Monthly Archives: September 2010

What is in my bag?

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I am often asked “what is in that Domke bag of yours”?

Here. Too much, many would say…:

Photo Bag by Michael Willems

Photo Bag by Michael Willems

The bag is a Domke bag, and it contains:

  • Two lenses (Which ones? That varies per shoot).
  • A speedlight (Canon 580-EX II).
  • My off-camera flash cable.
  • My point-and-shoot camera (a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 Micro Four Thirds camera).
  • The indispensable Hoodman Hood Loupe (Get one. Now.)
  • Memory cards… always carry spares.
  • Fong Lightsphere – for safe shooting when I need safety rather than creativity.
  • Honl Photo reflectors/gobos.
  • A Honl gel set in a Honl roll.
  • My iPad .. plus, just in case, its charger.
  • Spare batteries for every camera and for flash. Never travel without spare batteries.
  • Lens caps for the lenses that are on the camera. I do not use them on the cameras I am using.
  • Cloths, plastic bags, headache and stomach acid pills.
  • Note pad, pens, comb, small brush, business cards.

And an important note: no camera. That is (or more accurately, those are!) over my shoulder.

Daily News

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In today’s Photography news:

  • Canon launches the G12. This is, like the G11, a low megapixel camera (kudos, Canon – good decision. High pixel densities cause more noise).
  • The Daily Mirror sacks 6 out of its ten photojournalists. Yes, photojournalism is dead.
  • A famous photojournalist was in fact a spy.

The quality of photojournalism has plummeted now that no-one is being paid to do it. There will be few more iconic news images, now that somehow people seem to believe that an amateur image shot on a phone with a 2mm-across lens is as good as an image shot on an SLR with an f/1.4 lens.

Progress cannot be stopped. Just like no-one knows Latin or punctuation anymore, and people think Sweden is the capital of Amsterdam, and just like only 5-10% of people can tell me that 1,000 x 1,000 is one million, this skill too will disappear.

And that is fair enough. “It is what it is”: if society does not value Latin, or math, or photojournalism, or knowledge of history, then they will not be around. Almost no-one reads a newspaper anymore, so why employ photojournalists?

The good news is that while deep ability like this is disappearing, at least the remaining abilities are democratizing. Instead of a few Robert Capas, we have millions (that is, thousands of thousands) of increasingly able amateurs today.

And I am determined to help Canada and the USA and any other areas that I have students in become the best-educated photography nations in the world!

5 feet.

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Uncle Fred takes every picture from exactly 5 feet above the ground.

Don’t! Look for unusual viewpoints. Up, sideways, or like here, down:

Skateboarder on wet sidewalk

Skateboarder on wet sidewalk

And unusual viewpoints can include diagonals:

Dark Diagonal Church

Dark Diagonal Church

Or they can mean “table-top level”:

Reflection, photo by Michael Willems

Reflection

So avoid shooting everything with the straight and narrow Uncle Fed horizontal viewpoints!

And, um… recognise the Rule of Thirds in there, anyone?

Colour combinations

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There are some colour combinations I always look for. If you see those, think “could there be a shot here?”

They include Red vs. Green, a combination that contrasts on the colour wheel:

Red and Green

Red and Green

But also:

  • Yellow vs. Blue, ditto, another contrasting combination.
  • And the following harmonious combination we find a lot in nature: purple and green.
Green and purple

Green and purple

And this one, shot in yesterday’s “Creative Urban Photography” walk that I did with nine students in Oakville:

Harmonious Colours,photo by Michael Willems

Harmonious Colours

So any time you see any of those combinations, ask yourself “could there be a picture?”. And if you see lots of green, look for some red; if you see lots of blue, see if you cannot find some yellow to add to it.

Update: two more notes. First, remember to set your white balance properly (e.g. on a cloudy day, use “Cloudy”). Second, the upcoming autumn is a great time. Cloudy, overcast days provide wonderful saturated colours, and of course the leaves are turning. Get Out and Shoot!

Wide, and wider

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Wide angle lenses are good, you have heard me say this many times.

Not just for travel. Also, for instance, for “event background shots”, like this recent picture taken at a corporate event:

Bar Lemons

Bar Lemons

Or for this:

Montreal Plateau Tree

Montreal Plateau Tree

Wide angles because:

  • You get more in (d’oh).
  • They are easy to focus – if you wish, you can get it all in focus (but see the note below).
  • It is easy to avoid camera shake (a safe-ish shutter speed is “1 divided by the lens length”, after all, so shorter lenses are easier).
  • You introduce depth (“close-far” technique).
  • You can exaggerate perspective, if you wish.

