Getting creative with Depth of Field

Lanterns

With a prime lens at its widest aperture setting, like a 50mm f/1.8, only a very narrow slice of what is in front of you is in focus. The farther away from the subject you're focused on, the thicker that slice gets. If you're focusing on something 3 feet in front of you, the slice might only be 1 inch thick. Focus on something 8 feet away, it becomes a slice 10 inches thick. The numbers aren't perfect, just examples used to illustrate the principle.

The important aspect of this is that you can have one thing in your picture perfectly in focus, and have everything else in the picture out of focus. This technique can be used to awesome effect :D

Notice how only the middle lantern is in focus?

Why Expensive Cameras Are Useful

So as I've clawed my way up the photography ladder, I've had a few thoughts along the way. A few years back, one of them was "Why in the world should a camera cost $1,500 dollars?!" (and now I'm of the opinion that $8,000 for a camera isn't half bad. Oh how the times change)

Coming from the world where a 35mm Point and Shoot was $15, and a new digital camera might be $150, a digital SLR costing $1,500 seemed... Well, insane!

So what's different between a $150 digital camera and a $1,500 one? Do you even *need* $1,350 dollars worth of improved gadgetry? In fact, why not just shoot everything with a $25 dollar Holga (a notoriously bad (yet desirable because of that) medium format film camera)

Another photographer posed this same question. He was at a photoshoot, and when he pulled out a Holga, the other photographers looked at him 'like he'd just killed a kitten'. He was curious as to why the disdain, and another photographer had a particularly good answer:

"The idea behind "photoshoots" is control. The common idea of a "good" photographer, is having control over the majority of the elements affecting the image (even if it looks spontaneous). Therefore, pulling out a Holga at a photoshoot is like saying "whatever happens happens"....that's why I'd look at another photographer funny..."
-JGraham

What you're paying for in that extra $1,350 dollars is having control over all the elements in a photograph that are under the possible control of the camera. Needless to say, a $1,500 DSLR can do a lot of things a $150 P&S camera can't.

A specific example would be spot metering. Proper exposure is tough. Usually the digital camera takes its best guess as to what should be the brightest and darkest areas in a photo, and tries to make everything in the image visible. Some times, as a photographer, you don't care if the background is visible or not, you're concerned that every bit of the model is properly exposed and don't give a fig for the rest of the picture. With a DSLR, you can select a small spot (say the model's face) that should be properly exposed and to ignore the rest of the picture. This is useful when you have someone in front of a really bright window. Or a strobe. Or any number of strong back lights. Spot metering is a $500 option, it seems (if you count the number of dollars between cameras where it's available and those where it's not).

There's quite a few controls like that. While costly, they are very useful. Telling the camera how to focus is also another expensive option. Etc, etc, etc.

What it adds up to is 'yes, there's a good reason for a camera to cost $1,500, or $8,000, or even $38,000'. It all adds up to the photographer having more control over his images. Being able to get things exactly like need them to be is worth a lot of money, as it turns out.

Film Only or Film Mostly Photographers

It's kind of interesting to observe the transition from film to digital. It truly is the end of an era. What's really interesting is how people react to it.

In some of the places I frequent, a subject that comes up on a regular basis is 'film vs digital' or 'who still shoots with film only?'. The topic is posted on the assumption that people who shoot entirely with film, or still shoot anything at all with film are in some way better at photography than their foolish peers who have entirely embraced digital photography.

Film certainly has its advantages, but when you look at all the people that make a living from photography, 99% of them shoot in digital now. That's very, very telling.

I look at the work of people who proudly state that the use 'only film' or 'mostly film'. Without exception, their work is sub-par compared to their peers who are at the same point in their career.

Interesting.

To conjecture as to why the vast majority of film users are sub-par photographers leads to even more questions, none of them with happy answers I fear.

There are exceptions, art photographers and photographers for whom digital isn't an option for their particular subject. But they're the exceptions.

It's tiring to read posts trumpeting the value of film photography when the work of those who do so speaks to the opposite.

