Tag Archives: creative photography

10 Embarrassing Mistakes I Made as an Intermediate Photographer

These are common mistakes for photographers, and I’m a big believer in learning from other people’s mistakes, rather than your own. That’s what this post is all about.

You may remember last year I wrote an article called 10 Embarrassing Mistakes I Made As An Beginner Photographer, which was all about the silly mistakes I used to make, when I knew no better. This post is an advancement to that, showing you that there’s still plenty to be learned.

I Only Used On-Camera Flash

This might seem like a bit of a weird one to start on, but it’s similar to a mistake I made as a beginner photographer. It used to be that I would never use a flash, but when I finally started using an external flash, another problem arose.

Flash that comes from the same angle as the lens has a very flattening effect on a photo, which would make my photos dull and two dimensional. When I started to take my flash off-camera, I was able to make my photos much more interesting.

Find out how to use your flash off-camera.

My Focusing Sucked

This may be airing on the side of beginner problems, but it wasn’t included in the last post, so it deserves a mention.

When you buy your first wide aperture lens, such as the 50mm f/1.8, you end up with a lot of photo where there’s a very shallow depth of field. This leads to focus problems.

Here’s a few examples for you.

If you’re taking a photo of a person, always focus on their eyes. We’re drawn to a person’s eyes, so that’s where the focus needs to be.
If you’re taking a photo of a group of people, focus on the person closest to you. This is where you’ll look first, so it’s important that it’s in good focus. The focus will still extend back naturally. If you’re focused on the person at the back of the photo, then you’re going to have a hard time keeping everyone in focus.
When you’re shooting landscapes, focus about a third of the way into the scene. I often just use my center focus point if I’m facing down to the scene. If you focus here, with a narrow enough aperture, this is where you’ll find the greatest depth of field. Even if there’s no apparent foreground subject.

I ‘Invested’ in Cheap Photography Products

Ergh, this one still annoys me.

I was so tempted to buy a good selection of tripods, lighting modifiers, accessories, etc. that I would end up buying the cheapest available. And even though it seems good value, when the gear eventually arrived, it was never really up to scratch. In fact, it tended to break pretty quickly.

I would end up buying the same thing twice. First, the cheap version, and then second, the expensive (and good quality) version which I had put off the first time.

To stop you from making the same mistake as me, I’ve put together a selection of recommended photography gear for you to browse. This probably sounds like a sales pitch, but just trust me on this one.

I Held my Camera Poorly

You never really realise how useful holding your camera correctly can be. Especially when you need to keep still in low light.

Just by learning how to hold my camera correctly, I stopped my fingers from getting in the way of the lens, and I would feel much more secure in holding my camera. This would allow for slower shutter speeds, which can come in really useful.

My Camera’s Sensor was Dirty

You may not even realise how dirty your camera sensor is, so before you go any further, I want you to test it.

Pick up your camera, and point it at a clean, plain part of the wall. Then turn your ISO up (to allow for more exposure), and narrow your aperture. Take a photo, and because you have a narrow aperture, you will be able to spot any dust lurking around.

I recently had mine cleaned professionally, and it only cost £15 so it’s not bad. Ask other photographers to help you, don’t take it to as shop as it will take a lot longer, and cost more.

In the meantime, buy this blower to help remove sensor dust.

My Workflow was Useless

Here’s how I used to import my photos…

If I went to take photos on Brighton beach, the folder would be called ‘Brighton Beach’ and the file name would be ‘Brighton Beach’, followed by a number.

Not anymore.

The folder name always has a month/year after it now, so if I take a photo on the beach now, the folder is called ‘Brighton Beach 10/12′. But much more importantly than that though, is the file name. Lets have a look at what I do.

Custom Name_Date_Sequence

I also apply my own copyright information onto it too, during the import.

This way, whenever I need to search for a photo, I can find what I’m looking for, and if someone sends me a photo back, I know where it’s come from. It’s good practice for your file management.

I Waited For the Weather

This is such nonsense. It’s just an excuse to not get up and take photos.

Waiting for the weather is when you want your scene to have very specific conditions before you take a photo. And then when it comes, and you’re busy, you just think, oh well, this weather will be back in a few weeks. What nonsense.

In reality, you can’t rely on weather, and you would do much better if you learned to adapt to the weather you have. I went to take a photo of the sunset on the beach the other day, but it was cloudy, so I adapted.

