Ithemba Kids
This last month I went to the Natal Midlands and whilst there spent quite a bit of time with the guys from Ithemba Projects, a wonderful group of people with huge hearts who work with children in the Sweetwaters community (http://www.ithembaprojects.org.za/). Whilst there I went along with them to a holiday project they were running in Sweetwaters and took my camera. It was great to see what they are up to hands on and I really admire what they are doing with the kids, not only academically educating but also building a foundation of strong values, in the belief that with education and good morals instilled during childhood, the community can be uplifted from within. I was touched most of all by the scincerity with which these kids got into the worship session- it was not as if they were just singing a song they learned , you could feel something more was going on, that there was real connection with what they were doing and what is was about . I was also struck by the sense of responsibility they had toward each other, the older kids really looked after and tended to the younger ones with patience and love. Here are some of the photos I took on the day…..
Shooting Solo
This last week I did my first solo photo shoot of a couple. A friend photographer from JHB, Doug Place, was here in CT to do an engagement shoot with his wife Carla coming along to assist, and he suggested that whilst here, I do a shoot with them. The experience would be good for me, giving me the opportunity to practice doing a shoot on my own, and they have not had many photos taken together since their wedding, a win/win situation. Doug is a photographer whose work I admire (http://www.dougplace.com) and he is in there with the top 50 SA photographers, he is also someone who has mentored me on my journey with photography, so when I got a call from him suggesting that I do a shoot of him and Carla, I was mildly terrified but excited none the less.
We enjoyed a day of wine tasting where I took some very informal shots of them and the next day we took a stroll on Muizenberg beach for some more formal photographs. As planned I did learn a lot from the experience and these are some of the tips I took away from it:
Take time to consider all the aspects of your shot, don’t rush yourself. I had stupidly put allot of pressure on myself about this shoot and didn’t make space for the fact that this was my first solo job. I tried to work at the pace of someone who had been doing this for a while, instead of acknowledging that this was a first and I may need to build myself up to being as fluid, fast and confident as an experienced professional.
If you are rushing yourself you are likely to focus more on either what’s going on inside your camera or what’s going on in front of it and end up neglecting one, the other, or both. For me, in general, it was what was going on inside my camera that I gave all the attention to, I was focused on my settings, getting my exposure, depth of field, sharpness/movement and composition right and neglecting to assess the lighting how it was falling on my subjects, how they were responding to it, if shadows were falling behind them and how I should work with those factors. Looking back there were so many times when I thought why didn’t I use a scrim there, get them to stand further away from the wall there and why did I have them facing that way? I knew better. All the theory I needed to know was there but in my nervous, rushed state I was only using half of it, and had I stopped, taken the pressure down a notch and thought calmly before each shot, I would have given myself the opportunity to consider everything a bit better.
On two of the courses I have been on, I was told that as a photographer you need to act confident and do things quickly, even when you are unsure, because this way your subjects think you are super professional and won’t get restless when you are taking time between shots. Having been on a solo shoot now, I couldn’t disagree more, you will look like a professional when you hand over amazing shots and no one will remember that you took a little longer between getting them, and your confidence will grow naturally with getting results you are proud of.
Don’t be shy to do what you need to get a good shot, in the end the people you are photographing are there because they want good pictures, and if you are stopping yourself from doing something because you don’t want to put anyone out, you have missed the point. If you have a vision, go for it and don’t hold back. I had two shots in mind that I wanted to get Doug and Carla to do, nothing crazy or over the top, but a little more complicated than your average shot. Instead of going for them, I held back not wanting to send them up a hill, go scouting for that slope or make them roll their jeans up a little higher so they don’t get wet and I regret it now because those more creative shots are often ones that end up being your “cover shots”.
Don’t fall for the idea that the more shots you take, the more options you are likely to have. I tried to get as many shots as possible which took away from getting as many quality shots as possible. Fewer well thought out photographs are worth far more than many rushed photographs. The photographs that I had planned well came out beautifully and I didn’t need 4 or 5 versions of those photographs to choose from, the few I took came out as planned. The shots that I was a bit trigger happy on however, ended up being a bunch of relatively average shots, and those were often the ones I didn’t bother to “flag” in Lightroom.
