Photo insights May '15

Jim Zuckerman’s

PH OTO I N S I G HTS May 2015

• Fun with flowers • Chrome • Flash backlighting • Low Light photography • Online photo course • Student showcase • Photo tours 1

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Fun with flowers Chrome Low light strategies Whats wrong with this picture?

Short and sweet Extreme flash backlighting Ask Jim Student showcase Back issues

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til very recently, there was very little choice for buying long telephoto lenses. You either needed a mortgage on your home to afford one, or you were stuck with shorter lenses that made bird and wildlife photography difficult. Super telephoto lenses in the Canon and Nikon lineup are now in excess of $10,000, and that makes it very difficult for most people.

Both Sigma and Tamron have entered the arena with remarkable lenses -- the 150500mm from Sigma and the 150-600mm from Tamron. At roughly $1500 and $1000, respectively, these lenses level the playing field. The more expensive lenses from Canon and Nikon are still better, but as with all technology, you have to pay a lot of money for a relatively small improvement. With sharpening techniques and the ability to adjust contrast in post-processing, the less expensive lenses become even more attractive. I ‘ve used them and been very happy with the results.

Another option for Canon shooters is the new 100-400mm zoom. It’s tack sharp, and when used with a smaller sensor camera such as the new 7D Mark II, this gives a photographer 640mm -- more than enough for most situations. This new lens weighs only 3.5 ounces more than the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and it has far more reach, plus it costs almost the same. With a 1.4x teleconveter, this increases the range of the new zoom to 896mm.

So, for $2200 and a lens that weighs 3.5 pounds, you can go to Africa or on a birding trip to Costa Rica and have all the telephoto power you need. If you opt for the Sigma or Tamron lenses, the dollars are even less. This enables any amateur photographer the ability to compete with pros for a fraction of the cost of traditional super telephotos. It’s a great time to be a photographer!

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Fun with Flowers E

verybody loves taking pictures of flowers. Their color, design, intricacy, and beauty are alluring even to non-photographers.

Shooting flowers in meadows or gardens is challenging for sure because so many things come into play, such as light, background, composition, depth of field, and more. If you want to go beyond the straight shots to do some unusual and creative imagery, you will open a whole world full of possibilities.

See beyond the obvious when you look at

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flowers. You may be surprised by what you come up with.

Here are some ideas I’ve developed over the years in trying to think outside the box when photographing flowers. They are easy to do, you can do them at home, and you can produce a lot of very cool images.

1. Bubbles The picture of an orchid below and a rose on the next page shows what you can get when submerg-

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ing flowers in a clear, carbonated liquid. You can use either 7up or club soda. Pour the liquid into a flat-sided container, such as an inexpensive aquarium (I used a $10 plastic aquarium from Walmart). Don’t use a round glass bowl because photographing through the side will be virtually impossible due to the distortion of the image seen through a curved surface.

Once the flowers are submerged in the liquid, bubbles will instantly form on the petals. Over time, more and more bubbles form. The only challenge is to keep the flowers below the surface because they tend to float. I weigh them down with anything handy, such as keys on a keyring. I’ll use a safety pin that’s stuck through the stem and attached to the keys.

Once that is done, you are ready to shoot. You’ll

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need a macro lens and a tripod. For virtually all macro photography, I feel that small lens apertures are essential to show the intriguing detail of the subjects you’re photographing. A tripod allows you to use f/22 or f/32 to get that kind of depth of field.

The lighting can be natural or artificial. For the picture of the rose on the previous page, I used the ambient window light in my living room (and I used the plugin Flood to make the reflection). When I shot the orchid, I used an off-camera flash.

2. Grunge textures Textures placed over pictures of flowers can add an interesting artistic look. This technique doesn’t work as well with pictures of

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UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS The Pantanal, Brazil November 2-10, 2016

Jaguars in the wild, incredible birds, caiman, monkeys, and more.

Frog & Reptile Workshop Close-up encounters with poison dart frogs and exotic reptiles in St. Louis, MO.

April 11 - 12, 2015

Home Photoshop workshop Learn amazing techniques to help you be more creative in photography.

May 16-17, 2015

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gardens.

To combine the flower images with textures, you need to use Photoshop. Open the picture of the flowers and then open a texture. You can create your own textures by photographing a variety of things such as brushed metal, smeared watercolor paint on white paper, scuffed tiles, sandpaper, stucco, canvas, etc.

