Get Serious: Use a Tripod (Part I)

When I was about 20 years old, I was going through an intense period of frustration about the lack of progress my photography was making, both technically and creatively. My poor parents had to listen to me vent this frustration late nights as I would sort slides on a light table and fling the rejects (somewhat violently) around my bedroom like miniature Frisbees. One morning my father (also a photographer) said to me, "You'd like your photographs a lot more if you learned to use a tripod every time you shoot."

He was right. I had nothing to lose and so gradually (it wasn't an overnight thing, trust me) I started hauling a tripod around with me. The pictures got better, but still I would go through periods of laziness and rather than slow down and set up the tripod, I'd take the easy way out. Years later I came across a wonderful book by my now friend Bryan Peterson called Learning to See Creatively and I was really stunned to read that he used a tripod for almost every single photograph in the book. I was so impressed by the quality and creative genius of Bryan's photography that I decided to devote myself to using a tripod every time I took a picture.

Again, there was a quantum leap in the quality of my photographs--only this time I got the idea through my thick head: the secret to improving your photography is to use a tripod as often as you can. Today I wouldn't think of going out to shoot photographs without a tripod and even if I'm traveling I always take a substantial tripod. In fact, I'd rather leave a lens or two behind to save weight than leave my tripod.

To be honest, I don't think you can be a serious photographer unless you use a tripod most (OK, not all) of the time. I would guess that I use a tripod for 90-percent of my photographs and when the shot is very important, I use one 100-percent of the time. In fact, if I'm not using a tripod I feel downright lazy and I know I'm not giving the subject the full attention it deserves. I know that I'm not being serious about getting the best shot (and there is no quality I hate worse in myself than laziness). And if I find myself starting to get lazy, I remember those hundreds of nights in front of the light table cursing myself for the photographs that were "almost" good enough--but not quite.

"But!" you'll scream. "Tripods slow you down!" Or: "You can't photograph a birthday party indoors with a tripod!" Or "I have image stabilization, I don't need a tripod!" Yes, most tripods are a pain to carry, all but the most expensive graphite tripods are awkward and heavy. You're also right, photographing a family party with a tripod would probably be more of an inconvenience than it's worth (though I'll bet you'd get better quality photos if you did). And image stabilization is a wonderful thing (where was it when I was photographing rock concerts six nights a week at 1/30 of a second!). But image stabilization is no panacea, it's only designed to give you sharper images at marginally slow shutter speeds and that's all. It won't let you make a 10-second exposure of traffic flowing through city streets at night and it won't let you create multiple images to stich a panorama perfectly.

In the next posting I'll tell you exactly why you need to own and use a tripod--and why it's not as painful as it sounds.

Tell Them it's a Fake (Unless You Like the Mail)

What? You've never seen a photo of a blue flamingo before? Not surprising since I created it in Photoshop and this beautiful pastel bird never really existed. Unfortunately, I haven't always been particularly clear on that fact since I first started using it as decoration (and only decoration) on my website. I assumed people would know it was a fake just by looking at it, but oh how wrong I was. In fact, I've never had a single photo get as much attention as this goofy late night creation.

I have used the photo in a Photoshop tutorial and obviously people seeing it there know it's a fraud because I'm telling them how to create it. I've also posted it on my Flickr stream and I'm always careful to say it's just a fake and that there's no such bird. I took it down from Flickr because it was getting ripped off on a daily basis and I had to write a lot of letters to tell people that they were stealing (perhaps without know it) a copyrighted and registered image. Apparently a lot of people don't read captions too carefully on Flickr either, because even though it was identified as a Photoshop creation, about once a week I would get requests from bird photographers asking me where I found this unique and wonderful bird. I even had one person offer to pay me to tell them (wow, how tempting that was).

Creating the image was easy by the way. I simply selected "red" from the pull-down menu (the flamingo was a sort of salmon pink in reality, of course) in the hue and saturation tool box and sampled the red color with the eyedropper tool. Once I'd sample a few different red tonalities in the bird, I just used the hue slider to change the color. The background stayed natural looking because there was no red in it--thus I ended up with a "blue" flamingo with in natural-looking surroundings. And I think that's the reason it draws so many double takes: it just seems so real.

