In 2011 three mates and I headed to Utah for four weeks of winter goodness. And the snow gods certainly delivered. Here are some of the shots I was able to get between pow fever. No time for lighting or set ups. Just shooting from the hip!

Yesterday in Auckland it was a beautiful 25 degree day. Today it’s absolutely pouring down. Which provided the opportunity to get a few more images for my ‘Storm’ portfolio I’m putting together to ultimately exhibit.

Here’s one of the shots I got, taken from the beach at Mission Bay.

It was a beautiful night yesterday so I headed out to Piha for a surf. I only spent about 45 mins in the water as the surf was pretty poor, but I spent a bit of time taking a few photos.

This is my favourite. A little self portrait.

Shooting directly into the sun, I deliberately overexposed the shot to blow out the highlights. And I mean seriously overexposed, probably by 7-8 stops. It also gives the image that overall warm/summer hue. I set my aperture at f5 to give a smallish depth of field and pull me out from the foreground. Then camera on tripod, self timer and Bob’s your aunty.

I’m no post production digital whizz, preferring to capture the scene in camera as close to the final product as possible. But I am working on some stuff to put on my walls at home and a Polaroid style photo would be perfect.

I’d love to just whack the shots through Instagram or Hipstamatic and get the look I want, but given I’ve taken all my shots already on my dSLR, I set about searching online for some Photoshop filters I could use instead.

I struggled through a lot of crap guides and tutorials, but found a couple of little gems that I thought I’d share.

1. Spoongraphics

This great little post will give you a really faded, dirty look. Not 100% on the border but that would be easy enough to fix with a different brush.

2. The Best Photoshop Tutorials

And the effect these guys show you how to create is a sweet retro feel. It’s actually a very current advertsing look in my opinion. For denim in particular. They also provide a free PSD file you can download to make the whole process so much faster.

I’m going to combine some of the ideas together to give me the exact look I want. Then stick them onto my wall in a pretty random way with semi transparent coloured tape. That’s the plan anyway! I’ll try and remember to post some actual photos once finished.

I’m pretty stoked to have been selected as one of the top 15 design & photography blogs in NZ by Concrete Playground for The Bloggers 2011 competition. Thanks heaps to those who nominated me. I was really surprised to be told I’d been shortlisted. And thanks to everyone that has voted for me since.

Looking at all of the other blogs in my category, mine is quite different as it is an extension of my website. I set out from the beginning to write content that would help demystify a lot of photography process and jargon. And also help inspire others to just get out there and take photos and experiment. Hopefully I’ve made some headway in achieving that since I started.

Anyway, if you feel like voting for me, head over to Concrete Playground, find my thumbnail and give it a big fat Like.

This is a really awesome competition and idea by the Concrete Team. There are so many great blogs out there covering almost anything you can think of. And this initiative is an awesome way to bring some of them together under one roof.

Here are three of my favourites.

1. New Zealand Design Blog

2. Studio Home

3. The Shutter Pirates

My last few posts have explained that the two basic variables you can control exposure with are shutter speed and aperture. I’ve also stressed that the way to consistently take better images is to get your camera off its automatic setting and take some control yourself.

So let’s look at how you can take the control back.

Your first step is to set your camera to Manual. This will be expressed by an M or the word Manual on your camera’s mode dial. Now look through the viewfinder. See a whole bunch of scary lines, numbers and symbols? It’s not really that scary and is actually very simple if you understand what you’re looking at.

Apart from the frame and focus area, what you are looking at is essentially a light meter. Back in the old days, and still used today by many professional photographers, everyone used a hand held light meter. You probably remember getting your school photos taken and the photographer would walk around with a little hand held gadget and take readings from different areas of the scene. This was telling him the optimal exposure for that part of the scene. They’d take multiple readings, from the shadow areas to the highlight areas, then average these out to arrive at the best exposure for the current light conditions. They do this because you’ll recall that light has different levels of energy depending on its source, time of day or weather conditions. They’d then set their camera accordingly and take the picture.

Today however, cameras have very advanced light meters built into them. You may have heard or seen the term TTL, which refers to the fact that the light metering is done Through The Lens. Even a few years ago the in-camera technology wasn’t as advanced or accurate as a hand held meter and many purists wouldn’t dream of trusting anything else. But camera sensors have evolved so significantly that in the majority of cases you can be confident in your TTL light metering system.

So when you are looking through your viewfinder, you are looking at your light meter as well. Check out the image below which is a pretty typical layout of a viewfinder. I have labelled the main areas you need to be aware of to take an image on a manual setting.

The five steps to take a photo on manual.

1.    Switch your camera to Manual

2.    Focus on your subject by half pressing the shutter release button. This will not only focus the shot (if on auto focus), it will also ensure your light meter evaluates the lighting conditions.

3.    Now look at the Exposure Display. You will see it is a continuum with a + at one end and a – at the other. There will then be a series of bars either running to the + end or the – end. This is indicating your current exposure setting will either under or over expose the image you are about to take. In theory, the correct exposure is when you have no bars either side of the central line and the exposure display is centred. You can achieve this by changing your shutter speed and aperture.

