Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 3 i Outdoor Photography The Complete Manual

You might be forgiven for thinking that outdoor photography is another name for landscape photography but there is so much more to it than that. As the name suggests, landscape photography is the capture of the environment around us, whether coastal, rural or even urban. Some photographers will go as far as to make sure there is no man-made presence in any of their work. Well, we want to show you that there is more to being outdoors with your camera than shooting pure landscape images. Think of this manual as a guide to some of the kinds of photography that is possible outside the four walls of your own home. Potentially, there is so much to do and capture when you venture outside with the desire to create some…

In this first section, we want to outline some of the essentials you’ll need to consider if you are looking to purchase your first camera, or upgrade what you currently have. Shooting outdoors, particularly if you are wanting to shoot landscapes, can be done with the cheapest of compact cameras, all shot hand held. That is absolutely fine up to a point. Beyond that, to take your outdoors photography up a notch, getting informed about lens types and investing in a good tripod, are key things to bear in mind. Over the next few pages we’ll look at a few of the many different types of camera that are available. We show you a few good tripod choices, lens types, and also look at some of the accessories that are…

A camera can stand or fall depending on how a good a lens you have attached to it, and also if it is right for the job in hand. Imagine setting up by a beautiful lake that stretches off as far as the eye can see in each direction. You would need a wide angle lens with a very short focal length that is capable of capturing all that grandeur and spectacle, but all you have is a telephoto lens. That is going to limit the kind of shot you could take there. You could also find yourself in a field of bluebells, wanting to get an extreme close-up of the dew on those gorgeous flowers. All you have in your bag is a standard lens with a minimum focusing…

Modern digital cameras are marvels of miniaturised technology, with many automatic functions to help you take good photos in a wide range of different situations. However by learning more about how your camera works and how to use its many features you can expand the scope of your photography and get good results every time, even in difficult conditions. For owners of more advanced cameras there are options such as aperture and shutter speed control, sensitivity and white balance, as well as creative light metering modes and manual focusing, all of which can be used creatively to make your photos really stand out. It’s just a case of getting to grips with the basics of photography and your camera gear. Photography is a rewarding and potentially profitable hobby, and the…

Apart from the role that aperture plays in controlling the exposure in your image, it is also the key ingredient in defining how much of your image is sharp and how much is out of focus. If you want your landscape shots to be as sharp as possible from front to back, or you want a close-up of a butterfly to be the only thing that is sharp in the scene, then it’s aperture that will do that for you. The aperture is literally a hole through which light passes after it enters the lens. The diameter of this hole can be altered, allowing a greater or smaller amount of light to pass through on its way to the sensor. In the early days of photography, aperture was adjusted by…

Landscape photography is one of those genres where sharpness is everything. Wide angle shots of amazing vistas usually require front to back sharpness in your scene to maintain all the detail that was present. The viewer of the final photograph will appreciate the image more if their eye is able to take in all that detail. It will make the photograph ‘live’ for them. Nothing ruins a shot more than the image being fuzzy and blurry when you need it to be tack sharp. The problem however, is that in many cases in landscape photography you have a foreground element as well as a distant object that you want to be in as sharp focus as possible at the same time. Shooting with a wide angle lens and setting a…

1 Manual focus If you are trying to capture something that won’t stay still such as an insect or even just a flower swaying in a breeze, try to get used to turning your camera’s autofocus off and putting it into manual focus instead. If you use your camera’s AF mode, it may spend most of its time ‘hunting’ for focus and you may miss a shot. In manual focus, you can more quickly adapt to the movement of your subject. You can even just rock your body back and forth fractionally, moving the camera slightly to also attain better focus. 2 Flash Since you are shooting at very close range to your subject, you may find that a normal on-camera flash may not be able to light your subject,…

We love our pets. In fact for most people they are more than mere pets and become more like family members, the recipients of love, affection and lavish attention. It is likely then that their owners, at some point, are going to want photographs of their furry friends (or scaly, feathery or otherwise). I have a dog, and the number of photos that include him specifically outnumber those of all my other family members put together. However, pet photography presents its own special problems. Animals, as we all know, can be unpredictable, lazy, aggressive, hyperactive and downright cute. If you’re thinking of trying pet photography, here are a few pointers to get you started. Pet personality profile You don’t need to sit the pet in question on a psychiatrist’s couch…

