Beyond Phototips

by KK+Photojournalism, is that immensely satisfying, yet sometimes wildly dangerous profession where a photographer goes out into the world and documents it’s goings on. Many of us, as photographers aspire to this profession, yet few have the guts and talent required.

The problem with defining lenses for Photojournalism is that there are so many fields of journalism that there is no real “defining set” of lenses. Each kind of journalism calls for a different set of lenses. Take for example, the sports journalist… He would use lenses that fall into the Sports Photography set. I’m going to go out on a limb now, and ‘guess’ that what all you guys want to read about are the photojournalists who have the ‘real’ journalist’s job. The foreign correspondent… The guy who records wars, drought, floods, changes in government and so on. Let’s cut to the chase.

Requirements

Photojournalists do pretty much the same things as regular journalists and then some… They end up carrying their gear around almost all the time when they’re on assignment and land up in places that newspaper journalists need never venture. All this makes it hard for him. His choice of lenses, camera body and other accessories depends on the kind of picture that he expects to be taking. Typically they have a very vast range of gear from which they can choose. Gear needs to be usable for multiple purposes, lightweight, fast, and really, really reliable.

Very often, they choose lenses with large apertures. Large apertures help them focus more easily, because they let in more light. It also gives them the flexibility to shoot in low-light scenarios. The trade-off is in weight. Lenses with large apertures usually have very large front elements made of high quality optical glass… This makes it heavy.

They also have an odd assortment of prime and zoom lenses. Primes for clarity and wide apertures, especially at the long focal length range, and zooms for ease of composition in situations that may demand a quick change from telephoto to wide-angle.

Style and Purposes

Of course, the personal style of individual photographers also plays a crucial factor in the choice of equipment… Whether the style of photography at hand is street photography, or war reportage, or whether its something more elaborate which allows you to set up lights and choose your lens in comparative leisure will also determine what lenses the photojournalist will choose.

However, do remember that some photographers may almost always use a 50mm while others may use a 400mm f/4.0 L at one moment and switch to a 24mm wide the very next… Of course, the subject being photographed also determines the kind of lens being used; there’s absolutely no point using a 50mm while photographing a Formula 1 race (unless you’re photographing the crowd) and there’s no point trying to use a 400mm in a mob… you’ll only get their noses…

So now, with no further ado, let’s look at some lenses. The list is easy… Just list out all of the high end lenses you can think of… The list can also go on and on, so I’m listing here, some of the specialty lenses that you’re likely to find on journalists’ cameras. If you’re interested in any particular type of photojournalism (portraits, for example), do look it up in one of the posts I’ve written in “The Lens Resource.”

Canon Lenses

EF 600mm f/4L IS USM | (Stats)
EF 500mm f/4L IS USM | (Stats)
EF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM | (Stats)
EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM | (Stats)
EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM | (Stats)

Nikon Lenses

AF-S Nikkor 600mm f/4D IF-ED II | (Stats)
AF-S Nikkor 500mm f/4D IF-ED II | (Stats)
AF-S Nikkor 400mm f/2.8D IF-ED II | (Stats)
AF-S VR Nikkor 300mm f/2.8G IF-ED | (Stats)
AF Zoom-Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D ED | (Stats)
AF VR Zoom-Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED | (Stats)
AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED | (Stats)

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Canon today announced their replacement for the 1Ds MkII, the 21.1 megapixel EOS 1Ds MkIII.

The news of the USD 7,999 camera was splashed across amazon.com pages for a while before some details went offline. However, engadget managed to get some screen shots.

Apparently the EOS 40D has been announced too. Go to dpreview.com for Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III specs and Canon EOS 40D specs.

I’m off to yet another photoshoot in the long list of photoshoots that have been keeping me busy through the last month… I promise we’ll be back with more tips and tricks by the middle of this week. In the meantime, let the drool rule!

Update: Amazon is now taking pre-ordersfor this amazing camera.

Yes, I’m all drooly and skeptical at the same time, you can tell by the large pictures… It sure does look like a Canon… and not any Canon that I’ve seen till now. I’m in two minds about buying that point n shoot now…

Word is that Canon’s new camera is likely to be a 10.1 Megapixel marvel with the Digic III processor.

Interesting new features currently look like - low and high speed continuous shooting, sRAW (possibly a lower res RAW file format), 3 User Customisable shooting modes, 2 different Self-timer durations and possibly a more full featured heads up display.

I first caught wind of these pictures over at Engadget, but the images were found by a Forum member at dpreview who managed to download them before the source went offline.

