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As discussed in the previous post, Shooting encompasses all of the actual technique and legwork that goes into capturing the image. We will also be touching on Processing and that will include all the editing and colour correction that takes place after the picture has been taken.
To keep things easier to navigate I’ll keep the tips separate.
Shooting
1. Don’t Be Afraid of Flash
I understand why people don’t like using flash, when I first started taking pictures, I avoided flash like the plague, I used to always associate flash with wedding photographers in Bangladesh but over time I realised how important it is to learn how to light a scene and how great an asset a flash can be.
You know what makes a photograph? Light. Light makes pictures. But what do you do when you don’t have enough light? You use flash that’s what. But here’s the thing, you could use flash on every other picture and your phone might even want to but you need to tell it how and when to use flash.
Now generally the onboard flashes on phones and cameras have a tendency to overpower the image.
So how do we correct that? We make the rest of the image darker, the best time to use flash is night time as a result but during the day we can move the camera and subject until we achieve a position where we have the subject close enough to the camera for the flash to illuminate them and far enough from the background for it to appear darker than the overall image. Alternatively if you have a flash with variable power and manual settings, you can use those to darken the image.
An alternative is to place the subject right up next to a solid background, like a wall.
2. Know your Camera and learn to use it to meter according to the scene
First things first, it’s very important to get to know your camera, whatever you’re using, it’s always good to test your camera in different scenarios and get to know it. Make sure you know how to make it do what you want it to do. Now for a lot of people this will be your phones, for you it’s very straightforward, you’ll just want to know how to quickly start up your camera, focus and take a shot, honestly the same goes for cameras, you can use manual controls, that’s fine but for the most part as long as you can be quick enough to take the shot, anything works
Now here’s the part with some new terms, namely metering. Metering is the calculation your camera makes to determine the ideal settings for a picture. There are several types of metering, the 3 most common types are:
a) Average/Matrix Metering: This reads the light in the whole scene and chooses settings to have the average tones in the image exposed correctly
b) Centre weighted Metering: This gives the centre more importance but still uses an average reading
c) Spot Metering: This exposes the image to render a chosen point, usually the point of focus, accurately
We’re going to focus on Spot Metering because it’s the one you’ll get in your phones and the one with the greatest ease of use.
Metering is extremely important because where you meter will change how an image looks. This is especially critical when you’re working a scene with different levels of lighting, which is quite common. Let’s look at how an image behaves when metering in different places.
For this example scene, we have the curtains drawn with a small slit to allow the windows to be visible. There are substantial shadows on the bed and the primary highlight in this scene is the window. The focus point on the images is at the centre, where the curtains are open.
Now the point of explaining all of this was to show you how the metering changes how your image looks, I will now include examples of images with different methods of metering to show when to use what kind of metering.
3. Take the pictures you want to take
One of the most important things in photography is to do what you want. Take every picture you want to take, there is nothing worse than regret, some pictures might work, some might not, but you will gain not only peace of mind from having taken that first shot but you will also have gained experience. For every shot you take, you train your eye to get better at looking for shots, knowing what will look good and how to deal with different scenarios. When we get into conception of a photograph, we will talk more about how to plan shots but for the shooting aspect, sometimes it can work wonders to just pull up your camera and fire off a couple shots. I’m going to include one of my favourite pictures here and a series of similar pictures I took of subway stations, leading up to that shot.
Processing
Before we get in to talking about processing, I want to talk a little about my own thoughts on editing.
In my opinion, editing in digital photography is extremely important. It could even be just as important as actually capturing a good image. This is because we now use digital sensors to take our pictures. These sensors are great at capturing light information but they’re not always the best at interpreting it. Many companies go to great lengths to create profiles for their cameras and phones to get a decent image but most people tend to process their own from jpegs or raw files.
This is very different from analogue photography because back then we used film and each film had its own colour profile and look, you knew what you were getting based on the film you used, processing wasn’t much of an issue because films were beautiful. In my editing I always try to emulate films to certain respects, especially in the colour rendition.
The editing process is different for every person and so the tips here will be a general guideline on how I think it should go but also some basic steps to build on.
1. Keep it simple and mostly natural
I know it feels really easy to just slap on a filter on Instagram/vsco and roll with it but I think the best images that get produced are ones where the colours and the picture themselves look believable. Colours and contrast can be exaggerated a little and yet still look natural, that’s what I usually aim for. Every now and then I’ll do a more artificial edit but for the most part, I look to keep colours quite genuine but a little punchy.
2. Preserve highlights and shadows to pleasing levels, avoid fades
I’ll level with you, I loved using fades as much as the next guy and you might find them generally pleasing at first but they’re far too easy to overuse/misuse. Your best bet is to figure out how to balance highlights and shadows and tweak contrast to achieve pleasing images without drowning bits of them in fades. Another very common issue this will help fix is the overuse of HDR in editing to completely remove shadows. Shadows exist, they should exist, they can be extremely useful if you use them right, you shouldn’t be removing them from photos unless absolutely necessary. If you don’t like the shadows in a picture, you’re better off taking it with better lighting instead of removing them in post. I’m going to include examples showing what these problems look like and examples of how it looks when they’re handled better.
3. Good editors copy, Great editors tweak
If you have a certain photographer or a certain style of images you really enjoy, even a certain film, you should attempt to edit your pictures to match them. Even if it turns out not to work for your pictures, it’s a good exercise to teach yourself more about editing and you can also then tweak the style to fit your tastes and create your own unique look.
Personally I use profiles based on 4 films when working with colour. Whenever there are people involved I use a base profile of Kodak Portra or Fuji Pro 400H and then I build off of that. I do this because I really like how these films portray skin tones. They don’t have the most punchy colours though so I manually add in whatever colour saturation is required after I’m happy with the overall exposure and look on the person. I use Portra more commonly but I use 400H when there is an abundance of green in an image because I think it handles greens just a little better.
When shooting colour photos that don’t have people I tend to veer towards profiles based on Kodak Ektar or Agfa Vista because of the strong colour renditions of both of these films. Sometimes they can be a little overpowering so each shot is treated differently to achieve the right results.
VSCO and RNI both make great film based presets and filters that you can use to start the edit on your pictures if you’d like to give them a shot.
For today I’m not really touching on black and white editing because I specialise in colour but I’m going to be shooting some more monochrome in the coming weeks and hopefully it will get its own tutorial somewhere down the line.
I’m also turning on comments for this post so if you have anything you want to ask about or have any ideas for a future post or just leave some feedback, please feel free!