To be honest I think a lot of people (me included) wish there was such a beautiful bird species hanging out on a Caribbean island beach, but there's not. It reminds me of the colored chicks that some farmers used to sell around Easter time. They would inject the egg with food coloring and, for a few days at least, the chicks would come out in pretty shades of pink or blue. I don't imagine anyone still does that, but I could be wrong.

I really don't mind all the email about the shot, but I feel terrible when I can tell that it's a young kid writing to me and I have to disappoint them with reality. But I do tell them that blue flamingos can always exist in their imaginations--along with green flamingos, orange flamingos, yellow flamingos--and mayb even a striped variety. I suppose I should caption the photo on my website, but I'd probably miss the letters. Still, I am careful to caption the photo as a fake when I post it anywhere beyond my site--but like I said, I'm not sure anyone reads the captions (or maybe they just choose to ingore them!).

Look Through Normal Eyes (Optically Speaking)

Since I've talked about the fun and creative aspects of using extremely wide and extremely long (telephoto) lenses, I should probably also take a minute to appreciate the simple beauty of the normal lens. Normal lenses are those that (in 35mm equivalent terms) range from about 45 to 55mm in focal length. They're called "normal" because they closely approximate what you see when you look at the world when you don't have a camera pressed against your face. In other words, normal lenses closely match the angle of view that you see with the naked eye.

Since most of us own cameras with zoom lenses (either attached or as accessory lenses) and since digital cameras don't have a standardized sensor size, knowing exactly what is normal, optically speaking, isn't as simple as it was with 35mm cameras. But if you are using a point-and-shoot camera, you can assume that the most normal/moderate setting is probably halfway through the zoom range. So if you have a camera with a 5x zoom, when you're in about the mid-point you're probably pretty close to normal. If you have a moderate zoom that came with your DSLR (my D70s came with an 18-70mm, for example), the mid-point is about 44mm or about 66mm in 35mm equivalent, making it just a bit on the long side of normal in 35mm terms. The numbers aren't really that important, it's just knowing that normal for your moderate zoom is somewhere between the extremes.

Historically there have been some master photographers that actually preferred the view through a normal lens. The great color-photography innovator Ernst Haas (one of my personal photographic heroes, by the way), for example, used normal lenses for much of his work because he felt that extreme focal lengths altered the world too much and he wanted to show the world they way that it really looked. While he never restricted himself to normal lenses, of course, he appreciated (and spoke often of) the familiar beauty of "normal" when it came to lenses. Haas felt that if you wanted to get closer to a subject or make it smaller, you should just change your vantage point. One of his more famous quotes is: "The most important lens you have is your legs." Much of the beauty of Haas work to me is that I feel as if I'm seeing exactly what he saw with no optical interpretation (or exaggeration) at all.

When is a good time to use a normal focal length setting? Sometimes the shot tells you. I spotted this lamppost in Camden, Maine right after I had parked my car and was heading into a deli for lunch. The composition of the flower basket and the lamppost just grabbed me immediately and that made the focal-length choice easy: I knew that I wanted the composition to reflect exactly what caught my eye with no optical exaggerations. In 35mm terms the focal length was set to 55mm--completely normal.

I think that before you can hope to understand the creative beauty of having many different focal lengths available to you, you must take time to look through normal eyes--yours and your camera's.

Zoom In On Distant Subjects

In the last posting I talked about the advantages of choosing an ultra wide-angle lens as your second DSLR lens. The other option (and the opposite end of the optical spectrum), of course, is to buy a longer telephoto zoom lens. Lenses in the 80-200mm or 70-300mm range make a great addition to a DSLR kit because they provide you with the ability to reach out and snatch great close-up shots of distant subjects like sports and wildlife.

Remember that with the cropping factor of a DX-size sensor, you're really working with a lens that's 1.5x longer than the stated focal length. So for example, if you buy a 70-300mm lens, in effect what you're getting is a 105-450mm lens. In fact, that's exactly the lens that I used to photograph this great egret in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Titusville, Florida. While I used to haul my very heavy (and very expensive) 400mm f/4 single-focal-length tele (which required it's own heavy case since it is too big to fit in any shoulder bag), I now bring my affordable, small and lightweight Nikkor 70-300mm lens and not only can I shoot at 450mm (with a one-stop slower maximum aperture of f/5.6--that's one small drawback), but I'm now shooting with a zoom and I can tweak the focal length at will. When I use the 400mm lens, I'm stuck with just that one focal length.

