Tag Archives: composition

Normal views and wide views

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Many photographers lust after new cameras and lenses. Indeed, many spend more time lusting after new equipment than they do consummating - err… working on the relationship they have with the cameras and lenses they already own.

For my large format camera I have one lens. It is a 180mm lens, and that roughly corresponds to a ‘normal lens’, i.e. one that has about the same perspective as the human eye, or, in 35mm terms, it is about the same as a 50mm lens. It’s a very fine lens, but there are times when I want a lens with a wider view (say, 90mm), and another with a telephoto view, such as a 300mm. It is simply(!) finances that preclude me from buying these lenses, I lust after them all the same…

So what to do when trying to make an image that would benefit from a wider view? In July I made a series of photographs on a very foggy morning at Glen More on the Isle of Mull. I was trying to photograph the glen near the edge of a lochan in the valley, whilst showing something of the scale of the valley - but the 180mm lens only covered about half of the valley. So one of my studies involved a triple exposure, moving the camera round a little at a time to include one side of the valley, the bottom of the valley, and the other side. The ground glass of the large format camera includes grids and markers for various purposes, so it was relatively easy to measure this out. I think the resulting image manages to communicate something of my view of the scene that morning:

Glen More, Isle of Mull (Ilford FP4+, triple exposure)

Glen More, Isle of Mull (Ilford FP4+, triple exposure)

The use of a 90mm lens would have enabled me to capture the entire breadth of the glen, but the image would have been different: is it important that the image doesn’t ‘look like’ the glen did? For me this communicates what I saw, even though the hills are not really this precise shape. I would still like to have a wider lens, but my lusting after such a lens has lessened somewhat since seeing the interesting and rather pleasing result that can be achieved with just the 180mm lens that I already have - in this context it was perfectly possible to communicate the image in my head using the equipment I already had.

 

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Intentional Film Movement

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No, the Intentional Film Movement is not a radical revolutionary brigade, forcing all digital camera users to move to film…! It’s just my play on words in relation to the current trend for ‘intentional camera movement’ (I think ICM - a bit like HDR - is interesting the first few times you see it and then it just gets tedious, mostly because it’s rarely done well, and is often done just for the sake of being able to do it, with little underlying narrative).

Anyway, rant over. Holidays at home are wonderful: I have been tidying up this week, and came across 19 rolls of film (14 rolls of 35mm and 5 rolls of 120) that I had had developed but then never really looked at. I knew there were some portraits in amongst them that I was somewhat concerned at having lost, but also some experimental images.

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical 'accident'

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical ‘accident’

My old Rolleiflex, with six decades behind it, works really well. Except for those times it doesn’t. In particular, the film transport mechanism can be a bit dodgy: the film doesn’t always quite engage the way it should, and then the winding mechanism fails: it becomes possible to wind through the whole film without making a single image, as it doesn’t ‘lock’ for each exposure, even though the shutter can be cocked. That has resulted in some rather strange double (triple?!) exposures, in part covering the bottom or top of an image, but I found that when the film fails to engage properly (and in the meantime I can tell when this happens with the first winding of the film to get to the first frame), it also becomes possible to wind the film on whilst having the shutter open. Some of the ‘problem’ images I was getting were like this one here (oops - some of my wife’s family at a celebration last year!).

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

However, this also offers some interesting opportunities. Rather than being annoyed about the film mechanism, I began to experiment, whilst also still making ‘proper’ images in between the experiments (after all, this can easily be done, if you guess how far to wind the film on - does cock the shutter, it just doesn’t move the film on evenly). I tend to used Ilford FP4+ in this camera, which has such a wide latitude that exposure doesn’t really matter - and that makes it ideal for things such as this. I began to try doing two or three things simultaneously to create new images:

  1. using a small aperture, open the shutter
  2. turn the film crank whilst the shutter is open
  3. at the same time, also move the camera.

I was using a tripod (I find that easiest with the Rolleiflex - I struggle to keep the image even vaguely straight without a tripod, and so if it’s important to keep straight, then I need a tripod!), but even doing the first two of these three actions requires a degree of coordination that I struggle with - and moving the camera at the same time becomes much harder! However, the images do then become more interesting.

I tried several experiments with these techniques, using several films, all of them in this pile of unexamined films that I found this week.

Only having seen the negatives, I have been aware of the effect I was generating, and did see how moving the camera also played a role (I didn’t do so for the first roll, and, of course, just ended up with a blur). So here are some of the attempts that have resulted in more interesting shapes.

