Does it improve my composition and technique? No. But knowing this stuff can be helpful. For example, when I want to shoot a landscape at 70mm and f/5.6 will my corners be sharper with my 24-70 f/2.8 or a 70-200 f/2.8? Or which will have less distortion for an architectural shot (since I hate the resolution loss of correcting distortion in post), my 35mm f/1.4 or my 24-70 zoom at 35mm? (Surprisingly, the answer is my zoom.)

This kind of information is easy to find. DxoMark has nice graphs for each lens that show distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and resolution at various focal lengths and apertures for each lens they test. SLRgear.com has a nice pop-up app that shows the resolution across the field of the lens at various apertures and focal lengths.  The Digital Picture has great pop-ups that let you compare two lenses side-by-side for flare, distortion, vignetting and even images of ISO 12233 crops.

A lot of people use those tools when deciding which lens to buy. I use them after I have the lens so I know how to best use it.

 Resolution Maps

One thing that I’ve started using more frequently in post processing is a resolution map of the lens. We all know that every lens has highest resolution in the center and less in the corners. But the pattern of sharpness is different for different lenses.

Some lenses have a high peak of resolution right in the center that quickly drops off. Others maintain significantly high resolution halfway to the corners and then drop like a rock. Others have a rather linear drop-off from the center to the corners.

Just as an example, below are 6 Imatest charts showing MTF50 of 6 different lenses across the field of view. The absolute resolution numbers aren’t important for this demonstration, rather it’s the pattern of how the resolution changes. For each lens, yellow is the highest MTF50, blue is about 1/3 the value of yellow.

Why Does it Matter?

There are a lot of reasons, of course. But one I use a lot is creating sharpening maks for postprocessing. Like a lot of people, I use a masked layer for sharpening, applying less sharpening to the already sharp center of the image, and more sharpening to the softer areas. Instead of just a generic oval, I try to make a mask that mirrors the resolution map of the lens I’m shooting with.

I keep masks as actions for my most commonly used lenses, which speeds up postprocessing considerably. For example, I’d use something like the first mask, below, for images shot with the lens on the upper left above, and the second mask for middle right lens above.

As an example I’ll use two 100% crops from the left edge of this snapshot.

The crop on the left shows what that edge looks like when I sharpened the entire image to give best center sharpness. The crop on the right was when I used a mask to use stronger sharpening, but only at 50% strength in the center of the image. With either technique the center looked the same, but the edges were quite different.

Of course you can simply use an oval mask and adjust it for each image with a bit of trial and error. But I had 500 vacation photos to go through. Since 75% of them were taken with one lens at the same aperture, saving an action with the appropriate sharpening made that quick and easy.

You don’t need Imatest to figure out the sharpness pattern for the lenses you have. A simple photograph of a flat wall or fence with reasonable detail (bricks or unpainted wood are nice) will let you see where each lens starts to soften and by how much. Once you’ve made a good mask for that lens you have it forever. For most lenses, the same mask can be used at different apertures – you simply reduce the strength of the layer if you’ve shot stopped down. For other lenses, though, like my Zeiss 50mm f/1.4, you will need to make masks for different apertures.

Uwe Steinmueller at OutbackPhoto.net and I have been doing a series of articles trying to show how a little gear head knowledge and a little post-processing knowledge compliment each other and help make better images, and this is a great opportunity for that. Uwe’s article and action for corner sharpening, provide a nice photographic demonstration of how sharpening with a mask improves your end result, and a nice script with an adjustable mask.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

April, 2012

Important aspects of Human Vision

Because we present our work to other people it is important to understand some basic aspects about how we perceive detail.

Human vision works quite differently than our cameras:

• We all know that our eyes adapt to scenes. If it is darker our pupils open and if it gets brighter they close. This process often takes quite a while and is not instant.
• Detail we see is based on contrast (brightness differences)

Contrast

All detail we can see is not based on absolute tonal values but based on contrast. The eye is extremely sensitive to very small brightness changes. This makes the concept of contrast so important.

Global Contrast

Global contrast measures the brightness difference between the darkest and brightest element in the entire image. Tools like Curves and Levels only change global contrast as they treat all pixels with the same brightness levels identical.

The global contrast has three main regions:

• Mid-tones
• Highlights
• Shadows

The sum of the contrast amounts of these three regions defines the global contrast. This means if you spend more global contrast on the mid-tones (very commonly needed) you can spend less global contrast on highlights and shadows at any given global contrast level.

The mid-tones normally show the main subject. If the mid-tones show low contrast the image lacks “snap”. Adding more global contrast to the mid-tones (“snap”) often results in compressed shadows and highlights. Adding some local contrast (see next) can help to improve the overall image presentation.

Good lenses can improve the contrast too. This may not always be welcome if the scene is very contrasty.

Finding the “right” amount of contrast is tricky. Lets show some samples (diagonal split view).

Both show the same image at a different contrast level. The upper right part looks hazy in comparison. But also the comparison is a problematic tool because the more contrasty version will always grab your attention (compare images printed on matte and glossy papers).

Because the more contrasty version grabs your attention does not mean it really looks better. Be careful not to add too much contrast. If you print on matte papers more contrast may actually be a good thing because the print on matte paper will soften the contrast quite a bit.

The image starts to look harsh (upper right). Actually contrast and smoothness (opposite of harshness) need to be balanced. If maximum detail is your goal you may add a bit stronger contrast while other scenes require lower contrast levels. Even very low contrast scenes (e.g. fog) need a certain amount of contrast to look right. Once you add too much contrast you may remove the fog and turn it into a normal low contrast scene.

Local Contrast

The following chart helps to understand the concept of local contrast.

The circles in each row have exactly the identical brightness levels. Yet the top right circle looks a lot brighter than the one on the left. Why is that? Our eyes see the difference to the local surrounding. The right circle looks much brighter with the dark gray background compared to a brighter background on the left. Just the opposite is true for the two circles on the bottom. For our eyes the absolute brightness is of less importance than the relative relation to other close areas.

This effect — called Retinex Theory  — was described in 1971 by Edwin H. Land (founder of Polaroid).

Some of the Basic Lightroom tools and Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight act locally and do not treat all pixels with the same brightness values as identical.

The classic Dodge&Burn also manipulates the local brightness of contrast of images. Dodge&Burn is still one of the top methods to refine images because our own eyes judge how the image is presented to the human eye. In some way modern imaging tools like Lightroom’s Highlights and Shadows reduce the need for manual Dodge&Burn without replacing them. The main local contrast tool in Lightroom is the Clarity tool.

Tools with Global Action

There are some controls in image editing that have ‘global’ action. With global we mean that they treat all pixels equal and only depend on the single pixel value itself. Classic global controls are Levels and Curves (also the Tone Curve in Lightroom).

Tools with Local Action

Often more interesting are tools that act more local. The main tools in of this type in Lightroom are Highlights, Shadows and Clarity.

Local contrast corrections are also not free lunch. They can often add wide halos if used at strong settings. Here is a sample in Lightroom with Clarity set to 100 (10-20 may be more reasonable settings):

Sharpness/Detail

Sharpness is created by local contrast at edges. What is in your way of optimal sharpness?

• Lens contrast: Good lenses really make a major difference
• Lens resolving power
• CA (CA correction costs real resolution)
• Lens distortions (again distortion corrections costs resolution)
• Bayer filter (you can study this by comparing results from the Sigma Foveon cameras)
• Anti Aliasing Filter (blurs the image to avoid moiré and aliasing)
• Camera shake (tripods and good technique can help)
• Sensor resolution: but often the system is limited by not so good lenses
• Sensor noise: hides detail. Stay at lowest ISO if you can.

Nothing lost here can really be recovered. Still good sharpening can give a very much-improved impression by improving the acutance (edge contrast). Sharpening is a balance act:

• Improve acutance
• Avoid artifacts
• Halos
• Stair stepping
• Amplify noise
• Keep smooth surfaces

The following crop from the above image (magnified) shows some halos that would be too strong for our taste:

We think our own Optimal Sharp V3 script for Photoshop helps to improve fine details and yet minimize some of these artifacts. Here is a sample where sharpening with Optimal Sharp V3 makes a major difference:

Fine Detail and Noise

The detail you can get from your system is of course limited by the sensor resolution. The other important factor is noise. At some point it is impossible to distinguish noise from real detail. It may not really matter for grungy scenes (e.g. rust) but in smother areas it does not look good (e.g. the sky in the above building image showed also more noise dues to over sharpening).