In the photo below, it would have been great to have the sun glowing through the sky, but it wasn’t, so I worked with the what I had, and it looks great in black and white. Stop waiting for the weather.

Only Ever Shot From Eye-Level

I’m tall.

I’m 6 foot 3, and I tower over a lot of people when I take photos. This can have a pretty negative effect on my photos, if they’re always looking down, from the same perspective

When you can start to consider different angles that you can take photos from, you’re going to produce far superior results, because there will be a mix of perspectives.

I personally love shooting from the hip now.

I Only Shot in Manual

But Josh, professional photographers only ever shoot in manual?

Rubbish. Completely not true. Some may, but the majority don’t.

It’s great (and essential) to learn manual mode, but the truth of the matter is that I probably only use it about a third of the time. The rest of the time I’m on aperture priority mode, or shutter speed priority mode.

Manual is great when you want to take full control over your photos, and has loads of uses.
Aperture priority mode is used when you know that the most important factor is the aperture (perhaps because you want a certain DoF or sharpness), and the shutter speed isn’t so important.
Shutter speed priority is for when you know your shutter has to be a certain speed, such as when you’re shooting in low light, or a fast moving object.

A lot of the time when you’re shooting in manual mode, you’re doing something that a priority mode would have easily done more for you. Read more about it here and here.

I Would Reach a Creative Road Block

When you take photos often, it’s not uncommon to reach a creativity road block, where you’re mind stops coming up with new ideas, and you find the idea of taking photos quite boring.

You may even start to hate your own photos.

This is no good, it’s poison and it can start to spread.

Whenever I get stuck, you know what I do? I look at my photos. I share my photos. I enjoy my photos. That usually stops me from hating them again, because you start to see why you like them.

When I want to find inspiration, I go for a walk. Only I leave my camera at home. I’m pretty well trained by now to look for photographic potential in everything, and for some reason, that feeling is even stronger when I don’t have my camera. It’s like an itch where your missing finger should be – you notice it more.

Don’t run your inspiration into the ground, you want to make photography fun for yourself, not to suck the life out of it. If you’re looking for inspiration in particular, I find it’s great to browse Pinterest too.

How to Capture Awesome Nightclub Photography – 5 Easy Steps

Introduction to Club Photography

Nightclub photography is becoming increasingly popular, with a lot of young photographers using it as their way into finding their first paid photography work, while enjoying themselves at the same time. I often walk straight into clubs with no photo pass or anything, just a camera slung round my neck, and nobody ever asks any questions – it’s a great way to start getting more experience.

Step 1 – Technique and Equipment

You’ll find that you’ll start to employ a lot of techniques from low light photography, night photography, light painting and slow sync flash, as you’re often left to make do in low light. As far as gear goes, if you want to actually come out with some good photos, you really need to have an external flash, but you can get away without one if you’re doing basic slow sync flash.

Here’s the kit that I use:

A camera body, preferably a newer one as they deal with high ISO a lot better.
Wide aperture lens, preferably f/2.8 and below, with the lens hood on (we’ll get to that).
A wide angle lens, so that you capture a lot is cramped conditions.
An off camera flash with a diffuser if you’ve got one.
A transmitter for you flash would be ideal if you want to up your game.

Step 2 – Setting Up Your Camera

When I walk into a club, the first thing I do is go to the places that I’m going to be spending the majority of my time shooting and find out what settings I’m going to use. Because the lighting is fairly controlled, I can set my camera to manual and set up different exposures for different situations and then save them to my custom dials.

A great way to ensure that you include enough ambient light is to set your camera to aperture priority with your ISO set and your aperture wide open and see what it tells you. I did this about half way though the night as it just confirmed my beliefs that it would be around 1/13. If you’ve got custom dials, I strongly suggest you look up how to set them on your camera as they can come in very handy (it’s easy to do), but if you don’t, then don’t worry, just keep your camera on manual. The two different places I might find myself shooting are in the crowd and at the DJ booth, so I adjust my camera for those.

For the majority of my shots, my ISO is set to somewhere around 1000-1600, my aperture is almost always completely open (which will be f/2.8 for most of these photos), and my shutter speed ranges anywhere between 1/8 to 1/50 of a second. The ISO and aperture deal with all the ambient light whereas the shutter speed is used to freeze the motion, with the help of an off camera flash.