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

This one, which has a floaty lightness to it, is perhaps my favourite of this group of photographs - it involved a longer exposure, a smaller aperture, and slow consistent movement of the film (I think the darker line is when I stopped winding consistently). I was actually seeking to make a portrait of a friend, but I’ll not give her name here - suffice it to say that the subsequent images of her worked really rather well, even if this one doesn’t actually look anything like her!

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

I think this last image is interesting for a different reason. I intended to create a ‘cloud’, but this worked exceptionally well: what I am including here is not just the image on the film, but the jagged edge where it has been cut, and the straight line from the scanner’s film-tray. It may be quite hard to see on smaller devices (and perhaps I should have processed this a little more to bring out this contrast - all of these are simply straight from the scanner with no adjustments of any kind), but on a larger screen, I can quite clearly see a night landscape here. The jagged edge is a curved hill, and the lighter areas further up the image are (strange-looking) clouds. Of course, it is not just landscapes that can represent more abstract concepts - abstract concepts can also represent landscapes!

There is a pleasant mix here of images. Creating them involves an element of randomness, but I have tried to create certain kinds of shapes and patterns too, even if I don’t see if they’ve worked until the film has been developed.

Do I think this is going to be something I do more of? Probably not, unless there is a motif that I think might be made more interesting with this technique - AND I happen to have the Rolleiflex with me AND the film hasn’t loaded properly! The one thing I can’t predict is when the Rollleiflex will work properly and when it won’t, so there is a further element of randomness in these kinds of images - most of the time I don’t know when I might (have the opportunity to) create more!

Something a little different

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On a recent outing to Helmsdale, I made this:

River Helmsdale: road and river

River Helmsdale: road and river

Made with a Lensbaby selective focus lens, it is one of the few times I’ve really managed to use the lens in a way that resulted in a meaningful image, rather than just something that used the Lensbaby for the sake of using it. Photographing flowers with it is just incredibly boring; I do have some interesting portrait ideas I want to use it for, but haven’t quite organised the model for this yet.

I stood on the opposite bank looking across the river for some time. I felt the road bridge in the top right appeared to be more of a gaping mouth into complete darkness, and the stream that came down into the main river was somehow escaping from it. I played about with a 50mm f1.4 lens, but when I looked through the viewfinder, I didn’t feel it really communicated sufficient menace (or rather, I couldn’t visualise what post-processing I would need to do to enable that to happen). The Lensbaby - that I almost didn’t bother taking with me on that day - was just right. All I’ve done to the image in post-processing is cropped it to 5×7, adjusted the levels/curves a bit, and added a vignette.

There is not much here that could be regarded as representative photography, which is just what I wanted.

Why workshop?

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A while ago I mentioned on Twitter that I had booked myself a place on a photography workshop. Someone commented on this in what felt like a throw-away remark, saying they had never seen the point of going on workshops. So I - in 140 characters! - sought to explain why this was important to me. Now that I’m just back from the workshop I booked on at the time, I thought I’d try and say more about it, and include some images from the time away (these are just the digital ones - I have yet to take the film rolls to be developed).

Achnahaird Bay

Achnahaird Bay

Firstly, it’s worth noting that I have no formal artistic training (unlike my correspondent, who has, I think, a degree in art/photography), and so for me, I hope that a workshop can serve partly to teach me something. Secondly, having a pretty intense full-time job means that if I get the time to go and photograph for a few days and do nothing but think about photography, that is really fantastic! The week was a proper holiday, and I didn’t read a single academic text whilst away (even though I did have a book with me… I rarely travel without one!).

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, engaging with a photographer leading a workshop is about having someone critique what I do and help me move forward in my thinking and my photography.

Loch Bad a' Ghaill

Loch Bad a' Ghaill

My week away was with Bruce Percy, who has been running workshops for several years now. Exactly two years before going on this Assynt workshop, I went (with my neighbour, Mabel Forsyth) to Torridon on one of his weekend workshops. That was a great experience, as I wrote about here at the time. So I was confident the week in Assynt would be a good week.

There are some people who seem to be workshop-regulars, going from one to the next all the time. I am not like that: I have attended a couple of other day-workshops in recent years, but have not been on residential workshops other than the one in Torridon and this one in Assynt. So if you’re wanting me to offer comparisons, I can’t do so (though I have now heard quite a few horror stories of other workshops, some by really famous photographers… and no, I won’t say more on this). My main purpose in going to Assynt with Bruce was that I wanted to rediscover something about my own reasoning and motivation for making photographs - especially landscapes - that I had found increasingly difficult to identify in recent times. I felt I knew enough theory in terms of operating my cameras (though of course, Bruce was able to help me improve in certain areas, such as my exposures and hyperfocal focusing). But I felt I needed input on more important things, especially aspects of composition and how and why I frame the way I do or give more attention to certain things in a scene, and what all that says about my own ‘visioning process’ (sorry, I think that is a rather horrible phrase, but I can’t think of a more suitable one; pre-visualisation covers some of it, but is not the same thing).