Note: in the camera forums we often read that camera X does not show any noise at ISO 800-1600. Not sure what these people are looking for. Noise with top cameras can even be revealed at ISO 100 once you open up the shadows. More truthful would be to say: The images from camera X can still produce usable images at ISO 800-1600. Often taking a picture at ISO 1600 maybe the only way to get the shot. Then we live with the noise but it is still there.

Conclusion

In the end the whole system of camera, lens and post processing defines your result. While a good camera and lens are always the best starting point the processing matters as much. Tuning Contrast (global and local) and sharpening play a central role and have to be well balanced. Also don’t forget that in the end the image content counts and not all our pixel peeping. Don’t forget to have fun with your photography.

Uwe Steinmueller

Digital Outback Photo for Lensrentals.com

March, 2013

Aaron is a Chicago-based photographer and retoucher who combines elements of reality and fantasy to create his images. Aaron has taught Photoshop and photography to over 100,000 people, and his images have been viewed over 15 million times on Flickr alone.

He is also the founder and president of Phlearn.com, which offers daily videos, advanced tutorials, featured photographers and more. Aaron is one creative, hard-working guy, and we’re thankful he has the time to show you guys some of the magic behind his work!

The Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II is what I call a “superlative lens.” It is very different from anything you can get from a point-and-shoot or an iPhone. It is at an extreme, and the images that it produces reflect that extreme, bringing the viewer into another world.

“Superlative” lenses really have to stretch the extremes, so not many lenses fit in this category. The Canon 85mm f/1.2L II is a superlative in that it allows you to photograph with an extremely shallow depth of field. Anything longer than 200mm at f/2.8 I would also consider superlative, as it compresses an image far more than the human eye does. Using one of these superlative lenses will make your photography stand out.

Include More

Using the 16-35 on a full-frame body like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III will allow you to get extremely close to your subject while also capturing the entire environment. If you are shooting in an amazing environment this is a plus. If your location leaves a lot to be desired, you may choose to shoot at a longer focal length in order to crop some of it out. Sometimes your environment may not be great on its own but can be enhanced with lighting. In this example you can see how the original photo includes too much.

The back door is in view, and light is spilling into the scene from many directions. Instead of trying to change the environment physically, you can alter its appearance with light. Also a slight change of camera angle will avoid distracting elements like the back door.

In the final shot, I used a large softbox, camera left, to light the scene. A fast shutter speed allowed the light from the outdoors to go to black. Doing this made the water and the subject the focal point of the image.

Adding Drama

The wide angle lens shows off the environment and pulls you into the image. It is as though the water really is rushing towards you. Just in case you are curious, minimal Photoshop was done to the final image—we really did pour hundreds of gallons of water down these steps.

Floor to Ceiling

Using a wide angle lens will allow you to capture the floor and the ceiling of a small room at the same time. If you use this to your advantage, you can include a lot of great detail. One thing I have learned from shooting wide is that most ceilings are bare and boring.   In order to avoid the lack of detail present in the ceiling, I added a flurry of leaves to the room. Two leaf blowers were used just outside of the room, stirring up a tornado and allowing leaves to go everywhere.

These shots were composited together with the final images of the model to create a dramatic photo with detail from floor to ceiling.

Converging Lines

Straight lines made by walls and ceilings will converge more dramatically when photographed with a wide angle lens. If you can, place your subject where these lines come together, and they will help to lead the viewer’s eyes straight to the subject.

Lighting

One problem many photographers face when shooting wide is getting too much in their scene. If you are using lighting such as a softbox or beauty dish, it may be very hard to keep this equipment out of the image. At the same time, not using lights may cause your image to be underexposed in key areas.   If you expose for the outdoors, the subject of this image would be dramatically underexposed. In order to expose both, a softbox was necessary.

The subject and the background are now exposed well for the final image, but the softbox is visible to the viewer. This is where Photoshop comes in. If you do have to include lighting in the shot, be sure to take a photo in the same place with the lighting moved. Then you can simply replace that part of the image. As you can see, the final shot does not contain any of those elements, allowing the viewer to focus on the subject.

Center Your Subject

If you are shooting a person, be sure to keep them near the center of your frame when shooting with a wide angle lens. These lenses cause a bit of perspective distortion, and if your subject’s face is near the edges, it will come out looking like you printed their face on a fruit rollup and then pulled it apart.

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Thanks again, Aaron!

To learn more about photography, lighting, and how to Photoshop together images like these, check out Phlearn.com. They make five free videos a week and offer the most in-depth Photoshop tutorials on the internet. Pretty sweet deal if you ask us!

 Hope you enjoyed!

Caroline Bishop

Lensrentals.com

June, 2012

Hey Everyone! We’re so glad to be able to share on the Lensrentals blog! We love this company, and it is by FAR our favorite rental company to use. Let’s get started on today’s Tuesday Tips & Tricks!

Lens choice is so much more than just getting a different look on an image. Using the right lens for the job can make—or break—the story that you are trying to tell. It can bring attention to—or completely distract—your viewer from what should and should not be seen in an image. So instead of talking about tons of lens choices and tons of options, we are going to talk about just one of our favorite lenses that we use for photographing weddings and the perspective that this particular lens gives us. Without further ado, let us introduce you to one of the greatest lenses ever produced, the Canon 85mm f/1.2L II.

This lens is considered a “portrait” length lens, and let’s first talk about what that means. Portrait length lenses are usually between 85mm and 105mm (depending on who you ask), and the reason a shorter lens (like say the Canon 50mm f/1.2L) is not considered a portrait lens is due to the perspective that it gives.

A 50mm lens (on a full frame censor camera like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III that we use) gives a “normal” perspective, meaning that things through that lens look similar to what your naked eye sees. Things look average and normal on a 50mm. So if you want an image to look like you were standing right there when it was shot, then a 50mm would be a good choice!

If, however, you want to start altering reality, you can go wider than 50mm, or longer than 50mm. An 85mm lens actually compresses reality in a tight, neat little box. It makes everything look closer together, and it gives the viewer the feeling that someone was peering into a moment rather than standing right there in it.

This is a great lens for shooting many parts of a wedding because as a wedding photographer, when shooting the moments that are happening during the day, we want the feel of the images to seem as though we were not there at all. We want it to feel like someone happened to be looking in on a private moment, and this lens does that for us!

If we had used shorter lenses or wide angle lenses like a 24mm or 16mm, the images would not have the feeling of intimacy like they do in the above shots. We also love using it for portraits for a few reasons.

1. For portraits, this lens gives us that compression that we talked about earlier. It also helps us as the photographers to not seem as though we were there but rather that someone just happened to see a great moment between two people.

2. Longer lenses help throw the background out of focus which helps put the focus on our client and not what’s going on around them.

3. It helps eliminate distracting elements by pushing out elements around our client through compression. When you use a longer lens, you can make an area of a few small parts come together as one by compressing reality and getting rid of things you don’t want to see. Take for example, the two images below. The first was shot using our Canon 24mm f/2.8.

And then, look at the difference! How a different look is created by simply shooting with a longer lens (the Canon 85mm f/1.2L II) and framing the distracting background out.

We were recently demonstrating this idea at one of our IN-CAMERA workshops that we host around the country. At the workshop, we were taking a simple portrait of a model we had hired for the day. We had this building about 150 feet away from where we were standing that made for a super cool background. So we shot it with two different lenses to show what the perspective could really do and what impact using the right lens at the right time can have.

Long lenses will make distant objects in the background look larger than they really are and can play to your advantage in the right situation when you need to include some things and get rid of other distracting elements. In the below image (taken at 30mm), you can see how small the building in the background appears to look and how distracting all the elements around our subject are.

Now, in the final images you can see what a huge difference using the 85 to compress the sides and top/bottom of the image did and how big the background now looks in comparison. Also, using the lines of the railing adds further enhancement to the overall composition and style of the shot.