Step 3 – Different Photos To Take

There are five main shots that I like to take:

DJ photos
Crowd
Venue
People
Staff

Starting with the obvious, you’re going to want to take photos of the DJ, especially if they’re a big name act and not just the house DJ. The way this differs to the rest of the club is that there is usually more lighting so that the DJ can see what they’re doing, which can often ruin the shot. For the photo below, I set my camera to f/2.8, ISO1000, at 1/25 of a second and pointed my flash upwards at quarter power without a diffuser cap, but the little white reflector sticking out. This shone enough light onto the subject while giving them the dark eyes I was looking for. The slow speed and wide aperture allowed some ambient light onto the DJ’s shirt which helped to make it more interesting.

When you compare that you a higher budjet production of a dance music festival, you have a lot more light to play with and you’re not bothered by the small table lamps which are lighting up the equipment. I had so much more light to play with, my ISO was on 1250, aperture was set to f/2.8, but my shutter speed was set to 1/1000 as this DJ was prone to faster movement than this. I’ll move on to more creative photography for DJ’s in a bit.

Crowd shots is something the promoter is going to be looking for as it helps them to promote their night, so you’ll want to make sure that you get as many of these as possible, particularly during the headline act. If you’ve got a flash then it’ll likely come in quite handy if you’re taking photos of small groups of people like in the club that these photos were shot. The light would be lost in larger clubs, but there would be a lot more lighting to help make up for that. Have a look at the photo taken below which used a flash, and then move on to the photo I took without to see the difference. This photo was shot at 1/13 of a second to allow the light and smoke from behind to creep through.

When you’ve not got a flash, you can rely on the club’s lighting a lot of the time, but you will want to turn up your shutter speed as movement will be detected a lot easier without a flash. The photo was shot the same as the one above, only I turned up the shutter speed to 1/50 to freeze the motion. The photo below is one of the reasons I enjoy taking photos at live music events – the lighting allows you to get a lot more creative.

Venue shots are important because they’re used to promote nights over Facebook so try to include a few of them. I’ll go into more detail about how to take these photos so that they’re a little bit more interesting, but for now we’ll focus on exposure. This photo used a flash, but it was diffused and bounced off a wall so it’s well hidden. Again, the photo was shot at f/2.8, ISO1000 at 1/40 of a second.

Photos of people are fairly important as promoters often use this to promote their night again, by watermarking the images and tagging the photos so that people can see them. I don’t have an ultra-wide angle lens but these are typically used to capture as many people in the photo as possible while providing a cool fisheye effect. I personally think that this is a little bit over used and doesn’t look very original anymore. Again, ambient light is key here so keep the settings much the same, and if you don’t want the photos to look flat, point your camera upwards and use a diffuser on it to act as a light box.

Lastly, if I know the staff want photos, or it’s a particularly special occasion, I’ll try to take photos of them too. This is good for when someone wants to become the face of the night and not a name, and you’ll often find this happens with much smaller nights. The settings you might use are much the same as the other photos, depending on the location, but you have much more freedom to play around as you can take them pretty much wherever you want.

Step 4 – What to Watch Out for

This is a small list on how to look after your gear in a nightclub environment:

Drinks. They get spilt by drunk people all the time so watch out for anyone who’s had too much to drink, and keep the lens hood on your camera to protect from any splashes.
Thieves. Nightclubs are probably a bit worse for people stealing stuff so either keep everything on you where you can look after it, or keep it somewhere that you know is safe, like in the DJ booth or with the promoter.
Loud music. Pick up some earplugs at the beginning of the night as you’ll likely be subjected to a lot of bad/loud music which will damage your hearing before long.

Step 5 – Ideas For Different Styles

Context is important in anything you take a photo of, and this can be done pretty simply by following the rule of thirds and including some background detail to a photo. Again, I know I’ve been banging on about this, but if you want it to work, you’ve got to include some ambient light. Contrast that with a flash like I’ve done below and you’re onto a pretty good thing.

Slow sync flash allows you to capture the movement of a subject without producing a blur which takes away all the detail. I’ve written a whole blog post on it which can be found here, but it’s pretty simple to get your head around. Play around with the shutter speed to match the speed of movement of your subject and you’ll soon come up with some cool photos. Again, this works better in more exciting lighting as it produces a more interesting effect, but if the lighting is particularly dull, try and use the lights from the DJ mixer to produce some light trails.

