Photo insights september '15

Jim Zuckerman’s

PH OTO I N S I G HTS September 2015

• Painting with light • Topaz Impression • Photographing decay • Online photo courses • New ebook • Student showcase • Photo tours

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4. Painting with light 15. Topaz Impression 23. What’s wrong with this picture?

25. Short and sweet 27. Photographing decay 31. Ask Jim 34. Student showcase 38. Back issues 22

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was sharing my pictures recently with a long time friend of mine who is also a professional photographer. He shoots primarily weddings and comercial work along with business portraits, and he said something interesting to me. He said, “You take pictures that people want to see. No one gets excited about wedding pictures or comercial work except, hopefully, the clients.”

That got me thinking. When you show your work to friends, family members, photographers in your camera club or photo judges, if the subjects are boring, mundane, and/or uninspiring, no matter how good your composition is, how perfect the exposure might be, how tack sharp the image is, and how hard it was to get the shot, it won’t matter to your audience. They don’t care. They want to be excited by what you are showing them. If they are not, they will (probably) be polite and say your work is very nice, but you can tell by their tone of voice and how quickly they turn their attention elsewhere that you haven’t grabbed their emotions, their curiosity, and their involvement in your photos.

I have said for many years that great subjects make great pictures. Great subjects, when photographed well, compell people to look at and appreciate your photography. I have spent a good portion of my life in pursuit of what I consider great subjects -- wildlife, tall ships, European villages at twilight, stunning landscapes, puppies, exotic cultures, Civil War battle reinactments, butterflies, and more. This, in my opinion, is what separates truly engaging work from the rest of the crowd.

Jim Zuckerman www.jimzuckerman.com 3

Painting with Light A

unique approach to making pictures is to paint with light.

This is done in a dark environment with either a large or small flashlight or other light painting tools. You can apply this kind of light to macro subjects, landscapes, architecture, ancient ruins, junker cars, and many other subjects. The light tools can themselves be the subject, too, for creating abstract images.

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The tools First you’ll need flashlights. There are many available, but it comes down to size, power, color, and intensity. If you want to light paint small subjects where you can position yourself in close proximity to them, then you’ll use a small flashlight that doesn’t need to be powerful. The painted rose, below, is an example. In this case, you’d want a flashlight that has a fairly narrow beam.

The closer the light is placed to the subject, the more narrow the beam will be. For this picture, I held the light about six inches from the flower.

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it is invaluable in lighting up objects outdoors at night. This picture was taken at dawn just as the eastern sky was showing cobalt blue.

When I light painted the truck on the previous page, I used a larger flashlight because I had to stand a few feet away so I wasn’t seen in the picture. That required a little larger flashlight.

For the 1st century B.C. megalithic heads on Mt. Nemrut in Turkey, I used the large flashlight you see in the photo above. It is a Black and Decker V1 rechargeable spotlight ($20 at Wallmart), and while it adds weight to a piece of luggage,

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There are many other tools for painting with light at night. You can by them from online sources like lightpaintingbrushes.com or make them yourself. For example, a small flashlight will fit into a quart-sized plastic Coke bottle.

You can wrap the bottle with one or more pieces of colored gel, and at night it becomes an effective tool to create abstracts.

For the picture at right, I used another device.

I taped a seven-foot strand of Christmas lights powered by two AA batteries onto a bicycle wheel. I set my camera on a tripod on my driveway, and in total darkness I opened the shutter for 20 seconds and spun the tire as I moved all around leaving streaks of multicolored circular designs. When painting with light at night, abstractions can be one of your goals.

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UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS Carnival in Venice, Italy Two tour dates, Feb. 2016

Outrageous costumes in a medieval environment! Venice is beautiful any time, but during carnival it’s beyond amazing.

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

Nov. 14 - 15, 2015

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

October 16-17, 2015

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Color Some flashlights produce a yellowish white light and some are cooler, or more bluish.

For the latter, a daylight white balance is best.