Be aware of the comfort of your subjects. Doug has sensitive eyes and when there was bright light, he ended up squinting. We tried to do a countdown to each shot where he would open his eyes on the count of three but it didn’t really work, I should have been using a scrim. I didn’t notice it on the camera screen but when I pulled them onto the computer I had great shots that ended up being unusable because of the expressions. If your subject isn’t comfortable, do something about it because it will end up coming across in your image. Professional models train themselves to work with bright lights and look turned on even if they are in ridiculously uncomfortable positions. With wedding photography on the other hand, you are working with normal people who squint when it’s bright, shiver when it’s cold and generally don’t know how to look like they are head over heels in love or having fun if they are uncomfortable.
I am so grateful for this opportunity because I learned a lot from it. Even as far as the more technical things go I realised I had some misconceptions. For instance I had been told that the golden rule with getting sharp images is f8 is great, not so much the case, but that’s for another post.
If I had to make one strong suggestion for someone studying photography through shadowing, make sure you practice being the one in charge of the shoot. Take your friends out for shoots, if you are at a family braai, offer to have an impromptu family shoot in the garden. Just don’t think that you will be able to rock up on a shoot and apply all the theory you know. Driving back from the shoot I told my boyfriend that I was making a promise to myself never to watch a photographer at work and criticize how they are doing things. It’s harder than it looks and you may think you know your stuff, but it only counts if you know how to employ all that knowledge on the job, when the pressure is on, and the best way to make sure you learn to do that, is with practice. I have started to line up a few more solo shoots in my spare time so that next year, when I am in the driver’s seat, I am comfortable behind the wheel.
Here are some of the pics from the day…
White Balance
Before sharing the tip I have learnt recently about white balance and camera settings, I want to give a very simplified and brief version about why white balance is necessary.
So let’s start with an example, I am reading a book by candle light and I see a white page in front of me, and yet when I take a picture of that page it comes out with an orange cast and doesn’t look white at all. What the camera sees and what the human eye sees are actually very different when it comes to light. The strange thing about this is that what the camera is seeing is actually what is true of that lighting situation and what we are seeing is a colour corrected version of that.
This is because different light sources have different colour temperatures and our brains try to compensate for that. Colour temperature refers to the distribution of the colour spectrum in light, which varies from one lighting situation to another. Daylight has an even distribution of colour and contains equal amounts of the various colours in the spectrum, whereas candlelight does not. The light from a candle contains more reds than it does blues and would be described as a warm colour temperature. When we are reading in candlelight we see white as white because our eyes have adjusted their colour sensitivity to suit the situation. Our eyes will pick up that the light source is emitting more reds than any of the other colours in the spectrum, and will compensate for this by decreasing the sensitivity of the colour-receptive cells in our eyes responsible for sensing red light, allowing us to distinguish the colours of the objects in front of us correctly.
This means that if we want our cameras to see what we see, we have to set them correctly to do so. So my image in candlelight would have come out orange because it was not set to the correct white balance. Most cameras have different white balance settings on them that allow you to tell your camera what the lighting situation is and it will make adjustments based in this information. The list of options on my camera is as follows:
Automatic white balance, daylight (Approx 5200K), shade (approx 7000k), cloudy (approx 6000k), tungsten (approx 3200k), white fluorescent light (approx 4000K), flash and manual.
The approximate values next to each setting are the estimated colour temperature readings of each scenario. Colour temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin and despite what one would predict, light with a cool colour temperature (light which has more blues than reds) has a high Kelvin value and light with a warm colour temperature has a low Kelvin value (I know it’s confusing, but just go with it for now and I promise to give you some useful links on the topic at the end for a more in-depth understanding).
So if you are shooting in shade and you have your camera set to tungsten (a warmer light) your image will come out with a blue cast, and if you are shooting in a room lit by a tungsten bulb and your camera is set to shade, your image will come out looking orange.
To give you an idea of the Kelvin measurements of the different light sources you are likely to encounter here is a list I found…
| 1000-2000 K | Candlelight |
| 2500-3500 K | Tungsten Bulb (household variety) |
| 3000-4000 K | Sunrise/Sunset (clear sky) |
| 4000-5000 K | Fluorescent Lamps |
| 5000-5500 K | Electronic Flash |
| 5000-6500 K | Daylight with Clear Sky (sun overhead) |
| 6500-8000 K | Moderately Overcast Sky |
| 9000-10000 K | Shade or Heavily Overcast Sky |
As you can see these are just some of the lighting situations you might find yourself in and there are more here than there are options on my camera. But this doesn’t bother me, because to be honest I am not too worried about white-balance when I am taking pictures.