Make sure both images are approximately the same size. In other words, don’t combine a three megabyte texture with a 60 megabyte file of a flower. The texture won’t look as sharp as it should be.

With the texture image active, use Select > all and then Edit > copy. This places the texture in the clipboard, Photoshop’s invisible holding place for a photo or part of a photo.

Activate the flower image by clicking on it, and then use Edit > paste. The texture is now a layer floating above the flower.

At this point, there are two ways to combine the two images. First, you can lower the opacity of the floating layer by using the opacity slider in the layers palette.

If that doesn’t look good to you, then use the blend modes. In the layers palette, there is a submenu with the word ‘normal’ on the tab.

Click that and then try each of the blend modes until one looks good to you. I find that multiply and overlay are usually good, but try them all.

You can scroll through the blend modes quickly by selecting the move tool, holding the shift key down, and hitting the plus key. The minus key will scroll through the blend modes in the opposite direction.

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In addition to using the blend modes, you can also adjust the opacity of the layer so both adjustments combine to produce an image you might like.

3. Textured glass A favorite technique of mine before digital was to shoot flowers and other subjects through texture glass. Not all types of textures work; only certain ones produce the painterly look that you see in the picture below and at right.

Go into a glass store and look through their remnants of textured glass to find one that gives you the kind of abstraction you’ll like.

When you find one or more types of textures, ask the store to cut a piece about 8 x 10 inches.

The first thing you need to do before using it to take pictures is to tape the edges. Use duct tape because it’s thick and will protect your hands

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from the ultra sharp edges of the glass.

The technique is simple. Shoot in shade or on an overcast day, and place the glass close to the flowers. The closer the flowers are to the glass, the more defined they will be. When I say ‘close’, I’m suggesting that the distance between the flowers and the back side of the sheet of glass should be one to three inches. As you move the glass further away from the flowers, you lose definition and end up with a complete abstraction of color.

Hold the glass parallel with the back of the camera and use a lens aperture of at least f/8. It’s good to have some depth of field even though the flowers are abstracted because you want the surface of the glass -- i.e. the texture -- to be sharp from edge to edge.

4. Metallic paint A very different approach to shooting flowers is to add metalic paint to all or part of the flower or stem. You don’t need any talent as a painter -- I have none myself. The unique quality of the chrome paint to reflect light and shadow gives dimension, depth, and interest to the areas you paint.

The photo at right shows my first attempt at doing this many years ago. I painted the petals and stem of the rose with a small brush and then placed it on a textured piece of art paper. There are myriad choices of the types of backgrounds you could use, and in this case I chose middle gray with a rough paper texture. To reveal the interesting center structure of the flower, I removed a few petals in the center front.

The photography is simple. Shoot straight downward so the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the sensor) is parallel with the subject

matter. That insures you have good depth of field at any lens aperture. It’s important that the image be sharp from corner to corner.

The lighting you use can be studio strobes, window light, or open shade. It depends on the look you want. For the photo above I used a small soft box and studio flash. I specifically wanted shadows to give this image some depth, but you may want shadowless light.

There are many options to explore.

5. Black backgrounds Black offers a stunning contrast to flowers when used as a background. All of the brilliant color, the artistry, and the design stand out like never before.

I use three techniques to achieve this. First, a piece of black velvet works great to create the inky black you want. I often travel with a twoyard piece of fabric, and it comes in handy for 11

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flowers (and a lot more). The velvet instantly eliminates unwanted backgrounds, and at the same time it dramatizes the flower. I saw the flowers below on the side of a road in Ethiopia, so I picked them and brought them into my land rover for the diffused light. I spread the velvet on the seat, put the flowers on the fabric, and took the shot of this beautiful species using a tripod so I could use f/32 for complete depth of field.

Second, I use light from a diffused flash and choose a flower with shaded background. That forces the background to go black. That is what I did with the orchid on the previous page.

the magic wand tool) and then used Select > inverse to grab just the background. I then filled the area using Edit > fill.

Third, I use Photoshop to select a flower and then fill the background with black. For example, I photographed the dried dahlia above right on a picnic table in shade. I selected the flower using the quick selection tool (this hides under

When you fill with color this way, it’s also good to use Filter > noise > add noise to match the noise, however subtle it may be, with the rest of the photo. In the dialog box, I find that a value of 3 or 3.5 works well. §

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or many years I’ve wanted a chrome filter that actually looks like chrome.

