Teaching Experience

Recently I've started trying to teach a friend some basics of photography to help her get to a point where she can take some nice pics in tricky situations, without her having to wait for the course she's booked next month. I don't think I'm being arrogant if I say that I know a lot about the technical side of photography and the theory of how to get stuff right. I don't claim to be brilliant at the artistic side by any means, but I've always been good at the details. I have, however, never really tried to teach anyone anything and that appears to be a whole different skill set. Here's some things that tripped me up when we met up and I tried to illustrate some concepts.

Time and Location

Including people
Looking for juxtapositions
Shutter speeds to freeze motion

We were somewhat constrained on time, and location choice was a convenience thing given that we both happened to be in or around Lancaster. Now if you have the timing right then the location probably won't matter so much, but we started way too late in the day, as the light was failing, in a very grey town (not grey in a bad way - there's just a lot of stone there), and it was raining. It's difficult to find suitably illustrative tricky lighting situations on a grey background (cameras love grey) in failing light, specially when you're trying to stay indoors so as not to get wet. We ended up doing some stuff about exposure lock and compensation using remnants of christmas lights in the shopping arcade, after a completely failed attempted demo of exposure compensation with some baubles, then we covered some stuff about metering modes using the brightly lit front of a frozen food retailer, then use of histograms by shooting across the street at the front of McDonalds, and finally we looked at flash exposure compensation using the crane thing that they'd brought in to take down said Christmas lights. We were limited to wide apertures, slow shutter speeds, or flash. 

In good light we could have done all those things much more effectively, and could also have looked at contre-jour and backlighting, dynamic ranges, HDR modes, limits of shutter speeds and apertures, use of more of the ISO range, freezing movement, panning, deliberate motion blur, and the list goes on. Alternatively in the absence of good sunlight, we could have planned (with some extra preparation) a different location such as a much larger shopping centre, open at night, more people, more depth, more shapes and colours etc.

Planning of Content

Hyperfocal focusing
Variations in aperture and depth of field

We chatted in Starbucks (other coffee shops are available) about what was causing confusion and I based what I'm laughingly going to call a syllabus on that. As such, it was somewhat improvised and I just went wherever was convenient rather than giving any chance of having a shot to remember. Almost everything I took that day was entirely forgettable. For example, demonstrating depth of field on racks of DVDs while surreptitiously lurking in a shop is undoubtedly a very visually obvious way to do so, but it doesn't give you shots that you want to show anyone. 

If I'd thought ahead as to where to go for different topics I could probably have built up a plan that would have left us with one or two memorable shots even in the failing light, and also been able to illustrate some of the concepts in question. If additionally I'd come prepared for weather (umbrellas etc) such that she could shoot while I talked, then we could have gone somewhere like Dalton Square which has street and building/bar lighting, statues, lead-in lines, people, cars etc, and some depth. The inside of shopping centres tend to be pretty flat. You're either looking at a wall, or along a wall.

Familiarity With Equipment

Tricky lighting
Dynamic range issues

I know my SLR inside out and can operate most of the controls without looking at them, with the camera to my eye, or in its rainproof jacket. If I press the wrong button (which I do sometimes) I know that straight away, and I can then move along and press the right one. Things like focus point selectors, exposure compensation, live view etc I don't even think about. My student is significantly less familiar with cameras in general, has only had her SLR for a short time, and it's not a brand I've ever used. As such, neither of us knew how to do even basic things like exposure lock, bracketing etc. 

Five minutes on the internet could have furnished me with a crib sheet of how to do the basic things I was likely to talk about, and would have saved us probably 30 minutes of lost light on shoot, looking for controls. I also found myself demonstrating things on my camera then expecting her to follow on hers. I think it would have been better if I'd mostly left mine alone. The problem there is that I was making sure I was right on the concepts even as I was trying to put them into words.

