Tag Archives: Technique

Equipment, Morning Musings

About Tripods (Morning Musings 11/4/14)

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Working the Red Rock Landscape
“Working the Red Rock Landscape” — Photographers at work in Utah’s red rock country

Morning Musings are back! Today I have a few general thoughts about tripods — not aimed at those who are already confirmed tripod users, but rather at those who find it hard to bother using them.

To start, let’s admit that one does not always need a tripod. For certain types of photography in which quick response is required and being too obviously a photographer can interfere with photographs, it is usually better to not use one. There are exceptions to every rule, but you are unlikely to use a tripod for most street photography, for personal and family photography at home and on vacations, for certain kinds of portrait work, casual travel photography, and so on.

Let’s also agree that using a tripod is a burden, especially at first when you haven’t accepted the extra trouble and when you haven’t developed instincts that make tripod use a lot more automatic. I’ll readily admit to being less than thrilled on about the 50th time that I must remove my tripod from the car or pack, extend and lock the legs, level the thing, attach the camera, and only then make a photograph… after which I have to reverse the process: remove the camera, collapse the tripod legs, stow the thing once again. The slightly put-upon feeling diminishes as you get used to it, but it never goes away entirely. (The good news here is that the process of setting up and using the tripod does eventually become much quicker and much more automatic.)

Photographer Franka M. Gabler
“Photographer Franka M. Gabler” — Franka M. Gabler in the field photographing in the San Joaquin Valley

So, why use it then? There are more reasons than you might imagine.

Stability is an obvious advantage of the tripod. While you can, with care and practice, often hold a camera quite steadily and produce very sharp images when shooting handheld, you simply cannot eliminate all of the blur that comes when you hold the camera in your hands. And if you do happen to have very steady hands, you still will make mistakes that produce blur — working a bit too fast you may introduce a bit of camera vibration in some shots and you will reduce the number of successful results. A good tripod used correctly can virtually eliminate camera motion and vibration. This is especially important when doing types of photography that intrinsically require longer shutter speeds. This obviously includes night photography. Low light, low ISO, long lenses, and small apertures often require landscape photographers to use rather long shutter speeds.

Photographer, Sabrina Basin
“Photographer, Sabrina Basin” — A photographer working the autumn colors from a ridgetop in Sabrina Basin, Sierra Nevada, as an early fall storm comes in.

High resolution cameras can capture images that may be reproduced at much larger sizes, and at those sizes the effects of minor camera stability issues become more visible. If you want to take advantage of such cameras’ potential for higher image resolution, the stability that comes with tripod use can be critical.

Continue reading About Tripods (Morning Musings 11/4/14) →
Equipment, Technique

Some Thoughts on Aperture and DOF and Related Issues

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(This post is slightly adapted from something I recently posted in a photography forum in which hyperfocal distance, “DOF calculation” software, and related issues were under discussion.)

Shooting as a way to learn to understand how things like depth of field or “hyperfocal distance” work is a great idea – it is perhaps the best way to understand these concepts. I firmly believe that it is better than relying on tools such as software DOF (“depth of field”) calculators or tables. Fortunately, it is easy to do some basic experiments related to aperture and DOF and the so-called hyperfocal distance.

(The term hyperfocal distance can be interpreted in a couple of ways. In photography, this is often thought of as the distance at which you might focus in order to place objects at different distances in focus. If there is an object that is 15 feet from the camera and there are important subjects at infinity, the hyperfocal distance lies beyond the object that is 15 feet away and closer than the far away objects that might be in focus with the lens set to “infinity.”)

To find out about the effect of aperture on DOF, try the following:

  1. Put the camera on a tripod and compose some reasonable test image that includes subjects at various distances from the camera position, with a primary subject somewhere between the closest and the furthest.
  2. Focus on your primary subject within the scene.
  3. Shoot a series of images at apertures ranging from the largest to perhaps f/16 – shoot at f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, etc. You might want to go as far as f/22 on full frame.*
  4. If you want to be a bit more methodical, you can use your DOF tables/software to “calculate” your hyperfocal distance, focus there, and repeat the process – but, frankly, I wouldn’t bother.
  5. Spend some time – likely well under an hour – looking over the results on your computer. If possible, make a few small prints to confirm the relevance (or not) of what you observe on the screen.

Another great way to understand the effect of aperture on the depth of field in your shot is to shoot in live view mode on your DSLR. Here you can press the DOF preview button, zoom in the live view display to 5x or 10x magnification, and pan around the magnified image on the rear display to see a very good approximation of the effect of your aperture choice on elements of the scene at various distances from the camera.

SIMPLIFICATION: A SECRET

Let me share a little secret. From reading some photography forum posts, you might get the idea that lots of photographers are going around making careful and technical calculations of precise hyperfocal distance and DOF and all the rest and then making exactingly accurate choices about aperture for each shot. In general, it doesn’t work that way in the real world, where photographers often tend to select aperture in basically three ways:

  1. In a shot where the subject doesn’t have a lot of depth and DOF isn’t really an issue, we tend to shoot at some default aperture that we believe is more or less optimal for overall resolution, corner resolution, and perhaps vignetting. On full frame, this might frequently be roughly f/8, though there are reasons to vary from that a bit sometimes.
  2. When working a subject on which we want very large DOF, we tend to go straight to the smallest aperture that we feel will produce large DOF and very good resolution. For me, this is typically f/16 on full frame, it might be no smaller than f/11 on cropped sensor cameras. There are situations in which I might use a smaller aperture, but they are very rare and will involve acceptance of some tradeoffs.
  3. When faced with a shot in which we want very narrow DOF, we tend to open up as much as we think we can, perhaps tending toward the largest aperture on the lens we are using. There are some additional factors to consider here, but I’ll leave them out for now in the spirit of simplifying.