Personally, I’m a Canon man; at the moment, more because I have the equipment than because I like the body (I actually like Nikon’s camera layout better), but I’m certainly going to wait for news of this to get official before making my camera buying decisions. Aren’t we all…

by JanneM

Most of you have already seen the lenses that photographers use at sports events. You see them all the time, sitting at the sidelines at every sports event (the photographers with the lenses that is… not the lenses alone), with massive lenses perched atop tripods or monopods in almost any kind of weather…

I’ll be dealing with those lenses and the real reasons why photographers choose, and need, to use these lenses over other - not so big - lenses in 3 sections. Focal Length, Prime Vs Zoom lenses, and Aperture. An additional section on Image stabilisation is included.

Focal Length

by elyuyu

Outdoor sports events usually call for telephoto or super-telephoto lenses, more often Super-telephoto than plain telephoto. Super-telephoto lenses are generally lenses with a focal length of more than 300mm.

If you’ve ever tried photographing a soccer event you’ll know why these photographers use these lenses. A moderate telephoto lens of 70mm or 135mm will give you a rather wide view when photographing a player at the other side of the field and almost nothing if you’re photographing from near the opposite goal post.

Additionally, its usually difficult and/or dangerous to get too close to some of the action. Imagine having to sit 10 feet away from a racetrack to get frame-filling pictures of Formula 1 cars with a medium length telephoto lens! Both dangerous and impractical… also, you’d never get permission from the organisers!

600mm and 800mm lenses help magnify the players/drivers so that they fill up the frame and bring all the gritty action right up into the photograph. Also, if you want to capture the speed of the cars you can use a relatively slow shutter speed and pan your camera to blur the background; Impossible if you are too close…

Zoom Vs Prime Lenses
Sports photographers have to deal with a constantly changing environment. Very often incidents occur so fast that its not possible to change a lens. Zoom lenses are invaluable at these times. Imagine being able to frame a race-car 200 feet away one moment and the next swivel around to take a photograph of a car crash happening 30 feet away and then a portrait of a distressed driver as he walks past you, all without having to change your lens once! Sigma’s 50-500mm f/4-6.3 EX DG HSM Lens could enable you to do just that!

However, do keep in mind that super telephoto lenses are very specialised lenses and their optical design is very complicated. This is why you will find more prime lenses than zoom lenses at this end of the focal length spectrum. Prime lenses offer superior image quality to zoom lenses because they are designed optimally for a particular focal length while zoom lenses strive to offer decent quality at all focal lengths. Many fail in comparison with prime lenses.

Aperture

by hirevimaging

Capturing movement means that many times photographers will need shutter speeds that are upwards of 1/1000 sec. Most sports events are held in relatively well lit areas in the day, but at night, even the brightest floodlights are a poor substitute for the sun.

However, even in bright sunlight, it helps to use a large aperture to blur out the audience or scenery in the background and to keep the action alone in focus. This separation of the sports action from a cluttered background is one of the defining features of these lenses.

Also, lenses with larger apertures generally perform better at two levels:

1. They focus faster and more accurately.
2. They have a higher level of sharpness at their intermediate apertures.

Large apertures are even more important when it comes to indoor or night photography. Light levels are bound to be lower while the action is still at the same pace. Of course, you can compensate by increasing your ISO settings, but not everyone is willing to pay for the trade-off with higher noise levels. In this situation, larger apertures offer the sports photographer an added advantage of a brighter image in the viewfinder, thus making it easier to get better framing and composition.

Image Stabilisation & Vibration Reduction
Image Stabilisation and Vibration Reduction are Canon’s and Nikon’s terms for their proprietary shake and movement reduction technologies. Many of their lenses are now equipped with these technologies, making it inevitable that we take a look at them. I’ll use the term ‘Shake Reduction’ to refer to these technologies though I prefer the term “Image Stabilisation”.

Shake Reduction technology can mean the difference between a razor sharp and blurred picture at the same shutter speeds or the difference between the ability to hand-hold a lens for a photograph that would otherwise have to be tripod-mounted. Some older lenses of this genre do not perform well on tripods and instead introduce shake where there is none. Others have a panning mode for tripod mounted use and corrects shake only on one axis.

Shake Reduction does not fix all your shake problems; rather, it helps you increase your efficiency. If used well, it can be used to really push the limits of hand-held photography.

Wide-Angle Lenses

by ElectrikCandyland

Wide angle lenses are not practical for most sports applications. However, if you’re photographing a relatively low-impact sport (where damage to the photographer is ‘relatively’ low in a worst case scenario), say skateboarding or roller-blading for instance, you could use these lenses for great effects.