This will give you true colors. For the traditional flashlights that have the yellow/white color balance, you’ll need to use the tungsten or indoors WB setting on the camera. This is assuming you want correct color.

Sometimes, though, it’s very effective to mix the golden light of a tungsten bulb with the cool tones of dawn and twilight. For the photograph on page six, I used the tungsten light from the Black and Decker in combination with the first rays of dawn which were a deep cobalt blue. During the 30 second exposure, I walked down the row of heads and illuminated each one for a few seconds only. It took a few tries to make the exposure correct. Paint-

ing with light is basically trial and error with each exposure. After each shot, check the LCD monitor to make sure you have what you want.

The technique When photographing in the dark, focus is a challenging issue. When you are shooting something fairly close to you, it’s a simple matter of using a flashlight bright enough to allow the autofocus mechanism in the camera to work. However, if you are including the sky in the frame to capture a star field or the Milky Way, you have to use another approach.

The picture below shows a South African landscape with a dead tree in the foreground and the night sky. I had my guide illuminate the tree with a strong spotlight, similar to the Black and Decker. I used a 24-105mm lens for this picture set to the 24mm focal length, and this meant

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that the depth of field was significant. The guestion to ask is where should the focus point be -on the tree or on the stars? Due to the extreme low light situation, and due to the fact that the shutter speed shouldn’t be longer than 20 to 30 seconds because of the rotation of the earth (I didn’t want star trails), I couldn’t close the lens down from wide open because (1) that would force the ISO to be much higher than I wanted and/or (2) it would make the shutter speed too long. So, I couldn’t rely on a small aperture for depth of field.

If you do experiments to determine at which point of focus a wide angle lens becomes infinity, it is very close to the focal length of the lens.

In other words, a 24mm lens goes to infinity at about 24 feet. This means that if you set the lens to the infinity mark, everything will be in focus with a large lens aperture from 24 feet to infinity.

Therefore, with the tree photo, I set my tripod up

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about 25 feet from the tree knowing that I’d get both the tree and the sky in focus.

If you aren’t including a foreground and you only want to capture the night sky, then you have two options for focus. You can find a distant light to focus on -- say a street lamp or the window in a far away highrise, or you can focus on a cloud in the sky during daylight hours and note on the lens where the point of focus is. It may be on the infinity mark or very close to it. Then, at night, use a flashlight to set the lens manually to that predetermined mark, turn the autofocus off, and shoot.

For the tree photo I used the largest aperture on the lens -- f/4 -- and set the ISO to 3200 with a shutter speed of 30 seconds. The spotlight hit the tree for a total of about 5 seconds only. Due to the high ISO and the distance of the spotlight to the tree, that is all the time I

needed. It took three test shots to determine this exposure time. Note that the light is coming from the right side. I specifically didn’t want front lighting because the tree would be devoid of texture, and I like the strong contrast from side light.

In most cases, you will find that illuminating the subjects from the side or from a 45 degree angle is best. Even flat surfaces such as the beach house in Northern Ireland on the previous page benefits from lighting like this. I used a small flashlight to light the colorful architecture from a 45 degree angle, and if you study this carefully you can see the advantage of creating some shadows and texture.

Light painting has endless possibilities. If you like geometric abstracts, hang a small flashlight from a string or wire in a dark room or outdoors at night and, with the camera below

aimed at the light, open the shutter and give the flashlight a spin. As it moves in a circular pattern, change colored gels over the lens. No need to use glass filters. Use inexpensive plastic gels that can be held over the lens as the light moves. In the picture below, I used first a red gel and then a green one as the flighlight lost energy and made smaller concentric circles.

The entire exposure took about 15 seconds.

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In the well-known Upper Antelope Canyon near Page, Arizona (previous page upper right), my photo tour group and I used a light painting technique to illuminate the contoured sandstone walls against the night sky. Our Navajo indiana guide held the LED light facing the sand on the ground, and that was enough to bounce the light onto the high walls of the canyon. This exposure was about 25 seconds at f/2.8, a 14mm lens, and 1250 ISO. Again, this was determined by trial and error.

