Beyond Phototips

Here’s a short list of problems that you may encounter on your journey of discovery in photography, along with an equally short list of fixes to get you back on the road.

1. Red-Eye: Red, Alien-like eyes that appear to infest regular human-beings when using on-camera flash.

REASON: On-Camera Flash being too close to the lens’ axis.

FIX: Move your flash off camera; Get a little creative with it.

2. Blur: Blur were an English alternative rock band that formed in Colchester in 1989.// Oops, wrong Blur.

Blur is when objects in the frame or photograph seem soft, blurry (duh!) or streaky.

REASON: There are two main reasons, actually. 1) Relatively fast moving objects 2) Soft, or incorrect, focus

FIX:

1) Moving Objects. Use a faster shutter speed, fast enough to freeze it, or use a flash.

2) Soft Focus: Make sure you focus correctly, get better spectacles if you need ‘em. (I know I do…)

3. Shake: Similar to blur, but instigated by the camera and / or photographer.

REASON: Incorrect posture, bad camera holding technique, or use of a slow shutter speed

FIX:

1) Make sure your shooting posture ensures that you’re well balanced and stable when you actually press the shutter release

2) Learn how to grip the camera correctly. (Video)

3) Use faster shutter speeds, use flash to freeze your subject, or just shoot in better light.

4. Flash reflected off Glass: This is the all-too-famous blotch of white light that you see in airplane windows, in aquariums and offices.

REASON: Flash bouncing off the glass and back into the camera’s lens.

FIX: When shooting in to glass, remember not to shoot perpendicular to it if using flash. If possible, turn off your flash, else, if you have a camera with a lens that sticks out, go right up to the glass so that the lens is almost touching the glass itself, and then take a picture. That way you wont get reflections of your flash!

5. Flare: White diffused area next to a light source, or circles of light radiating out from a light source that’s directly in the photograph’s frame.

REASON: Light that comes directly into the lens sometimes does not get absorbed, but bounces off the surface of the lens. The best lenses have great coatings to reduce this, but a cheap filter most certainly will bounce light.

FIX: Use a lens hood to keep stray light out, get a lens with better coatings, Dont shoot directly into the light.

6. Vignetting: Dark edges in a photograph

REASON:

1) Light that is focussed by the lens starts falling-off towards the edges.

2) Filters on a wide-angle lens infringing on the corners of the frame

3) A Low quality lens

FIX:

1) All lenses have some degree of vignetting. The expensive ones just have less.

2) Don’t use filters that need step-down ring adaptors

3) Some cameras like the LOMO use low quality lenses intentionally. If you don’t want a vignette, don’t use them.

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…well, life happened.

I’ve been quite busy, running between two, no, three photo-shoots, post production of the photographs from those photographs and a website design that needs to be completed in a hurry. I have just not had the time to post here, and may not be able to for another couple of days.

However, here’s what you can look forward to when I’m back. I’m thinking of putting together a series of posts about lenses; what lenses to use for a particular job and some lens suggestions. Now, if you have some suggestions and ideas, do drop me a line at susheel(dot)c(at)gmail(dot)com.

Also, the Tiny Tips will be back. If you’re a first time visitor here and would like to know when I’m back up and blogging, do subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll know instantly.

Right now, I’m a semi-professional photographer, apart from taking photographs, I also do some graphic design, advertising design and web design. Over the years, I’ve always had trouble with designing websites because of the complicated tables that people used to use for web design… My print design experiences have led me to think that if I want to move a graphic element to a certain location, all I had do was to place it there… Web design changed all that with its rigid table-based formatting. I had to figure out how to place graphics that I’d created in Photoshop in them and then make it look like the various cells were actually seamless.

Now, I’ve always loved new technologies and this made me experiment with web designing more than once… Each time I ran from the challenge with tail tucked between the legs. Only recently has this changed. A client requested that I work on a website because he liked my print based design. I’m quite aware that there are different usability issues in print and web but I decided to take it up anyway.

So, I started off on the third attempt with renewed vigour. It had been about 2 years since the last failed attempt and I wanted to see what had changed. Almost immediately, I came across CSS based website design. A bit of research and a lot of help from my friends Umesh and Balaji saw me having a much more enjoyable experience this time around.