Glencanisp Lodge, with view to Suilven

Glencanisp Lodge, with view to Suilven

Of course, this is not something that I discussed in any detail with Bruce before or during the workshop, because I knew from previous experience that this might come anyway - and it did. One of the two key things for me in thinking about a workshop is that I have to like the photographs that the workshop leader makes, and I really love Bruce’s work - it offers depth and challenge, simplicity and elegance, in both his landscapes and portraits. Of course, I have no desire to create images that are like Bruce’s, even if I could do so, since they represent his vision and not mine; however, I feel I can relate to his vision. I have come to realise that the other key thing for me is that I have to feel I can connect to the leader, and that he or she can connect to me. Of course, I’m privileged in that I was able to go on the Torridon workshop with Bruce and I therefore knew him a little already; and we’ve also become friends over the last couple of years - that is not something that is necessarily open to people who don’t live in the next neighbourhood to a workshop leader! But it is possible to at least gain some impression of the person from their images and their writings (such as their blog) and this offers good clues. And, of course, you can trust my recommendation that Bruce is a great workshop leader!

So, is it possible to sum up what it was that I gained from Bruce’s input? There are a number of things that come to mind, but the main one for me can be outlined in the following terms. At the beginning of the week, he noted that he sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what I was seeing and why I had gone for a certain composition (I did say this was perhaps because the images were no good, but Bruce disagreed!). A day or two later he began to suggest that my visualising of scenes was perhaps too selective - I tended to visualise one or two really significant elements in a potential image, but I did not always frame these in a way that meant they were as apparent as I wanted them to be, whether this be unusual shapes, repeated lines, patterns on hills, the interplay between different elements in a scene, and so on. This is not simply about excluding extraneous elements - even if I intended to crop the image from whatever I saw in the viewfinder - although this is also a factor (see the tree image I discussed here recently and the grass in the bottom right of the image: 1, 2). Rather, for me, it is about expanding the view of the scene as a whole, about being able to encompass the elements that form the shapes, colours and tones in a way that enables a more holistic image to emerge. That is what I want to achieve, and I know that I do that, but not always as consistently as I would like.

At Achnahaird Bay, looking south

At Achnahaird Bay, looking south

Of course, this is just me. Other participants will hopefully have found something in Bruce’s critiques (there were 2-3 hours of image critiques on every day but one; other participants also commented on images) that helped them with whatever they thought they needed - or perhaps that they didn’t know they needed.

A month or two ago I removed all the landscape galleries from this site. There really was a lot of rubbish there, in amidst some images that I liked. Before going to Assynt I had begun the process of recreating the galleries and they are gradually going to reappear, but this time with far fewer, more carefully selected images. In general, I make photographs for myself and not for others: being clearer about what I’m doing is therefore essential, and I feel the week away with Bruce has enabled me to see much more clearly exactly what kind of images I want to create, and given me more tools to enable me to go about doing that. Those are the images I want to show here.

In essence, I feel I am approaching my photography with new confidence, a clearer sense of why I’m doing it, and how to go about achieving what I want. So in answer to my correspondent: that’s why I wanted to go on this workshop!

On laziness, composition and zoom lenses

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One of my main gripes about Nikon’s so-called ‘super zoom’ for DX cameras, the 18-200mm lens, used to be the distortion that made curves out of straight lines (mine is the older version, but the new version still has the same levels of distortion, as I understand it). And then came the fantastic new version of Adobe Lightroom and it was possible to fix all that at the click of a button. Then Nikon introduced a firmware update to the D90 and other cameras that took care of all this in camera - so you might see a sagging horizon in the viewfinder, but the camera now works out compensatory adjustments to remove this distortion, and you would see straight horizons directly on the camera’s screen (by the way, that link is to the Mac version, but if you haven’t yet upgraded to a Mac, there is a Windoze link somewhere too). Both fixes work for dozens of lenses.

So: on a recent excursion through a woodland outside Edinburgh, I thought I’d just take this zoom and leave the primes at home: exactly the opposite of what I’d been doing for quite a while now (I was only really using the zoom for portraits).

But I’d forgotten how lazy a zoom like this makes me! Here are two tree images from that walk.

