Alfred Stieglitz

One of the images I submitted for the last assignment was of a sunset (without the sun). My tutor mentioned in the assignment comments that I should take a look at the 'Equivalent' series by Alfred Stieglitz. Subsequently I researched him on the internet and viewed a video about him on You-tube.

I was surprised to find that his 'Equivalent' series is referred to as possibly some of the first deliberately created abstract images. Alfred photographed these from 1922 on into the thirties. The cloud masses represent the inner states of the soul but I have also read that Alfred wanted to present the viewer with images without any subject matter, to test how good a photographer he was.

The variety and tones in the images is fantastic and it is easy to identify (or imagine) various inner states from the patterns.

The image my tutor was referring to is posted below.

It strikes me that this is a subject that could be picked up as a project and still produce varied and different results.

A Google search found examples of these images here.

Judging colour temperature 1

The following three images demonstrate the colour difference of light at different times of the day. Sunlight in the middle of the day is colourless (also known as 'white' light). The first of the following shots shows this. The photograph was taken on a clear day and a neutral subject has been chosen to show the colour cast more accurately. The camera was set to daylight white balance for all shots.

From left to right: Sunlight in the middle of the day, shade in the middle of the day, low sun.

The next shot was taken in shade at the same time of the day as the first. The text asked us to study the light carefully. I sat for a while and looked at the cat figure. I was anticipating a blue'ish cast based on what we had learnt in the text. The light we are seeing is the light away from the sun i.e. the wavelengths that have been scattered. It is the shorter wavelengths that get scattered more easily and these are in the blue range.

I did indeed see a slight blue cast to the cat statue but it is markedly more prominent in the photo above.

The final shot was taken in the low evening sun. Naturally we would expect to see an orange cast at this time of the day, we are all familiar with sunsets! Again the picture seems to show the orange colour better than when I sat and studied the subject.

Outdoors at night

I have been lucky enough to get a couple of days away in Ghent, Belgium. The historic city of Ghent (or Gent) is a beautiful location and served well for this exercise. The shops and streets were all lit up at night and I took full advantage of this to get my pictures.

I had two cameras at my disposal, a compact and my SLR. The first group of shots were taken with the compact. This has a much smaller chip than the SLR and subsequently suffers more from noise in the images. It is also more automatic so has selected ISO and shutter speed itself at what it considers to be the best option. You can see the camera does not always get it right and some of the shots suffer a little from camera shake (partially my own fault for disabling the flash so that I could get just the lights from the city).

In amongst the shots above are a good example of a floodlit building and a brightly lit store front. Both were taken hand held.

The compact camera took care of white balance for all the pictures above. I think it handled this pretty well. On a separate occassion I had my SLR to hand. The following shots were taken with this.

A little about the technique I used here. As I was on holiday with my wife, I didn't really want to have to carry a tripod around with me. For the shots with the SLR, I always found something to stand the camera on such as a table or simply a post. I then used the camera's self timer as a kind of automatic cable release.

For the large interior shot below I was able to hand hold the camera due to a combination of a wide angle lens and the fact that this particular lens has image stabilisation. On this shot the white balance has been adjusted in the RAW converter by picking a white area as a sample. There are two different light sources in this photo - daylight from a large overhead skylight and then the light from the shops themselves. The white balance has been set to the daylight coming through the skylight, leaving the shop lighting to show with an orange tint.

Finally for this exercise I was required to capture light streams from traffic from a high location. I haven't done this kind of thing before so it was quite an interesting exercise. I set out to our neighbourhood dual carriageway equipped with my tripod and 24-105mm lens. When I got there it was still light so I set up and checked out my options while I waited for the light to fade. In one direction I had a roundabout and in the other a dual carriageway.

As it got darker I started taking pictures with a small aperture and very low ISO (50). This was to combat noise but also get the shutter speeds slower. I took about 60 images from various angles and with different amounts of light. I didn't find it necessary to change my settings too much. After a bit of experimentation I found that twenty seconds seemed to do the job.

Out of all the images I chose some that actually do show the road (although there was a lot of ambient light in one direction from some street lights). My reason for doing this is because I always see light trails on a black background. I think it is quite interesting to see some other detail with the light seemingly super-imposed on top. I have also picked what I hope to be slightly more abstract views. Below are four images from that evening.

Conclusion
Shooting outdoors at night was an interesting exercise which has resulted in a style I might not otherwise have tried. The factors to be aware of when doing night photography are noise in the images and slow shutter speeds although with modern cameras which have less noisy high ISO settings, this is becoming less of a problem. Slow shutter speeds can often be exploited by showing movement as in the case of the traffic light trails. Finally, you may have to consider your white balance settings carefully depending on your subject.

A project influenced by Drew Gardner

Girl on Water Buffalo by Drew Gardner.

Back in March I posted about the photographer Drew Gardner. I am a big fan of his work and have for some time owned one of his DVD's in which he talks about setting up some of his shoots.