4.    Before adjusting the aperture and shutter speed, remember what you learnt in the past posts. Do you want a small or large depth of field? Do you want motion blur or to freeze activity? Decide your main priority and set that first, then adjust the other accordingly until the exposure display is centred. Remember you will need a tripod if your shutter speed gets below 1/60th of a second.

5.    Take the photo and review the result. The great thing with digital is you can get instant feedback and adjust accordingly.

There may be situations where you purposely under or over expose the image because some lighting scenarios can trick your camera. I’ll cover these in my next post. But before then, just go out and have a play. The more photos you take, the better you will understand what you are doing and what impact your setting changes have on your final image.

Enjoy!

The surf wasn’t so flash today but there was quite a westerly wind. I’ve always wanted to shoot kite surfers so I headed down to Walker Rd in Waterview for a crack. There were loads of people out. Admittedly I went at a terrible time of day for taking photos, around 2pm, meaning I was shooting almost directly into the sun. But it was still well worth the practice despite most of the subjects in my photos lacking detail.

All the best sports photographers say that you need to know the sport to get the best shots. And I echo that sentiment. My early shots were pretty dull as I have never taken part myself, but pretty soon I found the better guys and observed their patterns. By the end I was getting some quite nice shots. Next time I will head down early in the morning as that would put the sun behind me and light up the boarders.

Anyway, a couple of shots.

I’m keen to get your help again in selecting which image you think is better.

Last week I was back down in Queenstown. As is typical for this time of the year the weather was very changeable. One day 25 degrees and perfectly sunny, the next cold and wet. On Friday the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up and the visibility dropped, creating a dramatic scene over Lake Wakatipu.

I knew the image I wanted. Tightly cropped. Minimalistic composition. Under exposed mountains and lake. And I got that. But the only thing I am debating between the two images below is the placement of the waves.

In the first image the breakers are further through the frame and draw the eye in more. They compliment the overall scene yet still illustrate the storminess of the lake. Whereas the second image has a very dominant wave in the foreground. It shows the conditions in a bolder way, but potentially makes the eye stop short of appreciating the overall scene.

What do you think?

I’ve had a number of conversations recently with people about wide angle lenses so I thought I’d write a quick post summarising these discussions.

The most common question is what lens do you recommend. Personally I am a fan of Sigma and all of my lenses are made by them. For my photography I find the quality to be as good as those by Nikon and Canon, yet significantly cheaper. I use a 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM and it’s great. Why not a fixed prime lens? Because I like the flexibility the zoom offers. 90% of the situations I am photographing in are capturing fleeting moments. It’s documentary style with no set ups. So a quick zoom gives me better odds of capturing what I want instead of a bit of leg work when the moment may have disappeared by the time I’m in place.

My 10-20mm lens produces great results. Shooting at f8 gives the best results with clarity pretty much right to the edge of the frame. The one sacrifice I have made with this lens is the minimum aperture of F4-5.6 meaning shooting in low light is harder. I would definitely recommend this lens though.

The second most asked question was why do I need a wide angle lens, or when should I use one? You need to be selective when you use one as the extreme perspective they create can really flatten out a composition and make it incredibly boring. The best times to use a wide angle lens in my opinion are when you are in tight situations, like city streets, vehicles, rooms or boats. They are also great when taking a self portrait as your face sits further into the frame and more background is included. Your arm just looks gigantic. Generally speaking landscapes aren’t great as mountains look less dramatic and the foreground becomes massive.

The two key things to remember when you do use one are:

1. Always have an interesting foreground object to avoid bland, empty looking compositions

2. Watch the edges of your frame as extreme distortion will occur on the periphery. Everything bows inwards so people and straight lines will appear very stretched and bent.

Like anything, get out there are try a bunch of scenarios. You’ll quickly get to know which situations work best for a wide angle lens with your style.

Here are a couple of examples using my Sigma 10-20mm.

1. Federal Hall in New York. If you know the area, this is a really tight space. Buildings towering on all four sides of you. Without a wide angle you wouldn’t be able to get the entire hall in one frame. Nor would you be able to create the sense of that tight space. The distortion on the edges of the frame work in this shot to provide the sense of being closed in.

2. Snorkeling in Fiji. By placing the swimmers in the immediate foreground allowed me to shoot a landscape on a wide lens yet still keep it interesting.

3. Likewise with this image walking down into the Grand Canyon. The walker and rock wall in the foreground adds interest. I have shots at 18mm and they aren’t nearly as appealing as the sense of sheer scale is lost with a tighter composition.

4. Fishing in Fiji. Boats are really tight spaces and it’s hard to shoot on them while keeping context to where you are. A wide lens allows that. You’ll be surprised how close you have to be to get your subject this close. I’m almost touching the guy on the right.

5. Pisa. The wide lens has really exaggerated the lean on the Tower of Pisa. Which may be verging on too distorted, but in this scenario I think it tells the tale well and it works as that is what this landmark is known for. Plus it provides a wider perspective on the surroundings. How often do you see images only of the Tower? It does make the building on the far left very bent however. I have many other shots with distorted people in the left foreground that don’t work.

6. Venice Beach. I love this shot as it sums up Venice to me. Beach, sun, stalls and the cycle track. But without the bikes in the extreme foreground it would be dull.

7. A self portrait with my Dad and Sister. We all fit in, plenty of background, but look at my arm!