So to give you some perspective on our shooting style, we take most of the portraits and moments that happen throughout the wedding day on the longest lenses we can to give them an intimate feel and look. We make boring and even bad locations look great by including what works and cutting out what doesn’t. We do shoot wide images—and we love the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L to show the story of what is happening—but our go-to lenses for portraits are the longer lenses.

If you don’t have any (and before you spend a bundle of money) rent the lenses you’re interested in. See how you like them and get a feel for them before you invest your hard-earned money! And what a coincidence, Lensrentals just happens to rent whatever gear you need.

Thanks so much for checking out this blog post, and let us know in the comments what YOUR favorite lens is and why you love it!! Feel free to join us every Tuesday on our own blog for more free photography tips & tricks!

ZachandJody.com/blog

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Thanks Zach & Jody!

In case this is your first time exposed to Zach and Jody Gray, they have been aiding photographers for the last 4 years with free tips and tricks on their blog and newsletter. Zach & Jody go beyond just teaching you the photography, but teach you how to nurture, develop and grow your business. They have just launched their brand new business DVD “Harvest”. This DVD is NOT about photography—it’s about your business. It teaches you the tools to make serious money in your business and how to attract, court and keep your clients re-selling your services through word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse marketing. To check out more info and to purchase the DVD, go to www.HarvestDVD.com.

But I took it on vacation last week, to give me something to read during 20 minutes after takeoff and before landing when they make me turn off my electronic gizmos. I planned on setting it back down as soon as I could power my laptop back up. But I ended up reading it for the entire flight. The excellent photos caught my attention early. The writing style was enjoyable and fun. And there were no cookie-cutter answers in here. Just lots of knowledge gained from extensive first-hand experience and shared in an easy-to-read, down-to-earth style. Steve emphasizes the practice and learning that are necessary to becoming an excellent photographer, but at the same time his enthusiasm and passion comes through loud and clear.

It’s a book filled with solid, good advice from someone who has been there, done that, taking photographs all over the world.  He shares what has worked well, and what didn’t. (And let me say, Mr. Simon is a much more secure person than I am: he actually prints his rejection letters in the book to demonstrate how important perseverance is. I generally burn mine.) The book covers topics ranging from composition to lighting, from editing to sequencing a presentation, to getting published and shown.

If you’re looking for a great gift for a photographer (or yourself) for the Holidays, I recommend The Passionate Photographer highly. It was the best of both worlds for me: I made notes of some technical tips I want to try, but at the same time thoroughly enjoyed it just as a good read filled with excellent photographs.

As with everything I review, I don’t get a dime or quarter or whatever the going rate is if you click through to it. I recommend this simply because I like it and think you might, too. I’ve linked the title to it’s Amazon page for your convenience (and so you can check out the 5-star reviews it gets there and see I’m not the only one who loves this book).

If you don’t like reading written reviews, drop by Steve’s gallery and get an idea of just how talented he is.

Roger Cicala

How to shoot a concert (or school play, theatrical production, etc)

By Brad Kolodzaike

Basic principles

I’m going to outline some of the information that I have learned photographing concerts. These same principles could be applied to any sort of stage production, your kid’s play, a nephew’s band, or any other theatrical light performance. Each event has it’s own idiosyncrasies, fleeting moments that we frantically attempt to capture on digital film.

Capturing moments & Storytelling

Concert Photography, as with any sub-category of photography, boils down to capturing moments that everyone witnesses but few stop to really appreciate. It’s a look from a guitar player, or an intense stare from a drummer, and a handshake with a young fan. It’s about freezing those moments to share with the world. By capturing these moments we are able to tell a story about the dynamic of the band, the show, or the venue.

The question is what story are we telling? Was the venue sold out that night? Maybe throw in a few crowd shots or wide angle of the entire space. Has one of the band members recently rejoined the group? Capture some shots of him/her interacting with the other band members. To be able to effectively tell the story of the night you need to research your subject ahead of time to know the dynamics of the band.

Creativity

Concert photography takes a keen eye and an open mind above all else. The performers are unpredictable and move in all sorts of directions. The lighting is constantly changing in rhythm to the music and the crowd is never predictable. While this plays havoc with the camera settings it also has the possibility to spark a creativity that is unmatched by few situations. The colors alone can be an inspiration, consider that you have at your disposal more lights and lighting versatility than most of the seasoned professional photographers will ever shoot with on the highest end commercial shoot. Your ability to use those lights to your advantage can make the difference. Working with natural stage performers is a huge advantage, just try to get a family portrait that is as expressive and natural as most bands. All you have to do is figure out how all of the puzzle pieces fit together to make a great image.

Equipment & Settings

Speed Kills (Fast lenses & high ISO)

As world and humanitarian photographer, David duChemin, says; “Gear is good, vision is better.” (David duChemin, PixelatedImage.com) In this case you are 99% more likely to bring home some great shots if you come to the event prepared and with the right equipment. There are two things that matter most when shooting in low light concert and performance venues; High ISO and fast glass. Most concert venues require somewhere between ISO 800-1600; you’ll need ISO 3200 and above if you’re in a club setting. If you are using a quality DSLR that was made after 2006 chances are good that the sensor will be able to produce great images at that level. A good post processing workflow always helps the noise as well.

The second part of the equation is to make sure you are shooting with fast lenses. That is, lenses that have an aperture of f/2.8 or wider in most cases This combination of aperture and ISO will allow you to have a shutter speed fast enough to routinely freeze the action. One of the staples of my shooting arsenal is the 70-200 f/2.8 which gives great reach for closeups and the auto focus is fast and accurate even in low light. A wide angle lens gives great perspectives and spacial relationships; for example, when used from the pit the 14-24 f/2.8 has a great look to it. A mid-range lens, something like the 24-70 f/2.8 is a great all purpose lens when shooting up close. If you’re looking for even more fun look for the f/1.4 or faster prime lenses. Choosing lenses with a fixed aperture throughout their zoom range will make your other settings much easier. If your aperture is constantly changing as you are zooming you’re in for a long night.

Vibration reduction

Vibration reduction is a newer technology that has allowed photographers to be able to shoot handheld at a much lower shutter speed while keeping the image steady. This is especially important when working with telephoto lenses in lower light situations. By anticipating moments of hesitation by the artists, such as a hand in the air or holding their guitar in a certain position you can time those reactions and be able to freeze the motion with a relatively slow shutter speed. By using vibration reduction technology it’s possible to eliminate the shake of the camera and the person holding it. One of the best examples of this technology is the new Nikon 24-120 f/4 VR II. By allowing the photographer a buffer of up to 4 stops of additional hand holding ability this is a versatile option in terms of zoom and shooting at slow speeds.

Manual shooting

With so many variables constantly shifting around you it’s important to know your camera’s functions and be able to adapt on the fly. The best way I have found to be able to accomplish this is to have the camera set in Manual mode. While shutter and aperture priority modes are very useful in constant situations, and being the modes that I usually find myself in, concert photography requires more control on the fly. The more variables that a scene imposes the more control you need to have over your camera. Although there are numerous custom shooting settings the three major controls you should know inside and out are the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO and their relationships with each other.

If you were to leave you camera in aperture priority to set the aperture wide open (usually a good practice) and happen to swing your camera to shoot towards some of the theatrical lighting your camera is going to make the decision to set the shutter speed somewhere near 1/8000 to compensate for the bright light. Now that’s a good thing if the light is your main subject, it will be well exposed. If, by chance, you’re still trying to photograph the lead guitarist the entire picture besides that light is going to be pitch black.

By shooting in manual mode it’s easy to leave the aperture where you want it and with the flick of a dial change the shutter speed to adjust for the lighting levels and leave them where you know the performer will be well exposed. Don’t worry too much if you’re new to this kind of shooting, these aren’t your father’s SLRs. The light meters in today’s DSLR cameras are very good and come with a handy display in the viewfinder. This meter moved to the + or – side based on how your settings currently are. If you’re familiar with your camera’s controls it’s a simple procedure to have the meter read somewhere near the middle. Of course in the digital age, instant gratification is king. You can always check your LCD and the histograms to figure out what changes need to be made.

Techniques

Composition

Always start with the basics and then put your own spin on them. Remember the rule of thirds, level horizons, and cutting portraits off at flattering points of the body. If you’re photographing the entire band in the shot look for opportunities where the members form a triangle in the frame. After you figure those out try adding some different angles to your image, zoom in for an expression and don’t worry that the back of their head is out of the frame. The people you are photographing on stage are creative personalities, make sure you represent them in the same creative way.