The native chrome filter in Photoshop CC (Filter > filter gallery > sketch) is terrible. It virtually never looks like chrome, and I’ve been waiting for something to replace it that really works.

ter programs”, Filter Forge. I’ve written about this program before, but it’s worth revisiting it because the effects it offers are literally infinite.

There are over 10,000 filters (yes, that number is correct) that you have access to, and there are at least two dozen filters that produce chrome and metallic effects.

Actually, there are several filters available now that create different types of chrome effects.

They are all available in the “mother of all fil-

The names of these filters include: metalizer, soft chrome, StevieJ’s SpectroChrome, Silver surfer 1b, and Quick and Funky Metaliser.

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Each of these filters have a dozen presets, and within each preset are sliders that allow you to tweak the many factors that go into making these unique effects. That means that the possibilities are limitless.

Not all types of pictures look good with a chromed finish, of course. A snapshot of grandmother’s 75th birthday party is obviously not appropriate. But there are so many subjects that work. I find that images with strong lines, like the facial features in the masked model in Venice, Italy, above, or the circular pattern of the roses on page 14 make excellent subjects for being chromed. The chrome technique abstracts an image significantly, and therefore you need the strong graphic lines and shapes

to maintain the integrity of the subject. Otherwise you will end up with just an abstraction in which the subject is obliterated.

In the Filter Forge dialog box you’ll see in the upper right corner the link that says ‘Filter Library: Download more filters’. Click this and when another dialog box opens, use the search engine within the program to find the filters you’re looking for. Type in chrome, for example, and you will see all the filters related to chrome.

When you click each filter that appeals to you, it becomes a permanent part of your favorites within the main Filter Forge dialog box.

To give my chromed images additional punch, I usually sharpen them in Photoshop. § 17

strategies for

LOW LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

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o many times you are faced with circumstances in which the light level is low, forcing you to use a shutter speed that isn’t fast enough for a sharp picture.

All of us have lost potentially good images in these situations.

I have developed strategies to deal with challenging lighting conditions, and while none of these solutions are as ideal as having more light on the scene, they are the best we can do given current techology.

1. Use a tripod. For non-moving subjects like landscapes, interiors, twilight cityscapes, and stationary macro subjects when wind is not a factor, a tripod is the best solution. With a tripod, you can use a low ISO for maxium picture quality and a minimum of digital noise, and at the same time you can have as much depth of field as you want.

2. When tripods are not allowed. More and more places that photographers love to visit and photograph are prohibiting tripods. The 6th century B.C. water storage cistern in Istanbul, below, is an example. It is extremely dark in the interior and yet no tripods are allowed.

A fairly small aperture is required to keep all of the columns in focus, and that compounds the problem.

The solution I used to overcome this was to take the ball head off my tripod and use only that. I lay on the cement floor -- in full view of the security guards -- and placed the flat, bottom part of the ball head on the cement with the camera mounted on it. With the ball head, I could angle the camera to compose the scene as I wanted. By keeping a continuous downward pressure on the camera, I was able to use an eight second exposure at f/22, and the picture is tack sharp.

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No one said I couldn’t use a ball head.

3. Moving subjects in low light This is the hardest situation of all. Assuming you want the subject to be sharp, you have no choice but to shoot with the largest lens aperture possible and raise the ISO until the shutter speed is appropriate to freeze the moving subject. Put the exposure mode on aperture priority and choose the largest aperture, such as f/2.8 or f/4. In this situation, depth of field is not a luxury you can have. Let the shutter speed vary according to the light. Check what this speed is, and if it’s not fast enough, raise the ISO until it is.

A good example of using this approach is the photo of the jaguar, below. This was taken in the Pantanal in Brazil. I was in a boat, which obviously isn’t a stable platform from

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which to shoot, and the cat was in deep shade.

I was using a 500mm f/4 lens handheld (a tripod is just not feasible in a boat), and I determined that I needed at least 1/500th of a second.

Therefore, I took this picture with a lens aperture of f/4, and I raised the ISO until the shutter was 1/500th. That ISO turned out to be, in this

instance, 1600. Most (but not all) cameras can now handle ISO settings this high without appreciable noise.

4. You want your cake and eat it, too What happens when the light is very low, the subject is moving very fast, and you also want a certain amount of depth of field.

