12 Photography Errors You’ll Make When You’re New to Photography

By: Simon Bond 

It’s a universal truth that everyone has to start somewhere. It’s also true that when you start something new, you’ll make mistakes. All the expert writers on this site will have gone through this process – myself included. In this article, you’ll learn about 12 common photography errors that are typically made, and how you can quickly correct those mistakes. So read on if you want to avoid some of the pitfalls of photography, and fast forward to creating amazing photos!
To demonstrate that everyone has to start somewhere, the photos used here are among my earliest photos. Taken with an SLR camera, and of course in the days of film. There are plenty of mistakes in the set of images in this article. At this point, I certainly knew my way around an SLR camera, but clearly there were still things for me to learn.

1. Crop in the wrong place in pursuit of minimalism

You’ll have heard photography is the art of subtraction. That is, removing unwanted elements from your frame will give you better photos. You’ve arrived at a popular location to take photos, only to find crowds of people there. The solution is to begin your photo, where the head of the tallest person in that crowd ends.
In other words, crop your photo halfway up the side of a building. While this does remove that unwanted element, it leads to a poorly composed photo in the pursuit of minimalism. This could arise from other objects like parked cars, or wires in the wrong place in your image. So what can you do instead of this overly tight composition?

• Arrive early – One of the best ways to avoid crowds of people or cars is to arrive early. Wake up for sunrise, and get that great angle before the crowds get in the way of it.
• Multiple photos – Set you camera up on a tripod, and take a sequence of photos of the same scene. Ensure people are moving around. Then stack the photos in Photoshop, and use the median function to remove people from the photo.
• Cloning – You can use clone stamping to remove elements in the photo you don’t wish to be there. This requires some skill, but can be used to remove wires, people and sometimes larger objects.

This is a photo that would benefit from more foreground being visible. There is too much dead space 

at the top of the image.

2. Photograph into the light

Not taking the time to plan when you’ll visit a location will lead to this mistake. Perhaps you’re on a walking tour, and your next location is a famous landmark. It just happens to have the sun behind it, with all the interesting detail of the object obscured by bad light. The same is also true when you photograph a person towards the light, unless you’re reflecting light back onto them or using external flash then the portrait is likely to be lacking. So what solutions are there for this problem?

• Know the light – Do your research on the location you’re visiting, and make sure to arrive when the sun is in the right direction. You can use suncalc for this purpose, it shows the direction of the sun in relation to time of day and geographic location.
• Change sides – In some cases, you can move to the other side of a building, where you’ll be able to photograph a person from the other direction. This is a relatively simple solution that can improve your results.
• Light modifiers – The use of reflector discs and or off-camera flash can make portrait photography towards the light possible.
• Digital blending – Photographing towards the light, when the main subject is larger than you’d be able to light with external flash? You can instead bracket your photos, and use digital blending with your image. This is an effective solution when you want to photograph towards a sunset.

A photo that’s reasonably composed but that would have benefited from being taken at another 

time of the day. This type of photo would work well during blue hour.

3. Never change your point of view

If all your photos are taken from a standing position, or perhaps seated position when you’re eating, then you’re missing a trick. A change in perspective is a great way to produce much more interesting photos.
That’s not to say there aren’t great photos to be taken in a standing position. A lot of street photography and portrait photography uses this perspective to great effect. There are plenty of other angles to use though, and adding variety to your photography through these angles is a great idea.
Changing your angle might be as simple as kneeling down, or as challenging as finding access to a high vantage point from a nearby building. The worm’s eye view and bird’s eye views can be used to great effect.
You don’t need to photograph straight up or straight down though. Photographing from lower down might emphasize a leading line on the road that much more, or allow plants and flowers to become a more important element within your frame.

Clearly the focus of the image is the roof tiling and the eagles. Area’s to the top and bottom of 

this image are not needed, and different framing should have been used.

4. Over reliance on post-processing

One of the common photography errors you can make is an over-reliance on post-processing. The aim as much as possible should be to get your result in-camera.
Your camera is, after all, an incredibly powerful creative tool. Of course, it’s important to learn post-processing. If you don’t do so, you’ll be at a disadvantage. It’s a good idea to learn how to use your camera and post-processing in conjunction with each other.
What can happen if you allow your skill in post-processing to outstrip your knowledge of the camera?

• Fix the photo – Instead of getting the photo right in camera, the idea is to correct mistakes in post-processing. This will stall your progression as a photographer, and it makes you a lazy photographer.
• New photography techniques – Post-processing can add that “x factor” to your image. So much so, that you may progress more slowly in learning new camera techniques.
• Transformations – It’s possible to make some quite radical changes to your photo. Compositing images is certainly something you should learn. It’s also possible to just change the sky in a landscape scene to something more dramatic. In doing this, are you as motivated to return to a location many times, until you get a dramatic sky in real life?
• Filters – Post-processing is all about subtle changes. Overcooking your photo by using a filter at too strong a strength might make your photo stand out, but perhaps not in a good way.

This photo needed to be taken at another time of the day when the sun lights up the building. The 

lamp to the left also adds nothing and should be removed by changing the angle.

5. Not learning your camera settings

Your camera is fulling of settings that affect your image. A lot of these settings are connected to one another as well. The relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO is fundamental to photography. You need to take the time to learn each of these settings on their own, and how changing one of them can impact another setting. The first and most important thing to do here is to stop using your camera on automatic.