So, a simple generalized approach:

  • Shoot at some middle-of-the-road aperture when DOF isn’t a major concern.
  • Shoot at the smallest acceptable aperture when you want large DOF – f/16 on full-frame or f/8-f/11 on crop.
  • Open way up when you want to minimize DOF.

This approach works in a wide range of real-world photographic situations, and it is especially useful to begin with it when you have to work quickly. There will be situations in which these are simply starting points, and you’ll need to make some modifications – for example, in very low light you might not be able to use that very small aperture if you are shooting hand-held, or your largest aperture might produce DOF that is too narrow for some subjects, and so on. But starting with this simple basic concept, using live view DOF preview when appropriate, and learning from experience will likely move you a lot further along on the road towards understanding and making effective use of aperture/DOF than trying to rely on some DOF calculator. (Depite their appearance of accuracy, these calculators depend on a bunch of assumptions that may not match up with your photography.)

* You can stop down further on cameras with larger sensors before you run into issues with diffraction blur, a softening of the overall image that occurs with the smallest apertures. To generalize, while you can stop down to roughly f/16 on a full frame and still produce very sharp images, you might want to avoid such a small aperture on your cropped sensor DSLR, perhaps avoiding anything smaller than about f/11… and you might want to be a bit cautious about using f/11.

© Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Commentary, Equipment, Technique

Thoughts About the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS Lens

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(This is another post based on something I wrote elsewhere as a response to a question about this lens – I’m re-sharing it here with minor editing.)

I’ve used the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS lens  a lot – for things as varied as handheld shooting of bicycle races and tripod-based landscape photography. Over time I’ve developed a few thoughts about the performance of this lens and some of the comments that I frequently hear and read about it.

First, especially from my tripod-based work, I have found that the lens is capable of very good performance in terms of image quality – e.g. “resolution.” This is true at all focal lengths, but more so perhaps at some than at others. To give one example, I also own the f/4 IS 70-200mm lens. At one point I tended to always switch to the shorter lens when shooting in the range up to 200mm, concerned about a potential sharpness hit with the 100-400. Over time I figured out that while the 70-200 is probably a very tiny bit sharper here, in most cases the difference in many kinds of shooting is insignificant and invisible in real-world output – and in many cases where I would have switched lenses I now leave the 100-400 on the camera. Continue reading Thoughts About the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS Lens →

Commentary, Ideas, Photographic Myths and Platitudes

Photographic Myths and Platitudes – Primes Make You a Better Photographer

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(This is another in my series of occasional posts based on my replies to questions about photography that come up from time to time. This question was under discussion in an online photography forum, where the discussion began with a new photographer asking whether the acquisition of certain equipment would make him a better photographer. Those with experience in photography know the answer to this question, but it comes up, explicitly or implicitly, all the time, so I think it is worth another look here. The following text is a slightly edited and expanded version of my original answer. This is also part of my “Photographic Myths and Platitudes” series of posts. )

For the moment I’ll leave the full-frame question aside * – not that there isn’t a lot to say about it in the context of your desire to become a better photographer – and just respond to the following:

“My goal here is to become a better photographer. I feel zooms make me lazy, and that primes would make me think more about my photography.”

Sorry to say, but that is nonsense, plain and simple.

This notion that somehow primes are more “serious” than zooms comes up from time to time, and certain folks who post about photography (though not so often people who actually do a ton of photography) encourage this odd and unfounded line of thinking. I’ve speculated about where it comes from at times, and some of the following come to mind:

  • There is a certain mindset among some folks who desire to be viewed as artists that holds that being “different” is the most important characteristic of artists. (It isn’t, by the way.) And by doing something different, like using only primes, they may feel that they have established their different-ness from a world in which most others use zooms most often.
  • There is another notion that modern is not as good as “classic,” and therefore sticking to older equipment types is better. While there can be a risk of being too infatuated with new stuff just because it is new (perhaps the opposite form of gear obsession from the extreme of automatically dismissing the new) it just doesn’t make sense to automatically assume that, for example, because Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with primes that  you should, too. (HCB, by the way, did not choose the gear he used because it was “classic” – he chose the newly developed and quite modern small 35mm film cameras for a variety of reasons relating to his specific needs.)
  • There is also an odd notion that assigns an almost moral imperative to doing things the hard way, and that then presumes that those who do things in a more efficient or practical way must not be as serious as artists. Therefore, if shooting with zooms is “too easy,” shooting with primes must be better. This is often paired with the derisive advice to “zoom with your feet” or a claim that “zooms will make [you] lazy.” (Artists typically have no interest in making their work harder; they are generally far more concerned with making it better, and will use any tools or methods that accomplish the latter goal.)
  • Finally, there is the unfortunate notion, not unique to photography, that being “better” is largely the result of having the best or the “right” equipment – e.g., if I use this sort of camera or this sort of lens I will be more of an artist than if I use that camera/lens. The seed of truth in this – photography does require equipment – is too often built up into a false notion that photography is largely or even primarily about what gear you use.

The “zooms will make you lazy” business completely baffles me. Yes, folks doing point and shoot photography often may use a zoom that way, just zooming to get the shoot of their kids or the waterfall that most fills the frame, without bothering to move from their current position. But that fact that casual amateurs can use a zoom lens on their point and shoot cameras that way does not mean that the use of a zoom always means that this is the way one shoots. Continue reading Photographic Myths and Platitudes – Primes Make You a Better Photographer →