You do not need a studio with expensive lighting set-ups to produce interesting still life photographs. A kitchen table; spare room; a garage or even an old shed? Provided you’ve got enough room in there to put up a tripod, it will do just fine. Ideally the space will have a window that does not get direct sunlight, but even this can be softened to some degree by taping a couple of layers of net curtain or sheet of tissue paper over the window. Even an ordinary tungsten lamp can be used as your light source, but you will have to set your white balance to ‘Tungsten’ to correct any nasty orange colour casts from this low temperature light source.

In your makeshift ‘studio’ you will have total control of your subject, your composition and lighting. You will be able to choose your own backgrounds and decide on your own props. You will be able to mix and match colours and spend as much time as you feel you need to create the picture you want. The best way is to experiment and move your chosen objects around until you feel you have completely exhausted every last possibility.

The great joy of using digital is that you can review your results constantly and make adjustments as you go along. This means that your camera becomes a real learning tool and you can delete anything that is obviously not working.

Top photograph:

I came across these photographs of mine this morning as I was sorting and cataloguing some of my old travel images. The top photograph shows two people strolling along the Roman wall at Antalya on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey. The bottom photograph is of a fishing boat with the mountains in the distance behind. They seemed such good examples of ‘Aerial Perspective’ I though it might be worth explaining something about it.

In my last post I mentioned that I took a student who was with me for one-to-one tuition, down to my favourite cove on the seashore near my home – I posted a photograph of him down on the beach. Well, this morning I got a lovely email from Phil Hallam, who has put up some of the pictures he took on a webpage… it’s worth taking a look..

 

Phil started taking photographs only ten months ago, so I think the results he produced during his day with me are all the more remarkable.

 

As I am never loathe to print a favourable comment, this is what Phil said about his day here in Galloway…

 

Anyway, I introduced Phil to the idea of Photoshop and explained that many of the adjustments that can be made to a photograph after it has been taken are perfectly legitimate – cropping and darkening a foreground or sky, for instance. This is not ‘cheating’ in any way and it’s not new. It’s just a matter of using the old skills and modern tools that are available – the Victorian photographers were masters of re-touching and adjustment of an image in the darkroom, so Photoshop – or post processing with any imaging programme- is only a modern way of doing what is really very old hat.

 

When I was working full time using black and white film, I knew exactly what I was going to do to a photograph when I put the negative in the enlarger. I knew this at the time of taking the photograph – when the button was pressed. Now, when I work with digital cameras, I have a fair idea of what I am going to do to a photograph when I get it onto the computer. This ‘post processing’ is, to me, all part of the normal way of producing the picture as I envisage it in the real world.

 

Above I have posted one of Phil’s super shots he took during his time on the coast with me. This is the way Phil saw it and took it and posted it on his web page. It has not been cropped, or changed it in any way.

 

Below is the same photograph. However – hope you don’t mind, Phil – this time I have cropped it a little and used the burning in tool and dodging tool to emphasize the dark storm clouds and waves. I would have done exactly the same sort of cropping, darkening and lightening if I had had this photograph in the darkroom. The idea is to maximise the impact of the photograph and to attempt to guide the viewer’s eye to the most important elements of the composition.

 

Notice that I have cropped a lot off the right hand side of the composition, but very little off the left hand side. This has put the waves more to the right so that the eye follows their movement to the left and brightest side of the picture. I agree that my crop has put the horizon pretty near the centre of the frame, but I think this is a price worth paying to get more visual impact from the movement of the waves.

 

Maybe you prefer this version, well that’s fine, but I think you will have to agree that the cropped version does have more impact.

Hope to see you again soon, Phil.

On Thursday pals Dave and Tony came for a shared day’s tuition. Dave has been to me before on one of my weekend workshops. This time he and Tony wanted to take things several steps further by doing a mini ‘assignment’ that would present a challenge. They felt they wanted to be ‘pushed’ a little, and could I arrange something.

I spoke to the local RNLI lifeboat secretary and got permission to take Dave and Tony along to the lifeboat station down the river here in Kirkcudbright Bay. One of the lifeboat crew members was able to join us for the morning and he proved to be not only great fun, but a willing and interesting photography subject.