Personally, I use only Firefox and being new to the web design business, I continued to use it through the building and testing stages of this first website that I was designing. Disaster struck when the client saw the page. He was using Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) and was seeing a significantly different layout from what I’d designed. What had happened?

A bit more research told me that it was because Internet Explorer interprets the code for CSS and HTML quite differently from the standards that are laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). This was causing hell for me.

I’ve always used Firefox because I’ve considered it safer… It does not allow pop-ups to open without warning, and has somehow kept the spyware and malware level down compared to what I see on other people’s computers that are using Internet Explorer, now my faith was reaffirmed. Besides, it has cooler things like tab-based browsing, and huge number of add-ons and themes. Its also easy to move to. You don’t have to worry about exporting your settings from Internet Explorer, Firefox transfers your bookmarks and other settings automatically!

There are always those arguments that IE is the most popular web browser around and so any website should be designed with it in mind. I think that that is a load of rubbish! Why design a website for a flawed browser? One that essentially does not understand what you’re telling it when you speak perfect “web lingo”… Instead, I now have to speak flawed “web” so that this one browser can understand it. There are a lot more reasons why you should NOT be using Internet Explorer…

Internet Explorer is not the only browser available, there are dozens of other browsers that understand the “web lingo” flawlessly and I urge you to use one of them if you haven’t already… Try Firefox, and I’m sure you’ll see the difference with time and usage. Your computer will have fewer problems with spyware and websites that are designed to standards will display perfectly. Please, don’t make people like me have to type messed up code just because you use Internet Explorer. You’ll make the web a better place by using Firefox or one of the standards compliant web browsers.

Hi there!

Photography Tip has added a new feed source. You can continue using the old blogger feed if you’re already subscribed, or update to our new feed by clicking here.

The new feed does not change anything in the way that you will access Photography Tip’s content, just adds some functionality.

If you’re interested in finding out what all this is about, do check out feedburner.

If you don’t know what a feed is, it’s an easy way to keep track of and read posts from all your favourite blogs in one place. You’ll need to use an RSS feed reader or ‘aggregators‘ as they are called. I’d recommend Google Reader for the un-initiated, because its easy to use. Firefox also has a useful function called live bookmarks which makes use of the same feeds.

Note: The Edit adds an explanation about feeds.

Where have all the dark rooms gone? Gone to graveyards, every one…

Yes, thats what is happening today… every one of the professional film developing and printing studios, especially the manual ones, have closed down… replaced by computerised labs that print your pictures, professional or not, with superb clarity and all-automatic adjustments.

Why would you need film today? “to preserve it in a museum” is the most likely answer…

Speaking to an owner of a manual developing and printing studio which was very popular among the professional photographers of Chennai not more than a year ago, he says that his business is at an all time low… His C-41 output is zero and E-6 is almost that. Why? Because all his clients, Chennai’s top photographers, have moved to Digital media.

In a city where a year ago some press photographers used to proudly make do with their trusty Pextax K-1000 and Canon AE-1, they can no longer survive with anything less than a Nikon D-100. Digital Reigns!

Now with Popular Photography (a significant publication in the United States) announcing that Film’s days are short and numbered, and Kodak significantly cutting down their production of film and film cameras, this is the death knell for photography as it is traditionally known.

Creating panoramic images is fun; especially when you can use a digital camera. The time consuming and painsaking process of developing, scanning, colour matching and only then stitching the images together. With digital images, you can take the photographs, stitch them together, colour correct and then crop and display the images.

Always remember to keep the camera perpendicular to the vertical and the horizon straight across the middle of the camera. This avoids distortion that is non-correctable.

My favorite software when it comes to making panoramas is Smoky City Design’s ‘The Panorama Factory’. It has a comprehensive list of cameras and the lenses’ focal lengths. This enables the software to compensate for this pre-determined barrel or pincushion distortion based on the zoom amount. The wizard generated images are quite good with a well shot panorama but a little manual tweaking can go a long way in improving a badly shot one.