One setting at a time

You won’t learn everything at once, but you want to get to the point that you subconsciously know the correct settings to use. It’s a good idea to spend time getting to know one particular camera setting at a time and what it does.
A good setting to focus on is aperture.
Learn how aperture can be used to control the depth of field, blur the background, and perhaps produce a starburst in your photos. Having learnt how this setting works, move onto a new setting and learn that one.

This detail photo would have been improved by using a larger aperture. At the time this sort of lens 

wasn’t available to me.

6. Not using selective focus

Getting sharp images is an important part of photography. To get the sharpest images you’ll need to learn how to use the focus settings on your camera correctly. One of the most important of these settings is selective auto-focus.
Another of the common photography errors is to let your camera decide where to focus for you.
Instead, you should be in control of this process.
It’s not always the case that you’ll want to have your focus point in the center of the image. Use selective focus, so your camera focuses where you want it to focus. Your camera will have a grid array that can be seen through the viewfinder. Use your camera’s direction controls to move the focus point to the appropriate position, and you’ll be ready to photograph.

The photo uses the rule of thirds, so composition is okay. The tree on the left is somewhat distracting 

though.

7. Going it alone

Photography is a great past time to practice on your own. It dovetails very well with nice long walks by yourself in the country or city. Indeed you can learn a lot about your craft through self-exploration, and perhaps reading articles on sites such as this one. To only do this would be a mistake though. There are a lot of good reasons to seek out and befriend other photographers. Here are a few things you’ll gain from teaming up with other people.

• Feedback – One of the best ways to improve as a photographer is feedback. Some of the best feedback you’ll receive is from fellow photographers.
• Collaborations – Not all photography is easy to achieve on your own. Once you start using off-camera flash to photograph models, working as a team makes sense.
• Learning – Tapping into the knowledge base of other photographers is invaluable. Different people learn about different things in photography, so being able to share that knowledge helps a lot.

The horizon line isn’t straight, showing this photo was taken too quickly. Another indicator of this 

is not waiting for the man to move out-of-frame. A rushed photo, and a poor result.

8. Not developing your own style

This is true not just in photography, but in many art forms. It’s easy to look to famous photographers, or perhaps local established ones, and look to emulate their photography. It’s a good idea to learn about how photographers take their images on a technical level. Once you know how other photographers work though, it’s then time to interpret these techniques in your own way.
There are, as mentioned, many benefits to joining a group of photographers, but one potential pitfall is developing their style of photography. Learn what makes their photography work, then spend a bit of time of your own developing a style that suits your work.

A photo that is spoiled by the wire at the top of the frame. Simply moving forward and using the 

same composition would have removed this wire from the photo.

9. Not learning new techniques

As you progress and become comfortable in your skin, you’ll come to one of the next big photography errors. You’ve developed a style, but then stopped progressing. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially if you’re getting attention for the photography you’re now producing.
Photography is always evolving and to stay at the vanguard of the field you need to be learning new techniques. They might not necessarily become your signature style, but learning new ideas allows you to freshen up those styles that are your signature techniques. This might lead to you combining two photography techniques. You might learn a different way of post-processing your images that allows you to improve all the photos you take in the future.

This was once a photo I liked. Today, I know that it really needed a graduated neutral density filter 

for the sky. This aspect of photography was something I’d not learnt at this point.

10. No main subject

How do you elevate a good photograph into a great one? To do that you’ll need a narrative to your photo, and that means a main subject.
It’s possible to take nice photos of a landscape or abstract detail photos that are very eye-catching. A silhouetted person on the brow of a hill instantly adds more story to your scene, making it a stronger composition. A detail photo with one part of the image that’s different? Now you have a photo with a subject.
Sometimes the main subject will be readily available, like a single tree in a landscape scene. At other times you may need to wait patiently for a person to walk into your scene, thereby giving your scene its subject.

This is an awkward photo that lacks a main subject, and leaves a lot of dead space on the right.

11. Too many distracting elements

In photography, you want to keep it simple. Once you’ve settled on a strong main subject, you need to frame it correctly.
Another regular in the photography errors list is a busy photo. This is often because the background has too many elements, but distracting elements can also extend to the foreground. How can you eliminate extra elements from your scene such as unwanted wires? It’s true that you could use post-processing. On the other hand, you can develop your photographer’s craft. So what options are there?

• Angle – That means changing the angle, perhaps as dramatically as walking to the other side of your main subject.
• Focal length – You can also use different focal lengths, longer focal lengths will compress your scene which might allow you to remove things you don’t want from the frame.
• Aperture – Get stuck on automatic mode and you won’t learn about this. A great way of removing a busy background is to blur it out. You can do this by using a large aperture, the resultant shallow depth of field will blur the background but keep your main subject sharp.
• Closer – Walking closer to your subject, when that’s possible, means you’ll remove elements from your frame. They’ll now be behind you, but you might need to use a wider focal length to take the photo.

The water makes some nice patterns, but the photo lacks interest. In addition to this, the bottom 

is overexpose. A well-placed GND filter could have fixed that problem.