If you've never had the fun of working with a long telephoto zoom and you like shooting things like sports, animals or even kids running around the park, you'll love owning one. Of course, I almost always use long telephoto zoom lenses on a tripod (in fact, as I've said a million times here, I almost always use a tripod, period), so you should realize that shooting with a 450mm lens is not something you want to do handheld. I know, you can (and probably should) buy long telephoto zooms with vibration reduction, but I still prefer a tripod. Keeping a bird like the egret in the frame with a long lens often requires watching it for hours at a time and even with a lightweight zoom, hand holding it for that long is no fun.

Adding a long telephoto zoom really extends your shooting range a great deal with other subjects, too. If you want to make the sun look really huge in a sunset, for example, having an 80-200mm lens (again, 120-300mm effectively), lets you really compress space and makes the sun look the way you see it in caldendar and postcard shots. In fact, I use my 70-300mm lens more than any other lens in my kit--especially when I'm traveling. And between that lens and the lens that comes with a lot of kits (say an 18-70mm), you're covered from 36mm to 450mm with just two lenses and that is an extraordinary range of focal lengths.

Add a Wide-Angle Lens to your DSLR Kit

Other than asking me what camera they should buy, the question I get most from friends (and students) with DSLR cameras is: What lens should I buy next? Most people buy their DSLR as a kit these days and that usually includes a fairly substantial zoom lens that covers a range from moderately wide angle to moderate telephoto. These lenses are typically lightweight, fast-focusing and, for the optical range they cover, offer a lot of flexibility.

The larger issue for me is that these lenses are restricted to a fairly moderate (i.e., creatively safe) optical zone. You get a moderate wide-angle lens through a moderate telephoto lens range and that's it. I much prefer working with optics that are capable of providing a more extreme view of the world--either extremely wide-angle or extremely telephoto. Let's look at wide-angle lenses first and in the next posting I'll talk about teles.

Most consumer-level DSLR cameras have a DX sensor that is about one-third (in terms of diagonal size) the size of a 35mm frame of film. One of the byproducts of having a digital sensor that is smaller is that, because the sensor is only seeing the center of the lens' coverage, the focal length of whatever lens you're using is effectively longer. This magnification is called the cropping factor. Typically you have to multiply the focal length of a lens designed for 35mm by a factor of 150% (it varies by camera and sensor) to get the effective focal length. (And again, I'm only talking here about cameras that have a smaller sensor; lenses used on digital SLRs that have a full-frame sensor provide the same coverage that they would provide on a 35mm film camera.) This is great if you're a telephoto lens user (if you often shoot wildlife or sports, for example), but not so great if you like using very wide-angle lenses.

If, for example, you're using a 24mm lens--which provides a stunning wide-angle view on 35mm--you're working with what is effectively a 36mm lens on a DSLR. That's only a moderate wide-angle at best and is actually closer to a "normal" lens. In order to get really wide-angle effects with your DX-sensor DSLR you'll need a much wider lens. I recently bought a 10-20mm Sigma ultra wide-angle lens and I love it. In terms of 35mm lenses it provides the angle of view of a 15-30mm lens and so restores the ultra wide-angle view that I'd get with a lens in that focal-length range. Nikon makes a 12-24mm lens that provides coverage equal to an 18-36mm lens on 35mm and Canon's EF-S 10-22 USM is approximately the same.

The beauty of a really wide-angle lens is that it exaggerates spaces like crazy and can elongate shapes and provide a much greater feeling of depth in all kinds of photos from landscapes to still lifes. I shot the photo of the old freight train show here (shot in Greenville, Maine) using the Sigma 10-20mm lens specifically to exaggerate the shapes and length of the train cars. Look at how that near car seems to be looming over the rest of the train and really draws the eye into the composition.

If this type of visual exaggeration appeals to you, you might want to consider adding an extreme wide-angle lens to your DSLR kit. I would suggest getting something that offers a minimum focal length in the range of 15-22mm (in terms of 35mm coverage), so 10-15mm in the DX lens format. (I wouldn't go for a "fisheye" lens as your first ultra-wide lens, but I will talk about those in a future posting.) In the next posting I'll talk about the advantages of adding a more extreme telephoto lens.

Protect Your Images with Copyright Notice

You've probably noticed that all of the photos I post in this blog (and anywhere else) have a copyright symbol and my name or web address--and so should yours. It only takes a second to add a copyright notice and, while it certainly won't stop someone from ripping off your images, it might slow them down. Also, if someone intentionally deletes or hides your copyright notice, it shows intention to commit a crime.