By not including the fiddle player’s upper half the eye is directly pulled to the lead singer. Also, the shadow of the fiddle player becomes a strong element.

Being artistic

As discussed later on, most of the time motion blur is a negative thing to have happen to your image, but if done correctly it can be a mesmerizing effect that adds a strong sense of movement to your image. Just like a race car with the wheels frozen doesn’t look like it’s moving a drummer with no motion in the drumsticks appears that he just has his hands up in the air. Pick your spots to use this and drop your shutter speed to something close to 1/50, be aware of which parts of the scene you are looking to blur and find which parts need to remain sharp.

The bassist’s hand is blurred while the guitar and the rest of his body is crisp.

Lighting

Using creative lighting to your advantage

Find ways to use the lighting to your advantage. Popular lighting techniques used today include back lighting, moving lights, and patterned lights of all different colors. Catching a bassist with a strong red light low from behind him will cast a beautiful silhouette. Find a few radiating light beams shining up from behind the lead singer really frame them as the focal point. Overhead lighting creates dramatic shadows, just make sure your subject is looking up towards them or it’ll look like Halloween all over again. Be on the lookout for the crowd flood lights when the band is looking for the crowd to sing along with them, this is your opportunity to catch an overall wide shot.

If you try to photograph the scene while the lights are out the stage area will blow out and they will be playing towards a sea of darkness. The lighting usually moves in a predictable pattern, try and find spots to shoot from that uses it to your advantage.

Watching out for UFOs

If you were shooting outside they are commonly referred to as sun flares. They are circular aberrations that appear when a strong light source passes through the various lens elements. From a strictly technical perspective the flares are something that lens manufacturers spend many hours and millions of dollars trying to reduce and eliminate completely. On the other hand there has been a strong revival artistically to create a strong linear pattern of flares as part of the overall composition. However you choose to approach UFOs make sure that you compose your images in such a way that they strengthen your image and not distract from it.

Notice how the light flares line up with Dusty’s guitar neck.

Pitfalls

Low shutter speed

Always a concern in low light situations, especially with moving elements of the frame. To avoid the blurry nature of slow shutter speeds make sure that your aperture is wide enough and that your ISO is high enough to balance out the shutter speed. The shutter speed is going to depend on what you are photographing. If your subject is seated at a piano and moving slightly back and forth from the mic a shutter speed of 1/160 will most likely be enough to freeze the motion. In contrast, if your main subject is a guitarist that you are trying to freeze in mid jump something closer to 1/500 will be more appropriate. Practice and experience will be your best guide to know what settings are best for the situation.

1/50 was not a fast enough shutter speed to capture Will Hoge while his head was in motion.

Metering off of a direct light source

All modern DSLR’s built in light meters are great instruments, but must be used as a guide only. If the camera had it’s way with everything you would end up with a perfectly gray image every time. Only you know what is supposed to be truly dark in the scene, trust your instincts in the metering. Lighting technicians like to play as many games as possible with photographers, at least it seems that way, depending on the song or the artist the lighting can change from a very dark scene to a brightly lit one in a matter of seconds. This lighting change can throw off your camera’s meter as much as 8 stops. Be constantly aware of the lighting conditions and be able to adjust on the fly by varying your settings.

On camera flash

Leave the on camera flash to the fans 15 rows back with the point and shoot. It makes a wonderful image if you have a wide angle of the performer leaning into the crowd with a bunch of small flashes going off. If you must use it make sure you have a flash unit besides the pop-up one and be sure not to overpower the scene, the most effective use of the flash is when someone can look at your image and not have it immediately jump out at them that you flashed it. Also make sure you’re close enough to your subject to make sure the flash is actually reaching them. Search for “inverse square law” to learn more about this. Most shows have policies regarding flash photography, make sure you check with whomever is assigning you the photo pass about their restrictions.

Obstructions

As photographers we’re often confronted with obstructions to getting the shot that we want that are often overlooked by the casual fan. Take, for example, the microphone and it’s stand, At the end of the night I always end up with more than a handful of photos that appear to have a large growth coming out of the lead singer’s cheek. The drummer is another example of someone who is usually dodging in and out of sight behind a cymbal.

Instead of looking at these objects as barriers look to them as opportunities. The lead singers usually dance with the mic and eventually they will lean away, that’s your opportunity. Make sure you include the mic stand if there is one, it gives a nice vertical element to the composure.
The drummer can be nicely framed within the drum set assuming you can get to a good spot on the floor to see them.

Kristian Bush of Sugarland leans far enough away from the mic to give a clear exposure of his entire face on the left, while Tyler Stewart of the Barenaked Ladies is framed within his own drumset on the right.

Limited shooting area and time

For some of the larger shows in arenas, photographers may be assigned to a certain area from which to shoot—usually somewhere towards the back of the floor near the mix. Be prepared ahead of time for this situation as you will most likely need a longer lens and possibly a monopod to get your shots as crisp as possible. In this case you just have to pick your moments when there is a good pose or scene on stage since moving to another location is not an option. Most of the time, you will find a song limit for most of the established acts. Three songs is about standard for the industry, some more, some less. For these shows you need to scout the location ahead of time if possible, keep moving, find your angles and move from position to position quickly. It does no good to come home with 50 images in a row from the same exact spot and nothing else. Don’t be afraid to push yourself up to the front of the barricade if it’s a general admission floor, just don’t be a jerk about it. Before the show starts, calmly ask the people around the area you want to be if it’s alright to get a few shots, let them know that you won’t be there for more than a minute. In my experience they are usually happy to oblige.

Conclusions

Concert shooting is an exhilarating experience, play your cards right and you’ll have access to some fantastic angles for shows in your area. Choreograph your movements for your time at the event to maximize your shooting time. The less time you find yourself wandering around thinking of the next shot the better. Set your camera ahead of time and be ready to change the settings on the fly. Bring your best lenses and open them as wide as they will go. Be flexible and adapt to changes as they happen. Most of all, enjoy yourself, being able to photograph concerts is a special privilege, I know it has been for me.

Brad Kolodzaike
LensRentals.com
November 2010

“Wait”, you say, “what about my $2,000 top grade f/2.8 Wonderzoom? People say it’s the best lens made.”

I’ll grant you it might be as sharp as a prime, at least at its sweet spot it might. But the difference between an f/2.8 aperture on that zoom and f/1.4 on the prime is two full stops of light. Shutter speeds 1/4 as long. Depth of field is remarkably narrow. You can do a lot of very cool things with those tools.

But probably no lenses cause more upset and disappointment with first-time users than a top-of-the-line wide aperture prime. The usual thought is “For this much money it should be perfect!” They aren’t perfect, just different.

I’ll give you an analogy: I have a really nice sedan. It fits 4 people in comfort, easy to drive, as fast as I could want it to be, handles corners and curves well, gets the oil changed every 3 months and needs no other work. Great car. I love it. My next-door neighbor has a track-ready Porsche racecar that costs three or four times as much as my sedan. It’s much faster and corners much better than my car. But he can’t drive it on the street, can only fit one person in it, and is working on it constantly. So it’s not necessarily a better car, it just does certain things much better. To take the analogy a step further, I’m sure he’d have no trouble driving my sedan, but if I took his Porsche for a spin, bad things would probably happen.

Wide aperture prime lenses are like that: fast and sexy, but there are some things they don’t do well, and they require a bit more care and a different skill set than regular lenses. But given that, you can get some spectacular images you could never get otherwise. Like driving a racecar, though, if you’ve never done it before then you need a bit of training and practice.

The Weaknesses of Wide Aperture

A little while ago I wrote an article on the 7 common lens aberrations. You don’t need to go read it, here’s the summary: 4 of the common aberrations (coma, astigmatism, spherical aberration, and lateral chromatic aberration) are all improved by stopping down the aperture to f/5.6 or more. For that same reason, they are all worsened, and more difficult for lens designers to correct, when the aperture is really wide. A couple of other issues, focus shift and spherocromatism (also called color shift) affect only wide aperture lenses.