If you have spent the majority of your time using a camera in auto mode, you may well have encountered situations where the camera has decided to focus on something other than your intended subject or even failed to focus at all. Low light situations can be very tricky for focusing, especially if you have a moving target. Even in daylight, certain situations can fox an autofocus system. Trying to get an area in focus that has little contrast like an overcast sky or a wall that is just one flat colour may cause your autofocus to ‘hunt’ for a suitable focus point and never achieve it. There are a few techniques you can use to help improve your hit rate when it comes to getting the shot for real.…

“The process is pretty straightforward and just requires a little bit of thought regarding the approach to the sequence.” There will come a time when your widest lens just won’t be wide enough to capture the scale and grandeur of a particular landscape. This is where the ability to capture a panoramic sequence of shots and combine them into a much wider or higher resolution image comes in very handy. The process is pretty straightforward and just requires a little bit of thought regarding the approach to the sequence you are about to capture. Essentially you are going to take a number of stills. Rotating the camera a few degrees left to right with each shot taken, while allowing enough overlap from image to image so that they can be…

For many people, new to the world of photography, one of the easiest and most accessible areas first explored with a new camera is the great outdoors, and why not? You don’t need a studio or masses of expensive equipment. There is plenty of available light, unless you’re feeling adventurous and want to try night photography, and beautiful seaside or countryside scenes are usually not too far away by car or a brisk walk. Photographing outdoors is an amazing and rewarding experience for the novice and seasoned professional. Whether it’s just a record of a day trip you’ve made to a new location with the family or a more serious professional endeavour in an exotic landscape, your shots, when taken well, are able to instil all sorts of emotions in…

Cameras come in so many shapes and sizes, packed with gadgets and technology that can be confusing to the average enthusiast. Add to that the fact that there are many types of camera system too, and you would be forgiven for wondering if it’s easier to take up fishing instead. Don’t worry, if you just want to snap pictures of your friends on holiday or shoot with the latest medium format camera in the wilds of Borneo, we’ve got a list of camera types that help sort it out for you. 1. Standard compact Most compact cameras fall into this category. They tend to be fairly small and light, measuring about 100 x 50 x 25mm and weighing around 120-130g. Modern standard compacts are normally fully automatic, although some may…

There can be no worse feeling, for a photographer of any skill level, than finding yourself in a location where the combination of setting sun, clouds, land and water conspires to create the perfect landscape image and what you actually capture is blurry due to too slow a shutter speed and the fact you shot it hand held. In situations like this, the tripod becomes your saviour. All the best cameras and lenses in the world cannot save you from the need to shoot long exposures in low light conditions. Even the most modern DSLRs with very high ISO capability will still produce a noisy image if you bump the sensitivity too high. If you want the sharpest, highest quality images for shooting in low light situations outdoors, then you…

If you’ve ever edited a photograph on your computer using Photoshop, Gimp, or any of the main image editing programs, you may have noticed a disparity between the size of the image as displayed in your computer’s file manager, and the size of the image once opened for editing. That image of the Lake District you took was about 4MB according to your file manager, but Photoshop is telling you it’s actually 35MB. Well, thanks to some clever maths and algorithms, image compression is at work here. We’ll start with the one you’ve all probably heard of which is the JPEG. The JPEG standard also happens to be an ideal format for storing pictures on a digital camera, because it uses something called file compression. This is a technique that…

“Apart from camera shake, bad exposure probably ruins more photos than any other single cause. The main problem is over reliance on automatic metering.” Light, and how it affects your scene is the basis of photography. Controlling how your camera handles exposure is a key technical skill that is one of the major methods you can employ to improve your photography. Leaving your camera in auto exposure mode when shooting selfies at a party is one thing, but trying to capture the best sunrise possible is going to require finesse. Relying on your camera to correctly, and automatically, meter a scene with difficult lighting conditions, is going to give you results you may not have been expecting. Most modern cameras, even relatively cheap compacts, have sophisticated built-in TTL multi-zone evaluative…

The difference between a good shot of your favourite view becoming a truly awesome landscape is simply down to how you compose the shot and the elements within it. A tree here, a lake there, it all adds up to elevate a photo to a piece of photographic art. There is a certain balance to a photo that is achieved by following some basic rules that will help you take better pictures. As in all things, it comes down to practice, but here is a quick introduction to the most useful rule of them all. The first and most important thing to remember is to take your time. Look at the scene in the viewfinder or on your monitor and try to see it not as simply a view but…

