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.

© 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

7.  Don’t show your face.

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

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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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.

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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Alfred Renger-Patzsch "Das Bäumchen" (1926)

This is a photograph with which I have some difficulty.

Das Bäumchen, by Albert Renger-Patzsch, is considered by many to be one of the world’s great photographs. Some class it as being amongst the top 100 of all time.  According to these experts, it ranks with ‘Migrant Mother’, ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Igor Stravinsky’.

And it’s not just experts’ opinion. Or maybe it’s because of the experts’ opinion, collectors go into a feeding frenzy when it comes on the market. Prints of Das Bäumchen sell for eye-watering sums. Here’s an extract from an auctioneer’s report in 2007:

Albert Renger-Patzsch’s “Das Bäumchen, 1929″, but printed in the 1950s, was bid up by a multitude of phones. After the phone banks quieted down, lot 82, which had been estimated at $6,000-8,000, sold to one of those phone bidders for $60,000.

Sixty thousand dollars? Ten times the estimated price? For this photograph? Why?

I regret to say that I am mystified by this. To me the image is bland to the point of boredom. And, coupled with the uninspiring scene is uninspiring composition.

In an effort to understand and maybe get some insight, I have read through various expert commentaries. Here is an extract from one:

… there is a palpable stillness about the picture, a sense of the artist’s quiet, patient and quasi-spiritual observation of an insignificant yet transcendental moment in time. The photographer has knowingly invited the eye of the spectator to roam over a landscape that is in no way distinguished. On the contrary, he would seem wilfully to have selected an undramatic, relatively flat and featureless terrain …

… and more …

… the picture is one of considerable, if understated, beauty and subtlety. The white highlight that runs down the black line of the trunk is just one – surely the most graphic – of the ways in which the sunlight gently caresses and animates this landscape. The irregular, yet perfectly balanced symmetry – like that of a leaf one might say – can be read as a metaphor for the order that is to be found in the natural world …

I’m sorry,  I’ve read through all that, and a lot more that is similar, and I still can’t see it.

The sapling cuts the picture almost exactly in half vertically. And we can’t see its upper branches at all. There is a line of rather dirty melting snow in the foreground, and the background is featureless rolling countryside – the sort of countryside you can see anywhere. Drab and uninspiring. There appear to be two more banks of melting snow in the distance, one of them bisecting the trunk. Apart from that, there is nothing of any interest. At least the horizon doesn’t cut the picture exactly in half … not quite … but that’s about the only thing that can be said for it. It’s nothing more than a slightly undulating line. The sky is empty.

In my opinion Renger-Patzsch took much better photographs. Here’s one …

Albert Renger-Patzsch 'Buchenwald im November' (1936)

Personally, I wouldn’t class this as a ‘great’ photograph, either. But it seems to me to be a significantly better image. It’s far more evocative, full of mystery, strange, slightly eerie and graphically strong too.

So why is Das Bäumchen regarded as being so great? In what way is it better than Buchenwald im November? Why is a collector prepared to pay $60’000 dollars for a print that was made nearly 30 years later?

I think that if I’d taken a photograph like it I would have considered it a mistake and thrown it away.

Can someone explain?

Here are some links to other commentaries on Albert Renger-Patzsch:

Prof. Boerner’s Explorations

eyEArchives

Those numbers, for anyone who doesn’t recognise them, are the values of pure white in a digital photograph: pure red—255,  pure green—255, and pure blue—255. If you remember your physics, a mix of those three primary colours produces white.

And if you get large amounts of it in an image, unintentionally, you’ve got the curse of ‘blown highlights’. Here’s one of my photos suffering from it …

The clouds (especially at the top right), the sides of the men’s faces, their shirts, and the cover on the strange cheese-carrying contraption on the man’s head are all pure white, i.e. burned out.

It could have been a good photo … I like the low viewpoint and wide angle. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s useless.

Why does this happen? Can’t modern cameras, with all their fancy electronics, get it right?

They find it tough. The problem has arisen in this case because there’s huge ‘dynamic range’ in this scene, from the brilliant clouds to the dark, almost black shadows on Djan’s trousers.

We tend not to notice this because our eyes are good at handling dynamic range. But cameras are far less successful. And digital cameras are worse than film ones. Here I had the camera set to aperture priority (it was an ever-changing scene and I wanted a good depth of field) and the camera tried to average out the range of tones present.

“Yeah …” do I hear you say, “… but you can fix that in Photoshop, can’t you?”

No, I can’t. No one can. In areas showing 255, 255, 255 there is no additional information. They’re burned out. I can reduce them to a uniform grey. But what good’s that?

Underexposure is not so bad. Information can often be retrieved from areas of shadow. But you can’t get something from nothing. Here’s the same image, tweaked in Photoshop, to bring out the shadow areas and enhance the colour …

Now you can see detail in Djans’ trousers. But those highlights remain a terrible blank white. It’s still a useless image for all practical purposes (except as a bad example).

What could I have done to overcome this?

There are two possibilities:

1. The less good option would have been to have the camera on manual, set the exposure for the clouds, so they come out correctly, and then try to recover something from the dark areas later on, back at my computer.

