Tabla de contenidos para Complete Photography Workshop 3 en Complete Photography Workshop 3

“More people than ever are using digital SLRs and mirrorless cameras to take control of their photography and capture stunning images. Not only are cameras, lenses and accessories better quality than ever, they are also more affordable too, allowing more people than ever the chance to develop a passion for photography, improve their skills and capture amazing images. Complete Photography Workshops is aimed at those looking to take their photography to the next level by learning skills and techniques covering an extensive range of subjects. It is packed with expert advice from a number of the UK’s leading professional photographers, with emphasis on key in-camera techniques and post-processing techniques. With articles covering a broad scope of subjects, the photographic possibilities are wide and varied. From creative photo skills through to…

1 Capture classic behaviour The one thing you can guarantee with pets are the idiosyncrasies in their behaviour that bring pleasure to their owners on a daily basis. Whether it's the way a cat's curiosity can be guaranteed to see it trespass into boxes, cupboards or bags, or the way in which you can be sure your dog will sleep in a comical position or stare wide-eyed at you as you eat, there are plenty of ways in which you can capture cute and insightful images of your pet. Because you know how your pet will react to certain stimuli or situations, you can set up some shots and wait for your pet to take the bait. Whether it's by having someone hold a ball of wool out of frame…

BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY IS rooted in the works of so many great landscape photographers – Ansel Adams, Michael Kenna and Josef Holehner, to name a few – that it's no surprise it's still inspirational. Their images have helped keep the beauty of film photography alive and inspired countless photographers in their wake to create monochrome masterpieces, ensuring the quality and variety of black & white scenics is still as strong as ever. Like film, digital images should be captured as negatives – in other words raw files – and that's never more important than with landscapes. To capture maximum detail throughout the frame and to retain as much control over your tonal range and quality as possible, shooting in colour and raw format is paramount. When you’ve taken so…

As with any type of photography, light is a paramount part of shooting architecture, however, unlike most other types of photography, there’s no shortage of subjects or techniques to shoot whatever the light, weather or time of day (or night). Whilst there’s a lot of potential in architecture, knowing what you want to photograph and research is vital for ensuring you achieve the best quality of light for the scene in question. The best time to photograph architecture depends on the direction of the sun, and therefore time of day and time of year, the subject's size, surroundings and style. A whirlwind tour of a city without planning will therefore rely on luck and responding well to the given conditions, so research whenever you can. If it’s a clear blue…

1 Panoramas Sometimes a scene is just too epic to fit into a single frame – a city skyline at night or humongous building that you can’t squeeze into your widest lens leaves one option: panoramics. The basic premise is to capture several frames, overlapping by at least a third, to capture the entire scene, and then stitch them together with editing software such as Photoshop or Photomerge. To get a great panoramic image, however, there are a few other factors that can help. Accessory-wise, a solid tripod with a panoramic head will keep your shots level and make editing easier. Use a standard or telephoto zoom to avoid the distortion of a wide-angle lens. Use manual exposure mode to keep each frame's exposure and white Balance consistent. If your…

There are few subjects as mouldable by shutter speeds as landscapes. you’ve the scope to create vastly different results depending on the shutter speed you choose, which could be anything from 1/1000sec to a few minutes long. with so much choice, it’s important to approach a scene with a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve, be it a realistic or creative representation, then to assess the right exposure based on the conditions. Not all landscapes contain water, but water is usually the first feature we think about when we want to capture movement in a landscape. It’s so readily available on our little island and its natural motion makes creative images a cinch to shoot. however, in landscapes, it’s not just currents that create movement, there’s…

ONCE YOU’VE MASTERED shutter speeds using continuous light, it’s time to try adding flash into the equation. new photographers often get overwhelmed by flash, either avoiding it completely or using an on-camera flashgun set to TTL (through-the-lens) for fully-automated exposures. however, by taking the flashgun off-camera, using modifiers and manual mode, you can open up a whole world of potential for dramatic and polished portraits, not to mention ways to incorporate movement too. even the most basic flashgun emits a pulse far faster than any shutter speed – 1/20,000sec or less – so it can freeze even the fastest movement better than shutter speed alone. When learning about flash – studio and strobe – the one thing to always remember is that shutter speed has nothing to do with the…