“…your camera, no matter how new and expensive, cannot see all the subtle tones and variations in light and dark that the human eye can.” If you have ever shot landscapes to any great degree, you have no doubt encountered the particular exposure challenges that go with them. Scenes with your beautiful foreground interest and far off mountains and dramatic skies are perfect landscape subjects. When you take your shots, however, you realise that certain factors come into play. The main one being that your camera, no matter how new and expensive, cannot see all the subtle tones and variations in light and dark that the human eye can. A typical daytime landscape of foreground and bright sky has such a large dynamic range from the brightest highlights to the…

If you have a flash in your camera setup, you have no doubt been enjoying the benefits of having an available light source when conditions demand it. You may discover there are times when you want a little more creative control over the end result. At the moment, your flash sits atop your camera providing one light source, perhaps with the option of bouncing it off a nearby wall or ceiling if you happen to be indoors so you can modify the light to soften the shadows. Anything is better than the direct flash rabbit-in-the-headlights look right? This is great, bounce flash can create some lovely images. If you were outdoors though, trying to do a portrait, where would you bounce the flash? Options become limited, and you may have…

Landscapes are great, they are often the one thing new photographers will go and shoot first. Landscapes are just so accessible, you usually don’t need to go too far before you find a local beauty spot, there is plenty of ambient light so you don’t need additional lighting, and they are great places to explore camera craft at your leisure. You will normally arrive at your destination and try and shoot the widest angle possible, feeling the need to get everything in shot. Not a bad idea, wide panoramic landscapes are beautiful. How about putting that wide-angle lens away, and for your next journey out, try something a little different. How about trying a deconstructed landscape? “…think about what actually comprises the landscape you are in…” First things first. What…

Selling pictures to photo libraries is a good way to make some money from your hobby. If you’ve got some decent quality camera gear, the technical know-how to use it properly, and you have a good eye for a picture, you can make yourself some useful extra cash by selling your photos to one of the many online picture libraries, such as Alamy, iStockphoto or Shutterstock. If you’re sufficiently dedicated you could even make a decent living from it. Almost any type of picture can sell, it just depends what picture editors are looking for that week. Even casual shots, like this moorland image, can find a sale in a book about photography, which means a sale for the library and a payment for the photographer. “If you’ve got some…

1 Choose the right camera When you’re looking to buy a new camera for outdoor photography, make a list of your requirements and set yourself a budget. Don’t forget to allow for accessories such as lenses, a tripod and cleaning kit if you need them. Don’t fall in to the trap of thinking that a more expensive camera will make you a better photographer. You’re much more likely to improve your technique by overcoming the limitations of cheaper kit than by spending more money than you need to. 2 Choose the right lens If you’re buying a compact system camera or DSLR, it will probably come with a standard telephoto lens that is ideal for general photography and snapshots but there is a wide variety of special lenses available for…

If you are just a holiday shooter or an enthusiast landscape photographer, then your choice of camera can be fairly specific. Obviously, when looking at a new camera, budget will have a major part to play. It is always recommended that you try to get the best camera you can afford without breaking the bank. Just be aware that it is a good idea to get something that you can grow into as you develop as a photographer. You may find that if you get a basic model with limited manual controls, you will quickly outgrow it and go looking for a new camera anyway, so it is something to keep in mind. You may not need all the fancy technology and gadgets that are on offer with certain cameras…

As camera technology develops and the megapixel count increases with every new camera that is released, the file sizes that these cameras create when shooting in Raw format can be substantial. As an example, if you were to shoot a highly detailed landscape image with lots of tree, grass, clouds and mountains, an uncompressed 12-bit Raw file from something like a Nikon D810 could be as much as 55MB. Now imagine shooting an action scene of ponies running across the moorlands in burst mode and capturing twenty shots in just one sequence, you can imagine how quickly you would start filling up any digital storage. There’s more to it than just the amount of storage you have. A memory card of 64GB will let you store a lot of images,…

Whether it’s the smallest flower filling the frame of your viewfinder, or the sweeping vistas of the high moors and dales, these images would not be possible to capture without the aid of different focal lengths, giving you very narrow or very wide angles of view. A zoom lens allows you to choose a wide angle of view, or zoom in and use a narrower angle of view, magnifying the image. Focal length is one of your primary tools for adjusting composition. Selecting the right focal length for the scene allows the photographer to control perspective, angle of view and magnification, and can radically alter the mood and style of the photo. Some focal lengths are more suited to particular types of photo, and the properties of wide-angle and telephoto…