12. Bad composition

There are some basic rules of composition, and it’s worth knowing what they are. These are things like the rule of thirds, leading lines, and framing. It’s also true that not every photo benefits by doggedly sticking to the rule of thirds, those photos that use minimalism for instance might not work so well. It is a good idea to know what composition techniques work though, and to look at how you can apply them to your photography. When you don’t do this you’ll begin your photographic journey with awkward composition mistakes.

Chloe, I miss you. This is quite a nice photo of this dog. The foot should not have been cut off 

though, and the angle is clearly from a standing position. Kneeling down might have worked better 

here.

Cut down on your photography errors!

As you’ll see, there are lots of photography errors you can make. Are there any on this list you’ve made? Perhaps there are other photography errors you’ve made while learning, and you can share them with the community here? As we all know, making mistakes is a part of the learning process.
So now it’s time to pick up the camera, and having read this article, hopefully you’ll know more of the photography errors to avoid!

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The Story of Photographing my First Wedding also Likely my Last

By: John Davenport

  There’s really no question that wedding photography is one of the most common forms of professional photography and if you’ve recently become the owner of a DSLR odds are sooner or later someone you know might ask you to photograph their wedding. Though this might be a tempting offer, I want you to think long and hard before saying yes, because photographing a wedding is a lot more than pointing a camera and capturing the moments. To help drive home this point I’m telling a bit of a story today.

My story is about why, even though photographing this wedding was the best experience of my photography life, I more than likely won’t be photographing another wedding anytime soon.
I don’t want you to think that I’m here to tell you that it’s a bad idea to get into wedding photography, or even that my first (and last) time as a wedding photographer was a bad experience. Neither of these are the case – in fact I quite enjoyed photographing this wedding, but there are some things that I learned about myself which would make me hesitate if I were asked to do it again.

First some background

Like most new photographers these days I created a website, set up a Facebook page, and started sharing my photos on a daily basis. Over time I noticed that my page was growing with not only my immediate friends, but friends of friends, and even people I didn’t know – I guess you could say I started attracting a following.
After a couple of years of sharing landscape and wildlife shots from around the New England area, one of my sister’s friends reached out to me and asked if I’d photograph her wedding.
My first instinct was to say “I’m not a wedding photographer – why are you asking me?”. So I sort of brushed it off as a random thing, but she insisted that she liked my style and wanted to work with someone she knew and trusted. If there’s anything to my credit – I’ve always been a hard worker. So, as this post requires that I photograph a wedding, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I eventually did commit to the job.

Months of preparation

And I mean months!
The bride-to-be was extremely organized and prepared, having everything booked months in advance – in fact – the photographer was one of her last jobs to tackle. After accepting the job I had nearly a full year to learn as much as I could about photographing weddings and that’s exactly what I did. This three part series here on dPS: Wedding Photography 101 (Part 1), Wedding Photography 101 (Part 2), Wedding Photography 101 (Part 3) should be on every prospective wedding photographer’s reading list. But a quick search for “wedding photography” on dPS will yield dozens of other great reads.

However, all the reading that I was doing, really couldn’t prepare me for the real thing. Emotions, stress, time crunch, uncontrollable problems, and anything else that you can pack into the ten hour day – you simply can’t read that, so I enlisted the help of a professional. I reached out to a local photographer, who worked closely with a friend of mine, and he was kind enough to allow me to shadow him, and even second shoot for him on a couple of occasions.
This experience gave me a huge boost of confidence going into the event, and I highly recommend reaching out to your own local wedding photographers prior to photographing a wedding on your own for the first time. The experience is priceless.
The final bit of preparation was gear related – I was being paid for this shoot and as a landscape/wildlife photographer my ultra-wide angle and telephoto zooms were not ideal for the task at hand. So I spent a little of the money that I was paid for the wedding to rent a second camera (you can never be too prepared) and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens which would be my workhorse for the night.

The wedding was a success

Due to my preparation and my commitment to wanting to provide the best possible photographs that my ability would allow, I’d say the wedding was a success. The bride and groom got photos that they will enjoy for the rest of their lives and I learned more than I could ever have imagined in a very short amount of time.

The day of the wedding I was at my wits end, running on pretty much pure adrenaline at that point. I had a list of ‘must have shots’ which I was able to check off throughout the day and night. It’s hard to imagine that the event lasted as long as it did, as it all went by so quickly, with barely a break for food or drink. All said and done, I left the reception after the last dance feeling confident that I had done the best that I could. So why never again?

Why I won’t photograph another wedding

There’s no question that this was a valuable experience. I learned more about myself as a photographer photographing this wedding than I had in the nearly 3 years of photographing landscapes, but I’d also learned that it wasn’t for me. I enjoy the peace and quite of nature and the ability to go back to the same location to fine tune the shot over a period of time and lighting conditions. Weddings are a one shot deal – you get the light you get – you get the weather you get, and you get one shot to make it happen.
You have to be a people person – something I am not. Going around to get various people that I didn’t know together for photographs was hard enough when there were actually a handful of people that I did know at this wedding (sister’s friend remember?). I don’t think that I could do this on my own, without help, and without a lot more practice. So I urge anyone who’s thinking about photographing a wedding to not take it lightly. It’s an important day for a lot of people – not just the bride and groom – but their parents, extended family, and friends will want to remember this day as well so you MUST get it right.
The moral of this story is that wedding photography can be a very rewarding experience, but you have got to put the work into it. If you are thinking to yourself that it will be an easy job – think again. Oh and please – don’t ever do this for free – being paid to shoot this wedding was what motivated me to find help, rent gear, drive to their location and process hundreds of photos – the experience was a bonus.

