insights into photography
Cambridge in Colour is just one of the best sites for HDR tutorials but it also has some of the most in depth tutorials covering all the areas of photography. If you really want to understand your photography Sean McHugh’s site should be a major bookmark on your browser. Over this holiday period maybe you should take an hour or two and get some real learning in. He has broken his tutorials down into sections to match your existing skills, if you don’t know where to start then I guess start at the beginning. Today the links are for beginners. If you prefer you could take one of our courses, I would recommend our Understanding your DSLR camera, dates for next term are on our site
These are a good place to start if you’re looking to understand fundamental concepts and basic came
Camera Exposure: Aperture, ISO & Shutter Speed
Image Histograms: Tones & Contrast
Camera Lenses: Focal Length & F-Stop
©Ana Cura Intermediate Photography Course 2011
Let me direct you back to Cambridge In Colour, a really great website with excellent tutorials. It looks as if they have made their web site even easier to navigate and have arranged their tutorials by type, here is a list of their camera based tutorials
In class when teaching Understanding Your Digital SLR camera I am often asked why does the zoom lens I bought with my camera say f3.5-f5.6 and why does it vary when I zoom. There is a simple explanation to this but this answer on the digitalphotography lifetips site says it all so if you want to know have a look here
This is a really useful article from Jim Harmer at Improve Photography. Regularly in the classes I teach I find people who are so absorbed by shallow depth of field that they fail to see that some of the most important parts of their image are out of focus.
“I get it. Depth of field is fun to play with and makes our pictures look amazing, but I’m here to say that more of a good thing is not always better.
Look at the image featured on this page of my beautiful wife, Emily. The depth-of-field adds to this image to make her stand off the page; however, this image suffers from too shallow depth of field. The depth of field was only about two inches in this picture because I used an aperture of f/1.8, a 50mm lens, and I was only two or three feet away from the subject. You can see that part of her face is out of the plane of focus, and that is a bit distracting. What I really wanted was to make her completely in focus and just blur out the background. You might not be able to tell this on the small preview of the image, but it’s obvious if you click to make it big. This post is for those of you who always crank the aperture down to the lowest number available.”…interested?...more
Too shallow depth of field – Jim Harmer’s mistake
A lot is spoken of when considering a portrait lens, that is a lens specifically designed for portraiture rather than a lens that could suitably be used for portrait photography. The tradition is for a portrait lens (when used on a 35mm film camera or on a full frame digital slr Canon 5DMk2 Nikon D700 etc.) to have a focal length between 85mm and 105mm. Naturally though you can use a lens of any focal length to take portraits if you wish. Portrait lenses also have a wide maximum aperture e.g. the Canon 85mm is F1.2. This article from BJP describes and reviews 6 lenses that are designed for the purpose.
If you do not have a full frame digital camera, say a Canon 500D or a Nikon D3000 you can still benefit from a portrait lens and do so while spending little money. Most non-full frame digital cameras have a smaller image capture chip and so any lens used offers a higher focal length than that stated on the lens itself. Generally a coefficient of about 1.6 is applied, so a standard 50mm F1.8 lens is actually a 80mm F1.8 lens, almost perfect for the job. The Canon 50mm F1.8 is only £90, the Nikon version is about £125. These lenses are not featured in this review but well worth checking out, there will also be F1.4 and maybe F1.2 versions available also but for much more money. The other thing you can do to improve your portrait photography is to take our Portrait Course which starts 27th of this month
Six of the best portrait lenses – British Journal of Photography.
I enjoy reading photography blogs that are more than just technical, I like the fact that photographers are engaged, interested, visual, aware people who look to see. Tom Dinning’s blog explores subject matter beyond the obvious and raises issues that are thought provoking. In this post he posits that using a camera in auto mode releases the photographer to see better. I am not sure I completely agree with this but I do agree with Tom that it is vitally important that people interested in photography learn to see. Read this post and see if you think he has a point. Here is a brief sample of the post
“My original attempts at teaching photography revolved around the technical stuff and darkroom processing. That was because I was young and believed in the power of ‘how’ and not ‘why’ we take photographs. Many years have passes and I am a better person for it.
As my grandson would say: ‘I’m over cameras’. Sure, I can afford the best but I find myself looking more through the lens than at it. I think my images have improved as a result. So, now when I teach I talk about concepts and composition instead of aperture and focal length. Most of the time I tell my students to set their camera’s on ‘auto’ and concentrate on what they want to see in the viewfinder.”
Oxford School of Photography 