A-Photo Mag

We see shadows all around us, in nature. The shadows are what help us see three dimensionally. To put that another way, the gradation from light to dark on the surfaces of objects helps us to see depth. We’ve covered that in another article with the example of a circle and a sphere, both represented on two dimensional paper. So, in the absence of shadows we see the world in a sort of two-dimensional way. That is not what shadow less lighting is all about by the way….just so you don’t get confused between the two.

By shadow less lighting, we refer to diffused light that does not cast a sharp shadow. Light that is not diffused, for example the flash light from a compact camera, casts a sharp shadow of the subject on the wall behind. That’s light that is NOT diffused. So what really causes this sharp shadow? Try this simple experiment – for this you will need a room with a bulb as well as a tube light. The bulb could well be a lamp light without a lamp shade. Now, switch on ONLY the bulb and hold your hand a few inches away from it. You see a shadow of your hand on the wall opposite. Next, switch off the bulb and switch on the tube light. Hold your hand near the tube light. No shadow! The bulb light is an example of light that is NOT diffused, and the tube light creates diffused light. The basic difference is – the bulb is a point light source (the light emanates from the filament of the bulb, which is pretty much a point source). The tube light on the other hand, is a diffused light source, meaning light does not emanate from any one point within the tube, but from all points on the surface of the tube, with equal intensity.

When you keep this simple idea of a tube and a bulb light in mind, you increase your control and understanding of diffused light, which is so often used in photography, especially in the studio environment. In reality, the tube light also creates a shadow, but a very soft one when compared to the point light source, the bulb. The shadows created by diffused light are much softer and thereby pleasing to the eyes. However, certain shoots call for the hard light of the bulb, the point light source. These may include a photo shoot that mimics the lighting from a spot light on a stage. So, let us not compartmentalize hard and soft lighting into good and bad categories, but rather get a better understanding on when and where each kind is required, and hone a better control over creating each kind of lighting artificially. In nature of course, the sun’s light is usually diffused by the clouds. However, on clear days when the clouds disappear, one can often see sharp shadows of people and objects, especially when the sun is high up at times like noon.

A photomontage is the result you get when you use two or more images to make one composite result image. Like almost everything else in today’s world, there are two ways to make a photo montage – the old fashioned ‘manual’ method, and the digital one. 

The art of photo manipulation can be traced back to the initial years of photo process discoveries. However, photo montages were first made around the time of the First World War. At this time, montages were made using the double exposure techniques, and by placing objects on contact print machines. People also found it very amusing to make postcards of different heads on different bodies! In today’s world, the most common place photo montages we see are on cinema posters. Today, montages are made on computers using Photoshop, all over the world. You could make your own montages. Maybe you have a few family images you would want to put into one single frame…the key to an acceptable montage, at least by today’s standards, is to seamlessly add images to the frame. Meaning, the images should NOT look like they’ve been ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ from elsewhere. Let us go ahead and try and make a simple photo montage of just two images.

First, decide on the print size of your final image. We made our montage of 6 by 8 inch size. Open Photoshop. Open a new file under FILE-NEW. Enter the relevant parameters of resolution and width and height  on the dialogue box that pops up. Remember, you need to set resolution (DPI) to 300 for print, and 72 for web usage. Next, select the image that you would like to use for the montage. We open the two images that we need, which gives us three image boxes on our work space – 2 photographs, and one canvas for the final image.

Next, we cut out the areas of interest from both root images, and paste them into our final image canvas area. Instead of using accurate selection tools such as the pen tool, we suggest you make simple, basic selections using something like the lasso tool. Making montages is not very hard work! Just make a basic selection outline with one motion of the mouse, and then feather the selection to something like 50 radius on a 4 by 6 300 dpi root file. If that confuses you, no sweat…simply experiment with various feather densities until you are able to get a good fade-out affect when you paste the copied image into the canvas. To recap, we

1. Select an outline
2. Feather
3. Copy-Paste into the new canvas

Do this for both (or however many images you are using) image.

We took things one step further by converting the entire image to black and white and then adding the brownish sepia touch to it (refer to our article on sepia toning to learn how you could do this).