To my knowledge, no ultra-wide aperture prime lens is free of problems, so it is important to know which ones affect the particular lens you are shooting with. Knowing the particular weakness of a lens allows you to plan your shots to avoid them. You can sometimes find this information in better lens reviews, and to some degree in online forums. But mostly you find out by shooting the lens and learning about it yourself.

Chromatic aberrations

Classic lateral chromatic aberration (purple fringing) affects some of the best wide-aperture primes in the corners and edges. Stopping down improves it, but that defeats some of the purpose of having a wide aperture lens. It can usually be corrected in post-processing, though, if you shoot in raw.

Spherochromatism (color shift) is quite different. It affects only the out of focus areas and the color is different in front of the depth of field than behind it. Unlike lateral chromatic aberration, it occurs in the center of the image as well as the edges. Only the out of focus areas are affected, however, and it is rarely noticeable in actual images (although it can easily be seen in test shots as shown below).

Figure 1: Color shift: note that the in focus area has no shift while areas behind the depth of field are greenish and in front of the depth of field are magenta.

Coma and Astigmatism

Both of these aberrations affect the edges and corners of the image, causing blurring, particularly of lights. It’s usually less of an issue in daylight shots because the areas away from center are often out of the depth of field and blurred anyway. In night shots, though, lights can appear obviously smeared along the edges of the image. And shooting objects of interest off center can make them appear blurred, even when properly focused.

Field Curvature

Curved lenses naturally want to make a curved image, but the sensor on your camera is flat. When a lens has field curvature it may be focused 6 feet away in the center of the image, but the focus would only be 5 feet away at the mid part of the image and 4 feet away at the edges.

How to tell if your lens has field curvature? A simple test chart or brick wall will do. Focus the lens wide open on a tripod so the center of the image is sharp. Then without moving anything, change the lens to manual focus and take some shots a bit in front of and behind the best focus distance. If the edges are just soft they will get softer with focus moved forward or back. If the lens has field curvature, the edges will actually get sharper when the center is out of focus just a bit forward or (less commonly) behind the sharpest center focus.

Figure 2: Field curvature: The right half of the image shows sharp center focus, with softening of the part of the images along the right side. The left half of the image had focus moved manually to bring the lateral part of the image into focus. Notice how out-of-focus the center now is.

When a lens has field curvature, don’t focus-recompose to put the object of interest off center. Instead crop the image later in post-processing. If you know, generally, what type of field curvature it has, you can sometimes position a set-up shot to keep objects in the field of focus. For example forming a group into an arc roughly along the curvature of the field may be effective. But you’re way more patient than I am if you pull this off.

Focus shift

Focus shift occurs in certain wide aperture lenses when they are stopped down just a little bit. Remember your camera always focuses with the lens at maximum aperture, then stops the lens down to the aperture you’ve set just before taking the image. In some wide aperture lenses, closing the aperture a bit causes the actual focus point of the lens to shift forward or backward just a bit. The depth of field of wide-aperture lenses is so narrow that this can be enough to throw the subject completely out of focus. After a certain point (usually f/2.8 or more), the depth of field has gotten so much wider that the focus shift isn’t noticeable anymore.

The clumsy solution to focus shift (at least with a still subject) is to focus manually using ‘focus bracketing’, shooting several shots manually moving the lens focus slightly forward of backward. One of the shots will probably be in focus. In reality, most of us simply shoot such lenses either wide open or stopped down to f/2.8 or f/4, but not anywhere in between. A few very good photographers know their lens well enough to compensate using manual focus: they autofocus, switch to manual focus and tweak the focus where it needs to be. Good for them. I’ve tried it (a lot) and haven’t managed to pull it off with any consistency.

Working with Narrow Depth of Field

All of the above problems only cause a fraction of the trouble people have when shooting for the first time with a wide aperture prime lens. At least 90% of the first-timer problems shooting at wide aperture have to do with controlling the very narrow depth of field (the area of the image in sharp focus). How narrow? An 85mm lens shot at f/1.4 on a full frame camera focused on an object 6 feet (72 inches) away has a depth of field just under 2 inches. Anything closer than 71 inches away is out of focus. Anything further away than 73 inches is out of focus.

I literally have a conversation once a week that goes “this lens is really soft, look at this image!”.
“Nope, it’s really sharp, look at those eyelashes. Its just that her nose and her ears are out of the field of focus. Only her eye is in the plane of focus.”

In order to use a wide aperture lens properly, the photographer must have a good grasp of what the depth of field is with the lens (s)he is using, and at the distance (s)he is shooting. There are a number of good online depth-of-field calculators and several iPhone and Droid apps that provide a calculator you can carry with you. If you want and in-depth discussion on depth of field, I wrote an entire article on it here.

But a few practical rules should help in most situations:

1. For a given lens and aperture, depth of field is greater the further the subject is from the lens. The depth of field of the 85 f/1.4 I mentioned earlier was 2 inches when focused 6 feet away, but it’s 4 inches when focused 12 feet away, and 2 feet focused 30 feet away.
2. Stopping down increases depth of field some, but not that much at these wider apertures. For instance, stopping down the lens above from f/1.4 to f/2.2 at 12 feet increases the depth of field from 4 to 6 inches.
3. Wider focal length lenses focused at the same distance in front of the camera have a much greater depth of field. For example, a 35mm f/1.4 on a full frame camera has a depth of field of 9 inches when focused 6 feet away, a 3 foot depth of field when focused 12 feet away, and a 21 foot depth of field when focused 30 feet away.

The narrow depth of field makes focusing difficult, but, more importantly, the slightest bit of front or back focus can put the image entirely out of focus. Since every lens focuses slightly differently on every camera, I don’t recommend shooting a wide aperture lens unless your camera has autofocus microadjustment. Without it, getting perfect focus at such a narrow depth of field is a bit of a crap shoot. That also means, obviously, you need to actually use that feature and tune your camera and lens to focus optimally.

A Quick Guide for Shooting Wide Aperture

Before Shooting

1. Adjust Microfocus for the lens and your body before shooting. If using more than one body, calibrate with both bodies. It will probably be a bit different on each.
2. Check to see if the lens has focus-shift. If you can’t find out online, test by shooting the same target at widest aperture; f/1.4; f/1.8; f/2.2; and f/2.8. If focus changes then focus shift is present. Plan to shoot either wide open or stopped down, not in between.
3. Before going out shooting, you may want to make a quick chart showing the depth of field wide open at various distances. Knowing the depth of field at various distances lets you frame the shot so your subject is entirely in focus, but the background is blurred enough to make the subject stand out.
   

When Shooting

1. Keep subject and autofocus point in the center. Crop the image to change composition, don’t focus recompose.
2. Unless you know the lens is coma and aberration free, night lights in the periphery of the image may be quite distorted. Night shooting is usually best done stopped down, anyway.
3. If there are important elements in the edges or corners, shooting stopped down will usually help sharpen these areas markedly. Even half a stop can make a dramatic difference.
4. Knowing the depth of field, pose the subject carefully. Plan your autofocus point so it’s in the middle of where you want your depth of field. If the subjects face is square to the camera, it will all remain in focus, while even the ears are beyond the depth of field.

If the face is tilted from the camera, for example, with the head tilted 45 degrees, don’t focus on the closest eye. Instead focus on the bridge of the nose so both eyes remain in focus (assuming that’s what you want, of course).

Sounds like kind of a pain, doesn’t it? It can be at first, but once you’ve used this kind of lens a few times, it becomes second nature. And the results are well worth it. When I’m trying to get my best possible shot, I’ve always got a wide aperture prime lens mounted on my camera. I may get fewer keepers, but the keepers I get are really, really special.

What is Ultra-Wide?

The definitions are arbitrary, of course, but first let’s eliminate fisheye lenses: they are ultra-wide by strict definition, but are usually used for entirely different purposes. I’m going to limit this discussion to non-fisheye lenses. So, since back when cavemen made the first lenses by chipping milky quartz, it has commonly been considered that 50mm was the ‘standard’ focal length. Anything 35mm and lower was wide angle. Depending on who you read, ultra-wide angle lenses were less than 24mm or less than 20mm. (These are for full-frame cameras, of course. Back in those days all cameras were full-frame, because cavemen only had film. Neolithic photography was primitive.)

