Photography
A link to our own Pictures Of Japan
Technique and Equipment
by Wes
I've been interested in photography ever since I went to the Academy. I even did some black and white developing there. But after futzing around with assorted 35mm cameras for the next ten years, I wasn't very satisfied with my results. So in the mid 90's, I decided to get serious and start really studying what I was doing. An important influence that came soon after my study began was, sadly, the death of my Grandmother Rema. After she was gone, I spent a few days looking through the thousands of family photographs she had collected, including some extremely old ones. It was obvious that many of the oldest, taken with extremely crude equipment by today's standards, were among the most pleasing and precious of all. Some of the 70-year-old pictures were a lot sharper than ones from just a few months before.
At that point, I decided that modern 35mm SLRs have advantages for some kinds of photography, but cameras with simpler mechanics had important benefits of their own. And technique and composition will always be a whole lot more important than equipment. In fact, some of today's equipment actually encourages poor technique. So, perhaps not surprisingly, the key to taking satisfying pictures is to learn how to best use the equipment one has, and how to pick the best equipment to get the kind of results one wants. I tried to do things the other way around, and learned a lot of things the hard way. I will fill up this section with some of the basic instructions that I think would have really helped me when I was starting out.
The Joys of Big Old Cameras
I love my Canon A2E 35mm SLR. It's engineering sophistication is incredible - it actually senses your eye movements and focuses the lens based on where you are looking within the viewfinder. It has so many light metering options that I can't even remember all of them. And it takes great pictures.
But I've learned that 35mm photography has a lot of limitations, and that I can only really be satisfied with it for certain types of subjects. 35mm is the world's most popular film format, but I have several reasons to use others frequently.
First, 35mm rolls are too long. That's right, too long. By the time most people get around to developing a 36-exposure roll of film, it has been in the camera for half a year or more. And half the pictures may have been shot outdoors in bright sunlight, while the rest were done inside under dim fluorescent lights. The fact is, there is no film that will work well under such varying conditions. But unless you are knowledgeable enough and have a fairly capable camera, there isn't any good way to change rolls somewhere in the middle with 35mm (it turns out to be pretty easy with the A2E).
Second, it's too common. Since so many people use it, there seem to be printing and developing labs just about everywhere. Many of the little "1 hour" shops are convenient, but more interested in getting the prints out fast than getting them out right. Print films are designed to be tolerant of enormous exposure errors. The automatic developing and printing machines in the little labs try to exploit this "exposure latitude" to minimize what appear to computers to be "incorrect" exposures. If you try something fancy, like correctly exposing a white cat on a light background, the automatic machines will reward you with a one-size-fits-all gray cat on a gray background.
Yuck! Looks like she's been sleeping in the coal bin!
That's a lot better.
If you don't believe me, get out an SLR and fire off about ten shots of a particular subject, all with different amounts of exposure. Your automatically done prints will all look pretty much the same. Fortunately, with slide film, there aren't any machines second-guessing you. Too bad that 35mm slides are now considered about as fashionable as Nehru jackets; they look a zillion times better than prints. Ditto black and white. But if you want to use anything other than common color print film, most small labs will have to send them off somewhere else to be handled. In the time they take to do this, you could just as easily take the film to a more advanced lab yourself.
Third, 35mm's too small. You need a magnifying loupe to see much of anything on a 35mm negative or transparency. It has to be enlarged to even print a tiny 3X5 print, so grain gets pretty obvious with even the best films when making large prints. The gradation between tones is much rougher than you typically see with the larger formats because images cover so much more real estate on the big films. This effect is really noticeable with black and white. Those smooth, creamy tones in the classic black and white prints our grandparents took are just not going to happen with 35mm.
Finally, 35mm cameras are too good. Or more precisely, they do too much work for you. Even the pros leave their 35mm SLRs set on autofocus and full auto exposure at times nowadays. The meters and computers are plenty capable, but I've found that photography, like music, requires that one knows the rules before one breaks them. If that fundamental knowledge isn't there, you won't know when the computers are likely to make mistakes, mistakes you could easily override. I used to let my cameras make too many decisions for me, so I never bothered to learn the basics of exposure that would have prevented a lot of my bad pictures from ever being made.
Now 35mm has its advantages too. Even the biggest 35mm camera is tiny compared to a 4X5 rig. I wouldn't even consider trying to shoot fast moving subjects with anything other than 35mm (although there are some pretty neat sports pictures from the golden age that were made with 8X10 cameras).
Wes' Rules for Taking Good Pictures
1. Have a camera
Ok, this one is pretty obvious, but I forget it a lot myself. Most of the rest of the world forgets it almost all the time. Never make fun of someone who's carrying a camera because they "look like a tourist." You may look a lot cooler than they do by leaving your camera at home, but at the end of the day, you will have no pictures, and you'll be whining about getting reprints from the other guy. I've never heard anyone say, "Gee, I wish I didn't have all those pictures of my friend and experiences." I bet you haven't either. Years later, if your camera was at home in the closet, you'll have only memories. (If you're memory is like mine, a lack of pictures will probably eventually mean a lack of memories too.) And don't stuff all your pictures in a desk drawer with the paperclips and the cancelled checks. You won't be able to find them when you want to, they'll probably get bent and scratched, and you'll never be able to remember which ones were taken when. Take a few hours some day and organize them into albums, you'll never regret it.