Here are some lens recommendations for Canon & Nikon cameras with links to their specs pages.

Canon
EF 600mm f/4L IS USM
EF 500mm f/4L IS USM
EF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM
EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM
EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM

Nikon
AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR Replacing the AF-S Nikkor 600mm f/4D IF-ED II
AF-S Nikkor 500mm f/4D IF-ED II
AF-S Nikkor 400mm f/2.8D IF-ED II
AF-S VR Nikkor 300mm f/2.8G IF-ED
AF Zoom-Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D ED - Added in Update
AF VR Zoom-Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED
AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED
AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6D ED

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If you’re interested in improving your photography, look at our Photo Projects series.

You can also find out more about lenses for different kinds of photography at The Lens Resource index post.

by fotofacade

Architectural Photography is a specialised branch of photography that not many people master. One of the reasons is that very often, the architectural photographer needs equipment that is beyond the reach of the average photo enthusiast. Other reasons include: needing a good aesthetic sense, and (as with all photographic subjects) a true appreciation of the architecture being photographed.

An understanding of composition and elements of design, and an eye for spotting them helps too… However, we’re not doing a class on how to take Architectural photographs, though that may come later. So, on to the lenses…

Tilt-Shift Lenses
A tilt-shift (abbreviated to TS and also called a Perspective Correction lens) lens enables your SLR camera to operate like a bellows or view camera (in a restricted sense though…). Essentially, the problem with taking pictures of tall buildings from the ground is that as their height increases, the top of the building gets further away from the camera, introducing ‘perspective’ into the photograph. The work around is to keep the camera pointed parallel to the ground; but the problem with doing this is that you more of the ground into your photograph and you may end up cutting off the top of the building. The TS lens, helps by allowing you to keep the camera perfectly horizontal but ’shifting’ the view of the lens upwards… Take a look a the illustration…

Here are some more interesting photographs taken with Tilt-Shift lenses: Charminar by Sabir, CIS building by fotofacade and Full Shift Boogie by iso100.

Here are a couple of TS lenses that I’d want to own (if I could afford them)

Canon
Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L Tilt Shift Lens
Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens
Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens

Nikon
Nikon 28mm f/3.5 PC-Nikkor
Nikon 85mm f/2.8 PC Micro Nikkor

Ultra Wide-Angle lenses

By Cuellar

Now, Architectural photography also includes pictures of interiors… Often the areas that need to be photographed are narrow or small, but need to be shown in their entirety. This calls for another breed of special lenses. Ultra Wide-Angle lenses, like TS lenses are expensive play things for people who have no need for them, but a necessity for those who do… 14-21mm prime lenses fit the bill for professional photographers who make a living out of photographing interiors. However, for the enthusiast who prefers to have a more usable range of focal lengths and does not ‘need’ the ultra-high quality that the prime lenses offer, the ultra-wide zoom lenses that various companies have on offer are a good option. Canon, Nikon, Sigma and Tamron have some really good zoom lenses for any Digital or Film SLR that you may have.

Here are some Ultra-Wide Prime and Zoom lenses for Canon and Nikon cameras. Sigma and Tamron lenses have not been mentioned as they come in either Canon or Nikon mounts; however, here is a list of all sigma lenses and Tamron’s lenses page.

Canon
Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L USM - Unique for its absolutely straight lines in spite of wide view.
Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM
Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

Nikon
Nikon 12-24mm f/4G ED IF DX - Meant for DX format cameras
Nikon 14mm f/2.8D ED AF - Similar to Canon’s 14mm lens
Nikon 18mm f/2.8D AF
Nikon 18mm - 70mm f/3.5-4.5G ED IF AF-S DX - Meant for DX format cameras
Nikon 20mm f/2.8D AF

Special Effects lenses
Fisheye Lenses bring a very different view to any photograph. A fisheye lens brings in a totally different aspect when it comes to architecture. It enables the photographer to explore architecture as patterns and shapes, distorting them - sometimes beyond recognition - so that the viewer is also forced to look at architecture in a new way.