Planning the kit would also have been helpful. I arrived with my standard 17-85mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens. My student had a 50mm f/1.4 prime. Our lenses and thus the cameras attached to them therefore behaved somewhat differently.

If I'd foreseen that one, I could have primed my friend to bring along her zoom lens, as the aperture range would be similar to mine, and we'd both have wide angle capability to take the same sorts of shots.

Pacing

I've always talked too quickly. Anyone who knows me would likely include that in their "oh you know the one" description of me. ("Kev? Oh you know the one. Impossibly good looking. Tall, dark and handsome. Extremely charming. Talks REALLY quickly"). I've also never been particularly good at staying on one topic when talking. I get interested / engrossed and then my attention jumps around to whatever I think is most relevant to the point that's just been made or the question that's just been asked. 

Selective focusing
Depth of field
Use of flash

Whenever demonstrating one particular option or technique I imagine that it's best to stay on that until it's clear, even if the conversation leads in the direction of something else. As such I think I implanted as much confusion as understanding initially when it came to discussion of meter lock vs focus lock vs metering modes vs semi-automatic exposure modes vs exposure compensation vs focus and recompose. Again, if I'd planned the location / time / topic a little better then it might have been easier to stay on one topic for longer, but I think it would also need a conscious effort from me to shelve extraneous details that might confuse the main event until understanding of that main event reached its lightbulb moment, and it was safe to move on.

Conclusions

Selective focus
Checking the corners for distractions
Hyperfocal focusing

I want to have another crack at most of the topics I attempted to cover in Lancaster and I can tell that my friend is also keen to do so, given that some of the advice I gave appears to have confused matters rather than clarified them. Next time however we'll hopefully be able to discuss it a little more beforehand, plan a better time and/or location (plus the days will naturally be longer as we get closer to spring) and I can have a read up on her camera, or persuade her to buy a Canon.

Please Note

All of the images on this post were taken in Lancaster. None of them were taken on this particular trip, but the page looked so dull without any pictures at all that I thought I'd include some older ones from a visit in 2010. None of these are images I think are particularly special, but each situation or scene could have been used to teach one or more concepts. 

Maybe I just need to move somewhere sunnier.

Continued Non-Professional Development

Sunday 9th November was the date of Wilkinson Digital Splash 2014 in Preston, to which I went along, having enjoyed the seminar and presentation I attended last year. Having moved to a bigger better venue, this year the headline speaker was acclaimed landscape shooter Colin Prior. I booked onto his lecture/slideshow mainly because, having heard of him and knowing he was something of a famous name in photography in the UK (there aren't many household names in photography but Colin's probably among those closest to being able to claim that) I figured he would have some inspirational content and images, as was the case with Charlie Waite last year. Similar to last year though I also booked a seminar with someone less well known who was presenting something I'm interested in. Last year that was Lancashire and Cheshire wedding photographer Lisa Aldersley. This year it was Andrea Denniss, talking about the anatomy or the story of a portrait shoot, as it is in her world. I actually find these smaller sessions much more likely to drive my photography in a new direction than the bigger lectures, which is largely the point of this post. If you get chance it's worth listening to someone who does what you're already interested in, and the nature of these events is such that the speakers will tend to be pretty passionate, or they wouldn't be at the front of the room with their pictures on the screen in the first place.

Don't get me wrong,  Colin's lecture and slideshow was great. He talked about his various projects and showed some amazing shots. The only slight stress factor was the overrun - I booked Colin at 11am, and Andrea Denniss at 12:30pm, and assumed that there would be a 15-30 minute gap between the two where I could throw a couple of sandwiches down my neck before heading to the second venue, but at 12:29 when Colin was showing us all the books etc he has available at the moment, I finally decided I had to get to the other presentation (better to miss the sales-pitch end of one than the beginning of the other) and sneaked out as quietly as I could. Galloping across the UCLan Foster building campus I made it to the seminar room where Andrea was presenting, with mere seconds to spare, and squeezed in past all the earlier arrivers who were all sitting oddly close to the door, leaving the other side empty. Andrea started her presentation, then all the people who stayed with Colin to the end appeared and rather than similarly squeezing in, they all gathered chairs and stayed by the door, at which point the seminar proper began.