2. The better option would have been to set the exposure the same way, but use a flash to fill in the dark areas. It’s better because it gets it right in the camera, and that’s what you should always aim for.

Ah well … such are the tribulations of photography. I hope I meet Djan and his mate again somewhere. They’re an interesting and photogenic pair, and I’ll try not to make the same mistake again.

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At the fair

Normally I don’t like photographs that are blurred all over.

Call me old-fashioned, but in my opinion they usually look like mistakes, with the mistake covered up by calling it ‘Art’.

In general, I believe that at least one section of a photograph should be in focus and sharp. But there are always exceptions to every rule.

And I think this is one of them.

All right … all right … so I’m biased. After all, it is my photograph.

So why do I think this one works, despite the lack of any sort of sharpness?

I like it because it shows a scene with which very many people will be familiar. And I feel that it captures that scene in a way to which people can relate. There’s the expression on the woman driver’s face, and her active pose. She’s swinging her car around to the right, up and into the picture.  There’s the swirl of colours – and they are a swirl – that grade from cool blue at the left to warm orange at the right. And the bumper car is moving into the orange. There is a hint of the other fair-goers and bumper cars, but they are only a hint, and they are even more blurred. No other people appear in the photograph, so concentrating the viewer’s attention on the couple. To me it captures something of the spirit of the night.

I took it the early hours of this morning, at about 1 o’clock, at the Fêtes de Genève. This is the annual summer festival when the Swiss city of Geneva goes berserk and people let their hair down. (Geneva is not the sombre Calvinist place people would have you believe.)

I was wandering the fairground with a 50mm f1.4 prime lens on my camera. That’s a pretty fast lens. But even so, with the lens wide open, I had to have the ISO rating turned up to 800 in order to get a manageable shutter speed. Again … I usually like to keep the ISO rating down as low as possible because the higher you turn it up, the more noise you get. But, in this case, the presence of a little bit of noise adds a sense of immediacy to the image.

Yes, I like this photograph and am well-pleased with it. What do you think?

Guerrillero Heroico

This is the best-known photograph in the world.

That’s a bold statement. Have I got justification for it?

Yes. This photograph has adorned posters, leaflets, books, drinks bottles, flags, T-shirts, CD and record covers, banners, walls and a host of other surfaces. It has been prominent in events ranging from the student riots in Paris, 1968, to present-day conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America.

It has come to symbolise anti-establishment thought and action to such an extent that it has achieved the status of an icon. It has inspired contemporary art and been hi-jacked by commerce. Its illegal use in advertising has spawned a number of international lawsuits. It has been used and abused by mega-stars and comedians. It is so well-known that no matter how it is altered – by means of reversals, silhouettes, posterisations, collage, wire-framing or colour changes – it is instantly recognisable. Its meaning is understood even by those who have no idea who the guy is.

The man is Ernesto Rafael ‘Che’ Guevara de la Serna, a revolutionary leader, and a major figure in the Cuban Revolution. This photograph of him was taken by Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz Gutiérrez on the 5 March 1960, and Guevara was 31 years old.

The day before this photograph was taken, the French freighter La Coubre, with over 70 tons of explosives on board, had exploded in Havana harbour. The explosion killed a large number of Cubans (the exact number was never known). Claiming that this was an act of American sabotage, Cuban leader Fidel Castro called for a mass funeral at Havana’s Colón cemetery. As Castro gave his funeral oration, Che Guevara was next to him on the platform, together with French intellectuals Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Korda, Castro’s personal photographer, stood in the crowd immediately below. Before the Cuban revolution Korda had been a prominent fashion photographer, so he had an eye for charisma and beauty. He shot off a lot of photographs with his Leica M2, using a 90mm lens, taking advantage of his low viewpoint. Here’s the contact sheet from one of those films  …

The crucial photograph is fourth row down, third in from the left. It shows Guevara with an unknown man to his left and a bit of palm tree to the right. The final image has been cropped from this.

Why is it such a powerful photograph? To start with, the low viewpoint, with Guevara gazing enigmatically into the distance, is a classic ‘statuesque’ form. But, at the same time, Guevara’s wild hair and moustache, his beret at a rakish angle with its solitary star and his leather waistcoat all speak of non-conformity and revolution. His shoulders are turned a fraction to the left, whilst his head is to the right, as if he has just seen some approaching foe. There is an instant tension here.

His expression is extraordinary. It is an mixture of authority, independence and defiance, with a hint of wistfulness in it, too. As with Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, you can read a whole host of emotions into it.

Then, descending to a practical level, this portrait has an enormous graphic strength. Guevara’s white face, surrounded by his dark hair and the beret lends itself well to techniques such as posterisation.

Did all this stuff about ‘enigmas’ and ‘graphic quality’ go through Korda’s head as he was working with his camera, down in the crowd?

Of course not. He was ‘shooting on the hoof’. And, much later on, in speaking about the method he used, Korda said, “… this photograph is not the product of knowledge or technique. It was really coincidence, pure luck.”

Maybe so. But I think Korda is being a little bit too humble. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”