Positioning and posing people is a vital aspect of every day snapshot photography as well as professional photography. It is true that seldom does the everyday ‘amateur’ photographer have the presence of mind, or the time to ‘wait’ for a natural photograph-friendly moment to occur. More often, we use the camera as a means to capture everyday moments on family picnics and get-togethers with friends. Here are a few tips on how you can pose people for your photography. We hope the article will be of use to you, and that you will soon be able to shoot more appealing images after reading this.

Many professionals feel that posing is more than half the ‘portrait battle’ won! Body language plays a vital role when you position the limbs and head and torso of your model(s). A chin held high spells out confidence. A chin held a little too high could, on the other hand, speak of pride. Similarly, a stooping posture could give the viewer an impression of sluggishness or depression, while a chest held out firmly tells the viewer that the model is confident and content.

Photographing and posing children is of course much more difficult than shooting images of adults, simply because kids do not respond to specific instruction as adults do. So, one needs much more patience and dedication to shoot a portrait like the one shown above. It is a great idea to ’set up’ everything other than the child, and wait for the right moment to begin clicking away. For the above shot, the photographer conveniently asked the child to lean her elbow on the bonnet of the family car, and then began conversing with the child. The hand on the bonnet forced a pose out of the child. Being the exceptionally boisterous child that Tanya is, she was not shy at all, as she laughed at all of the photographer’s jokes with zest!

Of course, it is much more difficult to photograph a child, or an adult for that matter when he or she is camera-shy. In such case it is best to pre-occupy the subject’s attention with a prop of some kind. For extremely shy people, it could well be their favorite book or magazine. In case of children, it could be their favorite toy…

A few things to remember in general - never let the background be too cluttered. Never let poles and trees ‘grow’ out of people’s heads and shoulders. Instead, it is better to lean them against the prop. Also, why not get the person’s hands to do something? Hands tend to go stiff when people are asked to pose for a photo. Again, in the above image, the child’s right hand was forced to get involved in the pose, by asking the child to take her hat off. Finally, shoot more images than you require, and select the best of the lot - to get the right expression on the subject’s face. The above image is one out of about 20 photographed one after another.

A telephoto lens is a lens which is considerably longer in focal length, compared to the ‘normal’ 50mm equivalent (on 35mm film cameras). When you use a long focal length lens, quite a few things happen - your depth of field becomes shallower (as seen in previous article), your images appear sharper as a result, the perspectives become flatter (background objects appear bigger than they do to the normal eye or the normal lens), and then you have a lot of technical mumbo jumbo to take care of as well. Lets look at some of that mumbo jumbo.

When you use a telephoto lens, your hands have to be that much steadier. This is thanks to the obvious reason that the longer the telephoto, or the focal lenght of the lens, the greater the dimensions of the lens, and the greater the difficulty of holding the thing steady. Simple physics tells us that the longer the ‘arm’ from the ‘fulcrum’, the more is the effect felt on the end of the arm when the fulcrum is disturbed. If you don’t understand that, no worries. It simply means, the longer the lens, the more chances you have of getting shaky pictures. The longest tele lens that you should brave hand-held would be the 300mm. Here is a rule to swear by - make sure your shutter speed is at least the inverse of the focal length. There is no hard and fast technical logic behind this, but it is simply a convenient way of determining a rough minimum shutter speed setting, as a mental note. For instance, if you are shooting on the 200mm setting of a zoom lens, you will need to have a minimum shutter speed of 1/200 sec. However you will in all probability still have a negligible amount of shake on your images, only visible to the trained eye, or on enlarged prints. To get a brilliantly sharp image, always use a tripod with your telephoto lenses. Some lenses are so heavy they need their own tripods.

This image of a homeless man was photographed in Bombay, using a tele lens. Notice that the sizes of the people’s legs behind him appear the same size as his own legs. This would not have been the case if the image was photographed on a wide angle lens. Moreover, a negligible amount of shake is visible, which means the image cannot really be enlarged to say more than 6×4. But of course it was a candid image, so the photographer had no time to set his camera on a tripod. Anyway, what is to be demonstrated by this image is the flattened perspectives of telephoto lenses.