The plan was to treat the morning as an assignment for an imaginary magazine editor who wanted a photo essay on the station and the lifeboat man. After they had got over their initial nervousness, both Dave and Tony did a fantastic job. They managed to find a couple of really good ‘key’ pictures and then set about gathering a whole range of really worthwhile peripheral, or detail, pictures. These included everything from the crews’ lifejackets hung in a row on the wall, to the winch that pulled the boat from the water into the boat shed, the inscribed plaques listing the number of rescues and rescued people, and shots of the boat’s powerful engines. By the end of the morning, they both managed to put together a really comprehensive photo essay, and everyone had a great time doing it. We went through the pictures together and did critique comments and advice during the afternoon

Today I have had Phil with me. He came up from Yorkshire for the day. Although he had taken up photography only 10 months ago, the moment I saw some of his work, it was obvious that he has a really good eye for a picture. He was less confident about composition and the workings of his camera, though. But we could soon help with that.

We spent the morning indoors as the rain lashed the windows and I went through each aspect of the camera controls with Phil. After lunch the sun broke through and we set off to my favourite little beach and cove. The light was truly spectacular, and the place presented a perfect situation to work on composition.

Phil was in seventh heaven shooting away happily. Whenever he had a query I would explain a few shortcuts and tricks. By the end of the afternoon, he was fully converted to the idea of the Manual ‘M’ settings on his little Canon 400D and wondering why he every bothered with the auto settings. I think we might be seeing more of Phil in the future

So another busy week comes to an end – have fun with your camera over the weekend.

Here’s a picture – a very simple one, with no pretensions to be anything other than a demonstration shot. It shows the group of photographers who joined me last week to learn more about portraiture.  

I was showing the group how to get the best from their flash guns both on and off the camera, when I decided to show them the old technique of firing multiple flashed on one exposure – with just one flash unit of course.

I was taught the technique by a photographer called Arthur Partington when I was just a 15 year old apprentice on a local newspaper. In those days staff photographers like Arthur were expected to turn their hands to every job that came in to the office – and that included news, features, weddings, some commercial work, and advertising. Arthur had the task of photographing a carpet warehouse in an old converted cotton mill. The floor area was vast, the ceiling fairly low and supported by dozens of steel pillars. The whole place was covered in rolls of carpet. The client wanted to show the scale of his operation by having the entire warehouse area photographed and the picture printed in a full page ad in our broadsheet paper.

One winter evening, Arthur went prepared with his Speed Graphic 5 x 4 glass plate camera, a heavy wooden tripod, a huge bulb flash gun, an empty shoulder bag and another containing about a dozen PF1000 flash bulbs (I think that’s what they were). These old-fashioned flash bulbs were about the size of a large orange and often exploded when they were fired.

And Arthur took me. I had a particular job to do.

First he found his best angle and set the camera up on the tripod. Then he turned to me and walked me right around the warehouse floor showing me exactly where and in which direction he wanted me to let of one of the flash bulbs. I was under threat of death if I got it wrong. Every time I let off a flash bulb I would have to be hidden behind one of the pillars. Right. Arthur eyed my with distrust and asked if I was ready. He pulled out the sheath from the slide holder. Opened the shutter on ‘B’ and told me to Go!

Oh, I almost forgot, before he sent me off, he turned off most of the lights in the warehouse. I could barely see where I was going.

A raced around that warehouse blasting off flashes as I went. Each time I fired a flash bulb it had to be unscrewed (burning my fingers), the spent bulb dropped into the empty bag and a new bulb screwed into the flash gun ready for the next blast. Three times bulbs exploded with a terrifying bag, spraying me with fine shards of glass. Each time Arthur yelled – “Don’t stop you little bugger, keep moving”.

By the time I had fired the last flash bulb and Arthur had closed his shutter, I had covered the equivalent of a 200 yard sprint under heavy fire in the dark. I was gasping for breath and shell-shocked.

“Right”, said Arthur. “Get that camera packed up and we’ll get off home.”

I watched Arthur develop the glass plate and print the photograph next morning. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was as though the entire warehouse had been lit with studio lighting. It was beautifully lit.

Well that’s a mighty long explanation for the method used to take the picture above. All I did was darken the room. Stick the camera on a tripod. Tell the subjects to keep dead still, opened the shutter and dashed around everyone letting off the flash gun. Closed the shutter. No cables, no infra-red, no wireless-systems. None of that is needed… just you with a flash in your hand The flash was fired four times.

I admit it’s not ideal – some of the shadows are in the wrong place, one flash has looked into the camera (over the shoulder of the man sat on the left) and another has lit part of my red sweater (over on the right). But as a quick two-minute demo it was very effective.

You can try this at home. It’s great fun and you’ll learn lots. Multi flash pictures can have an extraordinarily powerful visual appeal if you get it just right.