Light and shade

And the kitchen sink

The challenge, when knocking a quick still life into shape on location, purely for the fun of it, is to make a simple image without access to a studio full of expensive equipment. In this case I used things from around a kitchen sink.

I borrowed Sparkly’s dark grey fleece jacket to cover up the white draining board, because I wanted to work in red on black, then pressed a plastic chopping board into service as a makeshift reflector. The grey clouds in the sky provided the soft, broad highlights from the caravan’s kitchen window.

Just a few moments later, a tasty ratatouille was simmering in the pot.

Mother

Almost exactly twelve months ago to the day I showed you a five-fledgling family. Well, the seasons have turned full circle once again. There’s a new mother raising her brood in exactly the same old dry, rusty downspout.

Here she is, protecting her noisy, ever- hungry brood, giving me the kind of defiant look I fully deserve for intruding on her sanctuary.

Leading camera manufacturers have all invested substantial amounts of time and money in making sure that their products photograph almost any subject in practically any situation. This picture was certainly a challenge to my clever little Canon. But that old "auto-just-about-everything" setting delivered the goods reliably yet again. The rest was smoothed out in Photoshop.

Black and white, or colour, madam?

The story behind these two portraits began a long time ago. I’ve been waiting quite a few years to add something of mine to it.

Sparkly's sister Karen was a student at an Art College in Cheltenham in the Sixties. Back then, a photographer made a monochrome portrait of her, in a lighting style I deliberately reproduced for this photo of her daughter Ruby, who is today much the same age as her mum was when the original image came into being. It’s my practical way of showing the importance of photography as a social documentary tool, recording, as it does in such high fidelity, events separated by time and space.

A colour variation is also here, partly by way of comparison. One of the questions I often ask about the medium is “Do we react differently to black and white photographs?"

It illustrates too how contemporary cameras have changed photographic working methods. In times bygone, I’d have chosen a particular combination of film, developer and printing paper, processing them, chemically, in a darkroom, physically manipulating the contrast and tonal range I needed to create. That whole technical workflow would have differed completely when making a colour print. But nowadays, shooting digitally, the camera instantly records the subject fully. Black and white has become almost an afterthought, merely one choice made from a virtually infinite number of possibilities. Creative decisions can be delayed, reductions achieved through discarding some of the stored data by employing a few software tools.

I prefer to call my new working environment a Lightroom. It seems more fitting. And when summer comes, I can open the window, to let a breath of fresh air in amongst the pixels.

Picasa effects

I use Photoshop regularly. I know that not everyone has that luxury, so I set myself the challenge of seeing what could be achieved with some simpler, free software.

Picasa is one of several applications available at no cost. The simple download installed itself in a well-behaved fashion. Once it had finished indexing the pictures on my laptop, I was able to delete quite a few unwanted images from folders I'd forgotten all about .

Simple abstractions, like the picture above, can quickly be turned into greetings cards, or used for web design. I made this one in a few minutes, merely by playing with some of the various effects offered by Picasa. I liked that I could undo my changes at any stage, and that the original shot was preserved. Also, the on-line help made it easy for me to discover how to export and re-size the image, making it ready for uploading to this page.

We learn best by playing. I'd say Picasa has quite enough tools to encourage easy, worthwhile experimentation on a minimal budget.

Here's the original point-and-shoot snap, for comparison.

Lifting the shadows

I walked into St Mary’s Church, Batsford this week. The walls were set with candelabra, each one sporting three candle sticks. I found one I liked, near a window, in front of a pew covered by a carved wooden canopy.

This was a corner of the building with extremes of light and shade. There was too much range for the camera to record in one frame, so I decided to add a little lighting control, to help the camera capture the image I could already see in my head. I used two accessories: a cigarette lighter to bring the candles to life, and a small, remotely triggered flash gun to light the dark panelling. The process went like this:

1) I found out what the camera was already giving me. As the wide shot shows, the soft light from the north side of the church washed in from the right, catching the white wax, the wrought metalwork and the dogtooth pattern of the wooden arch, gently revealing their shape and form. Inside the canopy, the panelling and pews are in deep shadow, without detail.

2) I wanted to force the flames a warmer yellow, so I white-balanced the camera to “cloudy”. The glow from the three flames brought out more of the carving.

3) I needed to show the texture of the carved woodwork behind the pew, so I put a radio-triggered flash gun out of sight, on the seating, setting it to manual exposure. I also wanted this new light source to add a few highlights and bright edges to the ironwork, so I stood by the wall bracket and looked into the pew, to make sure I could see the flash. I could, which guaranteed that the light from it would hit the metal from behind and to the side (as the lens would see it). Back at the camera, the flash unit was still hidden from view, so I knew I wouldn’t get any unwanted lens flares from stray, uncontrolled  light. I made this one light source do as much work as possible; I like to keep my lights simple and efficient.