So how wide is “wide”?

I would say 16-35 mm on a “full frame” camera – that means 10-20 mm for those of you who use a crop camera, like a Digital Rebel, 50D, D3000, or D90.

Now I promised you a footnote. Wide lenses make it easy to focus on “everything”. So what if I want selective focus, like in the bar or in the following shot? Selective focus is oh so important in photography, as it helps you tell a story:

Buffet

Buffet

Well, then I need to have a wide open aperture. Wider than on a longer lens.

And that is why I use a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, and if I could find a faster one I would get it, too. The faster (i.e. the lower the “F”-number), the better. So when some say “a wide lens does not need to be fast”, they are wrong.

Fun today

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Today I taught Travel, Kids, Composition, Flash, and more to an overflowing crowd at Henry’s in Mississauga.

If you were one of that crowd, welcome here, and it was a great pleasure to have such an intelligent and attentive audience!

Michael Willems Teaching

Michael Willems Teaching

Catchlights

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Typically, a portrait needs to show catchlights in the eyes.

Those little sparkles of light. Like in this portrait of a recent client, Mo Vikrant, an amazing (and amazingly well educated) young financial advisor in Toronto:

Mo Vikrant, photo by Michael Willems

Mo Vikrant

Can you see how those dots of light add life, add sparkle, to this portrait?

Now, I am not as adamant as PPOC, the Professional Photographers of Canada, that every eye must have a catchlight (and only one), or it is a failed portrait. But I do think that typically, yes, they need to be there, and they need to be round.

So I used a speedlight shot through (not reflected off) a partially-unfurled umbrella for that portrait.I cold also have used the Honl Traveller 8 softbox – this too would have given me nice round catchlights.

Detail is important!

Dodo Lenses?

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A student from the other day asks:

My son & I really enjoyed the course with you last night.  I do find myself a bit puzzled though about one particular matter when it comes to future investment.  I’m thinking about updating my 10D and then purchase another lens, yet you’re not the first person to praise their “Micro Four Thirds” camera – especially given the quality and additional lens options.  I’m wondering if this is going to be like the cherry-wood entertainment center I purchased years ago when wide screen tv’s were just on the way… but this entertainment center was not built for it.  Today, it’s still a beautiful piece of furniture, but it’s admittedly been sidelined since it’s unable to accommodate modern TV shapes.

What do you think? If this is the way of the future… perhaps my EF lenses may go the way of the dinosaur?

Good question: and yes, I d love the Panasonic Lumix I recently bought, and yes, it can produce work as good as the SLRs. So are we dumping those and going to Micro Four Thirds?

No – not at the expense of SLRs. SLR cameras will always be here. Why? Why lug about a heavy camera when a small camera can be as good? For reasons like these:

  • The availability of a much wider range of lenses.
  • The ability to shoot more quickly (ten frames a second on my 1D, 8 on the 7D).
  • Waterproofing
  • Focusing systems that do not rely on the sensor
  • The ability to use a viewfinder that shows “the real thing”
  • More buttons – yes, that is a good thing. Few menus needed. To change exposure, ISO, metering mode, white balance, and a host of other things, on my SLR I can press one button. On smaller cameras I often need to enter menu systems, which can be convoluted.
  • Micro Four Thirds is so special because it uses a biiig sensor: but it’s still not quite as big as a crop SLR’s sensor (and not nearly as big as a full size sensor). And sensor size matters greatly: lower noise, and more restricted depth-of-field possibilities.

Those reasons show why SLRs will be at the forefont of camera development for many more years.

Now, one thing you may want to do is use EF rather than EF-S lenses. More cameras are being released as full-sized snesors, and an EF lens can fit on any Canon camera, while an EF-S lens can only fit o the crop sensor camera.

EF lenses, then, provide great future proofing. You can go ahead and buy and not fear that five or ten years down the road, your lens will be worthless and (worse), useless..

Simplify…

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I recently shot the picture below, during a Creative Urban Photography walk in Oakville.

Can you see how it is simple, how it is defined more by what it does not show than by what it shows? That is often the case: simple is good, and when the viewer has to piece things together that is a good thing.