The Break of Dawn

Getting Out ad Shooting–

One of the best things that came out of the digital era is the fact that it’s now so easy and convenient to put things together. You can have everything you’ve written down archived in a hard drive and then collate everything for a collection.

Erick Lirios

If you really look at Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography Book 1 (DPB1), you’ll notice that it’s a series of tips. For less than Php700 at your nearest National Bookstore, that’s a real steal and here’s why: To get tips like these all in one nifty and compact volume just wasn’t possible before.

There weren’t that many books around that dealt with different tips. Most books concentrated on the basics (there are John Hedgecoe’s excellent books for starters) and it was really up to the magazines to deal with tips. Popular Photography and Petersen’s Photographic had a lot of these and many subscribers looked to these and other titles for real world advice. People like Bob Krist, R.Ian Lloyd, Art Wolfe, and so many others made these magazines worth the price. But if you’re not a person who likes reading too many ads and making like Pavlov’s famous canine, salivating while looking at the newest lens or camera body, you do eventually realize that a good part of your hard-earned (or hard weaseled out of your parents) money actually goes into buying information that’s hardly useful for you. Perhaps that’s one of the best things about books, they do tend to be more focused on just what you may need.

Going back to Kelby’s DPB1, you notice that the chapters deal with what most people like shooting – weddings, landscapes, travel, sports and, of course, people. What’s more is that it progresses quite logically, starting off with the basics of what a person needs to bring first in general. Most people normally get easily bogged down by “more complicated” subject matter like people because these tend to be a bit difficult to control, having their own mind and all. There are some people who insist on giving tips on how to shoot them arguing that they do have a good side, for example.

So, as shown in last week’s entry, there’s a section on shooting flowers. Flowers are patient and they just sit there and are just beautiful without having had botox, too much make-up and fake pouting lips. If one flower already has one petal dried up, you just move to another petal. You can’t do that with people. If you have a client or a client’s guest (and some of them think they can push you around – some not all) who insists on getting shot again and again, without giving you any new look or smile, this can get tedious but you have to continue smiling and shooting while making sure you do still shoot what the real client wants. Flowers are, thus, one of the favorite subjects of many photography enthusiasts.

Next are weddings. You get invited to weddings of friends and relatives and this is the perfect opportunity to get your skills honed. After all, you can’t shoot flowers forever. Without becoming a professional (yet), a person can get a taste of what professionals get for creative material in weddings – the abubot (rings, invites, the cord, the souvenirs), the gown, the Bible and, oh, flowers. Tons of them. Kelby has enough tips about weddings to get a person started and they really do make sense. Many people get all lazy and bump up their ISOs to something like 1600 or more (My camera has it so why not use it?) not even bothering to notice that there’s now so much more noise in the shot. This is true regardless of the camera. If you think your camera has very clean shots at 1600, have you ever considered what it could do at ISO 400 or at 100? Don’t be lazy, please. That’s why Kelby, in one of his early points said not to bump up the ISO even when things get dark.

After weddings come landscapes and it’s here that he makes a very interesting point – yes, use a wide-angle lens but consider shooting landscapes and panoramas by stitching five or six photos together. If you’ve ever shot a landscape using a wide-angle, you will notice that when you zoom in 100% on your LCD or at the computer that there are details that lack definition. The reason is simple: You were asking a finite set of pixels to record everything in a very big scene. It’s actually possible that you were asking two pixels right next to each other to render maybe two leaves – one pixel for one leaf. With leaves, this may still be tolerable but what if you were trying to shoot something with very important details? The solution is not to zoom out but instead zoom in. Divide a scene into four, five or even six segments, one next to the other and then shooting each of these in turn. Of course, the best way to do this is to shoot using a tripod and Kelby makes this very clear. One thing he doesn’t mention though is that this is better done with a tripod head that allows you to move the camera along a rail so you don’t get that distortion if you just pan from left to right using your tripod’s pan-tilt or ball head.

One of the reasons so many people get frustrated with their landscape shots is that they don’t shoot at any other time than when there’s a lot of sunlight. The result is usually a bland shot with flat and nigh colorless lighting. Kelby makes a good point of saying things like, “Atmosphere is Your Friend.” Photographers have to deal with creating atmosphere and here, he makes short work of getting to the gist of the topic.

By next week, the last entry on this volume so we can finally look at volume 2!