Aerial Vantage Points in Europe

When you travel to Europe, many of the best vantage points can be gained from climbing medieval clock towers. Many of the old towns have them, and this is one of the things I seek out every time I travel to any of the European countries. The picture you see here was taken in Tallinn, Estonia.

The climb to the top of these towers is enervating, especially with photo gear, because they are usually between 300 and 400 steps, but it's well worth the effort. I like to go as early or late as possible to take advantage of low angled sunlight, but in this particular case the day was overcast. I enhanced the saturation of the color in Photoshop to compensate for the dull weather. In addition, I used the graduated neutral density function in Adobe Camera RAW to put a gradient of color in the sky.

Making the Sun Huge

You can make the sun seem disproportionately large -- and therefore a powerful element in a composition -- by using a long lens. The longer the lens, the larger the sun will be. The semi-silhouette sunrise shot you see here was taken on a photo safari in Kenya last year. I used a 500mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me an effective 700mm lens.

This complicates the exposure, though, especially when the sun is placed in or near the center of the frame. The meter isn't programmed to understand such a brilliant highlight. However, when you see the image in the LCD monitor on the back of the camera, it's an easy matter to adjust the exposure compensation feature plus or minus to tweak the exposure until you like what you see.

I'm leading a photo tour again to East Africa in June, 2010, this time to Tanzania. Contact me if this might interest you. There is no photography quite as exciting as an African safari.

Outdoor Portraits

One of the best things you can do in taking pictures of people outdoors is to throw the background out of focus. It needs to be so out of focus, in fact, that it's completely undefined. This is best done with a telephoto lens and a large lens aperture. Unless you are going for a very different look (such as using a wide angle for an exaggerated perspective), I would suggest using a 200mm telephoto or longer for pictures of people outside.

In addition, shoot them in the shade. Don't have any direct sunlight on them at all, and the background needs to be shaded as well. This means that their eyes will be open fully and you won't have any harsh contrast to deal with.

These two simple ideas will make a world of difference in your outdoor portraiture.

Wet Pavement at Night

When I am shooting cities at night or twilight, I'm always happy if there is a light rain or drizzle. The wet pavement or cobblestone glistens and reflects all the lights, and it enhances the photography considerably. It's necessary to protect camera gear from the water, of course, but the hassle of that is well worth getting great images.

The picture you see here was taken in the old town of Krakow, Poland. You can see how much more attractive this image is because the street was wet.



I now carry with me a microfiber cloth to wipe the water drops of the lens, and I use a clear shower cap to protect the camera. I find them in many hotel rooms, and they have an elastic band that goes over the camera and it hugs the body and a portion of the lens. You can see all the controls and work with them, and at the same time most of the rain stays off the camera.

Implying motion

Last autumn when I was in New England, I was working on producing a DVD on my shooting technique (due out within a couple of weeks) and the producer of the project was driving. I watched the beautiful trees passing by and thought they might be interesting to shoot with a slow shutter speed, so using speeds in the range of 1/15 to 1/60 I captured a lot of motion blurred images.

Last weekend when I photographed the classic cars in Lexington, Kentucky, I thought about using one of them behind the hood of a 1938 Packard. I got down low and shot upward on the car with a 24mm wide angle, and using the cut and paste technique with the pen tool in Photosop, I placed the abstracted foliage in the background. I think the results look pretty cool -- it's as if I had mounted a camera on the car and drove down the street using a long shutter speed.

Classic Cars

Last weekend I photographed the Concourse de Elegance in Lexington, Kentucky. It was very exciting to see so many stunning vintage cars, but photographically it wasn't even close to an ideal situation. The backgrounds were busy and unattractive, and of course there were hundreds of people milling around the cars.

To deal with this situation, I photographed the cars with the thought in mind that I would replace the backgrounds entirely. When I got home, I meticulously cut out the cars with the pen tool in Photoshop and then I selected backgrounds from my photo library. The cars were originally shot on grass, and that helped me merge the foreground with the new background.



If you don't know how to use the pen tool, it's an essential tool that allows you to create perfect composites. I explain how to use it on my Photoshop DVDs, and while it takes time to separate a subject from its background, it is the most accurate method to use.

FRAMED PRESENTATION

If you want to propose a gallery exhibition or if you want to present your work for sale on-line, considering framing it. Not with a digital frame but with a real one. Photograph frames that appeal to you and then use Photoshop to insert any of your images. It makes a striking presentation, and it can show a client what the image could look like.

Make sure that you photograph the frame when you are standing dead-center in the middle of it. If you don't do this, it will appear skewed. Of course, you can correct that in Photoshop by using Select > all and then Edit > transform > distort.

Graphic shapes

I worked very hard to get a good shot of this butterfly in Slovakia. It was very windy, and the grasses were blowing all over the place. Every once in a while there would be a lull in the wind and that's when I was able to shoot the picture you see at right.

In my on-line courses, I get a lot of butterfly pictures to critique. These insects are very challenging to photograph, and one of the reasons is that depth of field is usually limited in the field. Wings that should be sharp often aren't. Another reason is that the graphic shape of the wings are everything. If they are angled in an unattractive manor, they just won't look good.

Compare these two images. In the first one, the wings are nicely spread out and -- this is important -- I positioned the camera so the back of it was parallel with the plane of the wings. This gave me a lot more depth of field than had I angled the camera to be oblique with the plane of the butterfly's wings. In the second shot, the right fore- and hindwings were closer to the lens than the body and the wings on the left side, and due to the shallow depth of field I was forced to use, the foreground wings are not sharp. To my way of thinking, this makes the second picture not successful.

Notice the background, too. In the first picture, it is nicely blurred and it makes a very attractive backdrop. In the second shot, it's much more obtrusive. That one diagonal stem that is seen in the upper portion of the frame is quite distracting.