Here are some Fisheye lenses.
Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye
Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye - Meant for DX format cameras
Nikon 16mm F/2.8D AF Fisheye
Sigma 8mm f/3.5 EX DG Circular Fisheye (for Canon) - Circular Fisheye! - WOW!
Sigma 8mm f/3.5 EX DG Circular Fisheye (for Nikon) - Circular Fisheye! - WOW!
Sigma 15mm f/2.8 EX DG Diagonal Fisheye (for Canon)
Sigma 15mm f/2.8 EX DG Diagonal Fisheye (for Nikon)

I hope that this list and explanation of some of the lenses that can be used for Architectural photography is of some use. This is by no means an extensive list. Rather, I intend it as a list that will help you get a fair idea of the kinds of lenses that can be used profitably, to get pictures that bring a viewer back for a second look. If you’re interested in improving your photography, look at our Photo Projects series.

Find out more about lenses for different kinds of photography at The Lens Resource index post.

Portrait Lenses

by saisiv

A good ‘Portrait lens’ should be able to separate the person being photographed from the background and feature him/her in a pleasing perspective.

Imagine that you’re taking a photograph of a beautiful model out-doors, near a forest, under the shade of some massive evergreen trees with gigantic ferns in the background (don’t look to the left, picture this in your mind). You’d want to get the model in sharp focus but if the ferns are also in focus, they’d just add clutter to the photograph. In this case, a telephoto lens set at a nice, wide aperture will give you a shallow depth of field, separating the model and the background. If you’re just using natural light with some reflectors, the added advantage of having a fast lens is that you’ll be able to shoot at faster shutter speeds!

The best range of focal lengths
Most photographers use a zoom lens in the 85-135mm range for most of their portrait photography. Some of the faster lenses in this range of focal lengths come with apertures as wide as f/2.8 and f/1.8. Canon’s EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens is one such lens.

You’ll also want a lens that enables you to stand a reasonable distance away from the subject. Long focal lengths help with that… Staying away from the subject and taking portraits with a 70mm or 135mm lens has two major benefits.

1. The first is that it gives the sitter’s face a pleasing perspective. Noses are not enlarged and sticking into the camera while ears disappear into the distance; instead they are nicely proportionate to each other.
2. The second is that you will be able to give the model or sitter some space instead of intruding into their personal space. This always makes the sitter more comfortable, making for a more productive shoot.

At the same time, you don’t want to be too far away from the sitter, making it difficult to communicate… Also, you may not have all that much space! Taking a full length portrait of a 5’ 10” model with a 200mm lens would require you to stand about 30-40 feet away! So, extremely long focal length lenses are generally given a miss for this category unless you’re doing some really tight close-ups, in which case it would generally be cheaper to take a couple of steps forwards!

Alternate Focal lengths

by Jason Armstrong

The 70-200mm lens we talked about earlier is great if you’re doing half-length or close up shots, but if you’re taking full length, or group portraits, you may want to add a wider zoom to your repertoire of lenses to give your photographs some variety. A wide-to-medium-telephoto lens is usually good for this usage. I use the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens but have to keep reminding myself to stay at the telephoto end of the lens. A good way to remind yourself not to go wide is to set a marker at a safe distance away from the model and to remain behind it at all times. This will ensure that you don’t distort the sitter’s features beyond their most pleasing proportions.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule and sometimes a portrait taken with a wide-angle lens could emphasise a certain quirky aspect of your sitter’s personality, so remember, there is always room for a couple of pictures taken with non-standard focal lengths and angles…

Portraits with a Prime Lens
Some photographers prefer to use ‘Prime lenses‘ (also called block lenses) for portraiture because of the increased sharpness over zoom lenses. The Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L is one of the major candidates for this as many photographers feel that the perspective and bokeh. Many photographers also like using 105mm and 135mm prime lenses for their portrait photography. However, using a prime lens means that you have to keep ’shunting’ forwards and backwards to get your framing right.

Here are some popular ‘Portrait lenses’ for Nikon and Canon Cameras

Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L
Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM

Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom
Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom
Nikon 85mm f/1.8D AF
Nikon 135mm f/2.0D AF DC

Find out more about lenses for different kinds of photography at The Lens Resource index post.

Like I promised, we’re going to take a look at some lens applications and what lenses you’d want for a given use. I’ve divided them broadly into the following categories

Lenses for Portrait Photography
Lenses for Landscape Photography
Lenses for Macro Photography
Lenses for Nature & Wildlife Photography
Lenses for Sports Photography
Lenses for Still-life Photography
Lenses for Architectural Photography
Lenses for Photojournalism

I’ll be adding links to the related posts as we go along, so bookmark this page if you’re interested.

Do you think that something’s been left out? Do you want to see another category in this list? Add a comment to this post and I’ll put it in.