It’s important to realize that at the wide-angle end of things a couple of mm of focal length can make a huge difference in the angle of view. You get a much better idea of how wide an ultra-wide image will be if you think in angles, rather than mm. The photos below, for example, show the same scene from the same spot shot at 12mm (left) and 16mm (right) on a crop-frame camera.

The 4mm difference is very significant, resulting in a change in angle of view from 83 degrees to 112 degrees. (The difference in angle of view between 12mm and 16mm is much greater than the difference between 50mm and 70mm, for example.) The table below gives you an idea of the angle of view at various focal lengths on both crop-sensor and full-frame bodies.

The angle of view of various focal lengths on full frame and crop frame cameras. (Data for Canon 1.6x crop frames. Other bodies have slightly larger angle of view with 1.5x crop frames.)

Anyway, I define ultra-wide as 80 degrees or wider (twice the ‘normal’ 40 degree angle of view), which is about 21mm on a full-frame camera or about 14mm on a crop sensor. Down in these ranges, lenses behave differently, and, if you understand those differences, you can get interesting and unique images: not just a nice landscape, but some other dramatic shots.

So what’s so different with ultra-wide lenses?

Duh! The angle of view is wide. Here, I’ll show you:

But the difference is so obvious that you might miss the subtle meaning of it. That wide angle of view causes some different behaviors. Some differences are true at any distance, even out to infinity. Others really only are noticeable when working closer to the lens.

Differences at infinity

If all you shoot with a wide angle lens are landscapes where the subject is out at infinity (let’s say, where the little blue lines, that symbolize the angle of view, end), there would be only a few differences. But those few differences can be important, so let’s go over them.

• Light rays from the edges of the image are going to be bent a lot more passing through the lens elements in a wide angle lens than in a telephoto lens. This can cause more chromatic aberration if the lens doesn’t correct for it well. A good ultra-wide lens must have aspheric elements to correct for CA—an important thing to check for when choosing an ultra-wide lens.
• The extreme bending of light rays makes ultra-wide lenses to vignette (have dark corners). It’s like gravity—you can’t change it, you just have to live with it. Some lenses and (because of microlens arrangements on their sensors) some cameras are more prone to this than others.
• The sensor will “see” a lot more objects than usual. This means auto-exposure or white balance may be off. Wide angle shots with lots of bright sky often underexpose, because the camera is averaging all that bright sky in when calculating the exposure.
• Because the lens is so wide, the sun (or other bright lights) will often be in the image. Good flare control is more important in an ultra-wide lens than in other lenses.
• Because the angle of view is so wide, the angle at which sunlight enters the sensor will vary from one side of the image to the other, unless the sun is behind you. For example, if the sun is to your left, the left side of the sky will appear lighter and less blue than the right. Wide angles love overcast days and lots of clouds. Pure blue sky—not so much.
• A polarizing filter only polarizes light entering at certain angles, so it can actually make this phenomenon worse. Unless you absolutely need it, a polarizer is generally a bad idea on an ultra-wide lens.

So, if all you do with your ultra-wide lens is shoot scenic shots at infinity (and for a lot of you that is all you do with them), that’s all you need to know: Shoot with the sun at your back. Pick your ultra-wide lens on the basis of good flare control, aspheric elements, and minimal vignetting rather than sharpness (all ultra-wides are sharp), and don’t use a circular polarizer. If you possibly can, shoot in RAW, so it’s easy to fix irregular sky colors and vignetting. Do that and you can get nice wide angle scenics with dramatic skies and forever stretching foregrounds.

But, if you’d like to do more than that with an ultra-wide, then read on and we’ll talk about working at closer distances, using the special characteristics of ultra-wides to get some cool effects and avoiding those same characteristics ruining our shots.

Optical differences

I’ve somewhat purposely started this section of with an incorrect term, because there are three terms that are broadly, and often incorrectly, used when discussing ultra-wide angle lenses. The first is optical differences: all lenses work on the same optical principles, although ultra-wide lenses seem to behave differently: they exhibit more distortion of subjects than other lenses. The second is perspective, Technically, from an optical physics point of view, changing from a telephoto to an ultra-wide lens doesn’t change perspective. But from a “looking at the picture” point-of-view, it sure does seem to change, so for the purposes of this article, I’m going to be politically incorrect and refer to the perspective changes that you can see, even if the physicists can explain that they aren’t really there. The third is depth of field. Ultra-wide lenses use the same depth of field formula as other lenses, but, from a practical standpoint, ultra-wide lenses have a very wide depth of field at most real-world shooting distances.

So the bottom line is: I’m going to use some terminology incorrectly to make things understandable for those of us who aren’t optical physicists. And I’ll try to use image examples to clarify my terminology, so that it doesn’t lead to more confusion.

Distortion of Perspective

Our eyes use the relative size of objects as one hint to determine distance. We see a large human and a tiny human in the same image, we believe the tiny human is further away, unless the image has other evidence to contradict that. But our brains are used to making that judgment at a roughly 45 degree field of view (ok, rather arguable point here, but go read The Camera vs The Eye for more detail). A very wide angle lens throws off that distance judgment.

Look back at the telephoto/wide angle schematic drawing above. Let’s assume the green and red bars are two identically sized objects in our photograph. Notice that I’ve placed them so the green bar would completely fill the camera’s image. To do that, the green bar has to be closer to the camera with a wide angle lens. So if I take an image of an object, positioning the camera so that it is the same size on the sensor, it will have to be much closer with a wide angle. That’s obvious. But look at the red bar. It’s the same distance behind the green bar, and the same size as the green bar. With a telephoto lens, it still nearly fills up the field. It will appear close to the green bar in the image, and nearly the same size. In the wide angle image, though, it doesn’t fill up the image nearly as much, so it will appear much smaller than the green bar (which our vision may interpret as further away or just smaller, depending on the other visual clues in the image).

So what might that look like? Check out the three images below. On the left is the set-up as seen from the side: three shot glasses lined up on a counter, starting about 6 inches from the end. The second image is shot at right angles to the first with a 135mm lens on a full frame camera, the third shot with a 14mm with the camera repositioned so the subject (the first shot glass) is about the same size. Notice in the 135mm image how close the glass appears to the front edge of the counter, and how close the second glass appears to the first? In the 14mm shot, things look completely different, with the glass appearing far back from the edge and the second glass far back from the first.

Shooting with an ultra-wide lens close up can create awesome photographs that make things look much larger than they actually are (a great trick for real-estate photography). In the image at left below, the entire shop is, perhaps, 12 feet deep. From the camera, I was about 4 steps away from the yellow flowers on the back wall, but the wide angle lens makes it seem larger. The bricks on the right seem to stretch away for quite a distance, but count them: each brick is less than 4 inches wide, so 12 bricks away (about as far as you can tell individual bricks) is 4 feet from the camera. The brick wall curves out of the picture about 8 feet away.

Apparent depth of field

While we’re looking at the shot glass images, we might as well also compare the apparent depth of field. The 135mm image is quite blurred everywhere but on the glass that was the focal object. The 14mm image has a much greater depth of field, even though both images are shot at f/2.8. We will not start the optical physics depth of field argument here. I’ll simply state that at normal working distances wide angle lenses will have a greater depth of field than telephoto lenses. This will hold true for 99% of all wide angle shots, so the physicists’ objections can be taken to a forum where they enjoy arguing about such things. (The practical summary of all those arguments is you can still get a narrow depth of field, but the focus point must be very close to the lens.)

In a nutshell, with ultra-wide lenses we’ve lost one tool we use to emphasize subjects in a photo (a narrow depth of field), but gained another (size perspective to enlarge the object of interest). The two photos of a holly bush below are both taken with a 14mm lens. On the left, the entire bush is about the same distance from the camera. On the right, the berries are about a foot away from the front element, the remaining leaves about 18 inches. By shooting a wide angle up close, we’ve used size distortion to create a point of emphasis (Note also that if we get really close like this, we can get a fairly narrow depth of field for further emphasis. The pictures of the holly berries below, and the brick wall above, where the camera was focused about a foot or so in front of the lens, show a fairly narrow depth of field at f/2.8.)

