Photographer Coach

What the heck is this a photo of? Some sort of Photoshop digital montage? Actually, no, it’s a straight image I shot out my car window one morning last week! Ever consider keeping your camera at the ready on the front seat of your car? Read on to learn more about drive-by shooting!

What are the compositional elements of this photograph?

I made this image out the side window of my car while waiting for a light to change. The horizontal legs are part of a stationary statue, and these occupy the upper third of the frame. This helps us meet our compositional goal of the “Rule of Thirds.” The ladder truck and pedestrians helped balance the composition by placing themselves in the lower two-thirds of the frame! I happen to like the way the more distant pedestrian is slightly blurred—this gives a bit of depth to the image. Was there luck involved here? Of course. But you have to be well-practiced in the art of drive-by photography in order to take advantage of such situations. Read the rest

Someone once said that if your photos don’t seem interesting, that’s only because you weren’t close enough! Given physical limitations, we often resort to zoom lenses or print enlargement to get closer to the subject. However, digital image magnification now gives us another way to do this. This image of the bumblebee is actually a digitally magnified portion of the original. Let’s see the original and learn more about this technique.

One of the only good reasons to have a digital camera with high resolution (5 megapixels and above) is so that you can digitally zoom in on an area of the image and not have that zoomed in portion become all choppy or noisy. The lower the resolution of the original, the worse the magnified area will be. Realize, too, that with most digital cameras, you can choose low, medium, or high resolution. Best to use the highest setting if you think you’ll want to enlarge or edit the images later on. Read the rest

Concert shots look so easy when you see them in magazines, don’t they? Try to take one and you’ll see what the artist Georgia O’Keefe meant when she said, “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

If you walk away from this article with one thing let it be this: Cameras need light in order to record an image. The less light there is, the more difficult time the camera will have.

Getting a good concert shot is all about the lighting.

However, you must choose between flash and available light. Let’s explore both. Read the rest

Olympus EVOLT E-510
10 MP Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera

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The E-510 is one of several entry-level digital SLRs on the market, clocking in at under $1000 with the typical inexpensive short zoom. Olympus film SLRs have always been quirky, and their DSLRs seem to follow suit. A good analogy is driving a Subaru after years of driving other Japanese cars—the controls are oddly marked and not positioned in the standard locations. Read the rest

Holga 120CFN
Medium Format Fixed Focus Film Camera with Lens and Built-in Flash with Color Filter Wheel
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What’s a Holga?

A Holga is a cheap Chinese plastic medium format film camera. Essentially, a toy! Yes, I did say FILM camera! Why review this decidedly lo-tech dinosaur? Well, simply put, the Holga lets you express your creativity in ways that digital does not allow. Shoot a roll of color slide film and then have your photo processing people cross-process it as if it were negative film (For Kodak and similar films, that would be C-41 instead of the proper E-6). Check out my Holga shots here and see what you think!
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Happy Holidays! Christmas lights are very tempting to us photographers, aren’t they? Unless you have a “Xmas Lights” setting on your digital point-and-shoot, how are you going to make a photo like this?

First of all, you need to find a photo-worthy scene. This image was shot in Love Park (in front of City Hall) in Philadelphia. The Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture is a favorite destination photo site for tourists. Each year when they put up the 50-foot decorated tree behind it, the whole scene bursts into life! That is, at night. During the day it’s kind of mediocre. So how to photograph it at night? Read the rest

Black and white? Who would ever want to photograph a richly colored Autumn leaf in black and white? (That’s a rhetorical question). There was something about the way this wet maple looked the other morning on the hood of my car that just screamed “Monochrome!”

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Someone asked me the other day, “How can you get great contrast in a color photograph?” My answer was (and still is), “Sunny day and bright, fully saturated contrasting colors.” Short of that, you’re going to have to do a lot of work with a photo editing computer program.

It’s quite easy to get great contrast in a black and white photograph, provided the image is made up of mostly black blacks and white whites (not innumerable shades of grey between). Upping the contrast is generally very easy to do with photo editing software, your main concerns being 1) loss of shadow detail and 2) burning out the highlights. Color is a bit more difficult, what with there being all those, uh, colors. When you stop and think about it, its kind of unusual to see much naturally occurring contrasting color. Perhaps this is why we find deciduous leaves so much more interesting in the Fall than at other times of the year! Read the rest

Author: Amy Arbus
Publisher: Welcome Books
Year Published: 2006
Rating:
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On April 28, 2007, Amy Arbus did a lecture and book signing at the photography Gallery 339 in Philadelphia. For some lame reason, I did not attend the lecture. I did, however, go there and buy the book with the intent of getting her to sign it. Read the rest

Pentax K100D
6.1MP Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera
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The low cost competitor enters the DSLR market! The obvious question: “Are we still to consider it so?” Not really, as it costs the same as its competitors in the consumer-grade DSLR market. Pentax has never had much snob appeal or cachet. However, the lenses have always been great and the (film SLR) bodies workhorses. So let’s see how the digital version measures up! Read the rest