Ok, so maybe you don’t have a $3,000 camera, or the expensive lenses that go with it, but you’ve put in a tidy sum to get your camera gear, and I’m sure you’d like a couple of ideas on how to keep that gear ship-shape and humming all the time.

Keep it in use
Keeping your gear in use is one of the best ways to ensure that its working when you need it. Buying an expensive lens and storing it away in your closet is not going to keep it nice and well. You want to keep it in shape?Use it… Using the lenses and cameras that you have keeps the gears, motors and hinges lubricated and rust free. It keeps you lenses aerated and free of fungus (if you’re not in an excessively humid area) and your camera’s springs and gears lively and full of punch!

More than anything else, it keeps the photography gears running in your head. Remember, we talked about that…

Control the humidity when possible
Its important to keep your lenses in a moderately humid area, especially if you live near the coast or in a humid region. Excess humidity helps fungal growth in your lenses, which, over time will lead to poor image quality and softness. Once fungal growth has begun, its almost impossible to remove it completely without damaging the lens’s coating. Low humidity (below 20%) could dry out the lubricant.

In this case, prevention certainly is better than cure… And prevention is easy, just make sure that your lenses are in air-tight containers and that you have fresh indicative silica gel inside, along with those lenses. Don’t use too much though, a couple of sachets should do for most situations.

Keep them away from vibrations
Any delicate machinery should be kept away from vibrating surfaces. Vibrations make screws get loose in their threads and eventually fall out… Consider that your camera’s shutter is a delicate part and that a loose screw getting in between it while its moving could ruin it completely. Vibrations could also mess up the various delicately calibrated parts other than the shutter…

Make sure that your camera bag is well padded on the sides and the bottom so that vibrations are dampened to the maximum possible extent.

Clean it often, and keep it clean
A good assumption to make is that your camera is allergic to dust. Wipe its nose, will you? and keep it wiped…

Dust, sand and moisture are a camera’s worst enemies and the worst you can do is to keep it in an environment with these elements around…

• Dust gets jammed in inconvenient places and is very hard to get rid of once it enters your camera body.
• Sand is extremely abrasive and could instantly jam any moving part in a camera.
• Moisture/water and electronics do not mix. They go together like, well, electricity and water… a lethal combination. Keep your camera as dry as possible, even if the manufacturer claims that the camera is weather-proof. In addition, moisture is bad for your lenses, remember? fungus…

Cleaning your camera equipment takes care of dust that could enter the camera body, makes sure that you don’t have sand around the lens mount when you change lenses, and safe storage keeps moisture out of the equation.

Use UV filters on your lenses
The front element of your lens is always exposed to the open. Getting fingerprints, dust and often, horrible scratches on the lens element are not all that rare occurances. Getting an Ultra-Violet filter for your lens keeps your lens one step away from these disastrous events. You can leave them on all the time as they have a very minor effect on the resulting photographs…

In general, pamper them, but not too much
Your cameras have to be taken care of, kept clean and charged, but you do have a life beyond the camera. At the end of the day, your camera is just metal, plastic and glass; people need to be taken care of a lot more… and you also have those photographs to take…

Why Filters are fun
Filters have always been a fun thing for me in my photography, they allow you to take a photograph of a normal scene, and make it look extraordinary. There are various kinds of filters, coloured filters and special effects filters.

Colour Filters essentially add and subtract colour from the scene. For example, a yellow filter allows the frequencies of light that show up as yellow to pass through while reducing light of the opposite colour, blue. This is useful to know when you’re using filters for colour correction and when using filters for black and white photography. We’ll discuss those in more depth later, right now I want to get to the more interesting, special effects filters.

Neutral Density (ND) Filters decrease the amount of light that goes through the lens without changing its colour. This is great if you want to use a slow shutter speed or ISO on a bright day… You could also use it when you need to use a wider aperture for more depth of field. The effects that you can achieve with this filter are only limited by your imagination.

by Younes Bounhar

Graduated Filters are great on bright days when you want to get both your sky and land exposed well. Very often, we see pictures with well exposed land masses but totally white skies or vice versa, great blue skies but dark landmasses. A Graduated Neutral Density filter is clear on one side, but progressively gets darker, like an ND filter. There are also coloured graduated filters for other effects… Its important to remember that this gradation is affected by the aperture. The smaller the aperture (usually f/8 and smaller), the softer the apparent gradation. Large apertures could result in the gradation appearing as a narrow line…

Starburst Filters are good if the subject that you’re photographing is dark point sources of light. Take a small city lane at night, for example, most of the scene is dark with some lit areas and some street lights. The streetlights are point sources of light and when used with this filter will diffract into star patterns.