For many landscape photographers, the wide-angle lens is the first thing that they reach for when setting up in front of a picturesque vista. wide-angle lenses and landscape photography were made for each other – they are the ideal optic for recording as much of the view as possible. they’re also an excellent choice for adding depth to an image; wide-angles have the effect of foreshortening perspective, they make the foreground and horizon seem a long way from each other. this is in contrast to using a telephoto, which compresses perspective, making the perception of two distant objects appear closer together. why is this advantageous in landscape photography? well, it allows you to play with perspective when composing near and far objects in the scene – you can align objects…

THERE ARE TWO types of distortion that occur in photography: optical and perspective, and both are prevalent when using wide-angle lenses in particular. optical distortion is an inherent issue with wide-angle lenses, and manifests itself in three forms – barrel, pincushion and wavy distortion. Barrel distortion is the more common kind associated with wide-angles, and occurs when the image appears to fall back at the edges of the frame, and bulge forward in the centre. when it comes to more extreme ultra wide-angle and fish-eye lenses, curvilinear lenses tend to produce very pronounced barrel distortion, with rectilinear lenses less so. Pincushion distortion is more commonly associated with telephoto lenses, and looks the opposite – the image recedes in the centre and appears closer at the edges. wavy distortion is a…

CAMERA: CANON EOS 6D MARK I LENS: CANON EF100MM F/2.8 MACRO A POPULAR TECHNIQUE that nature photographers enjoy trying out in the warmer months is to head out on a dewy morning, or after a rainfall, in search of small droplets of water on plants, branches and leaves. Droplets resting on surfaces add visual interest to nature close-ups, while those hanging from the tips or lower surfaces of foliage offer something extra. These give the potential for creative results by focusing on subjects, most commonly flowers, that appear within the droplet thanks to the power of refraction. This fun technique doesn’t need to be restricted to the outdoors – you can try it indoors using your laptop or computer screen to provide a backdrop that will be refracted within the…

CAMERA: NIKON D750 LENS: NIKKORAF-S 24-70MM F/2.8G FILTERS: HELIOPAN 105MM CPL IF YOU’RE GOING to buy just one filter for your photography, no matter what type of subject you like to shoot, make it a circular polariser (CPL). The CPL is, by far and away, the most useful and versatile of all filters. The light that is reflected from nonmetallic surfaces, such as water and foliage, is polarised. Polarising filters, when used correctly, block this polarised light from reaching the image sensor. They also have the effect of darkening and adding contrast to blue skies, as some of the light from the sky is also polarised due to electrons in the air reflecting direct light from the sun. Circular polarisers are threaded filters that rotate, and they work by the…

WHAT’S YOUR TASTE for black & white? Bright whites paired with the darkest blacks, mostly midtones or perhaps a touch of sepia for nostalgia? There are many different styles of monochrome conversions, not to mention methods of doing it, so figuring out your preferred style is often a long process of experimentation and elimination. Strong black & white images with punchy contrast usually rely on good lighting and a wide tonal range, but a new ‘Marmite’ trend sees matte blacks blend tones by limiting true blacks. It works really well with low-key images that are already shadow-heavy, like this one, and finished with a subtle colour tint for softness and warmth. Duotone is a technique that applies one contrasting colour over another to bring out midtones and highlights – it…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS CONSUMER UAVS, OR DRONES, have burst onto the market in the last five years, taking aerial photography from an expensive pursuit reserved solely for professionals to a fun and relatively low-cost hobby for anyone. Chinese company DJI were the first to capture the attention of the consumer market, with the launch of the DJI Phantom back in 2013. While the Phantom range has continued to grow and improve year-on-year, it always suffered from one downfall – its size. Cue the DJI Mavic Pro. Announced late last year, the DJI Mavic Pro is a compact consumer drone that makes it easier to get flying without the hassle associated with drone size and setting up. While DJI’s Phantom series demands a large case or bag, and removable propellers for…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS DON’T GET ME WRONG, I love Adobe Lightroom. As a cataloguing and storage library, and even for everyday editing, it does 90% of what I need it to do. However if there’s one aspect of Lightroom that infuriates me on a daily basis, it's the inherent lack of speed in the import and culling process, especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of images. When Lightroom imports a file it generates its own preview. The issue here is that I often want to be able to quickly click through hundreds of images and choose a few to work on, without waiting for Lightroom to render previews for all of them. I didn’t want to replace Lightroom, but I needed a quicker way of importing files; no matter…