A selection of shots by Andrea Denniss of Pink Lily Photography

Now Andrea has a number of hats (in the figurative sense - she wasn't dressed like Danny Two-Hats from My Mad Fat Diary) being as she is a portrait and lifestyle photographer (she owns Pink Lily Photography) working to commission, and also a photography trainer for Aspire. I've included a montage of shots provided by Andrea above. (It's included at its original resolution to show it in its full glory, despite the odd shape that it leaves this post.) Andrea showed a slideshow of some of her work to give us a feel for the style, and then began to talk, and the thing that's immediately really obvious with Andrea other than her talent for creating beautiful portraits, is her passion for the craft and the business. For me this is the reason to attend these things - even if you're not necessarily into the style that someone does (not the case here - she had some lovely shots and I consider portraiture my favourite side of the hobby, though subjects are generally trickier to find, if not as hard to get to as the top of a mountain) listening to someone who really cares about it can make you care more about it too. It's left me wanting to shoot outdoor portraits in Autumn so I'm going to try (quickly...) to do that. It also got me thinking about training. I've wanted to learn how to pose group shots for ages and when Andrea decided to turn pro she took a number of training courses in photography. This lead on to talking about Aspire photography training for whom she works as a trainer, and the fact that they have a specific posing workshop day - exactly what I want. Accordingly, after the session Andrea tried to take me to meet the owner of Aspire photography training, Catherine Connor. Finding nobody in the room she gave me a card and said that Catherine was around the event somewhere so I headed back over to the trade stalls side to look for the Aspire stand, that I'd not seen earlier when wandering round unnecessarily spending money. (Hahnel Tuff-TTL Wireless TTL flash trigger and receiver - £90).

I found the Aspire stand and waited to chat to the lady manning the desk  (that sounds odd. A lady manning a stall - would she not be ladying it?) and handing out the leaflets etc. A short chat lead me to surmise (correctly) that this was the aforementioned Ms Connor and after taking my details and adding me to the mailing list, she mentioned in passing that she had another presentation in an hour. I'd intended to hang around until after the Andrea Denniss seminar which I had assumed would end at 13:30 but it actually continued unnoticed (time flies...) until around 14:00. This was followed by a chat between Andrea, another delegate and myself for another 20 minutes or so, then Andrea and I went to find Catherine and failed. As such I was already at the event much later than planned, so returning to reception I bought one of the last two tickets for Catherine's talk, which I assumed was about training but was actually about making the step from amateur to professional. Not being in this bracket you'd think this was of little use to someone such as myself, but again someone who really cares about their topic is usually interesting to listen to, and Catherine is definitely one of these.

I came away from this seminar full of ideas and inspiration to improve this blog, publicise my flickr, maybe even join Pinterest. I have no plans to go pro, but I do like it when people know what I do and what I'm good at, and I love doing shoots with people. I've not done one for a while so I definitely feel somewhat out of practice at people shots. In the past I've done a couple of individual shoots and one or two mini shoots (just a few shots for whatever purpose) plus two pretty planned 'group' shoots (each of which only included two people) and one family shoot in a park, and where I always feel that I fall down is in arranging them to look comfortable and interesting. As such I was very happy to receive two emails today from Aspire, one inviting me to an open day which I definitely plan to attend if I can, and one specifically addressing my interests as recorded yesterday, and describing the posing workshop course next February, which is partially taught by Andrea Denniss.

If I go on the posing workshop as I intend to, and I enjoy it as I expect to, I can already see that photography training might become (another) expensive new pastime. I suppose it's cheaper than track days and pilot lessons...

