Practicing with statues

Nikon D3000, 30mm (18-55), 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 3200, filtered

I encourage my students to take plenty of pictures of statues. I consider these photos “sketches,” practicing for real photography. The problem with shooting statues is that the sculptor already did most of the work for you. Statues hold perfectly still, giving you all the time you need to line your shot up perfectly. In short, they aren’t much of a challenge.

However, they patiently wait while you practice focusing, composing shots, fiddling with zoom and so on. So use them when you get the chance, and remember the lessons you learn while shooting “real” pictures.

The example above suffers from several technical defects. The worst is the ISO problem. The light at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art is designed to avoid damage to the art from over-exposure to harsh light. For viewing, the light is fine. For photography, it’s far too dark. And of course flashes aren’t permitted (again, that harsh light problem). Cranking up the camera’s light sensitivity allows me to get the shot, but the resulting grainy texture does the smooth marble a disservice. Even filtered in Photoshop to remove some of the grain, it’s still obviously there.

Quick note: if you’re going to use statues to practice shot composition and the like, you can find a lot of them in outdoor locations where you don’t have to worry so much about the light.

Defects aside, this shot allowed me to practice composing a shot with three or more people in it, shooting at an angle that allows me to get everyone in. I put this technique to work in an actual photo a few months later at Topeka’s Day of the Dead celebration.

Nikon D7000, 55 mm (18-55), 1/250, f/8, ISO 100

Note that the composition doesn’t exactly mirror what I did with the statues. I might have cropped this down to increase emphasis on the foreground figure (as I did with the statue shot), but then I would have lost the slightly blurry background thus costing myself the nice, three-dimensional look.

Day of the Dead

Nikon D7000, 55mm (18-55), 1/30, f/13, ISO 100

These dancers at the Topeka Day of the Dead celebration moved a lot. Thus getting the right shot required either frozen motion or – as in this shot – motion blur. A good motion blur shot requires a slow shutter, a steady hand and just the right mix of motion and stillness. Of all the shots I took that afternoon at slower speeds, this one came closest to the perfect combination of elements.

Notice that the background and the figure lying in the street are all still. A blurry background screams “I can’t hold my camera still,” but here I don’t have that problem. The dancers are blurred in ways that communicate their motion. The guy in blue is obviously either standing up or squatting down. The woman to the right is frozen except for her rapidly-moving arm.

But the best motion is on the skull-faced woman in the center of the shot. Her head is in circular motion, freezing her face (thus giving good facial detail) and getting a strong sense of rotating motion from her feathers.

The K

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100, adjusted.

In honor of the waning days of the baseball season, here’s a shot I took in May of Kauffman Stadium. The panoramic view comes courtesy of the 10.5mm lens.

The shot was slightly tilted, which looks really bad in a symmetrical, wide-angle shot with a clearly visible horizon. Fortunately it was an easy fix in Photoshop.

So farewell to baseball for another year. Next year we’re going to fewer games, but I’ll still try to get some more shots.

Car fire

Nikon D7000, 18-55mm (55mm), 1/250, f/8, ISO 200, cropped and adjusted

Having a bad day? At least this isn’t happening to your car.

I associate square aspect ratios with Polaroids, but here it makes for an interesting composition. Cropping down from 4:3 focuses attention on the important part of the scene, capturing an image that matches my perception.

Friday night football

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (150mm), f/5, 1/100, ISO 3200, cropped and filtered

This is the first time I’ve ever shot a football game. It’s also the first time I’ve used my Sigma 150-500mm lens for action shots. So it was a good learning experience for me.

The photos in this blog entry are a sequence of shots of the same play. The first one (above) has been filtered to compensate for the 3200 ISO setting. I needed the camera to be highly sensitive to light so I could afford to speed the shutter up, but the higher ISO produces a grainy look. None of the rest of the shots in this set have been filtered, so you can see the grain in them.

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (150mm), f/5, 1/100, ISO 3200, cropped

This shot demonstrates a couple of ways to capture motion in a still shot. The players’ postures clearly indicate that they’re moving. The dust they’re kicking up also helps the effect.

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (150mm), f/5, 1/100, ISO 3200, cropped

One of the disadvantages to football is that the helmets tend to obscure facial expression. But every once in awhile a little emotion peeks through. I’m particularly fond of the “I’ve got you now” look in the eyes of the guy on the right.

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (150mm), f/5, 1/100, ISO 3200, cropped

Of the shots of this set, this last one is my favorite. Despite the grain and the slight excess of blur, the action is hard to beat.

Playing with fire

Nikon D7000, 18-55mm lens at 30mm, shutter 250, f/8, ISO 100, cropped

Awhile back I was at a Chamber of Commerce presentation (don’t ask) waiting for a speech to begin when I happened to overhear a conversation between two photographers. One was boasting about how he knew photographers who shot hundreds of pictures and only got a handful of good ones, while he carefully picked his shots and got great pictures more than half the time.

In general I could take the boasting, at least in part because later I noticed that he had his flash at a 45-degree angle on a 20 foot high, irregular ceiling. In a future entry I’ll explain why that doesn’t work. The part of the boast that bugged me was the notion that great photographers get great photos every time they hit their shutter buttons.

Not so. For starters, even an experienced photographer can mess things up (see last week’s entry for proof). But more than that, one of the great beauties of digital photography is that it frees us from the obligation to be stingy with our shots.

A recent “photo safari” to the Renaissance Festival is a case in point. In all I shot more than 1600 pictures, including more than 340 of the troupe in this photo. Back in the film days, that would have been between 45 and 67 rolls of film, including the expense of buying it and the hassle of developing it. Just carrying that much stuff around the RenFest would have been a prohibitive proposition.

If I’d been forced to carefully pick and choose every shot I took, I could still have expected to get a few good pictures. But my chances of catching the exact moment when a fire trick looked like mushroom clouds? Odds would have been against it.

That’s why I encourage my students to shoot everything that moves and most of what doesn’t. This introduces the spontaneous into your work. You get the chance to catch anything you can see, all the moments that will escape if you feel obliged to dither about whether or not the shot is worth shooting.

Oops! Overexposure

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (500mm), shutter 60, f/11, ISO 800

Normally I like to lead off with a good shot. But today’s entry is about making a mistake, so what you see above is not exactly the best shot I ever took.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on 18th Street has some interesting gargoyles, and it’s just a block or two from my house. So one lazy summer day I dragged my 500mm over to shoot some pictures. Along the way I noticed a rabbit and took a shot or two of her.

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (500mm), shutter 125, f/11, ISO 800, cropped

When I got to the church I clicked merrily away. Satisfied that I’d gotten several good shots, I headed home to upload my photos.

Sadly, I’d forgotten two things. The first was that I’d put the camera on manual control so I could get a proper exposure on the rabbit munching grass in the shade. But you can see in the background of the bunny shot how overexposed subjects in bright sunlight would be. So I should have remembered to reset the camera to automatic exposure adjustment or at least corrected the manual settings for the brightly-lit gargoyles.

The second mistake actually would have fixed the first: I should have remembered to check my photos to make sure they were coming out okay. Back in the film days you never knew exactly what you were getting until you got it developed and printed. In the digital age you can get an instant preview of your pictures. If I’d simply stopped to glance at the preview I would have instantly detected the problem.

Lucky for me the location was just a short walk from my front door. If I’d come back from Chicago or the Black Hills with this mess, I would have been upset indeed. But the gargoyles were still there when I returned to reshoot, and on the second try I ended up with the result I was after.

Nikon D3000, Sigma 150-500mm (500mm), shutter 800, f/6.3, ISO 200