THE BEAUTY OF black & white portraits is you often have the time to control how you create them. Whilst with landscapes you’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and available light, portraits can be styled to enhance contrast, lit to create sculptural highlights and special effects, and positioned in front of backgrounds that provide depth through tonal separation. How you build your portrait is up to you but there are certainly countless ways to create stunning monochrome portraits that there’s no excuse for a ‘flat’ photograph. Colours can be used to grab attention in a number of ways: throw a red scarf on a subject in a crowd and you’ve instantly made them a focal point; or zoom in for a close-up and vibrant eye colour can be captivating.…

AFTER LIGHTING, YOUR chosen shutter speed has arguably the most influence on the quality of your images. When you press the shutter button and allow light to reach the sensor, the shutter speed you choose not only delivers you the correct exposure, it determines whether your image is blurry, sharp, contains movement or freezes motion. So how do you decide what speed is the right speed? It depends on numerous factors from the lighting conditions, subject type, to the equipment you’re using and desired creative effect. All these factors need to be considered before you press the shutter button and can mean the difference between missing a shot and nailing it. Over the next few pages, we’ll delve into these factors and how it all works together to control the…

WHETHER IT’S A speeding motocross racing car, a football game or the chaos of running children, you want to be able to freeze the action with the press of the shutter. the shutter speed that you pick dictates if you capture that split-second winning moment, miss it or render it a blur, so choose carefully. a great action shot typically shows a fast-moving subject stopped in its tracks – a sprinter in full stretch passing through the finishing line, a show jumper in mid-air or a diver at the height of their acrobatics or a fingertip away from the water. Catching that sporting moment takes more than the right shutter speed, though: continuous focusing and timing are essential. You need to know your subject, know when the action will be…

Huge sweeping vistas, big dramatic skies, dynamic leading lines, distorted perspectives and a truly unique view of any scene – just describing what a wide-angle lens offers is surely enough to make you want to grab your camera and zoom all the way out to capture a different take on the world. the wide-angle lens is an important part of many photographers’ kit, especially true if you enjoy capturing landscapes. but before you rush into buying the first one you see in the hope it transforms your photography, it’s worth taking a bit of time to understand the effect that wide angles can have on your images, their benefits, downfalls and the best types of scenes in which to utilise them. The wide-angle lens isn’t right for all situations, and…

It’s not just lenses longer than 50mm that should be in a portrait photographer’s kit bag. Yes standard 50mm lenses and telephotos like the 85mm are superb optics for flattering portraits, with their bokeh and compressed perspective. However they require ample space to shoot in, especially for full-length portraits, and that’s not always possible. A wide-angle lens simply fits more in a frame and distorts the feeling of distance. What is close to the lens seems unusually large and what is farther away appears small and distant, even if it's not. Wide-angle lenses, as mentioned previously, are focal lengths wider than 35mm. A 35mm lens, on a full-frame camera, is a popular focal length for portraits, as it offers limited distortion and a generous field-of-view for most shooting situations. A…

CAMERA: NIKON D750 LENS: NIKKORAF-S 16-35MM F/4G THE SHORT DAYS and dark evenings of winter can leave you fumbling for photo ideas. It’s dark when you leave in the morning, you’re at work all day and then it’s dark again when you get home. When it comes to the pursuit of light, chance would be a fine thing! Fear not – there’s plenty of techniques and ideas you can try after dark too, and one of my favourites is traffic trails. Now, this often involves standing in the cold by a roadside or overpass and, in the weather we’ve had recently, nobody’s got time for that. so instead, here’s a cool technique you can try, in the dark and from the warmth of your own car. Crank up the heaters,…

PHOTOSHOP’S MULTITUDE OF tools can be both a curse and a blessing – on one hand there are several ways to achieve approximately the same result, with varying degrees of user-involvement. On the flip side, there are times where one tool will do the job better than others, or quicker than others, without the fuss. Take for example Levels and Curves – both are very similar tools for adjusting contrast, amongst other things, but what's the difference? Where Curves allows you to plot multiple control points along a line and adjust each tone one by one, Levels only offers three main points of control – shadows, midtones and highlights. For those learning the ropes with editing, Levels is the perfect entry point, as it’s often seen as the simpler alternative…