Magnum Photos and Crappy Photography

With fine art over a certain age, it's fairly easy to decide what's crap and what's good art. A hundred years, or a few hundred years allows for perspective and distance that are impossible to achieve at the time.

Photography is a funny thing. It's a new art form. Historically speaking, that doesn't happen too often. Being new means that it's harder to say with any authority as to what is good and what is crap.

Coming from a fine art background and years of studying art history, it's pretty easy to distinguish why Michelangelo was a far better sculptor than many of his contemporaries who created very respectable sculpture in their own right.

If you met Michelangelo today, not knowing who he was, only able to judge him by the quality of his work, what would you write about him? "There's this Michelangelo guy who makes some pretty impressive sculpture, but will he be anything but a footnote in history?" Until history happens, so to speak, you really can't say. Time bears out the quality of our judgments.

I look at the various photographers represented by the Magnum Photos collective, and I read their website and wonder "Are they really all that and a bag of chips? Or is the collective opinion about those photographers a bit over-rated?" Truthfully speaking, quite a bit of the work shown *is* impressive.

Whether they've set the highest bar in the field of photography or not is a much harder thing to say. Two hundred years from now, how will their photos be viewed? Will Henri Cartier-Bresson be viewed as the equivalent of the Monet of his time, or as the equivalent of Sisley? In other words, you ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Monet" before and most people will say "Yeah!". You ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Sisley" and most people will say "Who?"

Perhaps it stems from my skeptical nature, but when I see many of my contemporaries in the photography world saying that the Magnum Photographers are the end-all be all of people photography, I hesitate to jump on the idealogical bandwagon. They're good, and some shots can easily be declared as excellent, but... It's hard to say whether collectively, they're "really all that and a bag of chips". I hesitate to make any judgment from anything less than a highly informed position.

Of course a lot of people at the time Impressionism became popular thought that the movement was complete crap and the lesson that denotes is quickly obvious. People at the time were wrong and Impressionism is most certainly not complete crap. In fact, as art movements go, it was pretty damn good.

But for every equivalent of the Impressionist movement, there's ten Rococo's or worse.

Where do the Magnum photographers fall between those two lines? To one side, or somewhere in-between?

Someone with a time machine get back to me on this.

Mr. Ducky in 3D

So, I've had this pair of 3D glasses sitting around the house, you know, the classic movie theater style, one eye red, the other blue / cyan. And I've always wanted to make stereoscopic pictures to take advantage of the whole 3D picture thing. So I finally did.

Patenteux.com was quite useful with some helpful instructions and their kindly provided Photoshop PSD template. Another useful resource to be noted is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has a Computer Science department that kindly hosts a very, very extensive manual on the math and everything else that goes into making anaglyphs here (PDF format).

The long and short of it is that for human beings, one eye is separated by 6cm or so from the other. So you might think, 'ah, just move the camera 6cm or so from one shot to the next and that's it!'. Not quite. For the best 3D effect, the ideal distance from one shot to the next is 1/30th the distance from your subject.

Say you have a rubber ducky 30cm away from the camera. Well, you'd move the camera 1cm to the right for the second shot, rather than 6cm, which is way, way too much for an object so close. And if you're outdoors, and your subject is 30 meters away (I'm using the metric system because imperial / english units suck for math purposes), the ideal distance would be 1m from shot to shot, rather than 6cm.

Now you too can make your own anaglyphs!

So long, Project 365

I'm finally done with Project 365. You can see all the shots here.

Project 365 is more or less like marathon training for a photographer. Taking a picture every day for 365 days in a row is pretty hard, as it turns out. And much like anything that you practice at constantly, you get better at it. Take for example the first and last images:

April 1st, 2007:



March 31st 2008:


To put it mildly, I've gotten a lot better.


Here are a few shots from over the course of the year that stand out in my mind:

Building a Contact Trigger for Your Flash

Building a Contact Trigger for Your Flash from Guy Montag on Vimeo.