My first thought is, good luck! But I am faced with this problem many, many times, and the only solution is to raise the ISO as high as you need it to be and then deal with the unwanted noise in post-processing.

When I photographed the snowy owl at sunset, below, I was faced with this kind of situation. I wanted tack sharp wings with not even a hint of blur in the tip feathers. Therefore, I chose 1/2000th of a second. With a hummingbird,

this wouldn’t be sufficient, but with the snowy owls I felt it would be enough.

At the same time, the bird has depth and I was using a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter equaling 280mm of focal length. That meant I didn’t have a lot of depth of field. Therefore, I elected to shoot with f/11.

In this low light environment in which I needed a fast shutter speed plus depth of field, the only option was to raise the ISO to 2000. This isn’t extremely high by today’s standards, but noise starts to be an issue.

Keep in mind that the choice was between getting a sharp bird or not. If the noise is unacceptable, then I use either Topaz DeNoise, Nik’s Dfine 2.0, or the Luminance slider in Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom) to reduce the digital noise. §

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LEARNING TO SEE

online course

by Jim Zuckerman

The ability to ‘see photographically’, to really grasp how your camera and lenses capture a subject or scene (which is different than how we see with our eyes) underlies successful picture taking. It is the bottom line that you’ve been looking for to take that quantum leap forward in your photography.

The great thing about online courses is that they can fit into any schedule. Life gets in the way at times, and Jim puts no limit on the time you can submit your work for his critiques. CLICK THIS PAGE to read more about this course.

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BOTSWANA/SOUTH AFRICA p h o t o t o u r June 6 - 20, 2015

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What’s wrong with this picture?

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t’s pretty obvious what the problem with this picture is. I clipped the wing on the left side, and as striking as this io moth is and as complementary as the background is, the problem remains.

It is never a good idea to cut off the tips of things. This includes flower petals, ears, tails, feet, noses, wings, and many other things. Even placing the edges of objects too close to the edge of the frame can be problematic, but when they are clipped like the picture above, the photograph doesn’t work. The picture on the next page shows the corrected version.

The question is, how do you fix this problem. It is a two step processs. First, you have to expand what Photoshop calls the canvas. This is done with the pulldown menu command Image > canvas size. In the dialog box (next page), you can add height and/ or width to your picture area. For the moth picture, I added width on the left side only. You can choose on which side of the picture the new

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area is added by clicking in the ‘anchor’ box. If you click in the right middle box, for example, the new area is placed on the left side.

The second step is to clone parts of the image into the new area. In the case of the io moth shot, I cloned the bark of the tree into the left portion of the image to complete the background. You have to do this carefully to make it look natural.

Note in the picture above that the light horizontal pattern in the upper left corner is carried to the edge of the picture. I did this to make the background look entirely original. § 25

SHORT AND SWEET 1. Look for unusual perspectives and unusual angles

for the subjects you choose to shoot. The velvet gecko that I photographed at my semi-annual frog and reptile workshop was on a table with a natural background as I took the picture straight downward.

3. Out of focus backgrounds are virtually always fine

and sometimes desirable. However, out of focus foregrounds are virtually always distracting, unattractive, and visually annoying. It’s interesting to note that we never see shallow depth of field with our eyes. It is solely a function of man-made optics.

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2.

Mirrored skyscrapers offer wonderful and very graphic photo opportunities. A frequent theme in photography is ‘old an new’, and here a building in Los Angeles is reflecting a gothic church at 6th and Commonwealth near downtown. Note the afternoon light.

4.

Ultra wide angle lenses like fisheyes enable you to use slower shutter speeds and still get sharp pictures.

They don’t show movement as much as normal lenses and telephotos. Therefore, you can hand hold wide angles much more readily than long lenses. This facade was captured in Provence, France. §

Photography Tours 2015 - 2016 BOTSWANA/SOUTH AFRICA June, 2015

VIETNAM, CAMBODIA, LAOS BURMA (MYANMAR) Sept, 2015 Sept, 2015

ETHIOPIA November, 2015

CARNIVAL IN VENICE Feb, 2016

SNOWY OWLS Feb. 2016

GALAPAGOS ISLANDS Mar, 2016

WHITE HORSES, FRANCE April, 2016

CROATIA, SLOVENIA, MONT. May, 2016

GREECE May, 2016

ARMENIA & GEORGIA June. 2016

CHINA Sept. 2016

For a complete list of all the photo tours/workshops Jim conducts, go to his website: www.jimzuckerman.com.

