Photography chat thread - for all who are into Photography in whatever form

[Selks]

Just starting a thread for all folk who are into photography - whether you are a happy snapper wanting to improve, a serious shooter, or somewhere in between.

Lets chat on here, share tips, techniques, dilemmas, ideas, show our photos if we want to, discuss cameras and equipment, support and encourage each other.....or just chat whatever photography related chat you might feel like!

It's lovely to see people's photos, especially the landscapes and nature photographs, I am really bad at nature and landscape photography so I am very impressed by those of you who can!

These are some of mine, instrigrammed and taken on my phone unfortunately

As you can see there is a theme ;)

Lots of great pics... I am not good with portraits!

A couple of mine....Winter full moon, and a Summer one too. The second one is the view from the top bedroom.

Ooooh! Found you. I'll pop on the computer later and add a couple of photos. It's great to see such nice work from others.

Ikea, no apologies needed for using your phone! Just goes to show it's not necessarily about fancy camera gear. Those photos are awesome....I love the baby by the stream; magical. And the watermelon one!

Catsmama; beautiful.

Thanks Selks.

With landscapes the general rules are:

• rule of thirds - your camera may have a 3x3 grid on the LCD in live view mode, or possibly in your viewfinder. Keep points of interest on the lines of the grid (or close to them), rather than central in the frame.

• have some foreground interest in the bottom left or right hand third, anything will do, a rock, flower, camera bag, person etc, this gives an idea of depth to the image.

• if there is a path, road, rail, natural straight line (farm track through a planted field, hedgerow) etc then use this as a lead in line from the bottom corner of your shot - your eye will naturally follow it to the focal point of the image.

• shoot during the golden hour. This is the period of warm soft light around sunrise and sunset. If you can't shoot at this time, try for a cloudy day, rather than in bright overhead sunlight.

• use a sturdy tripod. I like to keep mine low to the ground, I rarely open the legs up, so it is usually less than 3 feet high. But that is very much a personal preference. A decent tripod is expensive (I have a cheap manfrotto and manfrotto ball head, it cost me £150 back in 2008, you can spend upto £1k on them, if not more). The rule of thumb when buying is pick two of the three things you want from: cheap, light weight, sturdy, as you cannot get all three.

• play about with filters. I have a set of ND (neutral density) grads, full ND filters and a circular polariser. Buy decent quality ones to not affect the quality of your photos. Lee are the best, but cost £100 or so each, Cokin are ok (they used to have a magenta cast to the darker ND's years ago, I don't know if this is now resolved), hi-tech are mid range and mid priced. Hoya are a decent brand for circular polarisers. All the shots I posted (apart from the night sky) had a circular polariser and at least 1, maybe 2 ND grads. The polariser makes the sky and clouds more contrasty and reduces glare / reflection from water. The ND grads have a dark bit at the top, line this up with where the sky meets the land or the sea and it allows you to expose for the land without blowing out (over exposing) the sky.

• use your timer or a remote shutter to take the photo so you don't wobble the camera. If your tripod is a bit precarious (eg on loose shale etc), use the mirror lock up function so you don't get vibrations due to mirror slap. If your tripod has a hook underneath it, hang your bag on it to help steady the tripod a bit more.

• if there isn't an obvious focal point, then focus in the mid distance. Typically you would use an aperture of f8 to f16 for landscapes to allow a large depth of field. Don't go too small with your aperture as you start to get diffraction which affects your picture quality.

That is all I can think of right now. The rule of thirds and shooting in the best light applies to pretty much all photography (using flash photography is either about hard directional lighting (where the shadows are of equal importance as the lit areas) or soft even light, or balancing the ambient light with flash light. Good flash photography is an art in itself).

General rules that apply to photography are:

• if you are hand holding your camera (ie not using a tripod, monopod or resting it on something), then keep your shutter speed greater than 1/focal length. So if you are using a 17-50mm lens, keep your shutter speed 1/50 or faster, similarly if you are using a 70-200 keep it over 1/200. Also keep a solid stance (elbows in, feet comfortable width apart) and regulate your breathing and shoot on a steady out breath.

