Digital Photography

In your landscape photography you will find that the majority is probably with a tripod. But each type of photography uses different tools. Photographers that do sports photography like to use a hand-held strategy so they can get the shot quickly. The last thing they want is to be fiddling with a tripod when they could be shooting the football player who has just won the goal for their team. Instead, they ‘ll choose a monopod which has greater flexibility and gives them greater access to the series of shots they want.

Tripods are brilliant for nature and landscape shots. But sometimes they are bulky and cumbersome. When you are shooting your landscapes it can be a pain in the backside lugging the tripod up a mountain or a steep hill just to get to the top to get that perfect shot when the sun is just right. But as painful as this is, when you look at your photos afterward, you’ll most likely say “wow, it was worth it.”

One of the great things about tripods is that they allow you to capture that beautifully, gentle light you see during a sunset, just before twilight. Twilight has a sweet light, and just before that there are some pretty fantastic photographic opportunities.

You’ll no doubt find that as dusk blankets the land the more photos you take the more blur you get. There’s no other time of day that feels like light changes than dusk. It feels like light is just slipping through your fingers like sand through an hour glass. And its during this time that you need to keep that camera rock-steady.

If you are in the unfortunate situation of not having a tripod st this magical time you can always boost your ISO from the mid range 400 to a higher 800. This will increase the light sensitivity quite a lot. You’ll find more noise that way but you can always fix this in Noise Ninja or other photographic post editing software.

A tripod is not only good for dusk and for very low light situations such as getting crystal clear night shots. Anytime you want to slow down your shutter speed a tripod becomes the necessity.

Last week I was away on a family matter. (All okay.) On the way back I detoured through some delicious landscapes, valleys, and rolling hills. Soon I’ll post some of these pictures and talk about how I got the shots and what I specifically did to get them.

I live in Queensland, Australia now, as a change from Melbourne Victoria. Queensland is a subtropical state which doesn’t really have a winter, as opposed to Melbourne which pretty much has a winter 8 months of the year. So as you can imagine the adjustment is quite significant.

There are some fantastic photo opportunities up here and I’ve taken some of them. The “winter” light in Queensland is probably the best light all year. It softens hard lines, shapes and distinct sharpness.

So stay tuned and you’ll get to see some images. Promise.

Amy Renfrey

Picture courtesy of http://www.geocities.com/COKINFILTERSYSTEM/graduated_filters.htm

This week one of my loyal customers asked me a brilliant question about Neutral Density filters. It was so good I just had to answer it via this article. You’ll most likely appreciate this digital photography tip as much as he will.

“A question, I want to get a graduated filter, however, all the one’s I see are graduated grey, are they still ND and will not affect the colour? Very best regards, Pete.”

What Pete’s digital photography question is all about is the common confusion of photography equipment looking like something different to what we first expect.

When choosing a filter for our digital photography its best to first look at them as tools. Firstly in order to maintain clarity about ND filters, firstly think about what you need then work your way from there. Pete’s a fantastic photographer and is ready to move to the next level with his digital photography equipment choices, which is where I come in.

The answer to Petes digital photography question is yes, they are still ND, but like all filters, the colour will be affected. I’ll explain.

ND filters are predominately used to darken a bright sky so that both the sky and subject can be properly exposed. Graduated ND filters have varying degrees of “graduated grey.” The Graduated ND filter comes in a few different types, but can really be broken down into two main categories. They are; hard edge and soft edge.

As the name suggested a Hard Edge is mainly applied when there is a sudden difference in the luminance of the digital photo, such as an overexposed sky over a landscape. The soft edge filter is mainly applied to a digital photo that has less distinct over and under exposed areas such as the same landscape but perhaps taken at approaching dusk when the light is not do hard. A soft filter just gently tones down harder areas of light. It’s less dramatic and can often be used very well in black and white photography to give the digital photo a “boost” of the dramatic.

You can have a variety of ND filters that go from a weak graduated grey to quite a strong graduated grey. The “intensity” of graduated grey is described by numbers. So for example a weak graduated grey ND filter is known as “ND2X”. And the strongest is “ND8X”.

All filters affect digital photography colour whether subtly or dramatically. You can have an ND filter that’s quite soft but still darkens an area of the digital photography image. Even though it’s subtle, anything you put onto that lense will be affected. But it depends what we mean by “affected.”

If we mean the colours disappear and change completely…well a lot depends on that such as the intensity of grey, the colour at the time of day, the seasons etc. If you are using a Full graduation from top to bottom then your colours will most definitely change. They will become darker. However if you are using a less intense ND filter, then you’ll notice the change in colour is not as apparent. You‘ll notice that the lighter ND filters will have more of a polarizing affect, the darker areas being at the top and not so much shading at the bottom.

Graduated ND filters are brilliant in times of excessive brightness coming from the top of the sky for example. You can use an ND filter to darken an overly bright sky and keep the main subject’s luminance the same. It has a terrific influence over evening up unbalanced light. It can effectively tone down over exposed areas in your digital photography.

