Changing perspective - how to make small look big.

A Resort in Golden, BC; left - 16 mm close to stairs.  right - 35 mm away from stairs.

You can alter the relationship between the foreground, subject, and background of a scene by changing the focal length of the lens and your position relative to the foreground.  A good example of this is in the pair of shots above.  I used an ultra-wide lens on my full frame camera for the left shot.  I set it to 16 mm (which is equivalent to about 11 mm on an aps-c sensor camera).  I also was very close to the stairs, in fact only a foot away or so.  Wide-angle lenses, especially ultra-wides, cause distortion and make the foreground look larger relative to the background.

In order to capture the image on the right, I backed up quite a distance (about 15 feet or so) and zoomed in.  With the focal length now at 35 mm the foreground was considerably smaller than before, and the background seemed to magically grow in size.  In order to fully understand the effect, notice that the bottom stair in both shots is the same.  There are four steps on the left and four on the right.  These are the same stairs.  They look so different because of the change in focal length and position.

Although brand-name full-frame ultra-wide lenses are expensive, third party ultra wides for aps-c sensor cameras are very reasonably priced.  For example, Nikon's 16 - 35 mm ultra-wide lens for full frame cameras runs around $1,500 while Sigma's 10 - 20 mm for aps-c sensor cameras costs around $530.  The Sigma lens has a relative focal length (compared to a full-frame camera) of 15-30 mm, so the Sigma lens provides a very similar field of view to the Nikon, with a tiny bit more at the long end.  However, for the economically minded, the Sigma lens represents a savings of 65% and is also much smaller and lighter.

One of the big questions to ask yourself in acquiring such a lens is, "How much will I use it?"  Spending a small fortune on an awesome lens may not be justified if it is going to sit at home in your camera bag most of the time.  Although I love brand name lenses and have never been disappointed, their cost is often prohibitive.  I get around this by buying them used, although there is a risk in that.

You will find an ultra-wide angle lens will be a welcome addition to your arsenal.  It is an especially great lens for landscapes and architecture shots.  I love how you can manipulate foreground and background relationships.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com

Fill flash on the trail.

Paul during a hike at Minnekhada.  Left no flash, right fill flash added.

I have spoken about the benefits of fill flash before, but its value is so often forgone that it is well worth repeating.  Flash can make an enormous difference in many situations, even if the camera isn't suggesting its use.  In full auto mode, the camera will often pop the flash up when a low light situation is detected.  In other modes you may see a sign inside the viewfinder or on the LCD screen indicating that flash is warranted.  In automatic modes the flash is directly controlled by the camera and often cannot be suppressed or raised in contrary situations.  This is one of the reasons I so strongly suggest learning to use semi-automatic modes like aperture or shutter priority.  I often use manual mode as it provides even more control.

The trick with using flash though is very much dependent on the nature of the existing lighting, the camera, and the settings it is at.  It can be all very technical, but we can look at this from a more simplified perspective.  Shaded areas (such as the situation above), open areas on cloudy days, and indoors are all times when using your built-in flash can make a difference.  Brighter environments often benefit from a more powerful external flash, especially in cameras with a flash synch speed.

The second thing is to be closer to your subject rather than farther away.  Generally, this means keeping focal lengths.  A wide angle or mild telephoto setting will work better than zooming in more because it allows lower apertures to be used and deeps the flash-to-subject distance within the working distance of the flash.

Keep the aperture low.  Smaller apertures means the flash has to work harder; since built-in flashes have a relatively low amount of power ("brightness"), the lower the aperture number the easier it is for the flash to light something up.

Increasing ISO can improve flash distance, but it will only work with electronic shutter cameras, especially in bright situations.  In dim circumstances, a higher ISO will always allow your flash to go further.  As it gets brighter, especially with mechanical shutter cameras (DSLRs), increasing ISO has no effect.  An external flash is the only way to go in these cases.

