time-frittering ideas, not all of them free:

 

1.  Develop a healthy obsession with dust on your sensor. Buy a special magnifying thingie to fit in place of your lens. Then you can spend hours gazing through it, trying to spot the specks. You never know, a few more motes may even fall into your camera while you’re peering through the magnifier.

 

2.  Feed your dust obsession. Buy a changing bag that makes it look as if you’re handling radioactive waste every time you swap lenses. Don’t worry if your subject swims/runs/walks/flies/hops/crawls/slithers/drifts/blows or grows away whilst you are changing lenses. At least you haven’t got dust in your camera …

 

3.  … unless you forgot to vacuum-clean your lovely lens-changing bag after you last used it.

 

4.  Is your camera a Nikon? Join a photographic forum to argue that it’s way, way better than a Canon. And don’t let those Canon idiots put you down. Keep arguing.

 

5.  Is your camera a Canon? Join a photographic forum to argue that it’s way, way better than a Nikon. And don’t let those Nikon idiots put you down. Keep arguing.

 

6.  Is your camera a Panasonic? A Sony? A Fuji? A Leica? Join a photographic forum to argue …

 

7.  Choose one of your photographs … you have taken some in between all that dust-busting and arguing, haven’t you? … any one will do. Add an eye-catching, judge-stunning border and enter it for a photographic competition. Be sure to put © Your Name somewhere at the bottom of the picture too (preferably in a fancy font). Artists always sign their work. And you never know when a judge is going to try to pinch it.

 

8.  Better still, enter a rights-grabbing photo competition where the organisers legally steal your work.

 

9.  Buy the cheapest lenses you can find. After all, lenses are just lumps of glass, aren’t they? It’s the camera, with its logo, that’s important. Here’s a beauty. Looks big and professional, too.

 

10.  Join Flickr and leave breathless comments (Wow! That is sooooooooo coooooooool! Amazing!!!!!!!!! Brilliant!) on loads of indifferent photographs in the hope that people will respond to your photos in the same way.

 

11.  Shoot one-handed to look cool, like the photogs in the adverts.

 

12.  Use your camera’s dinky little built-in flash to take photographs of the action at rock concerts, football matches, athletic meets and other places. The flash won’t be powerful enough to light up the entire stadium but, what the hell, we’re into time-wasting here.

 

13.  Hand your camera to others, to take photos of you posing in front of tourist attractions. Better still, hand your camera to a complete stranger and ask him/her to photograph you. This can also be equipment-wasting – when the stranger runs off still clutching it.

 

14.  Shoot JPEG files. RAW is for wimps who can’t shoot a photo right first time and are afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, RAW files are huge and fill up your memory card.

 

15.  Spend hours working with an image editing program to add some fancy painterly textures to your photographs – brush swirls, canvassy looks and all that stylish stuff. After all, painting’s classy, isn’t it? Photography’s just pushing a button. (You could even enter the resulting work of art for a competition – see Nos. 7. and 8.)

 

There you go … a bunch of ideas for the weekends or long dark winter evenings.

Happy photo frittering!

Filed Under: advice, competition, equipment, humor, humour, tips Tagged With: , ,

Keep an eye on the sky

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A farmer is never wasting time when he is leaning on a gate looking at his animals.

And a photographer is never wasting time gazing at the sky.

The sky is the source of the best light for photography.

The sky is the backdrop to many of your photographs.

The sky is an ever-changing canvas, from light to dark and back to light again. It is never the same from one moment to the next, and it never repeats its patterns.

The sky is a constant source of inspiration and wonder.

Yesterday morning I did was what I often do first thing … I went out on to my balcony to look at the sky. The sun was still below the horizon and there, in the East, was a beautiful sun pillar, with a faint mock sun at the top of it.

Sun pillar over the Swiss Alps

A sun pillar, with a faint mock sun at the top, over the Swiss Alps at dawn

I dashed inside, grabbed my tripod, extended the legs, slammed a 300mm lens on my camera and fixed it to the tripod.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, with the cooling of the air, the season for sun pillars is beginning. They are caused by plate-like ice crystals high in the air, reflecting and refracting the sunlight. You can read more about them, and see more beautiful images at Les Cowley’s Atmospheric Optics website.

In fact, there are a wealth of sky sights that many people miss, simply because they never look up … sun dogs, haloes, fogbows, crepuscular rays, nacreous clouds, coronae, the zodiacal light … if you know what to look for there is almost always something happening in the sky.

