Author Archives: Michael Willems

Seniors

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Yesterday night I presented a custom version of my popular “Travel Photography” workshop to the Oakville Seniors’ Photography Club.

I have seldom met a nicer bunch of people. They were also very engaged : in fact my one-hour version was so well received that it became a two-hour version, and no-one left. I have a feeling I could have done the full three hour version and they would still all have stayed.

Photography is a great hobby to take up -any time, even when you retire. Modern, and in particular digital, technology has added fundamentally to what we can do in the following ways:

  1. Modern cameras can do more!
  2. Modern flash (with TTL metering) is easy to use.
  3. Photography is now cheap – it no longer costs $20 every time you use it.
  4. So your money can go to lenses, instead
  5. And finally the most important one: we get instant feedback, to see if what we did worked. You can now learn something in an hour that would have taken a year, back in 1975.

All you now need is training. Please get some, if you haven’t yet. It is amazing what a short course can do to enable you to use this technology properly!

A big camera... but your point-and-shoot does the same!

And then, once you know how it all works, you can move on to producing art.

And that’s where seniors, with their life experience and available time, have an edge. Everyone can learn, but when you have those two, you can put that learning to good use.

C? F? No, K.

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K for Kelvin, that is.

If you find that your white balance setting still leaves your pictures yellow when taking pictures in tungsten light even when you set the white balance to Tungsten, try a Kelvin value if your camera supports that. I find, for instance, that in my bedroom 2700K is about right.

If your camera does not support that, use a Custom white balance setting after you shoot a white sheet of paper.  Your camera’s manual will help in this.

Of course if you shoot RAW [corrected]  this makes no difference, but I still recommend doing this: it reduces your post-production work, plus your back-of-the-camera previews look better.

1D Mark IV need-to-knows

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Here again are two important tips for 1D Mark IV users:

  1. Disable ALO (Automatic Lighting Optimisation) and Peripheral Illumination adjustment.  Otherwise your RAW images will be underexposed!
  2. Focus-point linked metering does work when using evaluative metering (Canon do not tell you this, but evaluative metering is biased heavily towards the selected focus point). But unless you disable most of the 45 focus points and just use 19 of them, it does not work when using spot meter, even if you have enabled the focus-point linked spot metering function.

These are two small but important gotchas, wouldn’t you say? I thought they wewre important enough to point out again separately.

Snow snaps

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In preparation for an upcoming two-day Country Photography Workshop I am organizing with a colleague on 3+4 April (ask me about it!), I took a few snaps in the snow yesterday with the 1D Mark IV. Interestingly, it meters more accurately than the 1D Mark III: I needed less exposure compensation since even evaluative metering was biased more towards the selected focus point. (This is odd since focus-point tied spot metering works less often).

Can you tell I like wide angles?

Snow tips:

  • Set exposure carefully for most images, emphasizing background saturation. Use a grey card or spot meter off treees, or off the sky, and adjust starting from that.
  • Bring a spare battery.
  • Careful bringing the camera into the house afterward: use a plastic bag.
  • Meter carefully and use the “highlights” view and the histogram to ensure you are not blowing out the snow – but you are getting close.
  • Use flash to light up close objects (see how I did it?)
  • High-speed flash is needed if the time exceeds 1/250th – it can be left on since the camera will only use it when needed – but it will cut effective flash power by at least 50%.
  • It is very hard to see  your images: bring a Hoodman Hood Loupe and let your eyes acclimatise.

One more snap and it’s back to the order of the day:

Again, flash and careful exposure gives it that nice saturated look.

Always carry spares

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When you are shooting for pay, always make sure that you carry:

  • A spare camera battery.
  • Spare batteries for your flash.
  • Some Alkaline AAs.
  • Spare memory cards.
  • A spare flash.
  • Spares for essential cables (e.g. to connect your flash to your camera or pocketwizards).
  • Even, if at all possible, a spare camera.

That way you can offer your customer peace of mind, and you can rest assured that the price you charge is worth it – “Uncle Bob”, after all, does not carry the spares above.

I have been saved more than a few times by the spares above – yes, all of them.

The KISS principle

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Means “Keep It Simple, Student”.

Meaning, you can often use simple equipment. Like when you are lighting and instead of using many flashes, you use just one. On the camera instead of off camera. Like in this recent fun ‘desat’ shot:

Using  simple speedlite bounce-light.

I explain this technique in my workshops, and use it often. Key is to:

  • Be in a small room with white walls (a light box)
  • Use Flash Compensation (usually of +1 to +2 stops)
  • Think “where should the light be coming from” – 45 degrees above from the subject’s head
  • Then draw a virtual dotted line from the head in that direction
  • And where that hits the ceiling or wall is where you aim your flash.

It really can be that simple.

Why oh why!

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Why, some people ask, should I pay a photographer hundreds of dollars for some shots that Uncle Fred can do for free?

A fair question. It is clearly not that the photographer is getting rich. So what do you get for your money when you hire a photographer?

Here’s what.

  1. Knowledge. I have heard it say that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything, from brain surgery to plumbing. I can believe it – I spend every hour shooting or learning about it even today. A working photographer has the hours of learning needed to ensure success.
  2. Practical experience. It is unlikely that, when you hire a pro for, say, an important event, it is the first time he or she has shot that type of event.
  3. Artistic insight. Unlike Uncle Fred, the pro knows how to compose your photos. He or she will not put every subject in the centre: instead, you will get artistic photos.
  4. Equipment. A pro has the right gear for the job. My $15,000 worth of cameras, $10,000 worth of lenses and $10,000 of other equipment means something. It means that your shots will be tack sharp. It means that if we need a wide angle lens, we have it. It means backgrounds can be blurred out by large apertures. It means that if the shot involves low light, we will get it without motion blur. It means the cameras will work in the rain. It means that each shot can be written to two memory cards at once, so that if one breaks, the shot is safe. It means the colours will be right.
  5. Post-production work. The pro knows how to finish the shots in post-production. Cropping, exposure adjustments, skin blemish fixups: often, a one-hour shoot means two hours of finishing, exporting, and uploading. Do not underestimate that: half the work is in the post.
  6. Reliability. You can be assured that the pro will show up as promised, when promised…

And that is why a pro deliver substantially better photography service – and better photographs – than dear old Uncle Fred can. You are not buying prints: you are buying expertise – and in the end, results.

And that is what matters. Your event, your child, your product: a good photo makes it last forever,which presumably is worth the minor expense of doing it right.

KISS – Keep It Simple, S.

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This picture shows that you do not need a studio with much equipment, necessarily.

I used a Canon 1D Mark IV camera with a 580 EX II speedlite.

And that’s it. Really.

I had the camera on 400 ISO, manual, 1/60th second, f/4. TTL did the rest with the flash.

The flash which was of course pointed behind me, giving “light from 45 degrees above”. Leading to pictures like the one above, and this:

Which when you zoom in enough shows you The Man In The Pupil:

..which of course is me.

Can you see how my flash aimed backward makes a pattern on the ceiling that looks like an umbrella? That’s the  entire point!

Sometimes very simple equipment is al you need for professional work.

Me in 1982

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In Nineveh…

At the spiral minaret in Samara…

And after a ministry in Baghdad was bombed:

That picture, taken from my room at the al-Mansour Melia hotel, got me interrogated by security… but they were kind enough afterward to actually give me back my developed slide film. I must be the only person to have had their film developed by Saddam’s security men.