Black and white photos are really good at producing a certain mood and they’re very useful if the lighting isn’t very good. The style of music which was being playing the the photo below was very bass heavy and minimal, so using black and white worked really well.

How to Create Colorful Water Drop Photos

Introduction

In this tutorial I’m showing you how to create a cool effect of using waterdrops to magnify the objects beneath, creating a colorful water drop photo. There’s plenty of different ways that you can customise this to come up with your own original and creative results.

What You’ll Need

A bowl of coloured sweets or stones
A pane of glass (table, picture frame, etc.)
Water
Water dropper or sandwich bag with a golf tee
Flash (optional)

The Concept

OK, first thing’s first, I need to set up my glass above the coloured sweets and place some water drops on the glass. I was fortunate that I have a glass coffee table in my house that I could use, but if you’re struggling to find something to use, I recommend the glass from a large picture frame rested on some books or folders – it will do basically the same thing. I don’t have a water dropper so I used a sandwich bag with a small hole in the corner that I could drop the water out of. I thought that this would work fine, but it turns out that the shape of the water drop has a lot to do with the overall result. Here’s an image comparison of my first try at creating these waterdrops.After a little bit of research, I found a way to make a much more effective water dropper, using a golf tee. The idea is that you need to find a way of controlling the amount of water that you’re using and give it a path to form a droplet in. I widened the hole in my bag by pushing a golf tee through it and then widened the hole again to allow more water through. With a little bit of trial and error, I was able to make much more uniform water drops which reflected the shapes and colour of the sweets below, much more accurately.Once I had the droplets set up the way that I wanted them, I started to experiment with the focus. I knew the effect that I wanted to achieve was for the drop to act like little magnifying glasses, but it wasn’t always that easy. The autofocus on my camera would get confused about what I was trying to take a photo of and would, more often then not, fail and produce images like the one below, or photos of the sweets in the bowl. To counteract this, I could either try and use the focal lock, or switch to manual focus. I chose manual focus because the focal lock was stil unreliable and I could just start snapping away with manual focus and I was bound to get at least a few decent photos.Once I’d sorted out the focusing problem, it was time to play with the light and positioning of my sweets. As you can see from the photo above, you can see the shape of the bowl in the photo which wasn’t what I was looking for, so, I raised my bowl closer to the glass with the aid of some photo frames and a large book. Then, to make sure that I was only including the sweets in my background, I used the longest focal length available in my lens as longer focal lengths force the perspective of the scene to appear closer together, allowing less of the wider angles into the photo. Adding to this, I decided to experiment with lighting my waterdrops from the side with an off camera flash. This lightened the colours that appeared in my photo and ultimately resulted in some loss in the shape of the waterdrops, which wasn’t ideal. Believe it or not, I actually started with a flash before trying it without because this is one of the occasions where I thought it would work the best, but I was wrong. This is really a matter of taste though, you may in fact prefer it to the photo that I end up choosing as my final image. Having played around with my settings a little bit, I found that so long as the camera was steady and the shutter speed was long enough (1/200), the photos would come out fine. I did however want a strong contrast between the water drops and the sweets in the background so I chose a wide aperture of f/2.8 to maximise the background blur. I’ve mentioned it before, but the most important factor involved in taking good photos of these water drops was to take good care of their shape. To get the best results, I found that taking the camera a few inches further away from the glass, while still using the longest focal lengths, worked best. The photo below was shot without a flash.As you can see, the shape of the bokeh in the background is really quite nice, largly due to the wide open aperture, and the droplets were an excellent shape. The main problem is that it looks a little bit dull and includes too much space around the edges where my bowl wasn’t big enough to stretch. To come to my final image, I just needed to do a small amount of post production. Firstly, I cropped the image so that you can only really see the colour, and then I used the repair tool to fix a few blemishes which were scratches on the old coffee table. I boosted the exposure slightly, added a very small amount of contrast and raised the black point to make the colours appear richer. These were the only adjustments I made and even though it looks like I may have, I didn’t adjust the saturation at all. Here’s the final image.

If you like this sort of tutorial then I would encourage you to come and join the Facebook page where I regularly share these sorts of photos before I teach people how to create them themselves. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment either on here or at Facebook or Twitter and ask away. Enjoy - Josh.