I seem to have strayed from the point slightly, which is that in my opinion, when you're looking for ideas or inspiration, one of the best places is to get it directly from those who already do what you want to do. If you get chance to attend events like this and you haven't been to them before I'd highly recommend them.

I was going to liberally scatter images through this post but as it's all about other people's photography I thought my own shots wouldn't really make sense, so apologies that it's somewhat text heavy. I'll see whether I can find something appropriate and add it.

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Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. Thomas Huxley

How Deep is your Field?

Pictures to be added to this one later. Published as is for proofreading purposes.

During a conversation at work today, we were discussing how people are all seemingly buying DSLRs at the moment, whether they're actually interested in photography or not. In the ensuing chat we were talking about what are the biggest advantages of a DSLR over a digi compact, and then we moved onto more general photography related matters, including about what difference it makes where you focus in a picture when taking it - whether it makes any difference whether you focus on whatever's in the centre, your main subject, what's behind it, etc. It got me thinking that there's probably a whole collection of people out there whose photography has always been very much point and shoot with, most likely, a phone.

Now phones have come on a long way since the first camera phones came out. My first camera phone was a Nokia 6100 with a clip on camera on a wire. There was no viewfinder, the screen was tiny, the resolution abysmal (640x480 I think), but at the time I was working in an office where cameras were banned, so it worked for me as I could leave the camera part at home. Modern phone cameras are a world apart from these early beginnings. My phone, which is by no means the current state of the art, shoots pictures which have 13 megapixel resolution. It has adjustable white balance, ISO, flash control, scene modes, sweep panoramas and 1080p video. It's really pretty good, and much better on image quality than some older digital compacts, but it does have one really limiting factor in common with pretty much all phones and most low and middle end digital compacts - a tiny sensor. This makes a difference to quality in that there have to be more photosites (sensor elements) crammed into a tiny space, so they have to be smaller and therefore pick up less light and have to be amplified more, but that's not my concern with this post. My concern is the fact that with a tiny sensor you need a tiny length of lens and with a tiny short lens you cannot achieve shallow depth of field.

Depth of Field Defined

I've touched on depth of field before - one of my earliest posts on this blog (Not the length of the grass) was a mini discussion of the concept, but I re-read that today and noticed it's not exactly in-depth, if you'll excuse the pun. I'll attempt to rectify that here.

You can imagine depth of field as two points on a line extending straight out in front of you from the camera. Between those two points is the actual single "plane of focus" - you are after all focused on only one point in the image so the only completely sharp parts of the image will be things on the same subject distance plane as the subject itself. Anything in the "sharp zone" between these two points will appear "acceptably sharp" on the sensor and in any resultant image file. As you go outside of these two points the image will appear softer or more blurred, with the effect increasing as you get further away from the actual focussed point, whether that is towards the camera or away from it. There are various things you can do that will move the points on this line, and various features of the camera and lens that will limit the effect you can have. Listing the things you CAN change first:

You can change the aperture on the lens. This is the big advantage of a middle or high end compact or a DSLR over a low end compact (or pretty much any film compact other than a few specialist exceptions). Aperture has been discussed before in this blog, but is basically the diameter of the hole in the lens through which the light is able to pass. Making that hole larger by making the aperture number smaller (f/5.6 --> f/4 --> f/2.8 for example) will move the two points defining the sharp zone closer together, and reduce the amount that's sharp. Making it smaller by making the aperture number larger (also known as "Stopping Down" - f/5.8 --> f/8 --> f/11 for example) will move the two points further apart and increase what's sharp in the image.

You can change the length of the lens by zooming in or out, or by physically changing lens. A shorter lens will cause the points to move further apart, and provide more depth of field at a given subject distance. Of course it will also change the perspective of the shot so you'll then need to move and recompose to get a similar subject distance. A longer lens will move the points closer together and reduce depth of field, making less of the scene sharp in the image.