The tricky part is photographing the show. Here, as I said, I used a 300mm lens with the camera on a sturdy tripod. I would have preferred to use a cable release to fire the shutter but I wasn’t sure where the thing was (I’m not a tidy person) and I didn’t want to waste time looking for it. Sometimes sun pillars often get better after sunrise, sometimes they don’t. This one didn’t. It vanished shortly after I took this photograph.

I used a shutter speed of 1/60th second with an aperture of ƒ11. I could have opened up the aperture quite a lot – and so given myself a higher shutter speed – but I didn’t want to as, like most lenses, this 300mm zoom performs best at medium apertures. Under these conditions a lens is being tested to its full.

Several of the photographs were too blurred to be useful – even with the camera on a tripod, firing the shutter by hand can introduce vibrations – but some came out fine.

As a bonus, I like the way in which the hills recede, with different shades of grey, into the background. And I like the silhouette of the poplar tree to the right, echoing the sun pillar. I’m not too sure about the pair of birds flying across the skyline. They could be mistaken for specks of dust. I toyed with the idea of cloning them out in post-processing, but then relented.

How often do you look up at the sky? Do you know what to look for? Are you able to recognise a sky sight when you see it?

As a photographer, make a habit of looking up. If you don’t do this already you’ll be amazed at what you’re missing.

Filed Under: advice, astrophotography, exposure, landscape, low light, sky, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Seven ideas for successful self-portraits

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You see people doing it everywhere – holding a camera at arm’s length, grinning at the lens and taking a photo.

Self-portraiture is a popular activity.

Pretty well every famous photographer has created self-portraits – Robert Capa, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Weegee, Henri Cartier-Bresson – there’s a fine collection of them on the Listicles website.

Self-portraiture is so popular that you can even buy compact cameras with a second viewing screen on the front, beside the lens, to help you photograph yourself using the ‘arm’s length’ technique.

Sure, that’s one way of doing it. But it’s a somewhat boring and unoriginal way. All you’re likely to get is a snap of your face with your arm stretched out below it.

You can do better than that. And I don’t mean by using a mirror, either.

With a bit of ingenuity and creativity the sky’s the limit. After all, you’re the model. You can do what you like. And you may be surprised at what you can do.

Here are seven tips to give you some ideas for self-portraits with a difference …


1. Use a remote release* as well as the self-timer


Using your camera’s self-timer for self-portraits is a no-brainer. Its 10-20 second delay allows you to get around to the front of the lens and pose.

But adding a remote release to your kit opens up a number of other possibilities.

Some of these releases have cables with a length of a metre or more. They enable you to get a reasonable distance from the camera with more elaborate poses. And if you also use the self-timer, it will give you time to put the cable down and out of sight before the shutter fires.

Self portrait in the snow

I used a wireless release combined with the self-timer to achieve this. There's no way I could have got down from the balcony and cleared the line of snow in 20 seconds!

Alternatively, you could use a wireless infra-red or radio-triggered remote release. This will allow you to get even further away from the camera – for example, if you want to take a photo of yourself admiring a landscape. Again, use this in conjunction with the self-timer so that you can slip the trigger in your pocket and pose naturally before the shutter fires.

Oh … and it’s best if you have a tripod, too, when you do this.

 


2.  Be dramatic


If you’re doing the old hold-the-camera-at-arm’s length trick, then sitting and grinning at the lens is about the only option you have.

Why be so boring? Self-portraiture opens up a whole world of opportunity. Gardening, for example, is normally considered a quiet and contemplative occupation.

But, by using a low viewpoint, a wide angle lens, and the self-timer again – coupled with some fill-in flash to compensate for the bright sky – you can demonstrate that a worm may see gardening in a very different light …

Worm's eye view of a gardener.

Self portrait with broken leg


3.  Record life incidents


You take photographs to record events in your family, don’t you? To you record birthday parties, weddings, holidays, anniversaries, and the like?

So why not record your personal life too, with self portraits?

Last year I broke my leg in a skiing accident. For about 6 weeks my world shrank to the house and yard. During that period I tried to record my experiences. I converted my DSLR into a pinhole camera using a camera body cap and some aluminium foil. (See how I did it on my pinhole page.)

My intention was to portray a fuzzy and insubstantial feeling. To achieve the transparent effect I used a long exposure (easy with a pinhole) so that I could hobble out of the image part way through.


4.  Be creative


The majority of photographs that you see of people at computers show them smiling as they gaze at the glowing screen. Happy families gather around, fascinated by the wonders it beams out at them.

Oh yeah? That’s not my experience.