Painting with light techniques can be used with all kinds of product shots, too. It can be a much more engaging, artistic, and dramatic way to light small objects. I photographed the unique piece below that I bought in Peru (my wife hates it) with a single small flashlight, and I made the exposure over six seconds at f/22 with 100 ISO. I moved the flashlight over the

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face and horns until I liked the result.

In the unique landscape at right, I used the Black and Decker flashlight to illuminate the steam coming from the active Ijen volcanic crater in Indonesia. This was a very challenging image because the exposure discrepancy between the blue flames ignited by hot sulfuric gas and the night sky was extreme, and then I introduced the light from the powerful light.

This took several test shots to determine the best shutter speed and ISO. My exposure time was 20 seconds at f/4 with 3200 ISO. Still, the blue flames are blown out, but since I wanted to show the stars (and this required the longer exposure) there was nothing I could do to show more detail in the blue flames. In addition, the wind was blowing the smoke very fast and any exposure longer than 1/60th of a second recorded the movement in a white blur. ยง

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NEW eBOOK One of the most important ingredients to great picture taking is lighting. Most of your pictures are taken with natural light, and that’s what this ebook addresses. You will learn to recognize the best types of lighting for the most stunning photography, which types of light to avoid, how to make the most out of bad lighting, how to expose perfectly every time even in tough situations, and how to deal with the constant problem of contrast.

If you are in any way insecure about your photography when it comes to using natural light, this easy to read ebook is a resource that you’ll feel is essential to your growth as a photographer.

Click the photo to see inside the ebook

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Topaz

Impression

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f you like turning photos into paintings, you will love the program by Topaz called Impression (https://www. topazlabs.com/impression). It was recently introduced to me by my good friend, Scott Stulberg (with whom I’m sharing the photo tour to shoot the white horses of the Camargue in France next April), and this software is now my favorite means of creating painterly images. It is easy, the processing time is just seconds, and the variety of presets offer you an impressive range of styles.

Topaz Impression operates as a stand alone

program or as a plugin. If you use it as a plugin, go to Filter > Topaz Labs > Topaz Impression. This will open the preset list as you can see on the next page, upper right.

Once a preset box is highlighted, an icon appears (green arrow) that gives you access to many sliders whereby you can alter and adjust the effect. These include brush size, paint opacity, stroke length, saturation, etc.

The dialog box initially opens with a certain number of presets, but for the entire listing of them -- and there are many -- click a small icon

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in the upper right corner (red arrow, above).

You’ll be amazed at how many ways you can add unique and beautiful painterly effects to your images. To access all of the sliders without going to an individual preset box, click the icon shown by the cyan arrow.

It is a very simple program to navigate, and the rewards are huge. By varying just the brush size, you can go from the angry and powerful strokes of Van Gogh’s style to the softness of Monet or the subtlelty of Rembrandt. In many

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instances, photographs that aren’t impressive in their original form can become works of art.

In addition, critical focus in the original shot isn’t terribly important. With a wildlife portrait, for example, if the eyes aren’t tack sharp in the photograph, the image is pretty much ruined. But in the painterly, abstracted versoin it probably won’t matter.

In addition to color, there are many presets that turn original digital shots into black and white or sepia sketches. The artistic sketch of the 1904

Become a better photographer with

eBooks

Click on any ebook to see inside

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Oldsmobile, above left, is the preset called Da Vinci Sketch III. Within two minutes, you can make several different variations of a picture and it’s hard to determine which one you like the best because they are all great. The rendition of the Olds above right is a presest called Photo Color, and the pointillistic interpretation of the car below is the preset Abstraction I. The software sells for $99 (use the discount

code zuckerman15 at the time of purchase to save 15%), and I promise that it’s one the least expensive things in photography that will give you the most enjoyment and artistic fullfilment.

If you like to decorate your home or office with your work, a great way to display these images is to print them on canvas with a gallery wrap.