• focus on the eyes of your subject. If your subject is square on to you, focus on the bridge of the nose slap bang between the eyes.

• if you are taking a photo of a child kicking a ball, a duck swimming, a car driving past etc, give it some space in front of it in the frame, so it has space to move into. It makes the image more comfortable to look at.

I can't think of any more at the moment. The basic principles of composition and exposure are the same using digital as film, so old cheap books are still worth a read. I personally like John Hedgecoe's books. Mine is from the 70's!

Catsmamma, those are beautiful. You're very lucky to have such a nice view.

Ikea, I personally like the Instagram look on photos. Plus good photography is all about your composition and light rather than expensive camera kit. Your photos are lovely!

Oh yeah, I meant to add to my landscape tips:

• there is nothing wrong with doing a pano if you can't get what you want in frame. My second shot (I think, the one of Edale from Mam Tor), was I think 9 shots stitched together (automatically) in Photoshop. The shots were taken in portrait orientation too. I have an ultra wide and lens, and I rarely use it for landscapes due to the natural distortion at the edge of the frame.

• if your photo looks a bit bland, don't be afraid to process it heavily. My shot of Stonehenge was taken on a grey and miserable day. I played about with the contrast and selective colour channels and levels and curves features until I created the slightly more dramatic effect I ended up with. Using techniques like HDR can be fun too.

Thank you so much for those landscape tips...I will read and digest those, and may well take notes on holiday with me!

Re the tripod, why would you need to use one rather than hand hold?

What programme do you use for processing? Photoshop?

Oh and do you use a UV filter?

thanks :D

Location is why I do so many landscapes! I'd love to do a course on photoshop....Picasa is my limit!

I don't know anything about any of the processing programmes / applications yet....something else to learn! Is Picasa (relatively) simple?

I'm holidaying in Scotland - Outer Hebrides - soon, am looking forwards to doing some landscape shots there. Big skies and open spaces

Tripods are better than hand holding as even the steadiest person will struggle to hold a camera still for half a second or more! If you are using filters you can faff about with them easily without altering your composition. You can set your camera up for the composition you like, then sit and wait for the light to become nice (eg shaft of light breaking through the clouds, nice shadow patterns etc). To get consistently really good landscape shots, a tripod is a necessity to be honest.

I use photoshop CS2 at the moment. Adobe cocked up a while ago and when they discontinued support for CS2, they put the full working downloadable file on their website. It may still be there, I'm not sure. I have been using Photoshop for years, so like the way it works. There is a free package called GIMP, it is Linux based, but has PC and Mac versions too, it is almost as powerful as Photoshop, but has a different layout, which you may or may not like.

I don't use UV filters since I switched to digital. To get a decent quality one, it costs around £50 and I couldn't justify the price. Anything less than a good quality one (Hoya, kenko), will reduce the overall sharpness of your shot (you are putting a cheap piece of glass in front of your expensive calibrated lens), they can also create reflections in some conditions too. As they are no longer needed to remove the blue UV cast that affected film shots, they are only really needed in harsh environments, such as where sea spray may be a problem, or sand being blown around, or children putting sticky fingers on lenses.

The photography magazines often have good tutorials on Photoshop and it's various smaller packages (eg Elements, Lightroom etc) but there are plenty of online tutorials on how to do specific things with your specific software too.

Oh wow, your trip sounds fab! Big sky and wide open spaces are difficult to capture well though! It is very easy to end up with bland shots that have lost the grandeur and scale of the location. This is where foreground interest does become key to your photos. Think about taking a detail shot rather than just a wide angle shot. Our eyes see the world similar to a 50mm lens, anything wider than that is a distortion of what we see with the naked eye. Going wider has the effect of flattening what we see, and making things appear shorter and fatter (think about when widescreen tv's first came out!), which is where it helps to have foreground interest. Also think about taking panoramic shots. These are at least two photos side by side with a decent overlap (I aim for about 1/3). This gives you more detail per shot, so you end up with a huge file size that can equate to a massive print, but the greater level of detail can stop it looking a bit bland. There are a lot of software that will automatically stitch your images together, many have a free trial which allow you full use of the software.