4) A test shot showed the flash was too strong, so I dialed it down in power a couple of stops (it was set on manual, remember), covered it with a clean, white handkerchief, to smooth out the harsh, focussed look which the raw head has, then made the picture I’d first imagined.

I reviewed the image, checked the histograms, and zoomed in on the sharp shadow of the candle holder thrown onto the wall under the window. I could accept it might have been coming from the candles, (it’s really from the small flash source, far away, so it has hard edges) so I chose to live with it. I could have spent more time repositioning the flash, but there’s a fine dividing line between having pure fun with my ongoing series of “threes”, and getting bored with the impossible quest for perfection: life is way too short, and anyway, outside there was a patch of sunshine breaking through, just crying out for different pictures to be made.

Pluvial damage

I often write here about how always carrying a camera dramatically increases the chances of catching a picture.

Yesterday evening, out of routine after a student music recital had happily delayed me, I'd left my jacket at work, with my point-and-shoot in the pocket. I’d also lent “big cam” to someone to try out. As soon as I saw the rapidly flooding road home, after only a day or so of rainfall, I wished I hadn’t.

No matter: I pressed my mobile phone into service. Any lens in a storm.

Establish a rapport

There’s a deal of Internet discussion on some of the photography forums¹ about the law as it applies to taking pictures in public places. Many photographers seem to believe they can snap away freely at almost anyone or anything, at any time, in any place. It’s as well to remember that personal belief systems may not automatically be considered as valid defence in civil court actions.

I’ve been enjoying my street photography for decades. In that time I’ve come to realise that to produce a documentary picture like this one, one that pleases both me and the sitter, it's absolutely essential to establish a rapport with those I photograph, long ere I aim a lens at them.

I find that genuine street musicians, like Madi Stimpson here, are universally receptive to three main approaches: a no-strings cash donation up front, coupled with a genuine interest in them as working artists, leading to a respectful request for permission to photograph them. For me, being a guitarist always helps start a conversation. When I met him, Madi was playing Scott Joplin’s “Piano Rag” dexterously in the key of C, enlivening Ludlow town centre on a bitterly cold day. I began with "Your fingers are working well today", clapping my gloved hands together.

As for the law, I’m happier respecting it. If the image was to have been for profit, a Model Release form would have protected both me, as the photographer, and Madi, as the subject, for nothing more than a “consideration”, which could have been as economical as the gift of a print, or, as in this instance, the promise, dutifully and professionally fulfilled, to illustrate a part of Madi's musical life on one of my photo-blogs.

1. I’m sure my old purist of a Latin teacher would much prefer “fora”.

Change your viewpoint

Once you’ve found a subject, change your viewpoint. Explore it by putting your lens in different places.

Here I wanted to show you the effect on the picture that the angle between the camera and the light source has. Look a the relationship between the shadows cast from the direct sunlight and the subject. Simply by moving round, three quite different images were produced in seconds.

When shooting on location, give yourself plenty of choice, so that when you look at your photographs later, on your computer screen, you can make decisions about what pleases you most.

Editing

I said yesterday that I didn’t like using on-camera flash. Afterwards, I thought about my original purpose in creating this blog, which was to show you how I achieve some of my results.

So, here are two photographs, made from one identical camera exposure. On the left is exactly what the camera gave me, made on a setting I call auto-just-about-everything. The point is that professional picture editors want results first and art second. So getting the shot for them is all-important. Moments of pure fun like these evaporate faster than flaming vodka on a Christmas Pudding, so I end up catching as many of them as I can, then sending the original files away and forcing myself to suspend the inner critic.

The version on the right has had some Photoshop editing. The fundamental lighting hasn’t changed at all. I’ve just tried to tone down some of the more objectionable aspects, and tidy up the rushed composition by cropping it, to see if I could “improve” things. It’s a kind of re-balance, the visual equivalent of an audio re-mix. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. Please choose whichever picture you prefer: we all see things differently.

The arty bits I did purely for myself. I was particularly taken with this beautifully constructed owl lantern.

Accentuate warm colours

Arriving at work at much the same time each morning throughout the year could be boring, if it weren’t for the changing seasons delivering different lighting conditions on a daily basis.

This morning the orange sun flamed down from a clear, pale, blue sky, raking amber warmth across frosted grassland.

