I met with long­time friend Mitch Joel this week and gave him a few basic pho­tog­ra­phy tips. It was such a plea­sure to finally share some of my knowl­edge with him. He’s been shar­ing his knowl­edge about‚digital marketing‚and the World Wide Web with me for YEARS. Although I share my knowl­edge freely with many peo­ple, with Mitch it’s been all take. Feels good to give (just a wee bit in comparison)‚back. By the way Mitch Joel has an AMAZING pod­cast and blog on dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and I highly rec­om­mend it. He has a huge fan base and absolutely has the skinny on social media and dig­i­tal marketing.

Below are a few very basic pho­tog­ra­phy tips. Oth­ers may well be just start­ing off in pho­tog­ra­phy and these really brief and basic pho­tog­ra­phy tips‚might be‚helpful.

Expo­sure
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All cam­eras deter­mine expo­sure (the com­bi­na­tion of shut­ter speed and Aper­ture (size of the hole) ) by aver­ag­ing out the light in the scene. If it’s a scene with aver­age tones as most scenes are, the expo­sure should be cor­rect. If there is a pre­dom­i­nance of EITHER dark or light tones, the cam­era meter will prob­a­bly fail and the pho­tog­ra­pher must OVERRIDE the camera’s set­tings. The clas­sic exam­ple is the dude in front of the sun­set. The cam­era sees all that bright sky and cuts the expo­sure to aver­age out the scene and leaves the main sub­ject in near com­plete dark­ness. On the oppo­site end, a black‚car against a black wall — this will fool the cam­era as well, because the cam­era will try to aver­age out that scene and make the black‚car and black wall lighter. Rather than teach how to cor­rect for this (which is sim­ply to man­u­ally increase or decrease expo­sure) just be aware that scenes that have either too much dark or too much light in them are harder to deal with.

Com­po­si­tion
———–
Most peo­ple tak­ing a pic­ture of per­son will always place them in the dead cen­ter of the image. Take 1 shot, sure. Then place them off cen­ter and see how much more inter­est­ing the shot can become. This sce­nario works with every­thing. Art/photo his­to­ri­ans sug­gest that if you look at the scene through the viewfinder and divide it like a tic tac toe board, the most inter­est­ing place to place the main sub­ject is on the 4 CORNERS (top right, top left, cen­ter right, cen­ter left) of the cen­ter square BUT NOT IN THE CENTER OF THE CENTER SQUARE.

Red eye
——-
Red eye sucks and is some­times hard to get rid of with point and shoot cam­eras. WHENEVER pos­si­ble, mean­ing when there is a choice) don’t use flash. So if there is good ( good is dif­fused indi­rect and softer — bad is harsh direct shards of light) win­dow light, shut off the flash and use it.

Back­ground
———-
This one is sim­ple and makes a huge dif­fer­ence. Be aware of what is going on in the back­ground. Is it dirty, is there a coat-rack right behind the subject’s head? Move either your sub­ject, or you your­self move (when you can) to elim­i­nate dis­tract­ing backgrounds.

Hand hold­ing the cam­era
———————-
Most humans CAN NOT hand hold the cam­era at shut­ter speeds slower than 1/60th of a sec­ond (i.e. 1/30, 1/15 the of a sec­ond etc.) If you try to take a pic­ture and the result is blurry, it can eas­ily be a shut­ter speed issue.

Auto focus
———
Many point and shoot cam­eras have poor auto focus. The cam­era can’t know exactly what ele­ment in the scene you want to focus on. In this case, over­ride the cam­era and choose man­ual focus. If you are shoot­ing a por­trait, try to ALWAYS focus on the eyes.

Depth of field
————–
A huge topic but you should know some­thing about it. In a lens you can change the size of the hole or aper­ture to suit your needs. When the hole is large (mea­sured in F-stops F2.0, F 2.8, F4 etc) there is less sharp focus from fore­ground to back­ground. Great for por­traits where the main sub­ject stays sharp and the back­ground goes into soft focus.