Distortion of objects (and people)

Perspective distortion can be a great tool when photographing two or three objects at different distances from the camera. But a single object (say, a person) can have parts that are at different distances from the camera. The closer parts will appear larger than the more distant parts. This is especially important to remember when photographing people with an ultra-wide lens. It can provide an interesting effect if not overdone (like the image on the left, below). But if you get too close to a face the nose will appear overly large and the features distorted, like the image below on the right. Heed my wisdom here: note that the subject of those images is a male child. He thinks the picture on the right looks cool. No female over the age of 6 will ever have that opinion of a wide-angle portrait. Just don’t do it. If, like I once did, you think it would be funny to take a picture of your wife bending over to pick up something on the floor with a wide angle lens—well, consider yourself warned.

You can sometimes make this kind of distortion useful, though. In the superbly artistic series “Self portrait with tilt-shift lens” shown below, simply extending the object to arms length with the camera in the same position dramatically changes the emphasis of the picture (well, it would if I had focused properly, but hey, it was after midnight and I wanted to finish this). It can be a very useful technique for product photography. And for you, wedding photographers, an engagement picture shot with an ultra-wide, the left hand extended like that, will make the diamond look the size of an egg (Aha! You hadn’t thought of that, had you?? ). Just be careful to keep the body and face all in one plane parallel to the camera to avoid distortion where you don’t want it. If I had kept my head tilted down a bit, there would have been a little less nostril emphasis, for example.

Converging verticals and curved lines

One issue that affects wide angle lenses, especially when shooting in tight quarters where there are lots of man-made objects, is converging/diverging vertical lines. When you keep the horizon at the midpoint of the image, the problem isn’t too noticeable. But, if you put the horizon (or point of interest) low in the photograph to capture lots of sky, the verticals will converge. Put the object of interest high in the frame to capture lots of foreground and the verticals will diverge. It can be an interesting effect in nature photographs with irregular shapes, but just looks silly when there are man-made objects that should have vertical lines in the image.

The effect of placing an object low (left) or high (right) when framing a picture with an ultra-wide lens

The obvious solution is to make sure you keep objects centered vertically in the frame. If you want to emphasize sky or foreground, the simplest solution is to crop the picture. The alternative solution is to use Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter or another distortion correction tool to fix it in post-processing, but this may cause a bit of image quality loss and still requires a little cropping. A totally different, and often more interesting solution, is to just avoid vertical lines. Tilt the camera, make everything diagonal. This doesn’t work well for cityscapes or pictures of entire buildings, but for closer shots of buildings and architectural details it can be a neat effect. Let the lens force you into rethinking the shot and you may come up with a more interesting photograph.

A similar problem can occur when you have long straight lines on the sides of the picture: even though ultra-wide lenses aren’t fisheyes, you will often get a little fisheye effect, curving the lines into the frame a little, as is obvious in the right side buildings in the picture below, left (the verticals are converging, but look at the lateral side of the larger white building. It’s also curved.). Reframing to bring the long vertical lines in away from the edge will correct this, as was done in the picture below, right. (The astute among you will notice that I had to shoot the second shot even wider to keep the river in the picture, but get the building away from the edge. The really astute will also notice from the sky that the second shot was taken on a different day than the first. I told you it takes some practice to learn to shoot ultra-wides.)

A few more Ultra-wide hints

Change your background

This is completely simple, but I still forget about this option sometimes. By switching from a standard range lens to an ultra-wide and reframing the shot, you can get a totally different background while keeping the object of interest roughly the same. There’s nothing artistic in the samples below, but they demonstrate the point: the lamp is roughly the same in the 135mm shot (left) and the 14mm shot (right), but the background is totally different, even though they are shot from the same direction (in the second shot you can barely see the edge of the fireplace to the left of the lamp).

Emphasize near objects and magnify the sense of distance

Shooting a scene with an ultra-wide places a lot of emphasis on near objects and creates a sense of distance like the shot on the left. Using the converging verticals discussed above on a centered object makes it appear longer and taller than it really is, like the shot on the right.

Use the enlargement of near objects to emphasize details

The shot on the left, in portrait frame at 16mm gives quite a different look than the 30mm landscape framed shot on the right. Although they are of the same location, one is an old grave in front of a church, the other is a church surrounded by a cemetery. Very different looks.

Use the depth of field to shoot near-far objects of interest

They cause the viewer’s eye to wander around the photograph, creating various areas of interest that are difficult to obtain with a standard length shot.

So there you have it. Everything I know about shooting with ultra-wide lenses, which are a much more useful tool in our bag than many people realize. I often travel without a telephoto lens, but I never travel without an ultra-wide.

Note: There is an artistic nude below, for those who are offended by such things.

“I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.” Philippe Halsman

On Portraits

These days, no part of photography leaves me more disinterested than portraiture. Of course I realize it’s the bread-and-butter of many photographers, both professional and amateur—the ever-so-carefully-posed-and-lit, bore-me-to-tears portrait. Nice ones are hung over mantles and in corporate boardrooms. Bad ones too. It doesn’t matter, they all look the same. Photographers spend years perfecting their portrait lighting and set-up techniques so they can shoot portraits exactly like every other portrait. If I have to see another newborn-on-daddy’s-forearm; executive-in-chair-in-front-of-bookcase-body-tilted-right-head-tilted-back; or family-of-four-in-casual-sportswear-barefoot-on-hill-in-careful-triangular-arrangement, I think I’ll scream. Yes, I know it’s business. So is making sausage, but I don’t want to see that either.

When forced to view a series of portraits I find myself scratching through all the sameness, desperately looking for some minute bit of difference in technique. I almost screamed one day, when some photographers were deciding which of an endless series of nearly identical shots was the best: “This one’s a bit warmer”, “I like the head tilt into the light in this one”, and on and on. I literally flipped my computer over to youtube and pulled up the classic 1984 Apple commercial (if you don’t know it, click on the link), thinking “what have we become!” I had this mental image of all photographers dressed in identical gray marching in lockstep as Big Brother (or Sister Leibovitz) inspires them to sameness. I hate sameness. People can get a sameness picture at Walmart: 8×10 print for $8. Making those is not what most of us got into photography for.

As usual, when I find some aspect of photography boring, I only have to look to the past, at what we’ve largely forgotten, for inspiration. I’d written an earlier article, The More Things Change, about the first street photographer (Rejlander) and the first photographer to pose his portrait subjects naturally (Dodson) who worked back in the 1800s. But, for what I consider the peak of portraiture, I didn’t need to go back so far in history. Oddly enough, the person I consider the greatest, most unique portrait photographer of all time developed his techniques during those decades of uniform sameness, the 40s and 50s. And I was lucky enough to find a copy of his long-out-of-print On the Creation of Photographic Ideas through a used bookseller. It’s inspired me as much as anything I’ve run across lately, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned.

The Portraitist

Philipe Halsman lived a fascinating life, the details of which are too long to go into here (click on the name for his Wiki). Already a recognized photographer, he immigrated to the U. S. in 1942 and immediately began working for Life magazine. By the end of his career he’d shot hundreds of covers for Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. His portraits of Einstein, Dali, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon and hundreds of others are icons. In 1958 Popular Photography named him one of the 10 greatest photographers, and his work is exhibited in, well, everywhere that can get it, including the Smithsonian. But this isn’t about Halsman’s career, it’s about how he created his photographs.

• “Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless, if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character.” Philippe Halsman

Halsman believed that the photographer was not just a technician, the photographer was a psychologist and an artist. His goal in a portrait was not just to show what the subject looked like, it was to show what they were like. Posing, as he described it, “can’t be done by pushing the person into position or arranging his head at a certain angle. It must be accomplished by provoking the victim, amusing him with jokes, lulling him with silence, or asking impertinent questions which his best friend would be afraid to voice.” His goal was to create an image that revealed the subject’s personality rather than just physical appearance.

• “A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were.” Philippe Halsman

The techniques he used to accomplish this goal were numerous. The one most widely recognized was having the subject jump at the end of the sitting and capturing it on film. Halsman was photographing famous people who, he said, were constantly on display and had developed public masks that they put on for the photographer. By getting them to do something completely unusual, such as jumping in the air, the masks fell away and personality became visible.He must have been a good psychologist because he persuaded Richard Nixon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Judge Learned Hand (in his mid-80s at the time) among many others to jump for the camera.