I’m usually tearing my hair out as the thing throws up incomprehensible error messages, crashes without warning, or freezes solid (usually when I haven’t saved my work for the past 2 hours).

So I decided to record my response as a self-portrait. I was entirely alone when I took this photograph. Honest. With a bit of ingenuity I managed to catch my tie flying, and get motion blur on my hand. Can you work out how I did it?

Reaction to a computer


5.  Try a silhouette.


Just remember that you need to be careful with silhouettes. Keep your image clean and clear. Don’t lean against a tree, for example, as your shape will merge with that of the tree making it impossible to identify.

And try to tell a bit of a story. If you stand sideways-on against a bright window you may get a beautiful silhouette but it won’t mean an awful lot. Just another profile.

For this photograph I climbed a mountain ridge before dawn to create an image with a little ‘story’ to it. Again, I used a tripod and the self-timer.

Self portrait as a silhouette

6.  Frame yourself


This tip is not exclusive to self-portraiture. In fact, none of these tips are. But with self portraiture, posing yourself in a suitable frame can give some enigmatic results.

Here I used the self-timer set at 20 seconds, and I had to run quite fast to get inside the derelict barn before the shutter fired. Hence my expression.

Self portrait at a barn window


7.  Don’t show your face.


Is it a ‘portrait’ if your face is hidden?Self portrait with camera

You could argue the point—and I’m sure some will—but I think it is. A portrait reveals something about somebody and, as I’m a photographer, this is one way I can portray myself.

So … good self-portraits are much, much more than arms’ length photography – even if you do have a nifty extra little screen on the front of your camera.

Why not think about it, get yourself set up and try some self-portraiture with a difference this coming weekend? And share your experiences, too. I’d love to hear them.

 

* Also called a ‘cable release’, this piece of kit is essential for a number of other photographic techniques such as macro, low-light and landscape photography.


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Filed Under: advice, people, pinhole, portrait, self portrait, techniques, tips Tagged With: , , , ,

How many photographs has your camera taken?

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I don’t mean the number since you last uploaded stuff to your computer. I’m talking about the grand total. The number since you first took your shiny bright marvel out of its box, lovingly unwrapped it and listened to the delicious click of its virgin shutter.

There’s a way to find out.

Way back in about 30BD (Before Digital) I bought my first single lens reflex camera, a Nikkormat FTN. As I photographed I carried a little red notebook about with me and carefully noted down the exposure details of every shot. Then, weeks later, when the slides came back from the processing laboratory, I spent long evenings transcribing this information on to the cardboard mount.



One of my Kodachrome slides from 1973



I know. I can’t quite believe I did all that, either.

But there was method in my madness. The object was to improve my technique. So, if the photo was blurred, I could see what shutter speed I had used. If it was under exposed I knew the aperture.

Now we’re in the AD era all that detail … and more … is recorded every time you take a photograph. There’s an incredible mass of information automatically attached to each photograph … the camera make and model … the lens used and its focal length … the shutter speed and aperture … the date and time … whether you used a flash or not … and a barrow-load of other stuff I don’t even begin to understand such as ‘Strip Byte Counts’ and ‘CFA Pattern’.

This information is called the EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format). You can read some of it with most file managers or image viewing and editing programs. In Widows Explorer, for example, select the file and click on ‘Properties’. With image editing and viewing programs, look for the option that says ‘EXIF data’, or similar. However, most programs will not reveal everything recorded.

If you want the full works use Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer website.



EXIF viewer website

Enter the filename into the second box down, highlighted in blue



Enter the file name in the second set of boxes, labelled ‘Local Image File:’. Make sure it is an original file, not one that has been processed, as processing sometimes strips out some of the data. Click on ‘View Image from File’, and wait.

When the information appears scroll down to the ‘MakersNotes’ table where you’ll find the information arranged in alphabetical order. There’s masses of stuff there, much of it incomprehensible, but the total number of photographs your camera has taken is recorded in the ‘Shutter count’ row.

I got my current camera in 2008 and, mysteriously, when I examine the EXIF data for the first shot I ever took with it, the shutter count shows 472. It came boxed and wrapped and everything. Hmmmmm. Was the guy in the camera shop sneaking it out and using it for weekend photography before he sold it? I’ll never know.

What I do know, looking at the most recent image, is that I’ve taken 24’085 photographs since then. That’s over 29 photographs per day.

I’m glad I’m not recording all that exposure information in my little red book any more.



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Filed Under: advice, camera, equipment, EXIF, technical, techniques, tips Tagged With: , , ,
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