I have recently learnt two tricks with regards to choosing the right white balance setting on your camera. The first is that you don’t have to, and the second is that you have to shoot in Raw. This is because I am in the camp of evil photographers who think that it’s ok to correct your white balance on computer instead of getting it right on camera, and shooting in Raw allows me to do this.
The preset settings on the camera are not one hundred percent accurate, and often need tweaking due to the fact that it works on an approximate value to begin with, it can’t account for mixed light sources, there are more light sources than settings and the camera tends to get confused when there is a predominance of a warm or cool colour in an image and can read that as a warmer or cooler light source.
If I am looking for a completely 100% accurate reading, the best thing to do would be to use manual white balance, in which case I would get a piece of white/neutral colour card, take a picture of it and tell the camera to adjust its settings so that it reads that card as white. This works well if I have a controlled environment like a studio, or if I have the luxury of time, but in a wedding I have neither. I am constantly moving between different lighting situations and the action doesn’t wait for me.
Leaving my camera on one setting means that all of my images from one lighting situation will need the same colour correction, which allows me to batch edit them. If I were shooting in auto I would have a slightly different white balance for every image and would have to spend hours editing them individually. So I find it much more logical to simply lock my camera on daylight and wait till I am at my screen to correct. This way I save time, get consistency and can still get an image that looked like what I was seeing at the time I took it. As I am not a fashion photographer who needs 100% accuracy this works pretty well for me and using my eye in post is a perfectly acceptable way to get the image looking right. So if you are a fellow evil photographer willing to correct your colour balance in post, then I hope you find this blog entry useful.
I have tried to keep this as simplified as possible but there is a lot to read online about white balance and colour temperature and I had quite allot of fun getting a bit more into the science of it, so if you want to know more, I have some links that I found useful…
Duncan Davidson was able to write two blog posts on these topics that were in-depth and yet understandable with good illustrations and they were : Measuring the Colour of Light http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2008/04/kelvins-and-the-color-of-light.html) and Colour Temperature and white balance (http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2008/04/color-temperature-and-sensors.html).
If you are still with me, thanks for passing up on that warmer colours having a lower colour temp earlier, here are the links as promised(http://www.schorsch.com/kbase/glossary/cct.html, http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.html ) and a quick blurb on my understanding of this. To get a black body (as described in Duncan Davidson post on measuring the colour of light) to emit blue light means that you have to heat it up much more than you would to get it to emit red light. Typically “warmer” colours like your reds and oranges have longer wavelengths, and tupically “cooler” colours have shorter wavelengths, but it is these shorter wavelengths that actually contain light of a higher energey. If you have ever heard of something burning white hot and understood that it was hotter than red hot, or have ever been told that a blue flame is hotter than a red flame, and you apply that knowledge to this situation, then it all starts to make a bit more sense… (http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1545) 🙂
Before sharing the tip I have learnt recently about white balance and camera settings, I want to give a very simplified and brief version about why white balance is necessary.
So let’s start with an example, I am reading a book by candle light and I see a white page in front of me, and yet when I take a picture of that page it comes out with an orange cast and doesn’t look white at all. What the camera sees and what the human eye sees are actually very different when it comes to light. The strange thing about this is that what the camera is seeing is actually what is true of that lighting situation and what we are seeing is a colour corrected version of that.
This is because different light sources have different colour temperatures and our brains try to compensate for that. Colour temperature refers to the distribution of the colour spectrum in light, which varies from one lighting situation to another. Daylight has an even distribution of colour and contains equal amounts of the various colours in the spectrum, whereas candlelight does not. The light from a candle contains more reds than it does blues and would be described as a warm colour temperature. When we are reading in candlelight we see white as white because our eyes have adjusted their colour sensitivity to suit the situation. Our eyes will pick up that the light source is emitting more reds than any of the other colours in the spectrum, and will compensate for this by decreasing the sensitivity of the colour-receptive cells in our eyes responsible for sensing red light, allowing us to distinguish the colours of the objects in front of us correctly.