I'm definitely not an expert on copyright, but I do know that the moment you create a photograph (under United States of America law, anyway), that photograph is copyrighted in your name. Technically you don't have to register each image with the copyright office, but there are benefits if you do. If someone uses one of your photos without your permission after it's registered, for example, you are entitled to statutory damages and legal fees, in addition to being compensated for usage fees (without registration, you would only get compensation for the usage). And you don't have to register each individual photo, you can group your images together and register them for one fee; putting 100 images on a disc and calling them "Collected Works of Jeff Wignall, Volume I" for example. The United States Copyright Office has a great website that explains the laws very clearly.

Legalities aside, however, there are multiple benefits to putting your copyright notice in your images. For one, it discourages people (well, some people) from just casually downloading and using your images for their own purposes. Personally, it's OK with me if a college kid uses one of my sunset shots as their wallpaper, but if someone uses one of my sunsets on their website, they'll have to negotiate it with me first. Also, putting your name on your photos shows that you have a certain pride in your work. You see names on everything these days--including the company name on the side of the sea plane in the shot here, so why shouldn't your photos carry your name?

You're probably noticed, however, that there is no "©" (copyright) symbol on your keyboard. So how do you put a copyright symbol in your work? If you're using Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements is the same, I think) and a Mac, it's easy. Just click on the type tool and then hold down the option key and type the letter "g" and that will produce the symbol. If you're using Windows (and I know almost nothing about Windows), it's a bit more complicated: Holding down the Alt key, press 0169 and that should produce the symbol. I've read on a few forums that you might also need to press the "Fn" (function) key at the same time and also, you need to use the numbers keyboard when typing 0169.

You can also find the copyright symbol in your extra characters palette, which you can find next to the volume indicator on your top tool bar on a Mac, or by finding the Windows Character Map on your Windows machine. You can then just click (or double click) or copy/paste the symbol where you need it. By the way, if you're a Windows user and I've got this wrong, send me an email or post a comment and I'll correct it.

Also, if you are using a different editing program, there is probably yet another alternate method--just use the help screens and you should find it no problem. I try to be discrete about placing the copyright notice in my images and I know that that makes it easier for someone to clone it away if they have larceny in mind, but again, cloning out a copyright notice with intent to avoid paying for an image is a serious crime. On some images, pictures that I know might be in high demand (like some of the popular musicians I photograph), for instance, I put the symbol in a place where it's more difficult to alter--even putting it across the face if I think it's needed. But for most images, I think a subtle notice in a corner makes the point.

Read this Wikipedia article to learn more about copyright issues.

Include Interesting Reflections

Like almost everyone, I've always loved the great photography that is published in National Geographic and I've learned a lot by studying how they were made and what made the shots so special. One of the first National Geographic photos that made a huge impression on me was a photograph of a sunset in a church window in the midwest. I don't recall who the photographer was or where exactly the shot was made, but the photographer did a beautiful job of showing a colorful sunset sky reflected in the simple window of a small-town church. Since then, I've always made it a point to try to find interesting or colorful reflections in windows, especially when the subject itself was somewhat low-key and simple.

The shot here is a worker's shack at the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park (see yesterday's post) in Florida. I shot it very late in the day and the sun was behind the building, so that the front of the building was in almost complete shadow. I liked the shot but it was kind of bland from most angles. But as I explored more I began to see that from certain angles the palm trees and a barn behind me were being illuminated by the late afternooon sun and reflected in the shack windows. Beautiful! Once I knew that I wanted that reflection I just kept moving until I got a colorful but simple pattern of reflected light in the window.

And yes, I did boost the reflection's colors a bit in Photoshop using the hue/saturation tool. I used the individual-color pull down menu (at the top of the hue/saturation tool box) and "pushed" the yellow and green a bit to make the reflection pop. There is a tutorial about saturating individual colors on my main site.

By the way, finding the best place to stand to get a good reflection is easier if you remember a little bit of high school physics and the laws of reflection: the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. If you were to draw a perpendicular line straight out from the center of the window and then stood to one side of that line, whatever you saw reflecting in the glass would be (on the opposite side of that line) at the exact angle that you are standing from the window. Here's a really simple diagram that explains it. And you thought all those hours napping in your high school physics would never come back to haunt you!