Above: Philip Halsman with Marilyn Monroe (left), The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (right) Below: Bridgette Bardot (left), Richard Nixon (right)

There was a lot more to it than just jumping. Halsman probably made more photographs of Marilyn Monroe than any other photographer. He talked once about her first sitting: that she was completely frozen with a fixed model smile. During a break Halsman told all the male assistants to start competing for Marilyn’s attention, to flirt outrageously. Within minutes he had gotten the natural, unposed look that made her famous. At another photo session he sat her at a desk in front of an assistant and told her to pretend she was interviewing for a part in a film she really wanted to make. Again, he got natural, life-like pictures rather than the posed look other photographers were getting.

Halsman’s Rules

In his book On the Creation of Photographic Ideas Halsman writes of the three things that make a portrait interesting: The Added Unusual Feature, The Unusual Technique, and The Missing Feature. Jumping is certainly an example of unusual technique, but it is the Unusual Feature that often makes Halsman’s portraits so memorable. He often used props to emphasize the subject’s interest:

Above: chess champion Bobbie Fischer (left), Alfred Hitchcock (right) Below:The Birds actress Tippie Hedren (left), Audrey Hepburn (right). All examples of the Unusual added feature.

The missing feature can be just as dramatic, if not more so. In his self-portrait Halsman combined both the Missing Feature (his body) with an unusual feature (the tripod base for his large camera) for an effect showing he was the camera. And when Halsman’s editors sent him to make a portrait of pianist Vladimir Horowitz, I doubt they were expecting him to return with this shot, for example:

Self Portrait (left) and portrait of Vladimir Horowitz (right)

Probably the most famous of Halsman’s photographs came from his long-term collaborations with Salvadore Dali. In Voluptas Mors (In sensual delight – death) is a portrait of Dali with the Unusual Feature of nude models arranged to form a skull in the background (posing and lighting the models according to a Dali drawing). If it looks a bit familiar, it may be because the skull portion of the picture was used for the back of the Death’s Head Moth in all the movie posters for Silence of the Lambs and a similar arrangement recreated for the movie poster of The Descent. The added feature here not only makes the portrait an amazing photograph, by its scale it emphasizes that Dali’s art is the real subject – it’s more emphasized in the photograph than the artist is.

In Voluptas Mors

Dali Atomicus was photographed in 1948, featuring Dali with his painting Leda Atomica. Unusual Features abound: flying cats, water, and easels for a few. Techniques, in those pre-post-processing (I think I just made up a good word) days, included suspending objects with piano wire, (and an assistant’s off-camera hands holding the chair) while other assistants threw pails of water and cats across the studio as Dali jumped. (In case you didn’t think of it, according to Halsman, the Missing Feature is gravity). If it sounds complex, it was: there were 26 takes over 5 hours with the crew mopping up between each take, while Halsman developed the print. The end result is a picture that was one of the most reproduced of all time.

Dali Atomicus

• “What do I want to capture most in my photographs ? Human emotion and the essence of human being. I am less interested in forcing my subjects into a visually interesting form.” Philippe Halsman

Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting you show up to your next portrait shoots with a few buckets of water and a cat or two. Even Halsman took more mundane portraits when he felt it appropriate like the ones of Albert Einstein and Georgia O’Keefe below. But thinking outside the box may get you something less ordinary than one more photo of an executive posed 30 degrees to the left, sitting in a library chair. And if my little article today has prevented just one more carefully-positioned, overdressed-but-barefoot, family-in-their-garden portrait, or if one less newborn finds itself perched precariously on its father’s forearm for a baby picture, then it’s been a day’s work well done.

Stop down and use a tripod

OK, you knew it was coming. The most important thing you can get for shooting lights during the Holiday season is a tripod. Yes, I know you have image stabilization on your lens (or in your camera). But if you want the lights to really shine, you’re going to need a tripod. The reason is Light Rule # 1: Stop the aperture way down when shooting lights. If you shoot wide open, say f/2.8 or more, the lights show up as glowing little blobs. But if you stop down – way down, where diffraction softening would interfere with a sharp daytime shot – you get awesome star points from your lights. Look at the same shot below, taken from f/2.8 to f/22. Major difference.

The effect is well worthwhile, but by the time the aperture was reduced to f/8 (which still didn’t give great stars), the exposure time was almost a second—way too long for any amount of image stabilization to be effective, so a tripod is a necessity if you want pointy-star lights.

By the way – here’s your photography equipment trivia of the day. Did you know you can tell how many aperture blades the lens has by the number of rays on the star? If the lens has an even number of aperture blades, the star will have the same number of rays as the number of aperture blades: 6 blades, the stars will have 6 rays, etc. If there are an odd number of aperture blades, the stars will have twice as many rays as there are blades: 7 blades, the stars have 14 rays (the reason is that each blade makes two rays, but with an even number of blades two rays overlap at each location, while with an odd number they don’t overlap). Why does this matter? Because some of the lenses famous for their smooth bokeh have 9 aperture blades. The 18 points that result from these when stopped down tend to blur and not be as dramatic.

Dusk, not dark!

You know the “golden hour” that landscape photographers talk about, the time just after dawn when the light is soft and angled and you get the best landscape images? There’s a similar time for shooting lights, the hour right after dusk. During this time there’s still enough light left to allow you to see at least an outline of the house, people, or whatever else is being lit, instead of just a pattern of lights.

Fill flash / double exposures

When shooting indoors I go to lengths to avoid flash, especially direct flash. But outdoors it’s very useful. Especially if you miss dusk and things have gotten dark. A bit of fill flash can show the details of the house, gardens, or even the Christmas tree, that would otherwise be lost if you’re exposing just by the lights.

There are several ways to set flash so that you don’t blow out the lights. Many flashes will let you choose a “fill flash ratio” or number of “stops of compensation.” A 4:1 ratio (which is the same as -2 stops of compensation) is usually about right. With a tripod, though, you will get better effects by what is variously called “slow sync” or “dragging the shutter.” With this technique you’re basically using a long exposure to get the pretty lights, followed by a brief burst of flash to expose the background. The technique varies a bit depending on camera and flash brand, but I generally use it in Aperture Priority mode (to set a high f-stop to make the lights twinkle), and the camera will automatically set the flash for fill-flash function. If there is too much or too little flash, you can correct the next shot with exposure compensation. There are lots of other ways to do it, but a half hour of experimenting (along with GASP reading the flash manual) will get you comfortable.

If you don’t want to mess with flash, then shooting two exposures (Ha! You’ll need a tripod again), one exposed for the background and the other stopped down to expose just the lights, is an easy solution. You can combine as layers in Photoshop (I usually use the blend-if sliders, but there are lots of ways to do it).

Swirls and effects

If it’s pitch dark and you don’t have your tripod (or even if it’s not pitch dark and you do), holiday lights are a great excuse to totally play around. Set your aperture and ISO so the exposure time is a second or two, then move the camera around during the shot, zoom the lens in and out, or whatever floats your boat, to get some nice abstract patterns. They’re pretty by themselves, but if you put them in Photoshop as a layer over a properly exposed image you can do all kinds of fun things using the “blend-if” sliders, etc.

Three shots of the same set of lights with different camera movement during 1 to 2 second exposures

Reflections

Especially when shooting entire buildings, things are twice as pretty if you get the lights reflecting from other surfaces. Of course Christmas lights reflecting off a pond or lake are beautiful, but we don’t always have a pond or lake handy. Rain puddles, snowmelt, or ice can all provide great reflections. Indoor lights will reflect from mirrors, but at night they’ll also often reflect from windows, glass cabinet fronts, or off of a well polished floor (like the pond, at my house there’s usually not a well-polished floor handy).

White balance for snow!

Most cameras’ auto fill-in-the-blank functions struggle with snow. Auto exposure and autofocus are not much of a problem when shooting lights, because the high contrast lights will lock on autofocus easily and we’re usually setting long exposure times. The auto white balance is usually useless when there’s a lot of snow, creating blue or sometimes yellow casts. To me the simplest solution is to shoot everything in RAW and correct it later, but most people set their white balance manually before shooting in snowy conditions. Just setting white balance on a clean, shadowless patch of snow should do the trick.

So there you have it, everything I know about shooting holiday lights, to go along with everything I know about indoor holiday shots in the last article.