Trees

Trees

The first is not particularly great, but it sort of works. The four dark trees are offset by the dried out white wood at the bottom of the image, and there is a kind of lead-in through the trees framed on either side by the differently toned greens of the trees on both left and right from just above the white wood. Shot at 95mm (i.e. about 142mm in 35mm format), it still has just about enough depth to make it look like an interesting woodland. I’m not going to be framing this and putting it on my wall, but it is vaguely passable.

More trees

More trees

But this image really doesn’t work. I was initially attracted by the white cross/plus at the top of the image - an interesting feature that I wanted to set in the wider context of the trees around it. It was only visible from a particular angle, which I happen to have found. But this image is a victim of my laziness brought on my using the zoom: shot at the full length of 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms!), it is completely flat and totally boring, as all the detail of the surrounding trees just blends into one amorphous mess. I should have walked towards it, used a much shorter focal length (that cross would still have been visible) and shot it then - but somehow, when composing, I completely ignored/forgot that wide-angle lenses increase the illusion of depth, whilst telephoto lenses diminish it.

At least this little exercise ensures I’ll take my prime lenses with me next time and just work a bit harder at the composition, including using the zoom facility known as ‘walking’ - and then this kind of silliness is less likely to occur… I hope!

Thinking about colour and monochrome images

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There are some images that I just know need to be monochrome, even before I squeeze the shutter - I think that is perhaps the case for many photographers. And if I have my film camera with me and it has black and white film in it, then I try to compose and visualise accordingly. But sometimes I create a colour image and then come to the editing stage and find I have an image which could be either, and it’s not clear to me which one is ‘better’. This is especially the case when I have a series of images, and I wonder if a monochrome development of one or two individual images might be good.

For example, this image of Ngoni is a case in point. I have a number of these images of her on the bridge in the snow (in her bikini, in a dress, and in a coat), and this one seemed quite strong when converted to monochrome, emphasising her dark naked skin against the white snow and white bikini, with the bridge playing a less significant role than it appears to in the colour version (of course, that’s also an editing question). I did eventually put the monochrome image on RedBubble for sale - and you can see a larger version of the image there - but I’m not wholly convinced this is the right one to have used. The tones (values) of light and darkness are what make or break a monochrome image… and I find I’m not completely sure if this is quite right when examined under these criteria (and you may think this is because it’s not a particularly strong image, despite what I think!). Of course, in the ‘old days’ a camera would have had either colour or black and white film in it, and composition and visualisation would have been guided accordingly, but in these digital days (even with scans of colour images from film), conversion to monochrome is always an easy possibility - and perhaps this makes life a little bit harder. Thoughts on all this in the comments section below are most welcome!

And, of course, these questions apply not only to portraits… they also arise when thinking about landscapes.

I’ve struggled with this before…!

Dornoch images

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Embo - beach

Tim Parkin from Great British Landscapes has been in touch and interviewed me for the magazine; this will be appearing shortly. In talking with him I realised that I had completely forgotten to upload images from the week in Dornoch last summer, when I spent much of the time photographing using just my prime lenses (in Nikon DX format, the 35mm f1.8 and 50mm f1.4). A fault with my film camera meant I couldn’t take that with me, so all the images that week were created digitally, on the Nikon D90.

As I note in the text on the gallery page, this marked an interesting point in my compositions. Click on the image here to see the gallery, or look down the list to the side.

Alternative aspect ratios

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Bruce Percy, one of my favourite photographers, posted another interesting entry on his blog a few days ago. As you may know if you’ve read other entries on my blog, he is not only a gifted photographer, but also offers brilliant photography workshops. This particular blog posting was (provocatively) called “Abolish 3:2 (35mm)” and discussed aspect ratios: the size/shape of the viewfinders and resultant images in cameras. From the early days of 35mm film cameras to today’s DSLR cameras (as well as most compacts etc.), the format has stayed the same: all images are a multiple of 3 x 2. This makes for relatively long images, horizontally or vertically, but it’s not a very “natural” format, particularly for landscape imagery. After all, we don’t see the world in this way: our (peripheral) vision is much broader than this, and we see more in all directions. I have to say that I think the 3:2 format can work well for portraits because it can be used for the length of the human body. But for landscapes, a “squarer” format often tends to work better, either a real square (i.e. with sides of exactly the same length) or nearly square (such as 4×5 or 6×7 or similar). One of things Bruce tries to encourage is visualisation: “seeing” the image as you want it to be, even before you squeeze the shutter. He’s written quite a bit about this in his ebooks too (especially in “The Visual Sense“). His blog posting was picked up by others (for example, The Photographer’s Ephemeris and then Tim Parkin, and a lively discussion took place about all this (on Twitter).