WHEN IT COMES to making selections in Adobe Photoshop, as with many techniques, there are numerous ways to get the job done. For simple selections, you have the automated options such as the Magic Wand or Quick Selection tools. For more involved selections there are the various Lasso tools. For when you need to make precise and accurate selections, however, often the best tool for the job is the Pen tool. The Pen tool is often avoided or overlooked by photographers as it’s either seen as a design tool (rather than a photo-editing tool) or because it’s a bit tricker to get to grips with. Once you’ve mastered it, however, there’s no better way to make accurate selections in your images. 1 PICK UP THE PEN In this image I…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS IN YEARS GONE by, if you found that one of your lenses wasn’t quite behaving as it should, then you had to typically ship it off to the manufacturer, or a third-party repair centre, for a check over, service, or repair. If the issue was mis-focusing, then you could play with your camera’s microadjustment (where available) to make small changes. If that didn’t work then, even worse, both camera and lens had to be sent off, leaving you camera-less until the issue was resolved! Well, times are changing, and neat bits of tech like Sigma’s USB Dock now allow consumers to tweak and adjust our lenses in the comfort of our own homes. The Sigma USB Dock resembles an ice hockey puck, along with a mount-specific fitting…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS I REMEMBER MY FIRST manual flashgun was a Yongnuo item – it was crude, simple and very cheap but it worked flawlessly and, you know what, I still have it and it still works to this day. Nowadays it seems like there's no end to what Yongnuo manufacture, from lighting to remote releases, flash accessories and even lenses! One product that caught my eye recently, and looked like it might be useful in automotive photography, was the YN360 hand-held LED light. Similar in application to the Westcott Ice Light, which I absolutely love using, the YN360 had one big thing in its favour – the price. At just £65 from Amazon, I couldn’t resist giving it a try. The YN360 comes in a dedicated carry bag and…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS FROMTHEOUTSET I’ll say that if you just want to scan in a handful of old holiday snaps, then this is probably overkill. If, however, you’ve a large collection of film slides and negatives and want to retain a professional-level of quality, then you’ll find few better than the Plustek OpticFilm 120 at this price point. Inside the large box you’ll find the scanner, six film holders and one slide holder (which holds up to five slides) as well as the related software and cables. Setting up is easy as pie – simply plug the scanner in, switch it on and connect it up to your computer. The drivers for your PC or Mac are on the disc, or on Plustek’s website. The bundled software is Silverfast Ai…

1 Fresh perspectives Most major cities have several famous landmarks that are easily and instantly recognisable – London has Big Ben and St Paul’s cathedral, Paris has the Eiffel tower and arc de Triomphe, and so on. All have been photographed millions of times by tourists and locals – and often from similar viewpoints. Rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with camera-toting tourists, look for imaginative ways to capture these well-known structures to give an alternative and fresh viewpoint. Due to their size and proximity to other buildings, larger landmarks are usually captured using a wide-angle lens, so one option is to use a telezoom and shoot from further away, while another is to shoot from an upper level of a nearby building or multi-storey car park. One neat idea…

CLASSIFYING ABSTRACT PHOTOGRAPHY requires a broad brush, and there’s no definitive right or wrong when it comes to defining what is and not an ‘abstract’. One view is that abstract photography involves capturing images that lack context in relation to the subject or scene being photographed. What does this mean? Well, imagine zooming in and framing just one part of a large building, and capturing it in such a way that the subject as a whole isn’t recognisable. Without obvious context, i.e. This is a part of a building, it becomes easier to appreciate shapes, lines, angles and textures that might be missed when viewing the building as a whole – that’s an abstract approach. There are several popular techniques that fall into this category, such as high-key and low-key…

SHOOTING INTERIORS IS arguably easier than exterior architectural photography – you’ve often more control over the light and elements in the scene for starters. That’s not to say that you aren’t at the mercy of your surroundings to some degree – tight, cramped spaces, limited natural light and pedestrian traffic are all issues you'll probably have to contend with. First, let’s talk about lighting – while directional light is sometimes desired to bring out the shapes, lines and angles in building exteriors, when it comes to interior photography direct light can be tricky to deal with. As the interior of the building will be naturally darker than the light pouring in, such high-contrast conditions can make interior photography difficult, leading to deep shadows or bright highlights. The easiest light to…

WISPY ANGEL-HAIR waters, smooth waterfalls or crashing waves, whatever your style there’s a shutter speed for it. Whether you want to capture the split-second your team scores the winning goal, the momentary expression on a child’s face or make a slow-moving subject look speedy – there’s a shutter speed for that, too. In fact, a typical shutter speed range in a camera is between 1/8000sec and 30 seconds, and beyond that there’s Bulb mode giving you total control over how slow you can go. you’re probably noticed that your shutter speed is shown as whole or fractions of a second: 1/8sec, 1/160sec or 1/250sec, for instance. it tells you how long the shutter remains open to help you control the amount of light reaching the sensor, alongside your aperture and…