This means that if we want our cameras to see what we see, we have to set them correctly to do so. So my image in candlelight would have come out orange because it was not set to the correct white balance. Most cameras have different white balance settings on them that allow you to tell your camera what the lighting situation is and it will make adjustments based in this information. The list of options on my camera is as follows:
Automatic white balance, daylight (Approx 5200K), shade (approx 7000k), cloudy (approx 6000k), tungsten (approx 3200k), white fluorescent light (approx 4000K), flash and manual.
The approximate values next to each setting are the estimated colour temperature readings of each scenario. Colour temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin and despite what one would predict, light with a cool colour temperature (light which has more blues than reds) has a high Kelvin value and light with a warm colour temperature has a low Kelvin value (I know it’s confusing, but just go with it for now and I promise to give you some useful links on the topic at the end for a more in-depth understanding).
So if you are shooting in shade and you have your camera set to tungsten (a warmer light) your image will come out with a blue cast, and if you are shooting in a room lit by a tungsten bulb and your camera is set to shade, your image will come out looking orange.
To give you an idea of the Kelvin measurements of the different light sources you are likely to encounter here is a list I found…
|
1000-2000 K |
Candlelight |
|
2500-3500 K |
Tungsten Bulb (household variety) |
|
3000-4000 K |
Sunrise/Sunset (clear sky) |
|
4000-5000 K |
Fluorescent Lamps |
|
5000-5500 K |
Electronic Flash |
|
5000-6500 K |
Daylight with Clear Sky (sun overhead) |
|
6500-8000 K |
Moderately Overcast Sky |
|
9000-10000 K |
Shade or Heavily Overcast Sky |
As you can see these are just some of the lighting situations you might find yourself in and there are more here than there are options on my camera. But this doesn’t bother me, because to be honest I am not too worried about white-balance when I am taking pictures.
I have recently learnt two tricks with regards to choosing the right white balance setting on your camera. The first is that you don’t have to, and the second is that you have to shoot in Raw. This is because I am in the camp of evil photographers who think that it’s ok to correct your white balance on computer instead of getting it right on camera, and shooting in Raw allows me to do this.
The preset settings on the camera are not one hundred percent accurate, and often need tweaking due to the fact that it works on an approximate value to begin with, it can’t account for mixed light sources, there are more light sources than settings and the camera tends to get confused when there is a predominance of a warm or cool colour in an image and can read that as a warmer or cooler light source.
If I am looking for a completely 100% accurate reading, the best thing to do would be to use manual white balance, in which case I would get a piece of white/neutral colour card, take a picture of it and tell the camera to adjust its settings so that it reads that card as white. This works well if I have a controlled environment like a studio, or if I have the luxury of time, but in a wedding I have neither. I am constantly moving between different lighting situations and the action doesn’t wait for me.
Leaving my camera on one setting means that all of my images from one lighting situation will need the same colour correction, which allows me to batch edit them. If I were shooting in auto I would have a slightly different white balance for every image and would have to spend hours editing them individually. So I find it much more logical to simply lock my camera on daylight and wait till I am at my screen to correct. This way I save time, get consistency and can still get an image that looked like what I was seeing at the time I took it. As I am not a fashion photographer who needs 100% accuracy this works pretty well for me and using my eye in post is a perfectly acceptable way to get the image looking right. So if you are a fellow evil photographer willing to correct your colour balance in post, then I hope you find this blog entry useful.
I have tried to keep this as simplified as possible but there is a lot to read online about white balance and colour temperature and I had quite allot of fun getting a bit more into the science of it, so if you want to know more, I have some links that I found useful…
Duncan Davidson was able to write two blog posts on these topics that were in-depth and yet understandable with good illustrations and they were : Measuring the Colour of Light http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2008/04/kelvins-and-the-color-of-light.html) and Colour Temperature and white balance (http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2008/04/color-temperature-and-sensors.html).
If you are still with me, thanks for passing up on that warmer colours having a lower colour temp , here are the links as promised(http://www.schorsch.com/kbase/glossary/cct.html, http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.html ) and a quick blurb on my understanding of this. To get a black body (as described in Duncan Davidson post on measuring the colour of light) to emit blue light means that you have to heat it up much more than you would to get it to emit red light. If you have ever heard of something burning white hot and understood that it was hotter than red hot, or have ever been told that a blue flame is hotter than a red flame, and you apply that knowledge to this situation, then it all starts to make a bit more sense… (http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1545) J
Studying Photography
When I decided that I wanted to study photography, I was scared. I was choosing this over doing honours, something not to be taken lightly considering the scarcity of jobs here in South Africa and how much qualifications help one’s CV. Add to that the fact that there are thousands of photographers out there these days, and this decision was a pretty daunting one. It would have been an easier if I had been doing this for years or if I was a photography prodigy who was taking award winning shots from the moment I picked up a camera. But the truth is, I am still relatively new to this, and I am going to need to develop and work at my photography before I can compete proudly with the pros whose work I admire, and even then success is never guaranteed. However, I had chosen to make a go of becoming a professional photographer, even if it wasn’t the safe choice, but if I was going to do this, I wanted to make sure I did it right.