Some stats from the wedding

• hours shot from start to finish on the day – 10 hours
• number of images shot total – 1500
• number of images given to the couple – 500
• how long it took to edit it – approximately 5-6 hours
• number of hours estimated spent preparing: time with other photographer, etc –  Dozens and dozens of hours of prep time between reading articles and spending time with this mentor photographer I would say easily 50 hours or more went into the prep.

Equipment used to shoot the wedding

• camera bodies:  rental D600 and my own D7000 as backup
• lenses:  rented the 24-70 f/2.8 (pretty much used for the entire event) also had my 55-300mm Nikon & 11-16mm Tokina, and a 50mm prime on my D7000 for odds and ends shots
• flash:  Nikon SB700
• light modifiers like umbrellas or reflectors – none
• tripod:  had my Manfrotto 190XBPRO with me but rarely used it
• other:  nothing else, But Jim (my mentor of sorts) told me that if I were to get into this that it’s a good idea to stock up on things like needles, various threads, safety pins, tape, Advil, Aspirin, Tylenol, scissors, and so much other stuff – not really for you, but you’ll be the hero of the wedding if you pull something the bride needs out of your magic bag of tricks

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The Expert Wedding Photographer [Course Review]

By: Darren Rowse

In this post Linda Treter reviews The Expert Wedding PHotographer – a wedding photography course by the team at ProudPhotography.
This spring I had the the chance to take the wedding photography course offered by Proud Photography.
Proud Photography offers online interactive photography courses that allow you to improve your skills at your own pace complete with one-on-one support from professional photographers. They offer a basic photography course as well as the wedding course. The wedding course should not be taken by people new to photography. You will need to be comfortable with your camera and be familar with it’s use as well as have some experience taking portraits in general.
The lessons covered a wide array of topics including:

• Getting started – Marketing Techniques
• Setting the Rules – Fees and Contracts
• Equipment – Best Types of Equipment
• Types of Shots – Posing Ideas, Formal and Informal Pictures, Shots not to be Missed
• Post-Production – Digital Workflow, Fixing Problems
• Presentation – Ways to Present, Software

There are quizes and homework included at the end of lessons. Test questions mostly check if you read the lesson carefully and are not difficult. The real “test” is where you take shots for the assignments. These are turned in to tutors, professional photographers who will critique your images.
Each section contains a great deal of in-depth information. They cover common mistakes photographers make, posing ideas, digital workflow, etc., with plenty of photographs to illustrate the various points. The equipment section gives some excellent reasoning for getting good quality cameras and lenses.
The Digital Workflow and Post-Processing lessons offer valuable information as well as tips you may not have thought of to keep you organized, such as synchronizing the time on you and your assistant’s cameras to keep images in the proper order. Definitely helpful when you are trying to remember the order in which events happened on a busy day! There is step-by-step detailing of common problems that can be eliminated in Photoshop along with excellent images that will keep you on track even if you are a Photoshop newbie. There is even a video you can watch! I thought I knew how to do many of these, but I learned some better ways of doing things.
There is a large emphasis on the Business of Wedding Photography, which is something few photographers feel comfortable with when looking to get into this business . Dealing with clients, including tips for dealing with difficult problems that might turn up will enable you to feel more confident. These lessons also cover marketing, creating a website, and wedding photography contracts, which can be downloaded for your use.
Will there be subjects covered you already feel you know? Possibly, but more likely you will find areas that you never considered. There is some information here that you could find searching the internet, but to have it all in one place is a time saving advantage. The forum is great, but it would be nice to have a specific section on weddings.
Highlights of this course?

• Free gallery space
• Online tutors to answer questions and offer critique
• Sample contracts to download
• Learning at your own pace
• Forum to connect with other students

Conclusion, this is a good course for a photographer that wishes to start a business in wedding photography. You will find everything you need to help you begin and it will help you to avoid common mis-steps, all in one convenient place. If you like learning in a more structured environment with professional feedback, this may be the course for you.
Check out the Expert Wedding Photographer here for yourself.

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Photography 101 – Light and the Pinhole Camera

By: Neil Creek 

Welcome to the first lesson in Photography 101 – A Basic Course on the Camera. In this series, we cover all the basics of camera design and use. We talk about the ‘exposure triangle’: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. We talk about focus, depth of field and sharpness, as well as how lenses work, what focal lengths mean and how they put light on the sensor. We also look at the camera itself, how it works, what all the options mean and how they affect your photos.
This week’s lesson is Light and the Pinhole Camera

About Light

Light is everywhere, even where you can’t see it. Without delving too deeply into the mysterious physics of light, there are some basics that are helpful to know as a photographer:

• We only see light when it reflects from something, or we look directly at the source
• Light can be bounced (reflected) or bent (refracted) and always does so in predictable ways
• Reflected light scatters depending on the “smoothness” of the surface
• White light is made up of all of the visible colours
• Different coloured light has different energy levels or “wavelengths”
• Shadows occur when something comes between a light source and another surface
• Light varies hugely in brightness, and our eyes very cleverly adapt to see clearly in a wide variety of brightnesses
• Cameras are far less capable of “seeing” clearly in as wide a variety of lighting conditions

Fig 1.1.1 Light hitting a textured surface scatters in all directions, like water splashing from a thrown water balloon. Click for clearer version.

