I’m a sucker for good contrast in a photo. Since I mainly like to dabble in monochrome work, contrast for me is the gravy train – second only to composition. Regardless of whether you take black and white photographs or colour ones, take them of your cat or of war zones, I feel a little bit of contrast goes a long way to making a photo come alive. So, let’s investigate together just what contrast is, and how we can bring it out in our work.
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How do I know if my camera is a digital infrared camera?

Digital infrared cameras – how can you tell if your camera is able to do digital infrared photography? Well, if you have a digital point & shoot camera – with an LCD viewing screen that you compose your shot in, there’s a super easy way to tell – more or less.

To find out if you have a digital infrared camera, try this quick test:

Hunt down a TV, VCR or DVD player remote control. Look at the end that points to the TV (or VCR etc), and you’ll see a little bulb or flat back plastic. This is the transmitter that sends the signal from the remote to your device. And, guess what? The signal (usually) uses infrared waves!

“OK, so what does all this have to do with my camera,” you ask?! Ok, I’ll get to the point!

Turn on your camera, and point the remote at it and look at it through your LCD screen. If you see your remote sensor light up with a white light, while looking through your camera LCD, there’s a very good chance that you camera will take infrared photos.

See what I mean?
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In the ‘good old days’, when we had finished the day’s photography, we would disappear into the darkroom and spend hours breathing in the fumes of nasty, smelly chemicals in the pursuit of our art, now we have Adobe Photoshop.

Photoshop is the greatest programme known to man, well photographers anyway. Computers were invented just to run Photoshop. Every picture on this website has had some work done on it in Photoshop, even if it was just to get the size right.

This section of the site consists of a few tutorials for the absolute beginner covering such essentials as making your pictures the right size, getting the contrast right and getting the colour right.

These tutorials are not meant as an instruction book for using Photoshop they are designed to help you make better, more informed choices in your editing, whatever software you may use.

Photographing fireworks presents some technical challenges, it needs quite a different approach to most other subjects but follow these few steps carefully and you will be successful. What are we photographing? Basically we are photographing streaks of light that develop over a period of time against a black background. The great thing about a black background is that it makes no impression on the film, or sensor in the case of a digital camera. So we can leave the shutter open as long as we like, the black will still be black.

So, in short, the way to photography fireworks is to set the camera to manual exposure, set the aperture to a suitable
f-stop and the shutter to b or bulb. Open the shutter just before the firework bursts and close it after it’s finished. Easy!

Tripod

The first thing we need is a sturdy tripod. The alternative methods of support that I mentioned in the photographing buildings tutorial won’t cut it here. Here we are talking about seriously long shutter times of several seconds so nothing but a good sturdy tripod will do. The second piece of kit that would be very useful is a remote shutter release so you don’t have to touch the camera at all. In the old days this was a cheap piece of kit called a cable release but nowadays it is more likely to be an electronic gizmo with a higher price tag. I, personally, don’t use one but that’s because I’m a cheapskate.

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Getting it the Right Size

Although there are now photo library programmes that will adjust the size of your photo automatically when you select print, a little knowledge will put you in control of the process, enabling you to be much more precise.

Photos for the Screen

When publishing photos on the web, it is best to make the photo the exact size, in pixels, that you need. This way the download time will be minimized. There is no advantage in having a greater number of pixels in the picture as they will not show on the screen and often the picture will have a strange ’squashed in’ look about it. Minimising the size of the file is not so important if you are just going to make a slide show for your computer or a CD but you will find the whole operation will be slicker and work faster if you do.
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What makes a good portrait?

Photographing people is the most common and, in many ways, the most challenging task for photographers. We all know a good picture when we see one but what is it that makes the good ones stand out? Is it because it is an especially good likeness? A photograph will always be a true likeness, even when we think it isn’t. How many times have you heard someone say “that doesn’t look like me/you at all”? How can that be when we are using a camera?

The problem is that we are used to seeing people moving around, at least their faces, and in some kind of context, doing something or talking to us. We very rarely see people completely motionless, except perhaps when they are asleep, so a single frozen moment in time can seem totally unrepresentative, it can, only too easily, capture a moment when they are in a pose that we have never noticed before.

So what makes a good portrait of someone is that it should say something about that person that we feel is true. A good portrait sums up the character of the person or at least an aspect of their character. You don’t know the girl on the left but, looking at her photo, you have made some judgements about her and you have made some decisions about her character.

The pose, viewpoint, direction and quality of lighting, choice of lens, choice of background and the cropping of a picture can all contribute to the mood of the photograph and therefore what you are saying about that person.

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The Right Light

If you prefer to go on sightseeing holidays rather than flopping on a beach then you’re probably going to want to take photos of the buildings you visit. The trouble is you’re always there at the wrong time of day, the light is coming from the wrong direction, there are crowds of people blocking your view and the rest of the family are nagging you to put the camera away and get moving. You could just buy the postcard but, if you are a photography junkie like me, that will never be an option. Although sometimes I might buy a postcard as an insurance policy in case my photos are not good enough.

The best time of day to take photos of any outdoor subject is either the early morning or the evening when the sunlight has a reddish hue and the light is coming from the side rather than directly overhead. Early morning is best, there is a difference in the quality of light that I find it hard to put my finger on, also there are normally less people around. Obviously if you are photographing buildings the best time of day is going to be dictated by which way the building is facing. The photo on the right was taken at about 7.30am, I had spotted the building the day before but the light was all wrong so, as it was close to the hotel where I was staying I decided to go back in the morning.

As with any other type of photography you should ask yourself what it is about this particular building that you like and focus on that. Sometimes this will mean framing the whole building, sometimes it will mean picking out details and sometimes a mixture of both will work well. In the photo above it was the tower on top of the building that caught my eye but I found that I needed at least some of the building to give the tower context.
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Very often, when we upload our pictures to the computer from the camera and first look at them on the screen, they will appear dull and lifeless like photo No.1 on the right.

In this instance the photo is under exposed, often a problem when auto flash is used with a long lens, the flash is too far away from the subject to give the proper exposure.

Here are some suggestions for altering the brightness and contrast of the image in Photoshop, use them in the order that they appear, only move on to the next method if you are not getting what you want.
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Getting the colour right can be the most difficult part of photo editing but a little knowledge of how the colours are made will make this much easier. On the right we have a ‘colour wheel’ to help illustrate the concepts that you need to grasp.

All colours are made from three primary colours – red, blue and green. Forget what you learned in Art at school we are now dealing with light not pigments.

Where the three colours overlap in the middle of the colour wheel we get a neutral grey (somewhere between black and white depending on the intensity of the colours). I have faked it here slightly for the purpose of illustration.

Where two of the colours overlap they form other colours known as ’subtractive primary colours’. Another way of looking at it is that if you remove one colour from the middle of the wheel you will get a new colour. For example, if you remove red from grey you will be left with a mixture of blue and green, this colour is called ‘cyan’. If you remove or subtract green from neutral grey you are left with a mixture of red and blue known as ‘magenta’. Red and green combine to make the third ’subtractive primary colour’ – yellow. Knowlege of these six colours and how they relate to each other will enable you to correct any colour cast in a picture.
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Using digital imagery and Photoshop or other specialized computer stitching programs it is possible to create 360 degree seamless panoramas. These panoramas make for interesting stand alone imagery and can be converted into Quick Time movies for an interactive web experience. Creating a panorama is a multi-step procedure that is best done with some specialized equipment and software.
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