I set my camera to capture something of the glowing lighting effects I could see all around me. Selecting the white balance icon for “cloudy”, I forced the camera to adjust its internal sense of colour, tricking it into expecting a colder, more blue illumination than that which was really there. Yes: I cheated, simply for effect, deliberately recording the golden light as even warmer than it really was.

Why not explore some of those unfamiliar menus in your camera from time to time? Try out different colour balance settings. Discover what happens. Always sticking with those automatic program functions can seriously damage your picture-making health.

Foreground interest

There are often times when I need to be free from toting a bag full of heavy camera gear, so I set off with a small point-and-shoot in my pocket instead. It’s a fantastic little camera, capable of conjuring picture-making magic, but there are times when I wish its lens would zoom out wider.

The art of compromise is to make the best of what you have. One of the tricks I employ when photographing people in their working environment is to add some foreground interest. Dave and I, when we're in three-letter acronym mood, refer to this as “including a bit of FGI”.

Including a bit of foreground interest is a time-tested technique used regularly by professional photojournalists. It's a way of squeezing a lot into a single shot, and, as you see here, the exaggerated perspective, produced by getting in low and close, generates the illusion that the lens is just a bit wider than it really is. Once you do this, you’ll be using one of the very basic items in the visual tool kits of world-famous documentary photographers. Take a look, for example, at what Sebastião Salgado does with it, when he wants to.

In summer, I was delighted to have discovered the watercolours of Artist in Residence Christopher Ware, in his studio gallery at Levisham Station, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I was impressed by the way he had captured some atmospheric light in one particular interior scene, which immediately reminded me of the very happy days when, as a small boy, my granddad, who was a steam engine driver, would take me to see working locomotives at close quarters. I then believed they were alive. I do still.

Chris’ painterly talents combined some of my favourite childhood memories with my lifelong passion for observing the behaviour of light, which is why I journeyed north a couple of weeks ago, to fulfill an earlier promise I'd made to meet him, then treat myself to one of his high quality Giclée prints.

Silhouettes

Simple objects can often benefit from being presented purely as shapes, devoid of distracting detail, stencilled darkly against a brighter background.

Most automatic point-and-shoot digital cameras will let you make a silhouette very easily. There's usually some kind of target area in the middle of the viewing screen, for fixing focus and exposure. My tiny camera has a black rectangle, which turns green when the electronics decide that everything is ready for me to take the picture.

The trick with a silhouette is to fool the camera a little. Instead of putting the whole clothes peg into that target area, I placed the clouds next to the sun there instead. Keeping the shutter button only half-way down made the camera lock onto the brightest part of subject, forcing the pegs to become much darker as a result. It's rather like making the camera squint against the light.

I made sure I also kept a small edge of one peg in there, which meant that the lens focussed near, keeping the pegs sharper than the far-away sky. Then I held that pressure, moving the camera to compose the picture I wanted. Pressing the button fully down captured the effect I'd created.

As with so many of these techniques, it's much quicker to do than explain. Why not try it?

Different point of view

A brief experiment, just to see if I can avoid having to repeat myself.

Comments please: easier reading for you, or not?

Fixing focus

Cathy asked me at work today if I’d “seen the window”. She’s a teacher who manages, among other things, a reading and reference library in a specialist college for young people who have little or no sight. That's no mean feat: the final Harry Potter tome expands to eleven volumes in Braille –- but I digress. Cathy’s a bit of a wordsmith herself, so I guessed straight away that she was talking about something unusual.

At first, from a distance, I saw a white blur on one of the double-glazed panes, the sort of mark an errant football might have made. When I got near enough, I was surprised to see the perfect imprint of a bird. It had been frozen in flight, the outline of its wing, body and beak traced delicately by what I assumed was dust, flung off in the violent collision.

Making the close-up picture you see below jogged my memory about a conversation I’d had recently. It was with an experienced professional photographer. He commented on the limitations of many point-and-shoot cameras. The problem facing me here was a common enough one: how could I force the automatic focussing to select the transparent foreground, when all it wanted to do was travel much further outside, rendering the more distant background tree leaves and fruit sharp, instead of the nearer feathery pattern.

In needed to find something in the same vertical plane as the ghostly pigeon. So I pointed the camera off to one side, gently squeezing the shutter release button only half-way down, deliberately locking focus onto the window frame. Then I rearranged my composition slightly. The laws of optics were satisfied, so I pressed the shutter release all the way down, to capture the sharp image I wanted.

Practicing this technique will also save you from making useless pictures of blurry animals behind pin-sharp wire fencing on those family trips to the wild life park.