They are stunning. Alternatively, try metal prints. The colors jump right out at you with bold intensity. §

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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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INDONESIA WILDLIFE & CULTURAL TOUR June 8 - 22, 2016

orangutans komodo dragons Bali rainforest

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What’s wrong with this picture?

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his is an interior shot of a temple in Bagan, Burma (Myanmar). There are two major things wrong with it. First and foremost, due to the extreme contrast, the shadows are too dark and they are devoid of important detail. Second -- and this is fairly subtle -- the entire picture is slanted to the left (i.e. rotated counterclockwise). When I took the shot, I didn’t orient the camera perfectly, thus the horizontal line of the floor at the bottom of the composition is not parallel with the bottom of the viewfinder. That also meant that the imaginary vertical line down the center of the Buddha is angled left.

To fix these problems, I opened Adobe Camera Raw and chose the icon indicated by the green arrow on the next page. The icon graphic looks like the glass elements inside a lens. Then I chose the tab manual as indicated by the purple arrow (these same tools are in Lightroom). The five icons that appear below the word ‘upright’ allow you to tweak the keystoning of the image. I chose the middle one because that produced the correctly oriented image you see on page 24.

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Next, to open the shadows and keep the highlights from blowing out, I moved the shadows slider all the way to the right and the highlight slider all the way to the left. Then I adjusted the exposure slider to taste. These actions produced the perfectly exposed, perfectly aligned image above.

I could have cloned out the sheen on the Buddha’s chest just above the hands as well as the highlights above the eyes, but I elected to leave those areas alone. Gold glistens, and I feel these reflections show how it really looked to me at the time. Plus, those areas are small enough not to be distracting. On the contrary, I think they add dimension and depth to the contours of the huge statue. My settings for this were f/4, .4 seconds, 200 ISO, 24-105mm lens, tripod.

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SHORT AND SWEET 1. At dawn and dusk as well as when the sky is deeply

2. A technique left over from the days of film is still

3. By applying multiple filters to an image, the picture

4. If you can muster the temerity to sneak into another

overcast, blue tones occur when you use daylight white balance. Don’t be so quick to change this. Blue tones are moody, compelling, and artistic. If you use cloudy WB, you’ll eliminate the blue -- and the mood.

moves further away from being a photograph and it becomes much more abstract -- i.e. painting-like. You can use native Photoshop filters or third party plugins, but the more filters you use, the more interesting/ creative/unique the image becomes.

valid today. Even though you can add color digitally now, try making a black and white or sepia print on matte paper and coloring it with Marshall’s Oils. It’s a beautiful look. You need fine tip brushes and patience.

person’s setup photo, you can get some fun shots. At the Sheraton Hotel in Surabaya, Indonesia, I saw a lady taking this group picture on the lovely curved stairway.

So, with a smile, I asked if I could grab a shot, too, and all of the women smiled back a ‘yes’. §

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Photography Tours 2015 - 2017 BURMA (MYANMAR) Sept, 2015

CARNIVAL IN VENICE Feb, 2016

SNOWY OWLS Feb. 2016

GALAPAGOS ISLANDS Mar, 2016

WHITE HORSES, FRANCE April, 2016

CROATIA, SLOVENIA, MONT. May, 2016

ARMENIA & GEORGIA June 2016

INDONESIA July 2016

KENYA migration Aug. 2016

CHINA Sept. 2016

GREECE Oct. 2016

PATAGONIA Apr. 2017

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For a complete list of all the photo tours/workshops Jim conducts, go to his website: www.jimzuckerman.com. 6

Photographing Decay

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here is something fascinating about decay. To say it can be beautiful certainly stretches the definition of beauty, but nevertheless I and many other photographers do find beauty, intrigue, and fascination with many types of man-made objects in various states of dilapidation.

Many differernt types of pictures can be had when photographing this stuff: Amazing patterns and designs of peeling paint, rusted machinery, haunted-looking houses, mixtures of textures, colors, and graphic designs, ultra wide angle compositions, light painting, and more.