You can change your distance to the subject. The further away you stand, the further apart those sharp-zone points get, and the closer you get to the subject, the smaller the sharp zone becomes. It's actually not as simple as this when changing multiple variables simultaneously as explained here but for the purposes of this exercise it can be considered to be a truth for the moment.

The limiting factor that you can't do anything about other than change camera (unless you have a roll-film camera with different film masks available, or an XPan, or a sheet film camera - but that's one for the pedants...) is the size of the recording medium. This may be a sensor of one of myriad different sizes, or it may be film. For the purposes of this it makes no difference which it is - it's only the size that matters. It's not so much that a small sensor actually directly affects the depth of field - it's more about the lenses required for that sensor.

Short Lenses

For a given sensor size there is one particular length of lens that gives a 'normal' perspective, and wide angle or telephoto lenses are either side of that length. Going back to my own phone, according to Geekaphone it has a 4mm, f/2.4 lens and a 4.8mm x 3.6mm sensor. When you start up the camera it's set to a slight wide-angle (around 30mm equivalent on a 35mm format sensor or film) and assuming we ignore the fact that digital zooms are useless, the digital zoom can be used to get to 'standard', so we can assume probably that the "standard" lens for this sensor size would be around 6mm. We've said that a shorter lens causes larger depth of field. Now assuming we had this camera/phone with a 6mm fixed lens on it, the field of view (how much is in the shot) would be normal for this tiny sensor, but if you pointed it at a 35mm size sensor, this would be an ultra-wideangle lens. With such a short lens the depth of field would be enormous, and remains enormous even on this tiny sensor. As such, it's very difficult to achieve shallow depth of field (sharp zone points close together) on such tiny sensors, so you have to go to extremes on the other variables to overcome this - physically close in on the subject and use the widest aperture available - and you'll still be at a disadvantage over something with a larger sensor.

Long Lenses

We said that long lenses reduce depth of field, so again let's consider the phone camera. A telephoto lens might be, say, four times the length of a "standard" lens. On a 35mm format camera a standard is 50mm and a 200mm is very much a telephoto. On the phone, if 6mm is standard, then 24mm would be telephoto. This is a wide-angle lens on 35mm format and will still have very limited depth of field. A 200mm lens attached to the same sensor would be the equivalent of a 33x zoom, giving us an equivalent focal length of over 1500mm. This is exceptionally long, and would have the same depth of field as this relatively modest telephoto would on 35mm.

It should be added at this point that all a digital zoom on a camera or phone does is crop in on the centre of the image and interpolate enough pixels to make the image up to full size. As such, it does not affect sharpness / depth of field in any true optical way, but as the image is magnified, any loss of sharpness becomes more obvious. I've not tested it side by side with a real optical zoom or long lens but I suspect the effect will be similar.

Other Sensor Sizes

Working upwards from the phone sensor, many digital compact camera sensors will also be very small so we'd need to step into the mid-range to get a worthwhile increase. There are numerous sensor size charts on the net - for example this one. The phone was a 1/3" sensor. Canon Powershot G cameras (other than the G1X), Nikon 1, etc go slightly larger, then you get into the micro four-thirds popular in Olympus and Panasonic cameras, then to the APS-C found in most DSLRs and many compact system cameras, up to "full-frame" 35mm equivalent, and on above that into medium and large format film and digital backs. The same lens used on any sensor size with the same subject distance, cropped to give the same angle of view will always give the same depth of field, but if you physically move the camera to compensate then depth of field will be affected. This rather excellent depth of field calculator lets you play with the various parameters.

