Portfolio
http://www.smugmug.com/ria/ShizamSlides-2009120303.swf?AlbumID=11065984&dontpost=true&AlbumKey=s7tq6&newWindow=false&width=400&height=400&transparent=true&splash=&showLogo=false&captions=true&clickUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smugmug.com&showThumbs=true&showButtons=true&pageStyle=white&autoStart=true&showSpeed=true&VersionNos=2009120303&splashDelay=0&crossFadeSpeed=350&clickToImage=true&showStartButton=false&randomStart=false&randomize=true&mainHost=www.michaelhampson.com
Smugmug added a new feature this week that it’s calling Smart Galleries, essentially a way to place virtual copies of an image into more than one gallery. It’s something like Flickr’s sets and galleries in one.
Anyway, I’ve made a “best of” gallery as a portfolio for my nature photography, so when I point someone to my website, I can give them a single link that shows off what I’m most proud of.
Check it out here!
Back-button Autofocus
If you’re shooting with a camera that supports it, look into using back-button autofocus, which separates the autofocus system from the shutter button. Then, the shutter button starts and locks the light meter, and the AF button, pressed with your thumb, starts the autofocus magic.
Mid-range and pro Canon DSLRs will often have a dedicated button for this (“AF-ON”); the Rebels can use the AE-Lock (“*”) button for it. They all have a custom function that can let you select, basically, which of all these buttons do what — there are actually several ways to map different functions to these buttons besides the one I’m talking about here, one of which might be even more perfect for your work style. I can’t speak to Nikons from personal experience but I know they have this ability, and I assume other brands do as well — my EOS A2 can do this, so it’s not a new idea.
It takes a little bit of effort to retrain your thumb and forefinger, but not much. And for a lot of photographers, it’s worth it. If you think about it, having one button control the focus, the light meter, and the shutter all at the same time doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. A lot of times, the subject of your image is going to need be in focus and exposed properly, sure — but that’s no harder with back-button AF, whereas photos where that’s not the case are going to be much harder to manage without it.
Imagine trying to shoot a person against a bright, colorful sunset with fluffy clouds, and mackerel sky. You’re visualizing a mid-distance portrait with her silhouetted against the background, so you switch over to partial metering, because you don’t want the light meter to find some ugly middle ground by looking at everything: this scene is about contrast and color. So in aperture-priority mode* for shallow DoF, you meter off of the sky to bring her exposure down by two stops, full black, and AE-Lock it. Then you autofocus on the person, but the light meter wakes up again: your shutter speed drops to bring her exposure up higher than you want, the sky gets overexposed, and everything is either noisy or blown out. With back-button AF focus, you could have held the exposure with the shutter button, then focused with your thumb, without the light meter knowing or caring.
*Shooting in manual mode would also avoid this sort of problem, except of course that the light is fading fast in this hypothetical situation, and somebody’s got to keep an eye on the light meter, whether it’s you or the camera.
Another situation where this comes in useful is when you’re shooting in low but shifting light, where the AF drive has to work hard to find its subject in the first place. Imagine shooting a street corner on a cloudy day, with the street signs in focus and readable, and moving cars and pedestrians around it. You get the street sign in focus easily enough, but clicking the shutter button will send the AF hunting back and forth for whatever it thinks you want.
Sure, you can switch the lens AF off, but that’s is a workaround, and it’s easy enough to miss a shot because you forgot to switch it back on again. Back-button AF means you don’t have to think about working around slightly complicated, everyday focus/metering issues like this because they just don’t come up. It’s no harder than having the shutter button do all the work, and in many cases it’s just a lot easier.
2:1 magnification
I picked up a set of super inexpensive Pro Optic Extension Tubes
We’re covered in snow and slush here in Boston, so my macro expeditions have been limited to the far corners of the kitchen, where I found the exotic Chlorophytum comosum: the spider plant. With the 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens, the full set of tubes gives about 2:1 magnification. At this point, you really need buckets of light in order to get an aperture with a reasonable depth of field: my flash was set to 1/4 power and was only a few inches away. Unlike bugs, spider plants don’t run away from the camera, so I used a tripod to make these a bit easier.
Shooting manual
Shooting with the camera in manual mode is probably the most intimidating skill to new photographers. It’s not that it’s particularly hard, and there are definitely more complicated skills to grasp, but it’s one of the most visible challenges when you first pick up a camera: how do I use the M on the dial? It’s a sign of status, separating the real photogs from the snapshotters.
Which is crap, because placing technical skills on that kind of pedestal is losing sight of that fact that only the final image counts. Your audience won’t give you bonus points for shooting in one mode or another, and knowing how to shoot manual does not automatically give you the vision to use it. If you’re taking boring pictures in automatic, you’ll be taking boring pictures in manual. Composition is entirely in your eyes and your brain, and all manual mode, or any other feature of your camera, will do is help you translate your vision into a photograph.
That said, learning how to use full manual or one of the priority modes gives you control over the image. The camera cannot read your mind, and unless you understand how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO interact to control the exposure and depth of field, you’re going to up missing shots. Guaranteed. Technical skills are vitally important, and you can’t ignore them without sacrificing your potential as a photographer — not to mention if you spent a lot of money on a camera that can give you this control but refuse to learn it, you’d have saved a lot of money by getting a cheap compact.
But full-manual mode is probably less important than understanding metering modes, white balance, or shooting in RAW and post-processing, for example. It’s easy to do, by the way, once you’ve learned to read the camera’s light meter in the viewfinder — you’re not expected to just know what shutter speed you need to get a proper exposure with a given aperture.
But bear in mind that setting aperture and adjusting the shutter until the meter looks good is no different than shooting in aperture mode and setting exposure compensation, unless you need more exposure compensation than your camera can do — which isn’t likely, except in specific circumstances. If you trust the camera meter to tell you when you’ve turned the dial far enough in manual, you can trust it to turn the dial for you. Just remember you can’t trust it to turn all the dials for you.
(Exposure compensation, in case you haven’t used it before, is easy and useful. Most of the time your camera is metering with the assumption that you want the scene to be, on average, an even, neutral gray — in terms of brightness, not color. Setting the EC will adjust the target exposure, in case you want it brighter or darker than that, or if you’re shooting something that will fool the meter. For example, it’s hard for the camera to know that snow is really supposed to be white in color, and it usually needs about +2/3 EC to get it right. Or if you don’t mind underexposing just a touch to get a slightly faster shutter speed, you can use -1/3 EC.)
Anyway, if you’re intimidated by the big M, try using shutter or aperture priority. Experiment with those modes until you have a good sense of what you’re doing when you’re changing the aperture or shutter, and I promise you your ability to create images you’re proud of will increase 10000%. And don’t listen to anybody saying ‘real’ photographers do this or that. There’s nothing wrong with mastering one new thing at a time, at your own pace, and shooting manual does not have to be at the top of your list.