These observations are pretty basic, and most of them are either obvious or should have been taught in the science classroom. As straightforward as they are, these basic points are at the heart of photography, and understanding them is very important. Throughout this course, and through your adventures with the camera, you will be working with some or all of these essential principles of light. If you are unclear about any of the above points, it would be helpful to do a little bit of independent research. You’ll find some good links for further reading at the end of today’s lesson, and I encourage you to explore further by searching the ‘net.
The central point of photography is turning light into an image. An image is actually just an illusion. Anything that is a representation in light of a real thing is an image. So how do we turn light, which scatters randomly around the universe into an image that we can recognise?

The Camera Obscura

Fig 1.1.2 – Imagine a typical outdoor scene with the sun shining brightly on a tree. The light from the sun travels in parallel rays, shown here in black. When they hit the tree, the light is scattered in all directions, shown in grey. This is known as “diffuse” light. Because of diffuse light you can see the pretty tree, as some of this scattered light hits your eyes.



Fig 1.1.3 – Now lets imagine we pitch a tent with perfect light blocking material and a tiny hole in one wall. To keep it simple, a single ray hitting the tree will diffuse in all directions, but only a very tiny sliver of that light will go through the small hole. If you were sitting in this tent in the middle of the floor and you closed one eye and looked through the hole from there, you would only see a very tiny part of the tree at once. If you move to the right a bit, you will see the left of the tree. If you move up, you will see further down the tree. Your view of the tree is opposite to the direction of your movement.



Fig 1.1.4 – Of course there is more than one ray of light hitting the tree. These rays reflect diffusely in all directions. This is why you can see more of the tree by moving around inside the tent. If we were to set up a screen in the tent opposite the hole, which is made of nice bright white material, we would actually be able to see an image of the tree, projected onto it! For the reason that we saw parts of the tree in the opposite direction when we moved, the projected image of the tree appears upside down.

Fig 1.1.5 A camera obscura made by blocking a window. Photo by brighterorange, used under creative commons.

The room we just made in our imagination is called a “camera obscura” and you can make one just as I have described. Instead of a tent, you could find a room in your house with one window, and cover the whole window with thick card or foil. Then make a tiny hole (1-5mm) in the cover and look at the opposite wall. You should see a very dim, upside down image of the world outside.
The image will be dim because only a small amount of light can pass through the hole. If you make the hole bigger, the image will be brighter, but less sharp. Why is this? A small hole is very good at restricting the direction from which rays of light can enter the room. If the hole is bigger, then more light can get in, but that extra light comes from a bigger range of angles, and it overlaps nearby parts of the projected image.

Fig 1.1.6 – A small hole through which the light passes, restricts the possible angles of light reflecting from a certain part of the tree. The overlap of light rays on the projection is very small and the result is a sharp image. The trade-off is that the image is dim.

Fig 1.1.7 – A large hole allows a greater variety of angles of reflected light from a particular part of the tree to pass through onto the projection. This means that much light from neighbouring parts of the tree overlap each other. This results in lower contrast and a blurry image. The benefit however, is that more light can get through and the projected image is brighter.

How is it relevant?
The trade-off between sharpness and brightness should be a familiar one to many photographers. The “hole” of the camera obscura is the aperture of a modern camera. When you open up the aperture you let more light into the camera, but the depth of field narrows, and more of the image drops out of focus. We’ll talk more about this in a future lesson.

The Pinhole Camera

The camera obscura is a very old idea, first built around 1000AD in what is now Iraq. A variation on the concept is the pinhole camera. This shrinks the room of the camera obscura into a handheld box, and is the simplest possible camera. Pinhole cameras can easily be made of almost anything. All it needs is a light-proof box, something to project the image onto, and a tiny hole. There are countless projects online to make your own pinhole camera, or make a pinhole “lens” for your DSLR. Due to the tiny hole used in these cameras, one advantage is that they have is an enormous depth of field.

Homework

To help you get a feel for the issues discussed in each lesson, I’m going to be assigning some homework. Naturally it’s completely voluntary, but you learn by doing, and practical exercises will certainly help you improve your photography. I list a few assignments below, and you are welcome to do any or all of them. Please post links to your completed homework assignments in the comments on this post.

• Make a camera obscura – Whether it be a tent or a room of your house, build and photograph a camera obscura in action.
• Visit a camera obscura – There are a handful of publicly accessible camera obscuras around the world as tourist attractions. Visit one and take photographs.
• Make a pinhole camera – There are many projects online to build pinhole cameras from matchboxes, sardine tins, or various other materials. Make one yourself and share photos you take with it.
• Make a pinhole attachment for your DSLR – By drilling hole in a body cap for your DSLR camera, putting some foil over the hole and making a tiny hole in the foil, you can turn any DSLR into a pinhole camera. Show us your modification and photos you took with it. Have a look at my attempt at this.
• Project the sun – This technique for viewing a solar eclipse can work all year round. Put a pin hole in a piece of card, and project the sun onto another piece of card. You will be able to see clouds pass in front of the sun, and maybe even observe sunspots. Share photos of your experiments.