However, it is not always easy to visualise in a different aspect ratio to the one the camera offers. Tim Parkin pointed to a product that did this for his DSLR (though Tim is mostly a large format, not a DSLR photographer). That seemed like a good idea, but even if it were available for my camera, it seemed like an unnecessary expense to a poor person like me, so here is my version of the same thing for my Nikon D90, manufactured at great expense (er… yes… that is a wonky piece of card I’ve cut to size and jammed in behind the plastic cover of my screen…):

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

It does present problems when I want to see all the settings, as some of the key menu options are hidden under the bottom piece of card:

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

Nonetheless, once I remembered to use the “liveview” function on the camera rather than composing through the viewfinder, it did change how I went about composing: rather than guessing at what a 4×5 ratio image would look like, I could really see it on the screen. It is stating the obvious to note that it does make quite a difference to see the image in the proportions I am ultimately aiming for - even if I intend to crop the image later.

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

Of course, what I want next is a quick and easy way to convert this template to a square format.

And for my film camera… er… I can see the argument for a new investment coming…

Composition and tripods

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I went out photographing in Aberlady (East Lothian) with my friend Toni this weekend; she has recently started taking her photography much more seriously, but it was her first time using her new tripod (her husband had been complaining at her buying it several months ago and not using it… what we photographers have to put up with!).

Aberlady, East Lothian

Aberlady, East Lothian

It was all very interesting for me: whilst I think she has a very good understanding of composition, much of her photography happens when out and about with her two small children and so she doesn’t get much time to think and reflect about composing her images - this often just happens very quickly in order to keep up with her family, making sure the children don’t run off somewhere etc. So being out in the evening on her own (well, with another adult who was also photographing) - with her new tripod - was quite unusual for her, and she found it hard not to constantly just pick up the camera/tripod and reframe from a position the tripod could never reach! It made questions of composition very interesting for me, and she clearly has other ‘tripod issues’ to mine!

You can visit Toni’s Flickr pages here: The Thinner The Air.

Fashion show photography

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A purple shirt and a turquoise dress

A purple shirt and a turquoise dress

Last week I had great fun photographing the Africa-in-Motion closing party and fashion shows, along with my friend Mabel Forsyth. Mabel kindly sent me one of her photographs, capturing a beautiful model in an amazing turquoise dress, with a little purple-shirted gnome in the background… honestly, does that purple really go with that turquoise?!

Photographing an event like a fashion show is new to me - this is about portraiture on a super-high caffeine overdose! Portraits are fine, and I generally love engaging with people to create interesting photographs, but at the fashion shows decisions about composition needed to be taken at lightning speed - I was able to set myself up in a corner (as you can see in Mabel’s photo), which played a key role in the kinds of shots I could get, but there were still decisions needing to be taken all the time. Professional fashion show photographers are said to attempt to capture each model’s face, head and shoulders, and full body - all well-composed and properly lit, of course.

Well that’s a great aspiration… but I only managed this for one or two of the models, and even then the shots were not of a uniform quality! Of course, a professional zoom lens keeping a constant f2.8 aperture might have helped a bit (my non-professional zoom goes from from f3.5 to f5.6 depending on focal length), but this is not really about equipment. It’s a question of skill and incredibly fast reactions that come with a lot of practice - and I have no problem admitting that I’m not able to keep up with that! I don’t see myself having too many opportunities to reach that stage, and I probably wouldn’t want to anyway, given my limited interest in fashion. But I had great fun, produced some usable images, and have even more respect for the hard work done by professional photographers at fashion shows. And that has to be worth something, right? ;)

The wonder of film

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This evening I needed to be in nearby Musselburgh, where I would be waiting for half-an-hour at the harbour. Musselburgh has a lovely small harbour, and at the moment all the sailing boats are ‘parked’ in the car park round the harbour (in spaces that are marked ‘dinghy parking’!).

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

On the way out of the house, I took my camera, tripod, spirit level, filters, a 28mm and a 50mm lens - and looked forward to capturing some of these boats and the harbour scenes. I took my favourite film camera, the old Nikon FM2, with one of the last three rolls of Fuji Sensia that I have: this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, since I used to use Sensia a lot before switching to Fuji Velvia for colour landscapes; Fuji have recently announced they are stopping the production of Sensia so I have just bought three rolls of it to play with for the last time. It was fairly dark when I arrived in the harbour, and as I took my bag out of the car and began to set up, I realised that I had left my light meter at home - since the FM2′s slowest shutter speed before getting to the bulb setting is 1 second, the camera’s meter would be useless and I would have had to more or less guess all my exposures… so, sadly, I packed everything away again and went to buy a newspaper instead. Next week, when I expect to be there again, I’ll remember the meter!