Diopter Filters are also called close up lenses. The allow you to focus at closer distances, making it ideal for close up or macro photographs. They are cheap compared to macro lenses or extension tubes/bellows and are a great way to explore the world of macro photography without the expenditure.

by gaspi

Soft Focus Filters are filters that slightly diffuse a photograph. Most soft focus filters have a more pronounced effect in the brighter areas of the photograph. As the name suggests, Soft Focus Filters make the photograph look soft. This is useful for portraits where the photographer wants to achieve a nostalgic or ethereal look or maybe just give the photograph a diffused, glowy feel. Some photographers also use an old UV filter smeared with a thin coating of petroleum jelly to get a similar effect. The advantage of using this method is that the photographer can smear the outer edges alone and leave the center sharp.

An important point to note is that cameras with Through The Lens (TTL) metering - which means all modern SLR cameras - will automatically adjust for all filters that are fitted in front of the lens. So, don’t worry about compensating for them. If you have an older camera which uses manual metering, and uses a lightmeter that does not take readings through the lens, you may have to compensate for each filter’s filter factor.

But remember, no matter what filters you use, its the content and composition that will make your pictures stand out. Filters only help you capture what you’ve got in your mind.

For many years now, I’ve been a person who’s been caught up in the equipment game… partly because my father - a frequent traveller to european countries - is an equipment enthusiast and for as long as i can remember, has always brought home classic cameras like the Zeiss Ikon Contaflex Super B, the Hasselblad 500c, the Canon AE-1, the Yashica FX3, and some decent cameras like the Minolta X700 and the X7A. He used to buy these cameras and marvel at the quality of the construction, the ingenuity of the makers and the remarkable optics. The pictures that these cameras took were also remarkable…

Then I got my own camera for the first time… as a present. It was a Carena, a Taiwan-made camera that my father bought in Hong Kong. One that looked exactly like the Minolta X7A and later on, one of my father’s 2 Zeiss Ikons, a camera that I’d been eyeing for a while…

Well, I started taking more pictures than before (which was still not many). Now, some of those pictures were good, and some of them were bad… I especially had a tough time with on-camera flash and messed up entire rolls of film with that on both of my cameras…

Years later, after working with film in the dark room, and a whole lot of ‘gowing up’, I bought myself a Nikon F3 that I’d had my eye on for quite a while. I spent about Rs. 10,000 (~ USD 200) on it and I was suddenly taking much nicer pictures… unfortunately I don’t have any of these digitised or I’d actually be able to convince you!

So, now where am I going with all this? Where’s the tip? I’m getting to it, don’t rush!

Better camera = Better pictures?
Well, not really. My buddy Umesh had just an Electro 35 GTN Rangefinder camera and created great images when I was messing them up back in college! He still uses his tiny Sony P-72 to create great pictures!

What I’ve found is that with time, my understanding of the principles of photography have grown… especially my understanding and appreciation of the principles of composition, lighting and design. Allowing me to take better pictures “in my mind”.

Lets back up a moment… I’m taking pictures in my mind?
Well, not literally, but yes, that’s where they start off… When I’m looking through the viewfinder or just looking at a scene, I imagine it the way I want to see it. Ansel Adams, the master of the Zone system called this Previsualisation. You imagine the picture the way it can be finally, and then expose, develop and print it to achieve that previsualised image. So where does the gear get into the picture? Simple answer… It doesn’t! your equipment is just a tool in aiding the process of previsualisation. It makes the job simpler. It does not define what you previsualise… It just helps you attain what you have previsualised.

Let me put it this way, its not the brushes that make a work of art! Its the artist! If anything, a well balanced brush will make is easier for the artist to paint the picture, but the brush does not make the picture itself, its the artist. The same applies for photography. You may have just a Sony P-72, but you can still make stunning pictures!

Previz? Here’s an example.
Now lets see, these two pictures to the left… They did not start out that way. They started out being plain old dull pictures, but when I took the photographs, I knew that i was going to tone them in this particular fashion. I also knew that i was going to remove almost all detail in the darker areas and make them silhouettes… I did all this with the RAW file format. No Photoshop. Read my previous post to learn a bit more about RAW.

In the good old days, such toning, dodging and burning would be done in the dark room. Today its done in Photoshop or an equivalent photo editor. Its all a part of the evolution of photography so do try to learn how to use these new tools. In the end, thats what they are… tools made for you to accomplish what you see in your mind’s eye.

Happy previz, shooting and post production!

Susheel