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EXTREME FLASH BACKLIGHTING

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ff-camera flash offers many creative possibilities, and one of them is dramatic backlightling. In all three of the pictures you see here -- the frog, the seashell, and the inside of a red peper -- I placed the flash unit directly behind the subject from the camera’s point of view. In order to do this, the flash has to be connected to the camera with a cord or it has to be triggered wirelessly.

For the frog picture taken at my semi-annual frog and reptile workshop, I used a ring flash where the camera and flash were connected by a cable. I simply took the flash off the camera and held it behind the frog. The frog was sitting on a sheet of glass, and I used a white paper towel between the ring flash and the frog to

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prevent the flash itself from being seen as a hot spot. The exposure was tricky. It took me four tries before I locked into the correct amount of light.

For a wireless setup, you need a flash that is tripped by a radio trigger such as the pocket wizard, a radio popper, or the Canon 600EXRT flash with a Canon ST-E3 transmitter. This means that the flash can be placed behind the subject and the camera and/or transmitter can’t see it, but the flash still fires.

Determining the correct exposure is actually easy. In the film days before we had the advantager of an LCD monitor, photographers used Polaroid test prints to determine exposures.

Now all you have to do is take a picture, study the image on the LCD, and adjust the exposure as needed using the flash exposure compensation feature. Don’t think that photographers who have been using flash for decades can take one or two pictures and know what the exposure should be. Not true. There are just too many variables that affect exposure, such as the density of the subject, the distance of the flash to the subject, the ISO, and the lens aperture.

Therefore, it is a trial and error situation in which you’ll have to take several test shots and simply adjust the exposure to taste.

Translucent subjects are what you want to shoot.

In scouting for these, carry a small, high intensity flashlight with you and place it behind various objects to see if light can be seen through them.

You’ll be surprise what you find -- starting with your own hand. §

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ASK JIM

Every month Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at photos@jimzuckerman.com.

Q: Jim . . .I took this picture of the VLA in New Mexico several years ago, and even though the sky is

beautiful and the radio telescope impressive, I still don’t like the picture. What would you say is wrong with it? Warren Fessell, Mission Viejo, California

A:

The problem here is that the silhouette of the radio telescope is interfered with by the dark clouds.

What defines the success of a silhouette is the graphic design of the subject. If it is too busy, too messy, or if it is truncated in some way, it won’t be as successful as it should be. In this picture we need to see all of the complexity and design of the structure without the clouds obscuring important parts. Perhaps at the time you could have moved to a different location so there were not so many clouds in the background. If that wasn’t possible, then there was nothing you could have done to make this work other than replace the sky in Photoshop.

© 2015 Warren Fessell

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Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos photo tour

September 13 - 28, 2015 Culture • Ancient ruins • Great people photography • Temples

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NAMIBIA PHOTO TOUR

June 22 to July 3, 2015 Wildlife Bushmen Dunes Epupa Falls

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Student Showcase

Each month, Jim features one student who took beautiful and inspiring images on one or more of his photography tours or workshops. It’s really fascinating how photographers see and compose such different images even though we may go to the same place. Everyone gets great images on my trips.

Gill Bateson, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom, Carnival in Venice workshop

Š 2015 Gill Bateson

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Student Showcase, continued

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Š 2015 Gill Bateson

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Student Showcase, continued

Š 2015 Gill Bateson

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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my home

Sat. & Sun., May 16 - 17, 2015

Photoshop is a photographer’s best friend, and the creative possibilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and ‘homey’ environment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using ‘grunge’ textures, modifying lighting, replacing backgrounds, using layer masks, blend modes, adding a moon, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many great techniques that you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do. I go over each technique several times to make sure you understand it and can remember it.

Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from different points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you

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creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you’ve already taken.

I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I’ll give you my address and you can find my home on Mapquest or with a GPS. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel.

Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up (photos@jimzuckerman.com). All you need is a laptop and a lot of your pictures. If you don’t have a laptop, I have two Mac Book Pro laptops I can loan out for the duration of the workshop. §

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PHOTO INSIGHTS®

published by Jim Zuckerman, all rights reserved © Jim Zuckerman 2015 email: photos@jimzuckerman.com snail mail address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014

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