Google is your friend though for big sky shots or shooting wide open spaces.

Picasa is very simple, and has quite a lot of tweaks to try, also very easy to undo

I only ever use my tripod for long exposures.....unless you want to do slow silky water shots or blurry clouds if you are snapping landscapes I wouldn't bother to take one.

I've a 50mm lens but I tend to stick with the 18-55 for most stuff....but do mess about with the focus point...as What'sIt says something interesting in the foreground can work really well, esp if you have focus on one or the other.

I really want to get up to the Islands and get some pics, especially of the old stone circles.

Just take lots of pictures and see what you like! And see what altering the settings does....it's only by tinkering that you get to see how your camera works

Interesting points, thanks. Do you think a polarising filter would be good for the big skies? Interesting that you don't favour a UV filter, I had it recommended to me to use one.
Might look into a tripod.

Sorry I haven't replied before now, been a busy day.

Selks regarding which I'd like to learn, that's a difficult question to answer, because I don't know anything - I feel like I'm starting from zero, if that makes sense. I think my composition is ok, but I think I inherited that from my dad, who was a pretty good self-taught photographer. I want to learn what my camera is capable of, and make use of it's features. I like wildlife so would like to learn to take good wildlife shots, and I live on the Isle of Man with beautiful scenery, so would like to be able to take a decent landscape or two. I have experienced to problem mentioned above somewhere, about losing the impact and grandeur of the location, and ending up with a dull, uninteresting photo of a beach on a dull day.

With no particular theme or sequence in mind, here are some of the pics I've taken that I quite like - although maybe they're really lame, I don't know. Taken on my Fuji Finepix F11.

Is that your little one? So sweet .

I think I'm coming from a similar place as you, MrsPenny, in terms of where I'm at with photography. I used to know more than I do now...I used to be half way competent with my old SLR many years ago but that was a long time ago and cameras seem so complex now.
Still, I have a lovely new camera and I'm not going to be daunted by the technical side, I will just get to know it bit by bit.

Yes, that's DD, about two years ago!

I think I can produce a pretty good shot now and then, but it's more by luck than planning, The auto function on my DSLR (Canon EOS 550) often seems a bit bright, if I'm taking pics on a sunny day they often appear over exposed - if that's even the right term! So I know I need to learn how to adjust the manual settings to account for that.

I need to read these books I have. Anyone know how to extra hours into a day? Even one would be a start.

I just point and shoot while out and about (go walking in dales/peak district/pennines pretty much every week) and would love to learn how to use my camera properly (Canon G15 now, but I think the photos below were from my earlier digital cameras) and am also going to try some of the landscape tips on here as that is what I mainly shoot.

Friends and relatives often say they love my photos, but I think it's generally the subject matter, rather than anything I'm doing.

I'm glad that a tripod is not always necessary, as I CBA carting loads of stuff around and I hate to say it, but I'm a bit baffled by the proliferation of 'giant cameras' sported by every man and his dog these days (sorry).

Lesson number one I've just learn't is that you need to compress your pics before posting them on the web, or else it takes ages to upload!

Might as well use up my daily allowance of six pics. One thing I'd love to do is take a great waterfall shot, where you can see still drops of water. I think you either need a very fast or very slow shutter shutter, but I have no idea really.

I've posted some examples of the subject matter.

Do you all take photos in jpg or do you use raw.
Dh and dcs now use raw, although the filescare bigger it is much easier to edit afterwards.Lightroom is really good for editing

I use raw.

Could never go back to jpg. Lightroom is fantastic, then I take them into photoshop and work mainly with curves.

That cyanotype process is fascinating, if complicated. Just had a read online. Do you do it the old school way, Funky, with mixing chemicals etc?

I do it both ways, mixing the chemicals and use light paper.

I am in the middle of commissioning a new structure at our community garden for a combined shed, potting area and dark room. Yippee!