My first thought , as would be most people’s I would imagine, was that studying through an institution is the sensible, logical way to go about this and that I should find the school that boasts the best reputation and student portfolio and go there. But I ended up choosing to do it differently, and here is why:
Whilst comparing the different institutions, I found that the curriculums involved allot of theory and would spend a couple of weeks at a time on subjects such as the history of photography, ethics, building your own pinhole camera etc. For me, this felt like it was drawing a one year course over two-three years (which is the duration of pretty much all the diplomas offered).That would mean spending another 2 years studying before I even started to get any experience in the actual field.
I was also feeling a little weary of doing something too theory based for such a practical subject, I had previously done a degree that spent allot of time on theory , was very interesting, but it did not leave me feeling at all equipped to actually do the job I was supposedly being trained for. I wanted intensive, practical training.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I think theory is irrelevant, not at all, especially with the ethics of photography. You need to be prepared for what kind of ethical dilemmas you might be faced with, where you stand with your views on them and the laws you will need to know etc. I had however, already covered these topics in previous courses at great length and was not looking to repeat them.
I was feeling a bit frustrated and did not know what I should be doing. Not wanting to make a hasty or ill-informed decision, I started seeking advice on whether to study at an institution or not. If so, which one? If not, how should I go about teaching myself photography?
I called up a photographer friend I looked up to and asked him for advice. He had taught himself everything he needed to know through shadowing a photographer, reading blogs, finding resource material and building a network of photography contacts which he could turn to when he needed ask questions or seek advice. He felt that the courses/diplomas were “criminally overpriced”, and with each one costing around R45000 a year, I had to agree. His advice to me was not to go through an institution but rather to shadow a photographer and invest the money in equipment.
I started to get very excited about the idea. What my friend said made sense, with photography you do not need a degree or diploma to show that you have what it takes, everything people need to know about your ability as a photographer is in your portfolio. Whilst shadowing a photographer, not only would I be learning about photography, building up a portfolio and gaining experience in the actual field, but I would be learning the ins and outs of running a photography business as well. It would also mean that when I started doing my own weddings, I would have some professional equipment.
As I said I wanted to do this right, and so before making a decision, I looked for some second opinions from other photographers whose work I respected. I phoned both photographers who had studied at an institution, and those who had not, and everyone (apart from one, singular person) said the same thing, don’t study, shadow. They all seemed to share the opinion that the money could be far better invested in equipment, and that by shadowing, you would be able to learn everything you would have learned at an institution and more.
So, I have decided to follow the advice of the pros, and this year I am going to be shadowing a photographer, reading blogs, finding recourse material as well as doing a couple of workshops at the Cape Town School of Photography. This way does mean that I am going to have to make sure I am taking responsibility for my own education, setting up my own syllabus and asking the questions I need to, but I am happy to trade some added responsibility in for an intensive, practical learning experience.
A Short Introduction
Hi, just a quick intro. My name is Sarah, I am a 20-something who after finishing my BA decided that, instead of doing honours or getting a job in my field of studies, I wanted make a go of becoming a photographer.
I first became interested in photography a few years ago, when I took a photojournalism seminar as part of my degree. It was during this seminar that I was introduced to some of the photography greats such as Henri Cartier and Robert Capa, as well as some of the photography basics such as the “rule of thirds”, aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I was immediately captivated, and decided to learn more in my spare time, I got an entry level SLR, did a couple of short courses, taught myself to work in Photoshop and Lightroom and started following photography blogs.
With the degree over and a basic knowledge of photography, I have taken this year to learn everything I can about photography and running a photography business. In this blog I am going to be sharing some of the tips I learn, links I find, and pictures I take along the way, as I explore the world in thirds.
The World in Thirds 