This inspired me to start a little project called 'lost in the woods'. A large part of Drew's technique is to do with the lighting. He uses studio lighting on location and basically drops the ambient light to a level where he can control the light on the subject using mobile studio lights. Other factors are the use of a smoke machine and conceptually, subject matter that stands out from the norm. I wanted to create a similar thing.

The project idea was called 'Lost in the Woods'. It was to be a semi fashion, semi story book sequence of images lit in a dramatic way. I would of course also need a model.

I am a member of Model Mayhem and a contact not to far from where I live came to mind as having the right look. I contacted Holly and explained what I wanted to do. She was more than enthusiastic and duly emailed me various clothing suggestions. We settled on the red dress and black tights. Next up some props!

I found a basket at a car boot sale and arranged it with artificial flowers. Something else was needed to take the shots just one step further away from the ordinary. Giant toadstools seemed to be the thing. I made several of these from paper mache. Lastly smoke for fog. I really wanted this to add some 'depth' to the shot, as Drew puts it. On the day this didn't work. I couldn't manage a proper smoke machine and the cans of party smoke were simply not up to the job - too much breeze.

One of my forest shots

All the elements were in place except lighting. For this I would use my speed lights. I have three with stands and some umbrellas as well as remote triggers to fire them.

On the day Vincent, a good friend came along to help with some of the kit as there was quite a lot to carry. He also held a flash unit with an umbrella most of the time as the wind was determined to blow this over.

Holly, our model, worked her socks off. There were various poses that required her to run and she was also happy to climb in among a tangle of vines as well as under a blown over tree.

The end result was a collection of images that I am very happy with. Not all the shots worked and there is of course no fog but hey, that's all part of learning. Above all though,  I think the objective to create a Drew Gardner inspired shoot was met!

More images from this shoot can be seen on my Flickr account. Just click on the images in the right margin.

UPDATE: I emailed Drew Gardner to check it was ok to use one of his images for this post and got an almost instant reply together with a valuable critique of the image above. Many thanks Drew -  well chuffed!

Measuring exposure

As my camera has manual exposure adjustment I am able to do this exercise. The first part requires a number of images which have been deliberately over or under exposed.

The picture below is of our cat Murphy. The shot has been deliberately over exposed. The reason for doing this is because of the difficulty of getting a nice picture of the cat when exposing under normal circumstances. Her black coat hides all the detail under normal conditions. The camera doesn't have the range of the human eye and her thick black coat just doesn't render well. With the exposure set a stop or so over it puts this detail back at the cost of the background being a bit over.


I visited Chichester cathedral which is near where I live. These bibles were laid out on a table. To take this picture a decision had to be made on what to expose correctly, the books or the background. As the books are the subject of this image they were exposed correctly. This in turn required me to deliberately over-expose the background.

Next a very special shot. This is part of a series which made up a little project. The image qualifies here as it has been deliberately under-exposed by a couple of stops and then lit with camera flash lights on stands. The reason for doing this was to reduce the light in the woods as it was plain daylight when the picture was taken. The flash lights, one either side of the subject, then picked out the girl.

You could argue that the subject is a little small in the frame but this has been done to make the woods seem more 'enveloping'. Their is a little more blur on the girls face than I had hoped for but the aperture was very small and admittedly the subject's face is just out of focus.

The following images have been shot at half stop intervals from 1 stop underexposed to one stop over. The centre image is correctly exposed according to the camera meter (metering on average exposure)

I have ticked the exposures that I think work. In this case the correct exposure according to the camera and half a stop under.

In the next group of shots I have again ticked the samples that I believe work. It is interesting to note that the centre shot only just qualifies. The statue is on the brink of being over exposed. The camera has not quite got its averaging right and seems to have over-compensated for the darker surroundings.

The best exposure in my opinion is half a stop under the camera's recommendation.

The next group were photographed under the same lighting conditions as the previous group. There is however a difference in the camera's meter readings. Remember we are dealing with an average exposure reading (or centre weighted averaging in this case). Where the overall balance of brightness is a lot closer in this arrangement, the camera has managed a better job in the centre photograph which is better exposed than the statue.

Again this closely balanced lighting has allowed the camera to pick a fairly even exposure. In this case the best images are the correct (centre) exposure and the two brighter ones.

From these images it is apparent that exposure is not an exact science. Sometimes a decision has to be made about what to expose for. On other occasions we may actually have more than one exposure to choose from, all of them correct.

Something that is very apparent though. If you have ever used film you will know that the range of exposure is greater with film than with digital. This means that as a digital photographer you have to be a little more decisive at the capture stage about what your correct exposure is going to be.

Part 4 -Light

Assignment three has now been sent off to my tutor so it's time to start on part 4, 'Light'. This is a very interesting chapter as I feel this is where I am as a photographer. I am experimenting a lot with light, both artificial and natural at the moment. An area of photography I am becoming ever more interested in is fashion. One of the reasons it appeals to me is the way light is used in this genre.

As an example see the image below from photographer Nicole Nodman. The lighting 'effect' is as much part of this image as is the girl, the clothing, the plant to her right and the out of focus background. The light is not 'just there' but our attention is actively drawn to it and the way it unifies the image.