To put things in a nutshell,

Tele lenses flatten perspectives

They gave shallow depth of fields

They need higher shutter speeds (to avoid shake) if hand-held

Very long focal length telephoto lenses are used for wildlife and sports photography

Extreme telephoto lenses are expensive and bulky!

Like most things in today’s world, there are two approaches to blurring out the background on your photographs - the classic method that is more difficult to master, but more rewarding at the same time; and the modern quick-fix digital method. It is good to be aware of both. But here we shall focus on the classic photographic techniques and leave the digital version to a later tutorial. The reason is, the digital version is a mimicry of the classic, so you would do well to be aware of the camera techniques.

Blurring out an area in front of or behind the subject is a very useful tool when you want to isolate your subject for obvious reasons. You understand how this is done when you understand the depth of field of the lens at the given aperture. As we know, an aperture determines the diameter of lens opening. The greater the aperture, the more light enters the camera and affects exposure. However, exposure is not the only effect of the aperture of a lens. Apertures also have a direct impact on the depth of field of the lens. When you focus on an object using your lens focusing ring (or on auto focus as may be the case), there is an area in front of the subject as well as behind the subject that are both ‘in focus’ up to a point. Objects in front of the subject will gradually fall more out of focus the closer they are to you (and the further they are from the point of focus). This gradual change in the sharpness or ‘unsharpness’ of objects is what we call the depth of field or ‘d.o.f.’ of the lens at the given aperture. When you are able to get your backgrounds (or foregrounds) out of focus at will, you have become a better photographer. But don’t forget to make an appropriate change in shutter speed to compensate for the increased amount (or decreased amount) of light that is allowed to enter the lens, with the change in aperture.

Take for example, the above image. It made a batter photograph to have the background out of focus. For this, the photographer used a large aperture. Another factor which has an impact of depth of field is the focal length of the lens. A longer focal length (’zoomed in’ for the beginners) produces a shallower depth of field. A 300mm telephoto lens was used to photograph the sample image of a bird in the hands of its rescuer. A wide angle lens has the exact opposite affect and produces a larger depth of field - directly proportional to the ‘wideness’ or shorter focal length. So - the shorter the lens focal length the more the depth of field, the longer the focal length the less depth of field. Also - the larger the aperture the less the depth of field, the smaller the aperture…you get the picture. Use focal length and aperture to control your d.o.f.

The famous black and white photographer Ansel Adams (recognized particularly for his zone system and landscape photography) coined the term visualization in the world of photography. To understand black and white composition (or color for that matter) it is extremely important to be aware of what visualization truly means. To put it simply, visualization refers to imagining the final print of the photograph in your mind, before you even press the shutter or plan on your exposure for that matter. It is not as simple as one may believe it to be. The fact is, it is not merely a reproduction of the scene in front of you that you always want on your photographs. You would want to get creative with your depth of field, you may want a certain shade to appear darker than what you see etc. Add to that the fact that you will need to visualize the scene (in fact the print of the final image) in black and white, and that is not something every one of us will be able to do with ease. It is imperative that a black and white photographer learn to see or visualize his or her images in shades of gray rather than in color. Some may find it easy to do so, and some may need time to hone their skills of visualizing. But do remember - visualization is much more important with black and white, although it is required in professional color photography as well.

So, when you compose your image, we see that the first thing you need to do is visualize the final print. Next, you will want to get your exposure readings. While it may seem that exposure is more to do with lighting that with composition, it is not so in black and white photography. The point from where you take your exposure readings can make all the difference to your final print, and you have more of a latitude with black and white film than with color film or digital cameras. Another great plus point while shooting in black and white (film) is the fact that color filters have an effect of darkening out complimentary colors and lightening the same color(as the filter).

In the simpler sense of the word composition, try and find subjects where you have extremes in brightness levels (NOT complimentary color). For example, a scene with strong lighting from one side, and strong shadow on the other would make a very special black and white print. Try shooting portraits against window light and you will see exactly what we mean.

When you begin to play with light and shade on black and white, you will soon see that it has much more of an effect on monotone than on color. A ‘good’ black and white print, it is often said, will have both the extremes of the gray tone - black and white - and a good deal in between. More on the tones later.