If you look at a white snow-covered scene, your brain takes over and manipulates what you see, so that it matches your expectation of what white should look like. So, what you see, even under differing lighting conditions, is white. If you put a camera in the same scene, it does not make any such adjustments and adapt to a certain expectation. The camera will simply record the colours that are present in the scene. ‘White’ light visible to humans can actually vary in colour from reddish orange to greenish-blue. This variation is usually described as a temperature range, with warm being the red end and cold at the blue end, and is usually measured in degrees Kelvin using a colour meter. Confusingly, the higher the colour temperature, the cooler…

Now you’re familiar with how your camera works and how to use its many features, you’re ready to start learning the creative techniques that professional photographers use to achieve great results time after time. By learning and using a few simple techniques you can turn your photographs from well-taken snapshots into works of art of which you can be proud. Professional photographers use some very simple tricks and rules-of-thumb that have been developed over many years, including rules of composition that are inspired by classical art. Combined with technical skill and a thorough understanding of the principles of photography that we laid out in the previous section, these artistic methods produce well-balanced, attractive photographs that will really stand out. However the true artistic inspiration that differentiates a talented photographer from…

First things first. What is macro photography? If you’ve never encountered it before, macro photography is the capture of tiny objects and organisms on your camera sensor at life-size or greater using a specialist lens or other equipment. In the case of shooting with a full-frame DSLR, a macro image of 1:1 means that if you had an old 35mm negative measuring 36 x 24mm, at its closest focusing distance, you would be able to fill your camera’s viewfinder with that negative and photograph it. For a DSLR owner, the most obvious route into macro photography is to buy a macro lens. If budget is no consideration, then full-frame macro lenses with image stabilisation are a great choice. There are more pocket friendly lenses for 100mm full-frame and 60mm cropsensor…

We have all seen long exposure images of night skies and the infamous traffic trails. This just takes that basic idea and changes the point of view to favour a driver in his car with the world going by outside at hyper speed. It goes without saying of course that the speed is achieved with a long shutter duration rather than breaking either the speed limits or the laws of physics! In our example we will show you the basic setup to achieve the end result you see here. Because the shutter speeds we are working with are right in the so-called ‘butter zone’ to get a good ‘hyperspace’ look to the streetlights and car tail lights zooming by as you drive at a nice and legal limit. In our…

“Those longer exposure times mean that moving objects, be they clouds, the sea, cars or people take on a more other-worldly feel.” It may sound counterintuitive. Why would you want long exposures during the day? Daytime shooting means you have no shortage of light, shutter speeds are high and there is little chance of either motion blur or camera shake. Why would you deliberately want to choose slow shutter speeds? It is, for want of a better phrase, an artistic choice. We are very used to seeing images taken in the daytime that are sharp, free from camera shake or motion blur where everything is static and frozen in place. That’s fine if it’s what you are after but consider how the world changes when you shoot at night (apart…

“It can occasionally be the case that you swamp yourself with technicalities and overlook some of the more basic creative aspects of photography.” Extreme point of view photography (POV) is the deceptively simple idea of taking your normal viewing angle when shooting an image and placing the camera in such as way as to create a wholly different, dynamic and exciting shot. As people develop their skills as photographers, it can sometimes be very easy to always concentrate on the technical aspects of photography to make sure that the exposure, focus and technique are yielding good results. It can occasionally be the case that you swamp yourself with technicalities and overlook some of the more basic creative aspects of photography. Choosing a point of view for your camera that can…

Finding a new way to capture a landscape or any scene in general is always exciting and quite invigorating. It can be helpful in getting you out of a creative rut and sparking new ideas and thoughts on how to see the world in a fresh way. One such way is crystal ball photography. In case you were wondering, it’s nothing to do with fortune telling, but rather the use of a crystal ball as an additional lens in your shots. How you use it in those shots dictates its effect on the final image. Using it very close to the camera so it fills the frame means it almost acts like a fisheye lens, whilst having it further away, it becomes a small globe containing the landscape it is…

Your typical landscape image is normally recognisable for what it is. There are an infinite number of beautiful images to be captured out in the world, and that is absolutely fine by all landscape photographers. Now and again though, it is refreshing to see beyond the grand vista, to capture something more than what mother nature has placed in front of us. There is much debate as to whether a photograph can be classed as art. Digital photography does at least enable us to express ourselves and set our imagination free. With that in mind, let’s put the landscape photography rulebook away for a spell and uncover some interesting techniques to elevate your landscape photos to a whole new level of artistry. Why not try the long exposure panning technique…