Resources

• Specular vs Diffuse Reflection
• Camera obscura on wikipedia
• Pinhole photography on photo.net
• How to make a pinhole Polaroid camera on Make Magazine
• Making a pinhole “lens” for your DSLR
• Pinhole photography group on Flickr

Next Week

Photography 101 – Lenses and Focus.
In addition to posting his Project 365 photos to his blog, Neil also runs a monthly photography project. This month’s topic is Iron Chef Photography – The Fork.



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Photography 101 – Lenses and Focus

By: Neil Creek

Welcome to the second lesson in Photography 101 – A Basic Course on the Camera. In this series, we cover all the basics of camera design and use. We talk about the ‘exposure triangle’: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. We talk about focus, depth of field and sharpness, as well as how lenses work, what focal lengths mean and how they put light on the sensor. We also look at the camera itself, how it works, what all the options mean and how they affect your photos.
This week’s lesson is Lenses and Focus

Bending Light

Last week we discussed how we can use a tiny hole to direct light so that it forms an image. All that a pinhole camera does is excludes all the light that doesn’t make an image. As we learned, however, the problem with that technique, is that it results in very dim images. As photographers we want bright images, and although that may seem obvious, we’ll discuss why in detail in a later lesson. Fortunately, there is a better way to do it.

Fig 1.2.1 A light shone into a glass
tank of water bends. Source.
Fig 1.2.2 As light passes into a more
refractive material, it slows and bends.

As we touched on briefly in Lesson 1, light is a form of energy that can be bent. Bending light is called refraction. What happens when light is refracted is that it actually slows down. It’s a common misconception that light always travels at the same speed. In fact, the speed of the light depends on the type of material that it is travelling through. The really useful thing about refraction is that it can bend the path of light.
I don’t want to get into the mysterious “dual nature of light”, but remember that light can be seen as a series of waves. Line after line of these waves make up light, similar to waves hitting a beach.

Imagine we have a fishtank of water and a torch. For the sake of simplicity lets also imagine that we can see the beam clearly in the air and water. When you shine the torch at the surface of the water at an angle, from the side of the tank, you can see that the beam has been bent, see Fig 1.2.1. The many wavefronts of the light are aligned perpendicular with its direction of travel. When the wavefronts encounter the water, one part of the front hits it before the rest. The part that has entered the water and slows down, while the rest of the wave is still travelling at the same speed. The effect of this is to bend the beam. See Fig 1.2.2.
Okay that’s enough physics for now. Lets talk optics.

Lenses

This bending of light can be very useful! Lets say we wanted to concentrate all the light from a wide beam onto a narrow point. If we can direct each beam of light by bending it slightly – a little right for the light in the left side of the beam, a little left for the light in the right side of the beam – then we should be able to focus the light. This is exactly what a lens does.

There are two main factors that determine how much a lens bends the light. The refractive index of the material, which is how much it slows down the beam, and the angle of incidence. The angle of incidence (or incident angle) is how far from perpendicular the light beam is when it passes through the surface. The greater the angle, the more the bending. This is why wide-angle lenses, that need to bend the light a long way, have such a bulging appearence.

Fig 1.2.3 How much the light beam is bent depends on the angle at which it hits the lens (all other things being equal). Light passing through the very centre of the lens is unaffected, while those at the edge are bent the most. This is why lenses are curved.

Fig 1.2.4 Different shaped lenses focus the light at different distances. This is the focal length of that lens.

A simple experiment

Click for larger version

Fig 1.2.5 An everyday magnifying glass can create an image. In a darkened room, set up a candle, a magnifying glass and a sheet of paper as a screen. With the magnifying glass squared up with the cangle and the screen, slide the glass and screen backwards and forwards until you bring an image of the candle into focus. Just as with the pinhole camera, the image projected by the lens us upside down. Notice that the shadow of the glass is dark except for the candle, even though the magnifying glass is see-through. This is because all of the light that passed through the glass has been focused into the image.

Fig 1.2.6 Click for larger version

Fig 1.2.7 Click for larger version

Not all lenses are equal
It’s not always the case that focal length equals lens length, as the complex optics in modern lenses can give a “virtual” focal length while keeping the actual lens size small. As a rule of thumb, the focal length isusually pretty close to the actual length of the light path through the lens.

Focusing

So far, we’ve been imagining a perfect beam of light hitting a refractive surface. In this beam all the light is parallel. Parallel light passed through a lens will always converge on the same point. The distance from the surface of the lens to the focus point is called the focal length and is measured in milimeters. Most lenses are described by their focal length. Zoom lenses have a range of focal lengths, a feat which is accomplished by using a complex series of lenses which can be moved relative to each other. The mm number translates into a real distance, from the front of your lens to the chip of your camera. In that way you can tell that a 400mm telephoto lens will be much longer than a 24mm wide-angle, without even looking at the lens.
If an object is close to a lens, even several hundred meters away, its reflected light entering the lens isn’t perfectly parallel. The closer the object to the lens, the less parallel, and the more the lens must be moved in order to keep focused. This change is much more noticable when objects are very close to the camera, and is one of the reasons why the depth of field in macro photos is so small – a point we will return to in a future lesson.

Fig 1.2.6 The closer an object is to a lens, the more its focus point moves, and so the more the lens must be moved to compensate.