I’ve read two nice postings on other people’s websites recently about using film. The first one was from the great Bruce Percy, who discussed how much he enjoyed using a particular kind of Kodak Portra film for a recent trip he made to Ethiopia and then, referring to Canon’s 5D digital camera, noted:

I get a lot of correspondence from people wanting to know how to get the same look with their 5D. You can’t.

If you want the look of film, then shoot film.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The other piece I’ve come across is more of a short essay by the wonderful Max Marinucci (though the second part describes how he develops film, so you may want to skim read that bit if you just want to pick up on his philosophy about film):

…patience and parsimony are virtues to be cultivated and nourished. When shooting film, you immediately accept the fact that it may be a little while before you see the fruits of your work and, by living with this, you will become a more disciplined shooter, which will in turn carry on to your digital side as well. It also means that shooting everything in sight without any thought into basics like light and composition is out of the question since you only have 24-36 shots in a roll of 35mm and it makes no sense in spending time/money developing simple, careless snapshots. This is a valuable exercise in restraint and it brings us to actually THINK before we shoot. Would you have taken a picture of your toes with film just because you can? I sincerely doubt it.

Although I use my Nikon D90 digital camera a lot, there is something wonderful about film that cannot be beaten by the more ‘clinical’ nature of digital… and it has to do with all these key components of photography that often go missing in the techno-madness that camera manufacturers obscure from us as they add ever more silly functions to their cameras: patience, composition, light, perspective… I’m not a dogmatic film shooter: of course digital cameras have their place (I couldn’t be involved in the same way in the African film festival if I wasn’t using digital, and I do like my D90). I think it is just a question of being reminded of that at times, of using film and digital in different circumstances as appropriate, and above all, appreciating film for all the wonder it can bring to the craft of photography.

Event photography: Africa in Edinburgh!

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Directors with Jean-Marie Teno

Directors with Jean-Marie Teno

Photographing at my first wedding in May, I found it a very pressured experience, but this last week I’ve been engaging in a different kind of event photography. Together with my friend Mabel Forsyth I’ve been photographing for the Africa-in-Motion film festival, one of the largest African film festivals outside Africa. This involves us photographing at selected events (the organisers have not booked us for every one of the myriad events that make up the festival) and ensuring images taken in the evening are available for press use by the next morning. There is a pressure in doing that, because there are usually a substantial number of images that need to have quick edits performed on them and made ready within hours of the event happening - no 15 months for edits allowed here!!

I have found all this (a kind of photojournalism, I suppose) to have a certain appeal: composition and ‘getting it right first time’ are important here, as is the need to quickly assess an image as 1) good, 2) good enough provided it’s edited a bit, or 3) not good enough/rubbish (hopefully not too many in the third category!), and then thinking about which edits are needed to improve each image. Having edited more than several hundred images in a couple of nights, I realise that the only edits that I have really been performing are related to cropping, occasional red-eye removal, adjusting/lifting exposure, and noise reduction. For sorting, editing and exporting large numbers of images very quickly, Adobe’s Lightroom 3 has been simply invaluable: I haven’t needed to open Photoshop once (Photoshop will be used for editing a selection of images for high quality print usage after the Festival, of course).

The reception

The reception

One of the interesting things about my crops that I have noticed is that most of them have automatically become 4×5 crops. Without consciously realising it, I have made this my default crop size for portraits; I was aware I was doing this (or going with completely square images) for landscapes, but I’ve been shooting just (environmental) portraits these last few days. The standard 6×4 size that SLRs produce (for historical reasons, it’s the size that 35mm film went with) is too long and thin for me and I generally prefer squarer shapes. That much I knew. But after editing over 200 images in one evening, I realised that most of them had ended up in 4×5 format too… an interesting little development on my part, I think.

The festival is still going strong at the time of writing, ending next week with a fashion show - I’m looking forward to that!

There is a gallery of images here from the festival that I’ll occasionally add to as time goes by (especially from the fashion show), but the festival Facebook page and (I think) the website are showing more images, including ones by Mabel - so check out the photographs and if you are nearby, go to some of the excellent events being organised in the festival!

Thoughts on ‘progress’ and loyalty and contemporary cameras

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One of the (to my mind) coherent arguments against digital cameras is that in the longer-term they cost more than film cameras. The idea behind this is that with a film camera, once you achieve a certain quality of body/lens, there is only limited additional quality that can be achieved by replacing the body. So whilst it might make sense to buy new lenses periodically (that is another argument entirely that I will perhaps return to another time), there is generally little point in replacing a body unless you’re a professional who needs a faster autofocus, motorwinder or whatever. But for most of us, we can buy a decent film camera body and be done with it, just spending our hard-earned money on occasional lenses. Then we can direct our attention towards actually taking photographs with all this expensive stuff we’ve bought.