Take our standard 50mm lens on a full frame 35mm SLR. At f/2 (pretty wide open) and the lens focused at 40 metres we have apparent sharpness from 20metres to infinity. If we take that lens and put it on a 6x7cm camera such as the Mamiya RB67 which has around four times the sensor size, we end up with a wide-angle lens. In order to take the same photo, the photographer needs to move much closer to the subject (one quarter of the distance), which will reduce the depth of field available. My maths might be wrong here (it's late at night) but assuming the photographer moves to 10m from the subject to make it the same size in the frame, and keeps all other variables the same, the depth of field reduces to only 15 metres - between 6.5 and 22 metres, so anything more than 12 metres behind the subject will appear blurred. This means that it's much much easier to achieve shallow depth of field as the sensor gets larger. This could also be taken as being harder to maintain a large depth of field, which is why lenses for large format cameras often go to smaller apertures than those on smaller formats, with f/64 being a commonly available small aperture on 5x4 inch cameras.

Back to the point

So we have our advantage for larger sensor cameras - depth of field is more controllable for a given length of lens - as well as a somewhat circuitous explanation of why it matters where you focus. There's one more point to consider that aspiring serious photographers should be aware of and that's the concept of hyperfocal distances. When you focus on a given point and choose your aperture to set the depth of field, one third of that "acceptably sharp" section is in front of the focused point (towards the camera) and two thirds are behind it. This allows you to maximise your depth of field by choosing where in the frame to focus. If you focus on infinity when shooting a landscape, you throw away two thirds of your depth of field beyond infinity (Buzz Lightyear kept labouring this point). If you can't see infinity and you're shooting at an actual plane (the front of a building) then focusing on the building itself puts two thirds of the depth of field inside or behind the building where you can't use it. If instead you focus in front of infinity or in front of the building, you should be able to keep more of the foreground in focus while not losing the sharpness of the infinity / building point. Some lenses (mostly older ones) have depth of field marks on the focus scale which allow you to pre-calculate this and pre-focus the lens. Without this you're basically reliant on guesswork/experimentation, on clever Canon-specific modes (DEP and A-DEP both use hyperfocal focussing) or on using the Depth of Field Preview function on your camera.

Depth of Field Preview

Found on most SLRs, this is usually a button but sometimes a lever, usually on or close to the lens mount. When you press it the lens is stopped down to the taking aperture and the image will (assuming you're not set wide open) darken. In this darker image it's possible to see the extent of the image that will be acceptably sharp. With enough dexterity it's possible to adjust the aperture and the focus distance while holding this button down, and watch the changes as they happen. Try it next time you have a camera and a few spare minutes. Manually focus on something distant, set f/8 as the aperture, and hold down the depth of field preview button. Now adjust the focus towards the camera. The item in the distance shouldn't start to go blurry until the focus point is quite a long way back towards the camera, but things in the foreground should start to get sharper as soon as you move the focus. It's a win-win for shots where you have the time.

DEP and A-DEP

Your remaining depth-of-field control options if you have a Canon DSLR are these two modes. DEP allows you to individually focus on two scene elements. The camera will work out the optimal aperture and focus distance to get both elements sharp, allow you to recompose, and take the shot. A-DEP is a simpler beast where you have to put both of your subject elements beneath focus points at the same time, but otherwise the logic is the same. In both modes, the camera will choose aperture and shutter speed to give you AT LEAST enough depth of field, if possible. It may, depending on lighting conditions, give you more. I don't think it's designed to allow you to deliberately get a shallow depth of field in bright conditions.

A Little Healthy Competition

I mentioned in the last post that a few of the members of the camera club had entered some images into the Lancashire and Cheshire Photographic Union Individual Competition. This is an annual event and one of the two main competitions held by this body each year. As well as this one there is the club competition where the club selects and enters images from among its membership. 

The individual contest is different in that each and every member of an affiliated club is allowed to enter up to 24 of their own images, under the banner of their club, but not as a representative of it directly. Best of all there’s no entry fee additional to your membership of your respective club. So often these days, photography competitions come with a price tag just to put your pictures in, sometimes per picture.