When the hole is small (F16, F22, F32)‚ there is MORE sharp­ness from fore­ground to back­ground. Great for‚ land­scapes. The key is always to play. Take shots at dif­fer­ent set­tings and compare.

I’ve had a pho­tog­ra­phy project in mind now for many years. I want to pho­to­graph peo­ple that make a dif­fer­ence in this world through their acts of kind­ness. It could be in ANY field whatsoever.‚The project would be called some­thing like Heroes and Vol­un­teers. I already have a few peo­ple in mind but I’d like to get ideas from oth­ers. Who do you know that really makes a dif­fer­ence, that really helps out, that really deserves some recognition?

Although I’m located in Mon­treal, so that would be eas­i­est, I do get out of Mon­treal once in a while so please send their names (and how they help)‚my way anyhow.

You can com­ment below or send the infor­ma­tion to photography.ca(a t )gmail(d o t)com
Thanks in advance! — Marko

Paint­ing with light is a really cool tech­nique for pro­duc­ing fine art pho­tographs. I am work­ing on a few right now and will post my results as a blog post or a pod­cast and posts some­time this week. For those that don’t know‚ — In order to expose a pho­to­graph you need light. Usu­ally that light comes from the sun, flash etc. When you paint with light you pho­to­graph in TOTAL or almost total dark­ness, then with a flash­light (torch) flash, or other light source you light the object while your cam­era sits on a tri­pod and the shut­ter stays open (on bulb) for the whole exposure.

This was just the teaser. So far the results are super cool — and I will post them with a fuller expla­na­tion this week (hope­fully). Hang tight. 2007 will be a year of experimentation.

I’ve recently come into con­tact with a few AMAZING fine art pho­tog­ra­phers. They have great sto­ries and great pho­tographs. A cou­ple of them have even agreed to do inter­views with me for future pod­casts and you’ll be see­ing their work and lis­ten­ing to them shortly. Stay tuned!

This is a good exam­ple of the expo­sure we talked about in pod­cast #6. In the first image, I took a shot of the scene using only the camera’s meter and no adjust­ments. As we dis­cussed in the pod­cast the job of all cam­era meters is to aver­age out the scene. Since so much light was com­ing in via the win­dow, the cam­era ‘said’ hey I need to reduce expo­sure. There­fore the cat has almost no detail, but the cur­tains look great.

In shot two I based my expo­sure on the grey card by approach­ing it, fill­ing the cam­era frame with it, plug­ging the read­ing into the cam­era and tak­ing the shot with that read­ing. Notice how the cur­tains have almost no detail now. This is a much bet­ter expo­sure if the goal of the shot‚in to show a cat in the light by the win­dow. The expo­sure should have also been very sim­i­lar had we used an inci­dent meter read­ing based on the cat.

As a final note both these shots illus­trate another point from the pod­cast which is that if the con­trast (the dif­fer­ence between the bright­est and dark­est ele­ments) of the scene is too great, the cam­era will NOT be able to record both ends properly.

‚

This has been some­thing that I’ve been mean­ing to do for a while. Now that I have that new dig­i­tal cam­era, I’m all over it. Great‚effects for fine art photography‚can be had by shoot­ing through dif­fer­ent types of glass and mate­ri­als with dif­fer­ent lev­els of translu­cency. Have I piqued your inter­est? Results will be posted here within 1 week.

Today’s small tip to bet­ter your pho­tog­ra­phy is a sim­ple yet cru­cial one and the title of this post really explains it all. Por­traits are the most com­mon type of pho­to­graph that peo­ple take. Peo­ple con­tstantly ask me to eval­u­ate their pho­tos that they think are amaz­ing. 50% of the time when there is a per­son in the pho­to­graph their eyes are not sharp. This DESTROYS the shot. When tak­ing a por­trait, focus on the eyes. Don’t focus on their nose or their hair, focus on their eyes. If their head is turned toward the cam­era, focus on the eye that is clos­est to the camera.

That said, I’m sure to get “but Marko what if I want to try some­thing funky and keep the sub­ject blurry to get an effect”. In that case you can do what­ever you want to do, because that is your inten­tion. You gotta know the rules before you can break the rules.