With digital, it’s been a whole other issue, as bodies have improved remarkably over time. Ken Rockwell describes this rather memorably as ‘digital rot‘, and Bruce Percy and many others have also made similar points in the past: people who buy digital cameras will tend to want to buy new digital cameras when ‘the next model’ comes out. In the longer-term, therefore, digital shooting costs more than film shooting, even taking into account developing and printing costs, because you buy new bodies every few years. With digital cameras, the manufacturers keep telling us, there is a marked difference in newer models: better metering and white balancing to make sure the images are better exposed, Active-D Lighting to deal with light/dark differentials (which is what Nikon calls it, I’m sure Canon will offer an equivalent though I don’t know what it is called), more megapixels, greater dynamic range, and so on…

And yes, to be sure, there is a huge difference in Nikon’s early digital cameras and more modern ones (for example, the professional level D1H that was discontinued in 2006 had a 2.66 megapixel sensor, compared to the 12 in my D90). However, I am increasingly unconvinced that all this is changing as rapidly in contemporary times as it did in the past. I write this as the ‘replacement’ for the D90 is hitting the shops, Nikon’s D7000. Yes, it looks very good, and I’m sure many people will buy it, and some of those people will make absolutely stunning images with it. But is it really so-o-o-o much better than the D90 that I should feel the need to go out and buy one?

But… but… the pixel-counter-nutheads will say, how can you ask that? Surely it’s newer, it’s better, it has more megapixels (16, as opposed to the D90′s 12… as if that really mattered! - see below), it can shot 6fps instead of ‘just’ 4.5fps, it puts the milk on your cornflakes for you and makes your tea… ok, probably not those last two.

For all practical purposes, in the DX camera range (Nikon’s cropped sensor cameras), the D90 has , until now, probably been Nikon’s most user-friendly digital camera producing better images than anything else in this price range. It perhaps even surpasses the D300, as this is heavier (though made of metal and therefore sturdier), with less easily accessible options (though they do shoot a little faster and have one or two additional imaging features). Unless you’re a professional taking hundreds of images every day, this is no better than the D90, as to all intents and purposes they use the same sensor and processor.

Now the D7000 has come along. It is an improvement on the D90, but I don’t feel that it gives me that much more than the D90 has given me already. To be sure, if I was now looking to upgrade from the D40 as I did a year ago (Nikon only list the D40x on their website - the D40 was much the same with a 6mp sensor), I would seriously consider a D7000 as well as the D90, but having the D90 now doesn’t make me want to move to the D7000.

I think we need to get away from the mentality that just because the camera manufacturers tell us that something is new and better, we believe them! They cynically presume an inherent disloyalty to the products they themselves sell us: we are no longer supposed to feel so attached to our cameras, instead willing to give them up for something ‘better’ just because it fits their marketing cycles. What we really have are fantastic machines that 10 years ago would have been way beyond anyone’s imagination, and I for one, feel I barely scratch the surface of what my camera can do. I have taken about 10,000 shots with my D90, but know that I am continually learning how to use it better. The early great photographers always said, ‘know your camera so that it becomes second-nature to use it’. I’m quite happy to admit that only after the first 2-3,000 or so shots did I feel I was beginning to really understand what my camera was doing and what I could expect of it. Getting to that point opens me up to using it more creatively, to experimenting with some of the capabilities that lie hidden in the menus or the way it interacts with particular lenses - and only once I’ve got all that sorted out, can I engage with it much more intuitively and create images that centre on the key themes of lighting, composition, visualisation and so on. Buying a new camera gets in the way of that, at least for me - I found it initially quite difficult to move from the D40 to the D90, as certain things kept not happening that I was expecting to happen, and other things did happen that I hadn’t expected!

The only real upgrade at this time, I think, is in format. If I was going to change from the D90, the DX sensor D7000 is not where I’d go. If money was not an issue, I would be interested in the full-sized sensor D700 or D3x - but that would in turn necessitate other lenses…

So if you’re anything like me, don’t fall for the camera manufacturers’ hype. If you have a great camera that you like (and most cameras can be great cameras in the hands of those who know how to use them properly), then stick with it - show it loyalty, and it’ll reward you with images that emerge from your intuitive abilities and interests. And you’ll be doing the environment a favour too…!