Happy Shooting,

Amy Renfrey

If you have ever wanted to improve your digital photography then you may want to consider learning about High Dynamic Range. If you have heard of this term in digital photography, but are not sure what it is, then keep reading because it will serious change the way you look at your digital photography images. What High Dynamic range does in your digital photography is simultaneously lighten your underexposed areas and darken your overexposed areas. Working with your Dynamic Range will aim to create digital photography images as your own eye would see them; even light all over the scene.

In the digital photography world Dynamic Range simply refers to the range of light (luminance) vales from the darkest to brightest. In the real world is really the range of dark to bright sections of light that you can see with the naked eye. This is transferred to digital photography and it given the name Dynamic Range. Digital Photography Dynamic Range is the range of light on your digital camera sensor that can be captured without having the higher light or lower light values altered or edited. In digital photography speak High Dynamic Range simply means a higher range of light values.

You will notice that after understanding Dynamic Range that your digital photography can be improved dramatically and, very fast. Digital photography Dynamic range can improve aspects of your image such as adding a sense of drama to your cloudy landscapes, giving detail to lines of colour, toning down some overexposed parts of light sections of a digital image.

You may find that when photographing things outdoors in your digital photography such as landscapes, beach and snowscapes etc, you have a lot of contrasting highlights that slow your progress down. To overcome sections of high contrast you can use ND filters, a polariser, exposure bracketing, post editing in Photoshop etc, etc, the list goes on what you can do in digital photography but really, to get a more accurate exposure working with your Dynamic Range will be more effective.

You can get a good idea of digital photography Dynamic when you go outside and look at the light. For example High Dynamic Range is the bright sunlight on a typical outdoor, sunlit scene. In saying that, a Low Dynamic Range may correspond to darker areas such as a dimly lit room.

Let’s take my Sony digital camera to use as an example. It has 6 stops of Dynamic Range. The Dynamic range’s objectives are to capture more dynamic range. While it’s easy to capture daylight scenes with the Sony, in some instances like landscapes, more Dynamic Range might be needed. So in this case producing my High Dynamic Range requires that I take some separate exposures. Then I place all of the brightness levels that I want in my final image that my Sony’s sensor can record properly. What this means is putting the darkest values no lower than in the mid-range of the sensors light sensitivity range.

In the wonderful Adobe Photoshop I may decide to take a handful of exposures to cover the complete dynamic range. In each photo exposure I keep the aperture the same (changing aperture changes the depth of field). My aim here is to create different photos making sure that in each I cover the available brightness levels in the landscape.

I take a collection of photos of my landscape at about 1 stop changes in each photo. I don’t do this by altering the f stop I do this via my shutter speed. To check whether I’ve got variation in my exposures I can check the histogram to see whether I have adequately captured the scenes brightness.

Once I have all my exposures in the camera I go home and check it out in Adobe Photoshop. What I should be able to do then is edit them and create a picture as my own eye would see; good lighting on the foreground and good lighting on the background, without over exposure of the sky or underexposure of darker parts of the land.

Have fun and happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

A great place to begin your landscape photography experience is a place that inspires you. A place that you absolutely love will make it easier for you to connect with the scene and make the scene look as good as possible. If you don’t live near the Swiss Alps or a Tropical Island and live in the city like me, with no special scenery around, then you’re in for a drive. As you are driving to your special location don’t hurry, just take a relaxed pace, and when you get there completely relax and reflect creatively on the surroundings. Then think about what you would like to see in a photograph. Really look at the scene and examine it in this way.

Getting into this relaxed and reflective frame of mind will help you relax and take better landscape photos because your mind will be able to concentrate on getting a good picture. Then you will tend to take shots where they enhance the scene, rather than just take ‘snaps’. Your special scene is a chance to create a magnificent piece of art with your digital camera.

The landscape pictures I’ve seen that don’t work visually are those with too much in the photograph. A nice beach can be ruined by several ships, houses on the bay, hard light, people displaced in the photo and so forth. Such a crowded picture can be quite distracting. So if you want ‘wow’ shots, then use less distraction in the shot, and go for a composition that focuses on simple shapes, lines and forms. If you are doing colour landscape pictures, then look for the colour that stands out the most and ask yourself how you can enhance it with the tools you have available.

Look for a foreground that’s going to have impact on your eye. A good landscape shot has a foreground that is commanding, as if you are magnetized by it and just have to look. Keep the attention on the majesty of the scene rather than things in the background that take the attention away, (leaving you unsure of where to look at the image). When looking at the scene to be photographed for the first time, you want to take notice of the subject in the foreground then see that the area around it (one after the other). The main subject should be the thing with the most presence in the shot.

Remember simplicity is the key, so the context of the scene should not detract from your subject; (make sure the “ski lodge” at the side of the landscape scene doesn’t detract from looking at the mountain range). It must work in with the mountain range, not against it. It must compliment the mountain range. Your subject doesn’t have to be one item like a rock or tree; it can be a sweeping coastline or a huge body of water, a mountain range or a desert scene like the one taken below above by Neil Gould.

Keep taking as many as you can to get as much practice as you can, whilst applying these simple tips.

Best wishes,

Amy Renfrey