In order to keep the image of a close object sharp, the lens must be moved relative to the screen (or camera sensor). This process is called focusing. When you are focused on an object at a certain distance, then objects which are closer or more distant than that will not be in focus. The situation can be helped somewhat, by reducing the size of the lens, just like we did with the pinhole camera, to restrict the variety of angles of light entering the lens. But we again are faced with the loss of brightness as a result.
We’ve hinted at the main reasons to use a lens: to make an image brighter and to make it bigger (or smaller!). Next week we’ll take what we have learned about lenses and see how we can use that to understand the concepts of focal length and f-ratios, and how they translate into maginification and image brightness.

Homework

I was disapointed at how few of you submitted homework for last weeks lesson. In fact, nobody did! Peter Emmett deserves some extra credit however, for his DSLR body cap pinhole camera photo taken coincidentally the weekend before the first lesson. This week’s lesson is challenging for setting homework, so I’d like to encourage you to experiment and think of how you can apply what you have learned here. Here’s some suggestions:

• Project an image with a magnifying glass or a lens from your camera gear and take a photo of it. If you want to get really creative about it, be inspired by this spectacular example seen recently on Strobist.
• Find and photograph examples of light refracting in everyday objects. The clearer the example the better. For example the classic pencil in a glass of water, or maybe play with some large crystals from a jewelery box.
• Shoot some natural lenses. Drops of water can be creatively used as little magnifying glasses to show an inverted image of the scene beyond them. This would be a good exercise for lovers of macro photography.

Resources

• Lenses (optics) on Wikipedia
• Refraction – Ch4 of Optics by Benjamin Crowell.
• Refraction group on Flickr

Next Week

Photography 101 – Lenses, Light and Magnification.
In addition to posting his Project 365 photos to his blog, Neil also runs a monthly photography project. This month’s topic is Iron Chef Photography – The Fork.

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Photography 101 – Lenses, Light and Magnification

By: Neil Creek

Welcome to the third lesson in Photography 101 – A Basic Course on the Camera. In this series, we cover all the basics of camera design and use.
We talk about the ‘exposure triangle’: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. We talk about focus, depth of field and sharpness, as well as how lenses work, what focal lengths mean and how they put light on the sensor.
We also look at the camera itself, how it works, what all the options mean and how they affect your photos.
This week’s lesson is Lenses, Light and Magnification
Last week we looked at the basics of the lens. We saw how lenses bend light by slowing it down, how the angle the light enters the lens affects how much it is bent, and how we can use this property to bring light that enters a lens into focus and create a bright, clear image.

Reading Optics Diagrams
Throughout this series, I will be using optics diagrams to illustrate various concepts. To help you get up to speed, I’ve written a short introduction on how to read these diagrams. I recommend you pausing the lesson for a moment to learn how to read and understand these diagrams.

The power of lenses

The advantage that lenses gives us over pinhole cameras is twofold: brightness and magnification.

Brightness and f-ratios

We saw in lesson two, with our experiment with the candle and the magnifying glass (Fig 1.2.3), that all the light that entered the lens from the candle was focused into the image. If we substituted a larger lens with the same focal length, then more light would be focused, and the resulting image would appear brighter, but no bigger.
It seems logical that if you double the diameter of a lens, you’ll double the size of the image it makes, but as you can see in Fig 1.3.1 below, that’s not true.

Fig 1.3.1 Doubling the diameter of the lens halves the f-ratio (see below) and collects more light but does not change the size of the image, which is a function of focal length (also see below). Doubling the diameter actually more than doubles the brightness of the image, as the light collecting sufrace of the lens increases rapidly as the radius increases (per the formula Πr² – pi times the radius squared).

Fig 1.3.2 The f-ratio indicated on a 50mm f1.8 lens.Fig 1.3.3 The f-ratio indicated on an 80-400mm f4.5-5.6 zoom lens.

F-ratio

In photography there’s a handy number used to describe the relationship between lens diameter and focal length: the “f-ratio”. Simply put the f-ratio is the focal length divided by the diameter. In Fig 1.3.1 above we have a lens with a focal length of 50mm and a diameter of 10mm. 50/10=5 which gives us an f-ratio of 1/5 or f5. If the lens was still 50mm focal length with a 20mm diameter, it would be f2.5.
The f-ratio for an SLR lens should always be written on the lens somwhere. Most compact cameras also describe the f-ratio somewhere on the body. The “shorter” the f-ratio, that is the closer it is to 1, the brighter the image the lens will produce. The term “speed” is also used to describe a lens. The word speed in this case refers to how fast the lens will allow the camera to capture an image, given the amount of light available. If the lens produces a bright image, then the shutter can be open for a shorter time to capture enough light to make an image. Thus a short f-ratio lens like f1.8 is considered a very “fast” lens, while a longer lens such as an f8 or f11 is a “slow” lens.
Recalling lesson 1, we learned that a large hole for the light to pass through makes for a brighter but less sharp image. Now that we know about f-ratios, we can connect these two facts together and understand why faster lenses have a narrower “depth of field” – the area which is in focus. We’ll talk more about this in the next lesson, but it’s helpful to connect the dots and see how all these various principles fit together.
Modern cameras allow a photographer to have some level of control over a lens’ speed by adjusting the aperture, we’ll also cover that in more detail in the next lesson.

Magnification and Field of View

Anyone who has played with a magnifying glass knows that, as the name suggests, lenses magnify. The amount of magnification depends on the focal length. The “longer” the lens, the more it magnifies the image. Short focal lengths have the opposite effect, reducing the size of the image.