FOR architecture, the wide-angle lens is the primary optic of choice. You can turn it to cityscapes, interiors or to capture the immense facades of modern and historical architecture, which populate towns and cities. Many forms of architecture tower above us, which means unless we can find a high and parallel viewpoint, we’ll be pointing our lenses towards the sky to some degree. With the many vertical lines inherent with architecture, this viewpoint means we often see a wide-angle’s lens distortion at its worst and it can be particularly challenging (see panel on Keystone Effect). However, with lens distortion comes a huge field-of-view to capture the vast activity of a city and its looming but beautiful architecture. For most architectural shots, aim for a wide-angle of around 24mm (16mm on…

CAMERA: NIKON D750 LENS:AF-S 70-200MM F/2.8G EDVR II PANNING IS THE PRACTICE of following the direction of a moving subject with the camera whilst using a slow shutter speed to convey motion. By keeping the subject, or at least part of it, in one place in the frame through the exposure, the result is a dynamic blurred background, with the subject rendered nice and sharp. It’s a relatively simple technique to learn, but one that takes lot of practice to become consistent at and to master. Because motion blur conveys the idea of speed in still images, the more blur, the faster a subject is perceived to be travelling. The amount of blur that you capture depends on several factors. The main two to consider are the speed that the…

WHEN WE’RE PREPARING our images for print it’s relatively simple – we want them sized at the best possible resolution so that they print in glorious high quality. preparing images for the web is different, however, as we also have to contend with file sizes, SEO (search engine optimisation) and image resolutions. Before preparing your images for web, it’s worth reading up on the website/s that you plan to upload to – they'll often provide guidelines for the optimal resolutions to use, which gives you parameters to work within. As we’re concentrating on optimising your images for exporting to the web in Adobe Lightroom, we’ll assume that you’ve already imported and edited your images and have reached the final stage when it’s time to optimise them for web and export…

Test: JORDAN BUTTERS WHEN IT COMES to image editing, Adobe has things pretty well sewn up. That’s not to say that there aren’t alternatives out there, quite the contrary – there’s a considerable amount of choice if all you want to do is a few basic adjustments, or apply a specific effect or technique. But when it comes to advanced editing, and the wide gamut of tools and effects packed into Photoshop, there’s not really much to contest Adobe’s domination. Unfortunately, there’s a considerable (and ever-increasing, it seems) cost attached to Photoshop and Lightroom, and many are put off by Adobe’s shift to an entirely subscription-based product range. Cue Affinity Photo from Serif. Load up the Affinity Photo website and you’re greeted by a bold proclamation of ‘no subscription’ and…

Test: JAMES ARCHER THERE’S NO TWO ways around it: the Fusion Photo OC VIII is a mightily expensive PC. Fortunately, this isn’t hubris – you’re getting the kind of high-end components that make speedy photo editing an absolute breeze. The brains of the operation is the Intel Core i7-7820X processor. Chillblast has over-clocked this so that each of its eight cores run even faster than usual, and this showed in our benchmark tests, which simulate various image and video editing tasks as well as heavy multi-tasking. It sailed through the image portion, indicating a system that will easily run any editing software you can throw it at, staying fast and responsive all the while. Even more impressive was its performance in the video editing and multi-tasking portions of the benchmark;…

Test: DANIEL LEZAN0 THERE IS NO shortage of choices for camera storage – there's something to suit every type of photographer and all sizes of outfit. Whether you're looking for a backpack, a messenger bag or conventional shoulder bag, you'll find options available to suit every budget. At around £50, the Kontrast from Case Logic sits at the lower end of the budgetary scale, but don't let that mislead you into thinking it's a cheaply built bag. This neatly-designed shoulder bag may be a no-frills proposition, but it is also well-made and great value. Its cuboid shape is rigid, due to the hard plastic 'Durabase' bottom that offers protection from the elements. A green zip at the lid allows for easy access, with the large compartment split into two by…

DIGITAL CAMERAS USE sophisticated exposure systems and all work using the same assumption that the average of the scene that is being metered from is a midtone, or 18% grey to be exact; ie the average of all dark, light and midtones mixed together is 18% grey. it’s the basis of all metering patterns and works surprisingly well, but while it’s fine for the majority of shooting situations, it can lead to incorrect exposures when the scene or subject is considerably lighter or darker in tone than 18% grey. For example, very dark areas can fool the metering system into overexposure. Similarly, very light subjects, such as a snow scene, can fool the camera into underexposing them – making them appear darker than they are – as the lightmeter will…