—

PS The difference in the D7000′s 16 megapixels and the D90′s 12 is as follows:
D7000: 4,928 x 3,264 - D90: 4,288 x 2,848
This means 640 x 416 pixels more, crammed into the same sized sensor (which brings its own problems, as I understand it…) - if my maths is right, this is about a 13% increase in image size. In practical terms, unless printing huge advertising hoardings, this is totally irrelevant. In fact, even for advertising hoardings, it’s probably irrelevant since you’d never look at the image closely enough to see the individual dots that make up the image. If you want proof of this, the next time you see an advertisement for shampoo at a bus stop, go right up to the image and look very closely at the model’s face and hair to see all the little pixels that make up her ‘smooth’ skin and even ‘smoother’ hair - they are anything but smooth when viewed closeup! But we don’t normally do that, and that is what makes these small differences so unimportant in large prints. Get over the megapixel mania and think about how you produce sharper images using the light you have and the lenses you use - it’s about art, not pixel-counts!

Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ and a new lens

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Although I don’t remember exactly when it was (it may have been when I was in Cairo in 1997), I vividly recall the sensation I had the first time I read Edward Said’s book Orientalism. It was a mind-blowing experience - the ways in which he addressed constructions of Otherness, how it became possible to rethink what it meant to write about anyone, anywhere, and anything, what doing that meant… and all these things continue to fascinate and intrigue me, impacting on my writing and research, and on how I live. I tend to re-read most of Orientalism once a year, and find more in it each time I read it. Of course, many scholars, reputable and less-reputable, have engaged with his work in more or less helpful ways, but there is no doubt that Said transformed numerous disciplines through his work, including visual arts. Each year now at the university where I work, I teach a course in which I introduce undergraduate students in some detail to Said’s thesis. I love watching them wrestle with the topic, seeing how for most of them, it unsettles them, realigns their thinking, and makes them work through their world-view, thereby challenging numerous preconceptions about themselves and the world as they have hitherto known it. This is one of the things I have been doing at work this last week.

And the connection to lenses? Yesterday my new ultra-wide-angle lens for my Nikon D90 arrived: the 10-24mm. I’ve owned and used a variety of lenses over the years, including what are generally regarded as wide-angle lenses (28mm in traditional 35mm format, 18mm in Nikon’s cropped frame format). I’m very aware that photographing at 28/18mm can do strange things to perspective, and it is very noticeably different to shooting at a standard 50/35mm. For my FM2 camera, I’ve recently acquired a lovely 28mm to complement the existing 50mm lens - that’s wide, but not crazy. This new lens takes wideness to a whole new level - photographing at 10mm (15mm in 35mm format) does really wacky things to what you see, and from playing with it yesterday afternoon and today, I feel as if I need to relearn how to see things with the camera, at least if I want to use this lens to its full advantage.

Although wide-angle lenses are popularly seen as being able to ‘get more in’, that is actually rather boring. Here are two such boring shots taken from the same spot a few seconds apart, at 19 and 10mm (the latter with my shadow in it - oops!):

Lots of beach

Lots of beach (19mm)

A bit more beach

A bit more beach (10mm)

The wider angle doesn’t really do much for the image, does it? The advantages of such a lens, it seems to me, lie in the possibilities offered by exploiting the distortions it creates, rather than seeking to ignore them, as these two beach shots show. So here are a couple of snapshot images that show precisely that kind of distortion being used, again at 19 and 10mm, both taken from exactly the same spot, immediately after one another:

Portobello Public Art

Portobello Public Art (19mm)

Portobello Public Art

Portobello Public Art (10mm)

In other words, this lens, more than anything else, is about re-imagining the world, thinking about it in a different way. Of course, as soon as we look through a camera’s viewfinder we are looking at the world differently: the artificial nature of the perspective offered, the reduction to two dimensions rather than three and the corresponding ‘flattening’ of multiple layers of three dimensional vision - all are a function of new perspectives on the world. But I think I have become used to the changing perspectives offered by ‘normal’ zoom lenses as they move from pretty wide (e.g. 28/18mm) to fairly strong telephoto positions (e.g. 300/200mm) - I usually know what I am going to see at different focal lengths and can ‘see’ my image accordingly, often before I lift the camera to my eye. With this new lens, I’m reminded of the transformative shift in world-view I gained by engaging with Said for the first time: the radical shift in perspective of my own position coupled with the excitement offered by his views, made for a fantastic journey of (self-)discovery. With this new lens, I feel I am starting to do the same kind of thing: as when I first read Said, I can guess at the road ahead, but the radical shifts in perspective offered by the weirdness of the lens’ abilities require re-seeing the world, re-imagining my place in it, and making it something I feel at home in again. This involves practice, both in the sense of learning and getting better, but also in the sense of usage and engagement, and that is what I am looking forward to with this fantastic new lens.