The Photography Tip of the Week #070
Photoblock Challenge – One Shot
070 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
The shot I waited for during my challenge.
There are many benefits of digital photography over ye-old film days. Instant feedback being the primary benefit, but the second important benefit is the ability to take a limitless number of photos for relatively no added cost. If you shoot in JPG, you can get thousands of photos on a single memory card. And if you shoot RAW, thousands of photos are still achievable. I like this ability, because I know that not every shot is going to be great and this gives me a lot to choose from. Yet there in lies the problem. We can amass a huge library of photos in relatively a short period of time with the bulk of the photos being junk. A few years back I showed my portfolio to a mentor and he thumbed through it really fast and said, “You walk too fast.” I instantly knew what he meant and we all fall victim to it during first years of the digital photography craze. Since we can photograph nearly indefinitely, we think it’s our duty to do so. What made photographers great years ago still holds true today, they took their time to make a truly great photo. So the challenge is to turn your digital camera into a film camera for a short period of time.
Scott Kelby had a version of this challenge a month or so ago. In his challenge, he stated that you could only shot 36 exposures, you had to cover up your LCD and you couldn’t look at the photos for at least 24 hours. I have a short version of the same challenge and that is to:
Set aside one hour and only take a single photograph.
Since you can only take one shot, you will find rather quickly that you will want to make that shot count and you will do everything you can to make a truly great photo. If you don’t know what to photograph, then do something like the sunset. At what point is the best photo going to happen? You’ll have to wait for it and see. But once you make the shot, pack it up. Don’t sit around and see if something better will come, you had the one shot, now see what you can do with it.
So why should you do this challenge? As you learn to control when you press the shutter button, you will reduce the amount of time it takes to dump the photos off your memory card. You will severely cut down on the number of images you need to cull, and cut down on the hard disk space required to store that amassed digital dogpile. Not to mention the transfer time required for backup to an online service like backblaze. All-in-all your digital photo life will be much simpler and you will have much more note worthy photos to share.
The Photography Tip of the Week #066
No Rush Hour
066 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
One of the golden rules of outdoor photography is related to what photographers call the golden light. There is an hour around sunrise and sunset when the sun produces “golden” light. This gives you a rather unique quality to the light that cannot be reproduced any other time of the day. It starts about 20 minutes before sunrise and lasts about 40 minutes afterwords. For sunset it starts about 40 minutes before sunset and lasts about 20 minutes afterwords. There are some subtle differences between sunrise and sunset, but for all practical purposes the light and benefits of outdoor photography between these times of day are the same. Here are a few added benefits of the golden hours of the day.
1) Softer light – The angle of the sun is low on the horizon. The light has to travel through more atmosphere due to the curvature of the Earth. This spreads the light out more than when the sun is high in the sky. This diffuses the light over a wider area and creates soft light and smooth shadows.
2) Longer deeper shadows – The angle of the sun is so low that the shadows are very long. This also has the added benefit of creating deeper shadows. Because of this I often will even shoot exposure bracketed images just in case I need to make an HDR image.
3) Color shift – Since the light of the sun is going through a steeper curve of the atmosphere there is a prismatic effect that changes the wave length of the light, shifting the colors. Depending on the altitude and the composition of the atmosphere (any added junk in the air) this color shift can be very pronounced.
And one more thing – Fewer people in the morning. There are fewer people out in the evenings as well, but sunrise is great if you want to photograph without a lot of extras in your scene.
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