Need some photography advice

Kidder

Hi all,

I'm planning a cycling trip through the Peak District in the UK (from Manchester to Derby) sometime this summer and need some tips and tricks for taking different types of photos. I have had my Fujifilm s8000fd for about 3 months now and I've used the auto-scenes settings (e.g. landscape and sunset) and played around with the manual settings.

There are essentially 3 types of photos I would like to take on this trip:
- Close up macros of nature (flowers etc.) with lots of colour contrast and crisp focusing
- Wide angle shots of the horizon, again with strong vivid colour contrast between the blue sky and green hills
- Night sky shots of (hopefully) the Milky Way. I don't have a car yet so I don't get much chance to spend the night in the countryside where there's minimal light pollution.

I would also appreciate any advice on the pictures on my flickr photostream. I seem to be fascinated by clouds and sunsets, but I'd like to diversify a bit...

Cheers in advance,
Kidder

kiwi_bird

Composition Basics

Churba

- Night sky shots of (hopefully) the Milky Way. I don't have a car yet so I don't get much chance to spend the night in the countryside where there's minimal light pollution.

Get yourself a good tripod and a remote, or else you'll be looking at nothing but blurry lines.

kiwi_bird

I don't know how long you're trip will be, but having a drive to backup your photos can be really useful, especially when doing stop motion shots.

Also, just take pictures of anything you find interesting. I've found that when I plan out shots they often times seem kind of boring. A few of my best pictures have been shots taken on a whim:



Of course you should practice before, so you don't totally mess up the shot. I guess my advice is to not just focus on the three types of shots you want to do, since locking you're creativity up is the worst thing you can do... IMHO. ^_~

MrRoboto

If its digital, then points one and two = Photoshop. As for the night shots, as Churba said long exposure and a tripod.

As a general tip, if you don't have a light meter and a 50% gray card to measure light with, underexposed is better than overexposed as you can rescue the colors and detail from one, but not quite as well from the other.

Also, the best light is always the first and last daylight hours, you get nice soft shadows

If you can swap lenses with the camera and want to take macro shots without a macro lens, just flip the lens and hold it in place with your hand, and take the pictures, let it be a warning though that it will take a lot of trial and error to get the light just right.

Kidder

Cheers for the replies so far guys!

I don't know how long you're trip will be, but having a drive to backup your photos can be really useful, especially when doing stop motion shots.

Also, just take pictures of anything you find interesting. I've found that when I plan out shots they often times seem kind of boring. A few of my best pictures have been shots taken on a whim:

Of course you should practice before, so you don't totally mess up the shot. I guess my advice is to not just focus on the three types of shots you want to do, since locking you're creativity up is the worst thing you can do... IMHO. ^_~

Most of my shots are unplanned . I think what I meant to say in my original post was that I'd like some tips on how to set up my camera to get good shots in those sorts of situations, so if the opportunity should arise, I'll be ready. No doubt I'll be stopping and snapping away for most of the trip, so I'll hopefully get at least one worthwhile photo.

By the way, I've calculated that the trip will take around 2 days and 1 night. The actual distance is pretty short, but there's a lot of hills in the Peak District (hence the name) so I suspect there's gonna be a lot of tough stretches.

- Night sky shots of (hopefully) the Milky Way. I don't have a car yet so I don't get much chance to spend the night in the countryside where there's minimal light pollution.

Get yourself a good tripod and a remote, or else you'll be looking at nothing but blurry lines.

When you say remote do you mean for the tripod or for the camera?

If its digital, then points one and two = Photoshop. As for the night shots, as Churba said long exposure and a tripod.

As a general tip, if you don't have a light meter and a 50% gray card to measure light with, underexposed is better than overexposed as you can rescue the colors and detail from one, but not quite as well from the other.

Also, the best light is always the first and last daylight hours, you get nice soft shadows

If you can swap lenses with the camera and want to take macro shots without a macro lens, just flip the lens and hold it in place with your hand, and take the pictures, let it be a warning though that it will take a lot of trial and error to get the light just right.

I don't much like the idea of "touching up" my photos. For some reason it seems... disingenuous. But I do see your point.

My camera is just an ultra-zoom, not a DSLR, so no lens changing. Should I bring my laptop along so I can check the photos right after taking them (the screen on my camera is okay, but obviously not fantastic for viewing pictures)?

Nine Boomer

I don't much like the idea of "touching up" my photos. For some reason it seems... disingenuous. But I do see your point.

Well think about it. What if you change the color levels in your photo? What if you change the light balance? These are things you can do with your camera by changing the aperture and shutter speed, as well as some other settings on your camera. There is nothing wrong with changing a photo to make it look the way you would have wanted it to, because you were fully capable of doing ti anyway. I would say that even cropping a picture is fine, as long as it doesn't change the meaning or intent behind it. After all, you could have always zoomed in or out, or maybe moved about.