There are three categories in each of two classes. Open colour can be anything in colour, whether photoshopped or not and in fact whether even obviously a photograph or not. Open mono is the same in… well… monochrome, which can include toned images as long as they’re single tone and not a toned black and white. Nature gets its own category and images must be very minimally processed - no major cloning etc. Within each of those categories, entrants can put up to four prints and up to four digital projected images. As this was my first time I dipped my toes into only the areas in which I felt comfortable. Three images in Open Colour, two in Open Mono and one in Nature, all as digital images. I don’t think that most of them will do particularly well, so all I’m hoping for is to not get bottom marks (6 points) for any of them, and to do better than adequate (10 or more) for at least one. 

I’ve put all my entries onto the bottom of this post. It’s being judged on Saturday 10th May and we should hear back as soon as our competitions secretary takes a break from the Eurovision build-up to check it.

The World is Waiting was taken when we went to the Paralympics in 2012. It was early in the morning and the park was fairly quiet compared to how it would get later. There was a little viewpoint to the side of the main walkway that provided this beautiful angle over the main stadium. Sadly we didn't get to go into the stadium itself, but we did see a couple of the other venues.

At the Start Line was taken at a motocross event somewhere in Lancashire - either Garstang, Whalley or just possibly Charnock Richard. Bike 464 is a former colleague (One Matthew Turner) who I'd gone along to support / shoot. This was the scene as the 20 or so bikes left the line simultaneously on full revs. Motocross at a well chosen track is a brilliant route to low cost close up motorsport photography, and being very much an amateur sport there are no subsequent restrictions on what you do with the shots you take.

Timing is Everything was taken at Southport Air Show 2013. The Red Arrows are pretty much one of my favourite things, and I reckon being a pilot with them has to be the best job in the world.

Black Country Afternoon was taken a few years back when visiting a friend in Birmingham. I grabbed this shot on a compact as we were about to leave the Black Country Museum. I have it on my wall at home in sepia tone. I like it because at a glance you can't tell whether it was taken in 2009 or 1949.

Komodo Dragon is my sole foray into the Nature category. This shot was taken at Chester Zoo. I like it because the animal looks friendly to me, like he's posing for the camera. I think the judges will dislike it for the same reason. There's no movement, no action, and this is probably my leading contender for bottom marks in this very competitive category.

Barren was taken during the sail away from Helsinki during a cruise of Northern Europe. I had no idea until I went there that Helsinki Harbour is guarded by a complex archipelago of small islands, some of them with buildings and structures on like this one, some bland and featureless, and some with small complexes and people clearly living or working on them. It was a slow departure and I took dozens of shots, of which this is one of my favourites.

The World is Waiting

At The Start Line

Timing is Everything

Black Country Afternoon

Komodo Dragon

Barren

Clubbing, or Camera-derie...

I've always thought it would be good to join a camera club or photography society as some of them are known, but like many people I've been put off by talk of obsession with distinctions (LRPS etc) and competitions, snobbery, and most of all by the times of the meetings. I work reasonably long hours and I'm not always able to commit to getting out of work on time to get to an early evening start, so I've never got around to joining or even visiting one and my photography was largely a solitary pursuit or something done with the indulgence of my lovely wife on days out and holidays etc.

Around six months ago I heard about a local camera club from a fellow member in the woodcraft club I also frequent. This one was different by the sound of it, as it was quite a young club so no long history to live up to, most of the members were relatively inexperienced in photography as a medium or as an art, it was just around the corner from me, and best of all, meetings started at 7:30 or 8:00 pm so I could get to them easily. So it was that before long I found myself a member of Roby Mill Community Camera Club.

The club meets in The Star at Roby Mill every other week. They're unlike most other clubs I've heard about due to their active programme during the summer months - they like to be out and about taking photos whenever possible. It's very much about going out together and taking shots, and much less about homework and critique, though there is still obviously a level of critique, as you would expect. In winter they are more confined by the conditions but there's still a lot of actual camera activity. 