Fig 1.3.4 All other things being equal, as the focal length of the lens increases, the relative size of the image also increases.
We saw above that f-ratio affects the image brightness. The two factors in the ratio are lens diameter and focal length. So far we have only talked about changing the lens diameter, but with greater magnification you increase the focal length, so you also increase the f-ratio. This means that the more you magnify the image, the dimmer it becomes. Most telephoto (long focal length) lenses have large f-ratios, and are therefore slow lenses. The exception of course are the hugely expensive and very heavy, giant lenses used by sports photographers. These use long focal lengths, and big diameter lenses. These telephotos are not for the casual photogrpaher!

Fig 1.3.5 A macro zoom lens showing magnification factors on the barrel.
Photo: Martini Captures used under CC license

We’ve talked about how lenses make the image bigger, and that’s certainly how it appears when you look through the viewfinder, or at the print from a telephoto lens. In reality, because most objects are distant, and the sensor is small, the vast majority of lenses produce an image which is smaller than the object itself. There are some specialist lenses, however, which do make an image larger than the subject. For this to be possible, the focal length needs to be long and the subject close. These are, of course, macro lenses.
Macro lenses will often be described by their “magnification factor”. A lens with a 1:1 magnification factor produces a projected image on the sensor which is the same as the subject. So the image of a 20mm diameter coin will span 20mm of the physical sensor, resulting in an image which will nearly fill the entire frame of a typical DSLR. A 1:1 magnification factor is usually considered the minimum for a lens to be described as a “macro” lens. Specialist macro lenses are often 1:3 or even 1:10 magnification factors, meaning that 1mm across the subject becomes 3mm or 10mm when projected onto the sensor, thus 3 or 10 times magnification.
Field of View
The final variable in this initially confusing balancing act of optics is the field of view. This refers to how much of the world the camera can see. A lens’ field of view depends on the focal length of the lens and the size of whatever the image is projected onto. In the case of digital cameras this is the sensor chip.

Fig 1.3.6 As the focal length increases, the field of view narrows and the image enlarges.

Fig 1.3.7 An example photo taken with an 8mm fisheye on a 1.6x cropped sensor. Fig 1.3.8 The comparative differences in frame size from compact camers through film and DSLR to medium format.

Fig 1.3.6 makes it obvious that at the wide-angle end, a slight difference in focal length translates to a large difference in field of view. The difference in field of view between a 10mm and 20mm lens is far greater than the difference between 210mm and 220mm. Some lenses can have exceptionally short focal lengths and wide fields of view, such as 12 or 8mm. These are fisheye lenses, so-called because the front of the lens bulges so much it looks like a fish’s eye. These lenses can have a 180 degree field of view, or even greater.
The size of the sensor also contributes to the field of view of a particular lens. In Fig 1.3.6 a particular sensor is shown at different focal lengths. Obviously if the sensor is smaller, it can see less of the image presented by the lens, thus the field of view is reduced and magnification is increased. This is the case for “cropped sensor” DSLRs, and compact cameras.
The “standard” frame size is 35mm, the size of a single picture on a roll of film. Cameras with this sized sensor are known as a “full frame” cameras. Large format film cameras exist with much larger film sizes, such as 150mm x 100mm. Less expensive, or earlier model DSLRs use sensors smaller than a 35mm film frame, and are referred to as cropped sensors. A typical cropped sensor may be described as a 1.6x, meaning that the apparent focal length of a particular lens is 1.6 times longer. Compact cameras use the smallest frame sizes of all, and as such require very short focal length lenses to get wide angle views.

Next Week

Photography 101 – Aperture and stops.
Now that we’ve pulled together the main theory behind the lens and creating an image, we’ll next turn our attention to exposure and how we control the capture of an image. Next week will see the introduction of the exposure triangle, an explanation of “stops” and brightness levels, and a look at the first point on the triangle: aperture.

Homework

• Find out your lenses’ field of view. Using whatever method works best for you (eg a tape measure on a wall), work out the field of view of your camera at the widest and longest settings. Measure it in degrees from side to side. Present photos of your findings.
• Shoot your entire focal range. Find an appropriate subject (eg an urban street or distant tree) and take a series of photos starting at your widest angle and zooming in at say 20mm intervals to your longest zoom. Compile them into a single image and post.
• Exploit magnification and field of view artistically. Take a photo at each extreme of your camera’s focal length range, carefully selecting the subject to take advantage of the magnification and field of view. Share the results here.
• Get up close and personal. This is ideal for users of compact cameras, which due to the optics of a small camera system are capable of focusing very close. Experiment with macro photography and show us photos of the world of the very small. Use macro mode if you have it (usually identified with a tulip symbol). DSLR users with macro gear may also participate.
• If all this is new to you, find an online camera store (for example the Canon or Nikon sites) and browse the lens catalogue. Pay close attention to the lens specifications we have discussed, and see how the shape and form of the lens matches up with these numbers. Look at how long telephoto lenses are, how wide fast lenses are, and how much ultra wide angle lenses bulge out the front.

Resources

• Canon lenses
• Nikon lenses
• Sigma lenses
• Tamron lenses
• Angle of view on Wikipedia
• Interactive focal length comparison on Canon
• Field of view calculator

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