2. Fill the frame
One of the most difficult things for people to learn is how to "see through" a viewfinder. It's hard not to get sort of fixated on the subject (at the expense of the rest of the image) unless you think consciously about filling the frame with the subject. So most of us just swing the camera around until the subject is visible in the center of the frame, and then fire the shutter. Not good, because we're probably ignoring everything else that will be visible in the print. This can really be a problem with 35mm because you're working with a small negative to begin with. So if you take a picture of a person, and they only occupy about 1/3rd of the frame, to get enough enlargement to actually see them, you'd have to blow up the image to the point where grain and image quality are real problems. Lens errors and camera shake become more visible with increased enlargement as well. A lot of good photographers work very hard at trying to eliminate distracting elements from their shots. A whole lot of background will visually overwhelm a tiny subject. I recommend you really think carefully about trying to fill the frame with your subject when you shoot. This is the easiest way to improve your shots. The only possible exception to this rule is shooting with big sheet film cameras, like 4X5s. It's very difficult to see the edges of the ground glass with wide angle lenses, film holders are often a bit smaller than the total area visible under the glass anyway, and with large negatives you can afford to do a bit of cropping.
Is
that a dog? A rat? What?
Oh, it's a Corgi on the lawn.
3. Steady the camera
The lenses in most cameras costing more than $100 or so are very, very sharp now. The great classic photographers had lenses that were awful by comparison. The fact is, most of the bluriness you see in your prints comes from the camera moving around while the shutter is open. A tripod will will cure this completely, but most people don't want anything to do with one. One reasonable compromise is a monopod. It takes far less time to set up than a tripod, but it will really steady your camera pretty well. It turns out that most people, even pros, have a tough time holding a camera steady for more than 1/30th of a second. Using a monopod, I've taken sharp pictures with shutter open for a whole second or more. Of course, for the ultimate in sharpness, you need a camera without a moving mirror. The slapping motion of a 35mm SLR is surprisingly detrimental to sharpness on any exposure longer than 1/30 sec or so. For 35mm, if you want to go for the sharpest possible shots, you'll need a tripod and a feature called "mirror lockup." Good luck finding lockup on a new camera. I believe only a handful of expensive SLRs still have it. Or you could avoid the issue entirely by getting a camera that does not have through-the-lens viewing, such as a rangefinder or a "twin lens reflex" (TLR) design. They introduce other problems of their own, as you might expect, but without a moving mirror, you can't get mirror shake.
A lot of those small "point and shoot" (p/s) cameras have lenses with very small maximum apertures, like f/8 or even f/11, especially those with zoom lenses. With a slow film (say around 100 ASA), the camera will have to pick a slow shutter speed most of the time. That's why those things are always auto-firing their flashes - the camera is trying to produce enough light on its own so that the shutter speed will be high enough to prevent shake. Unfortunately, the tiny flash of a p/s only has a limited range, which is why they produce a lot of underexposed pictures in conditions where SLRs have no problems. Most of those tiny flashes throw no light at all past about 10 feet, so all those flashes you see going off in stadiums are just wasting battery energy, and doing nothing helpful at all for the pictures.
So with a p/s camera, you're better off using fast film to keep your pictures sharp. Modern films have such small grain and good color saturation that you can get away with 400 ASA, as long as you're only going to make small prints (anything smaller than 8X10). Of course, the right grip helps to steady the camera too. And make sure you squeeze the shutter, rather than jabbing it. If you aren't careful, you'll move the camera just by pushing the button too vigorously.
One
handed is awfully shaky.
Cradling
the camera with two hands is a much better idea.
4. Don't use the film you like
This will be the most unpopular rule of all, but I just can't overemphasize what a difference it makes. I know I ranted about it before, up in the section on large vs. small cameras, but it's an important rule no matter what camera you use. Most commercial processors stopped developing color prints by hand a long time ago. When you take your film to be developed almost anywhere now, whether it's the 1-hour counter at the grocery store or the snobby camera store with prices three times higher, they feed it into a big computerized monstrosity that handles the entire process on its own. I honestly think the only reason they have a person look at your prints at the end is to make sure they got cut properly, not to check the color or exposure. The problem with this approach is that a computer decides whether a print has the right exposure. See the cat example above. One time I took six pictures of a building at night, using six different shutter speed settings to see which was best. All six prints came back looking essentially the same, because a machine tried to make them look "correct." If the machine gets a negative with a lot of black areas, it will just try to print it brighter to make them gray.
Guess what happens to slides. They merely get developed, which is really just dipping the film in a series of chemicals for specific times. No exposure decisions get made in the process, so what you see is what you took. Slides are the only way to precisely test the exposure accuracy of a camera or lens. They are the best way to test the sharpness of a lens. Even if you must shoot prints, test your new camera first with a roll or two of slide film. I suspect once you do, you'll want to shoot slides more often. They just plain look better. I know you can't take them to work and show your pals. I know it's considered ferociously uncool to make your guests look at slides. I don't care - they just look a whole lot better. Trust me. Just try one roll.
More rules will follow later