One of the nights earlier this year was a fifteen minute challenge where we all piled into cars, went to a less than obvious location and took the best picture we could in fifteen minutes, then returned to the pub to look at each other's best pictures. We've also spent time in a cemetery car park taking photos of a man dressed as a Jedi and waving a lightsaber, had a presentation on using Lightroom and Photoshop for post production, had a talk from an L&CPU judge (Lancashire and Cheshire Photographic Union) about what it takes to enter competitions, and as a result a few of us have entered some pics into the annual LCPU Individual competition, entry for which requires you to be a member of an affiliated club.

Overall impact of the club has been huge on my photography. I've taken lots of pictures that I wouldn't have had the chance to capture, used my tripod more times in the last three months than the whole preceding three years, talked to more people about photography technique and compared images with more interested parties than for a long time. And I like to think I've helped a few people to learn something as well, just as they have for me. 

Prints, prints and more prints

In the mail today I received a packet about an inch thick, and a tube about 40 cm long. Contained within were 380 (theoretically - I haven't counted) 6x4 prints and one A3 "poster" print. All but one of which were from my recent holiday. Why so many you ask? Well.

I remember when I used to shoot a lot of film that I always bemoaned the fact that a digital process encouraged the taking of thousands of pictures but the printing of none. In order to prevent the same phenomenon overtaking me, I invested in a decent photo printer within a couple of weeks of getting my first digital camera, and for a while the two were technological soulmates; any time I took a lot of pictures at least a couple would be printed in spectacular glossy colour on expensive A4 paper. I then moved house a couple of times, my life moved on in many ways and I found myself among those people with a huge archive of digital files but very few actual recent prints. I then discovered Photobox.

If I remember correctly I first discovered Photobox when looking for a route via which to print something larger than my printer could cope with. I don't think I went straight in with the 40x30 inch giant print, but that may have been my second or third order once I was confident of the quality. Since then it's mainly been when printing large volumes of shots that I've turned to they of the green splat logo. After my wedding and honeymoon I sent them about 500 shots and within a day they were printed and dispatched. There's something really exciting even now about waiting for your prints to arrive. Even though there's no longer the wondering what you're going to get, it's still nice to have some physical prints to flip through, maybe put one on your desk and a few on the wall. The A3 one is destined for framing if only I can find a wall with space for it.

As to why so many, I'm going to have to go with why not? I took 1500 shots on holiday of some amazing places and great experiences. I flicked through those and those 380 called out to me. At those volumes prints cost about 7p each, so my 380 + 1 cost me £38, and I should have plenty of options should I wish to fill an album.

If you're fed up of looking at photos on your phone or iPad, perhaps it's time to go back to a simpler time just for a few days , order some prints, and fill an album. Just maybe your grandchildren will thank you for it.

Mini Hint #281 - Protection Filters

With any interchangeable lens camera your first accessory purchase should be a protective filter for the lens. These are optically neutral (or close enough) and are mainly there as a sacrificial surface to take the scratches that you really don't want on the front element of your lens. Look for a Hoya multi-coated (HMC) UV filter (colourless and will supposedly cut down on atmospheric haze) or Skylight filter (slightly pink to reduce the blue effect of distant scenery), put it on your lens, and leave it there until you either break it, or inevitably get dust behind it and have to remove it to clean it.

Some people will say that every extra layer of glass reduces the optical quality. This is technically true, and I certainly wouldn't put a £5* filter on a £400 lens, but unless you're a professional and can afford to take the risk (in which case you wouldn't be reading this) then adding a decent bit of Hoya glass between lens and subject isn't materially going to hurt anyone.

* prices of filters depend on quality and thread diameter. Some tiny filters for lenses on things like the Nikon 1 or similar may actually cost only £10-15 or so so be led by brand in that case. Hoya HMC beats Hoya, which beats Hama. Cokin screw-in filters are probably somewhere in the upper middle range. It's rare for me to see anything that's not one of those four, but Canon etc do also make their own filters. I only have one of those :-)