Changing simple things is OK, but don't go airbrushing that ugly person out of the photo, or making everyone's hair pink.

WindUpBird

Changing simple things is OK, but don't go airbrushing that ugly person out of the photo, or making everyone's hair pink.

I agree with this, and it's also worth nothing that print shops were doing professional (read: highly complex, analog) touch-up long before PS existed. Don't feel too bad about what happens when you apply a filter; remember, some artists base their entire craft around what can be done with Photoshop.

Starfox

Remember, if you take a night exposure longer than about 15 seconds, you start to get star trails.

MrRoboto

I don't much like the idea of "touching up" my photos. For some reason it seems... disingenuous. But I do see your point.

My camera is just an ultra-zoom, not a DSLR, so no lens changing. Should I bring my laptop along so I can check the photos right after taking them (the screen on my camera is okay, but obviously not fantastic for viewing pictures)?

I don't much like the idea of "touching up" my photos. For some reason it seems... disingenuous. But I do see your point.

Well think about it. What if you change the color levels in your photo? What if you change the light balance? These are things you can do with your camera by changing the aperture and shutter speed, as well as some other settings on your camera. There is nothing wrong with changing a photo to make it look the way you would have wanted it to, because you were fully capable of doing ti anyway. I would say that even cropping a picture is fine, as long as it doesn't change the meaning or intent behind it. After all, you could have always zoomed in or out, or maybe moved about.

Changing simple things is OK, but don't go airbrushing that ugly person out of the photo, or making everyone's hair pink.

Thats right, thats why I said "If its digital" as you don't really have control over the film type and processing to bring up the desired colors, I didn't mean remove people from it with the clone stamp, just adjust some curves, some levels and presto.

Churba

When you say remote do you mean for the tripod or for the camera?

Pardon for my lack of clarity - I meant a remote for the camera.

Dr. Timo

For photographing stars the tripod and remote are essential (as already mentioned here) since they remove the main sources of movement. After getting these, there are a few points of note:

1) If you use a flashlight etc. during the setup of the night shot, turn it off before pressing the shutter. Even if you keep the flashlight pointed away from the camera, during long exposures scattered light will end up in your camera.

2) Take a very long exposure shot with the lens closed/covered. Some cameras have internal sources of light/IR which may end up on the sensor.

3) Focusing on stars requires a little bit of practice. Contrary to what you may think, focus at infinity will not give you the sharpest results. Start at infinity and on consecutive shots, manually focus back the smallest amount possible and compare.

4) Do not zoom in. The Zoom eats up your F-stops (aperture), and while this is hardly noticeable in daylight photography, for night shots you want all the light that you can get. Additionally, if you Zoom in, the sky will move faster relative to your sensor, so you'll end up with trails for even shorter exposures, compounding the problem.

5) You'll want to use the highest ISO setting you can, if the pictures get too grainy you can try noise reduction afterwards or drop the ISO setting down a notch and see if you can still see stars. (The review of your camera says that it is noisy at 800 and above)

6) If your camera has a "bulb" exposure mode, things get more interesting as you can play with aperture and ISO settings for very long exposures.

7) The flash will not help ;-).

8) Have fun!

Kidder

Someone recommended Google Picasa to me on another forum. Tried it out and really liked the results! Very simple to use and really does make my picture look crisper. I've definitely changed my mind about using an image editor to touch up my photos!

Dr. Timo

I've definitely changed my mind about using an image editor to touch up my photos!

Even in the time of film photography, most serious photographers had their own dark rooms and developed their own prints. Modern technology simply gives you the same (and a fuckton more) abilities to touch up, add effects, correct color/white balance as they had. No serious photographer expects you to shoot perfect pictures and/or leave them unprocessed. Good photographer may simply not need to do as much.

I should add that, in my experience, for a novice, the easiest way to improve your pics is simply to take more of them and delete 90% of what you take. Effectively you increase the quality of your portfolio tenfold. Also, the time you'd spend fiddling with picasa/photoshop/gimp, you instead spend working on your picture taking skill which is more important!

Think about it: let's say it would take a professional photoshopper 5 minutes to make a mediocre pic you took look good. It would take you less than a minute to take 10 of the same picture with different aperture/focus/flash settings, one of which will probably end up looking better than what the pro can coax out of the mediocre shot.

cosmicenema

Even in the time of film photography . . .

We're not dead yet! I would agree with Timo. You always have a certain amount of composition that occurs in post processing in both digital and film photography. However, good photographers should be taking pictures that don't require much processing. Chances are, Ansel Adams' raw negatives still look better than yours. The more effort you put into composing prints while you're taking the photograph, the less you need to do post-processing.