Usually the older the objects are and the more time has pasted for them to crumble, the better the photography is. With the remarkable abil-

ity now to add unbridled saturation to our photos, you can enhance and embellish the images to move into the realm of fine art and surrealism. The peeling paint I captured on an old road grader in Vermont, above, illustrates what I think could easily be displayed

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in an art gallery and sold as a framed print. You can also go the other way toward desaturation or monochromatic colors like I did with the abandoned home in blue on the previous page.

Throughout the U.S. and other countries, there are junk yards, scrap metal recycling centers, abandoned homes, abandoned railroad stations, and crumbling ruins of all kinds, and with the Internet it’s not hard to find them. For example, search on Google for ‘The Ten Most Awesome Junk Yards in the World’ and you’ll be surprised by what you find. In the U.S., the Gold King Mine in Jerome, Arizona is amazing, and south of Atlanta, Georgia is Old Car City, another incredible paradise for photographers.

Using real estate websites, you can find abandoned buildings for sale, and if you like railroads, do a search for ‘train graveyards’. There

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is an amazing one in the country of Bolivia that is on my list of places to visit. I found it online.

It is the Uyuni Train Cemetery. In Hungary, you can visit Istvántelki Főműhely, an abandoned railway vehicle repair shop in Budapest, and in a small Belgian village near the German border is another railroad graveyard. Once you start looking, you be able to find these kinds of subjects pretty much everywhere.

Regarding equipment, you will definitely need a tripod. In most types of compositions, you will want as much depth of field as possible to show all the remarkable detail with tack sharp clarity. You will want a medium telephoto such as a 70-200mm or 80-300mm plus a good wide angle lens. In my opinion, the wider the better.

A 14mm or 16mm wide angle on a full frame sensor camera is ideal, and if your camera has a smaller sensor then a 10-22mm or a 12-24mm works very well to exaggerate the perspectives of the interesting lines and designs. Also, for shooting in tight spaces, such as the interiors of old rooms, train cars, and automobiles, an extreme wide angle is required. For the picture upper right of a junker car buried in the snow

in Japan, I used a 14mm lens, a tripod, and in addition I had to use HDR to capture all the details in both the highlights and the shadows.

HDR is an important tool in photographing decay. ยง

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PHOTO TOUR TO BURMA Sept. 29 to Oct. 13, 2015

• Amazing culture • Great people photography • Ancient temples • Landscapes • Long necked women • Intricately carved monasteries • Exotic art

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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 . . .You used the picture of the wreathed hornbill, below, for one of your blogs and you stated

that your lens aperture was f/11 to make sure all of the fascinating structures of the bird were sharp. My question is with f/11, I would expect that the background would be sharp. Why isn’t it? Did you do that in post-processing?

Carol Maillet, Laguna Niguel, California

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The reason the background is blurred is because it was far enough away from the hornbill to be soft. Had the background foliage been, say, 2 or 3 feet from the bird, then it would have been too defined -i.e. relatively sharp especially at f/11. But the plants and trees in the background were about 15 to 20 feet away, and that made all the difference. Remember that depth of field is determined by four things: (1) lens aperture, (2) distance of the camera to the subject, (3) distance of the subject to the background, and (4) focal length of the lens. Any one of these factors can overpower the others, as number (3) did in this case.

To make the background sharply defined, I would have had to place the bird right in front of the foliage or use a wide angle lens. The focal length I used here was a 200mm plus a 1.4x teleconver giving me 280mm.

Had I used a 16mm lens, that would have overpowered the position of the bird relative to the background and the entire enviroment would have been sharp.

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KENYA PHOTO SAFARI August 4 - 15, 2016 The greatest concentration of wildlife on the planet - The Migration

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SNOWY OWLS WORKSHOP One spot left February 14-17, 2016

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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.

Bob Vestal, Boise, Idaho Snowy owls workshop; Photoshop workshop

Š 2015 Bob Vestal

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Student Showcase, continued

Š 2015 Bob Vestal

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Student Showcase, continued

Š 2015 Bob Vestal

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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my home

Sat. & Sun., Oct. 17 - 18, 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

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 mail address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014

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