Using a flash to fill a scene is easy.  Pop the flash up and take a picture.  If the flash won't come up, you will have to switch to a mode where it is allowed.  Portrait mode often works.  I will often take two pictures as you see above.  One with flash and one without.  Sometimes the flash makes no difference - so what is there to lose?  Other times though it makes a huge difference.  Aren't you glad you tried?

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com

Telephoto lenses and backgrounds.

Tiger lily; same flower but shot from slightly different positions.

Focal length relates to the power or magnification of the lens.  A "normal" lens makes the foreground and background appear to be the same relative sizes.  A wide angle lens distorts the foreground and makes it look larger relative to the background than it does to your eyes (aka normally).  A telephoto lens makes the background larger relative to the foreground; it "compresses" the scene and makes it appear that the background is closer than what it actually is. 

It is this compression that I am talking about today.  As you zoom your lens in to magnify a subject you will notice that the background becomes progressively smaller.  You are enlarging both the subject and the background.  If you magnify the image by a factor of 2x the background decreases in its area by a factor of 4x (square of the magnification).  This had the advantage of being able to zoom in as much as you want and to control how much of the background you see.  More zooming means less background.  The tradeoff here though is that you have to be farther away from your subject because zooming in increases its size.

The beauty of this relationship is that, with increased magnification, you have greater control of what is behind your subject.  In the above photos of a tiger lily, I was back quite a distance and was using a relative focal length of 600 mm to magnify the subject.  That focal length also minimized the size of the background.  The nice thing here is that it was easy to pick what I wanted it to look like.  A small movement on my part produced a great relative movement of the background and allowed me to go from a mixed white and green background (right) to a fully green one (left). 

A property of zooming in has to do with depth of field; more focal length means less depth of field at any given aperture.  In a situation where an out of focus background is desired a longer focal length will be preferred.  If you want lots of background and depth of field stay with a wide angle setting on your camera.  You will not be able to affect the nature of the background though without major changes in position.  If you want a small area in the background that is blurred zoom in.  Small changes in your position will produce a major change to what is happening behind the subject.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com

The benefits of RAW.

The Highway 7 bridge between Mission and Abbotsford

Sometimes my images just come out all wrong.  In the above photo, I had unintentionally underexposed the photograph.  The top shot is how the unprocessed raw image.  You can tell by looking at the histogram (top right) that it is underexposed because the graph is pressed up against the left side while the right side has no data at all.  If you look at the slider controls below the histogram, they are all set to "0".  This means no changes have been made to the file.

The lower image is the same as the top one, but the slider controls have been altered.  The histogram now has a nice balance across the whole graph, and no end is empty or has data bars jumping off.  The image is clearly better.  Raw images are very flexible when it comes to altering an exposure.  This is because there is data present which would normally be lost when shooting jpegs.  This isn't to say that you cannot make changes on jpeg files, it is just that you will lose details in shadow and highlight areas which raw files will retain.

This doesn't mean that exposure doesn't matter.  You always want to do the best job you can in making an image.  Each error in making the image affects the final outcome, even if there is a certain amount of latitude.  Noise, fine detail distinction, and contrast are all adversely altered. 

The disadvantages of a raw file over the ubiquitous jpeg are many.  Raw images are larger, require post processing, and often are not readable without the correct software.  Raw files created by newer cameras may not be supported in older software, meaning that you will have to rely on conversion software such as Adobe's DNG Converter to access them.  All these issues pale in comparison though to their benefits.

Raw files give the user much greater control in colour balance, sharpening, and selecting the correct amount of image correction on a picture by picture basis instead of having to alter these values in camera.  There are fewer artifacts due to the lack of compression.  I especially love the greater latitude as mentioned above.

Keep in mind that not all raw files are the same.  I have found that compacts sporting raw capability do not measure up to the image quality produced by larger sensor cameras.  In general, it can be said that larger sensor raw images are superior to similar pictures created by smaller sensor cameras.  This is especially true once you drop below a 2:1 crop factor.