New updates!
Well it’s been a very long time since I have added new work to this site but I have been very busy. Two months overseas and a lot of work getting ready for a new family member. As always, it seems that I can find time to get out and shoot but not enough time to sit down and update this site. Anyway, here is some new work for your enjoyment.
The Jetty
Three new images today, including one of my newest favourites - The Jetty. I had envisaged this image without ever seeing the location that I was going to photograph, so I went out exploring Lake Macquarie to find the ideal location to make this image come to life. With nothing but cloudy weekends recently I needed a jetty that faced west and a after a quick scan of the area on Google Maps I had a couple of locations marked out. After a quick scouting trip I settled on this one and waiting until the sun went down the light was just right.
Subscribe To Updates via RSSMountains and Beaches
A few months ago I took a drive up the Snomy Mountains Highway from Wagga to Cooma. As well as being a fantastic drive, there is some great scenery along the way and some interesting places to stop. I was lucky enough to have a clear day with nice blue skies and the occasional wisp of cloud to highlight the background. Not long after this trip I spent a long weekend up at Coffs Harbour and found the beautiful Diggers Beach. With a day to kill on the way back to Newcastle we took the scenic route, stopping in at Hat Head and admiring the cliffs and the beaches.
How do I take lightning photos?
Lightning is one of the most difficult things to capture on your camera. Not only are thunderstorms quite a rare event but the lightning that they produce only lasts a fraction of a second, is unpredictable and is usually accompanied by driving rain and cold. Capturing a good lightning shot requires some tools, mastery of a few simple techniques, a little bit of luck and a lot of patience.
Composition
A great lightning shot, just like any photo should have an interesting composition. This is best acheived by photographing the lightning in context. Using the lightning as a stunning backdrop to a pleasing scene will produce a lot nicer photo than simply pointing your camera at the sky or capturing what can be seen from your backyard or balcony. Unfortunatly, lightning is unpredictable so you cannot be sure that the lightning will strike where you want it. There are weather radars that you can now access over the internet, www.bom.gov.au provides access to weather radars that cover most major population centres in Australia. By checking this web site before you leave (or opening it on your internet enabled mobile phone), you can have a good idea which way the storm is heading in relation to you. Most scenes that I photograph are a short walk away, during the walk to the site you can monitor where the lightning is striking. With all this in mind, set up your camera but zoom out a little on your final composition, you never know where the lightning will strike! Compose carefully because, as will be seen later, it is much better to leave your camera in the same position throughout the shoot.
Throsby Creek Storm
3x 220sec f/11 ISO100
Equipment
There are a few equipment requirements and whilst you may be able to get around some of these, you will find it much easier to get good results with the right equipment. Firstly, you will need an SLR, for my workflow that is detailed below, digital is preferable but film has it’s own advantages. At the time of writing (June 2008) I do not know of a point & shoot camera that allows you to take exposures longer than 30 seconds, for this application you will need to take exposures much longer than this. Naturally, you will need a tripod that is stable enough to support your camera/lens combination for some time without shaking. Whilst you can use the ‘bulb’ mode of your camera by simply holding down the shutter release button, this is not a good solution for two reasons. It is uncomfortable to hold the button down for 10 minutes or more, and even with the most stable tripod, you will introduce enough shake to the camera to make sharp images virtually impossible to achieve. In order to solve these problems you will need a remote or ‘cable’ shutter release for your particular camera.
Nature’s Power
180sec f/11 ISO200
Technique
Now that you have the required equipment and have found a storm that suits your intended composition, the pressure is now on to take a successful capture. As you are trying to take a photo of the lightning in the context of a wider scene, you will need to expose for this scene as a whole, as well as for the lightning.
I have had no success in trying to capture lightning during daylight hours because there is simply too much light to allow exposures that are long enough to capture enough lightning. Using ND filters does not help in this regard because in order to capture a strong lightning bolt, you need have a certain amount of light hitting the sensor from the bolt, I have found that f/8 to f/11 at ISO100 is ideal. If you are using an ND filter to reduce the amount of ambient light in a scene, you will need to compensate for this in aperture or ISO in rder to capture a strong and clearly defined bolt, thus defeating the purpose of using an ND filter.
Once you have set up and composed the image, set the camera to ISO3200 and f/4. Allow the camera to automatically work out the shutter speed take the first exposure. Why should you do this? Unless you are better than I am at calculating the exposure in pitch black darkness on a stormy night you will want to perfect your exposure in the histogram. This will take a few test shots and who wants to wait 10 minutes just to get a test shot?
Make sure that you leave sufficient headroom in the histogram to allow for the lightning that you will capture later, maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of a stop will be sufficient. Now that you have worked out your exposure it’s time to calculate your equivalent exposure time for f/8 and ISO100. It’s important to know that each time that you adjust your exposure a ’stop’, you are effectively halving, or doubling the amount of light hitting the sensor. Depending on your camera, each ’stop’ will correspond to 2 or 3 ‘clicks’ on your camera’s control dial. If your f/4 ISO3200 exposure was 4 seconds then halving the ISO to 1600 will require you to double the exposure time to 8 seconds, in order to maintain the same equivalent exposure. You now need to wind back the ISO and aperture and calculate the equivalent exposure until you get to f/8 ISO100. This is easy to do on your camera without any maths, dialling the ISO left 3 clicks on dialling the exposure right three clicks and repeating until you reach your target ISO and aperture. The problem with this is that once you get to 30 seconds exposure then you need to rely on your maths skills! If you start with 4sec f/4 ISO3200 you can calculate:
8sec f/4 ISO1600
16sec f/4 ISO800
32sec f/4 ISO400
64sec f/4 ISO200 (now, because I’m lazy and I would prefer not to make mistakes, I round the exposure down to minutes here)
2min f/4 ISO100
4min f/5.6 ISO100
8min f/8 ISO100
Now that you have calculated the exposure time you’re ready to take your first exposure. This is where patience comes in as you have 8 minutes to wait. This shouldn’t be too hard to wait out when you have a spectacular light show to watch while you are waiting.
Nobby’s Lightshow
400sec f/8 ISO100
Processing
Now that you have taken your shots and returned safely home it’s time to process your shots. You shouldn’t really need to do anything different than usual. However there is one technique that you may like to use to create really spectacular shots. Now, you didn’t succumb to the temptation to adjust your composition in between shots, did you? Of course not, so you now have a number of images that are exactly the same except for the lightning.
By stacking these images on top of each other in Photoshop or other advanced image editing software you can gain the effect of much longer exposures than would have otherwise been possible with the available light. Simply copy and paste each of the images into one file, once they are all imported change the layer mode to ‘Lighten’ as shown below.
Screen capture of the layers pallette from Throsby Creek Storm
Long Exposure Noise
One of the disadvantages of taking long exposures on digital cameras is noise that is inherent with this type of technology. When you take an exposure that is say, more than a minute or two long, the sensor heats up because it is electrically charged. This will cause a number of the photo sites on the sensor to ‘blow-out’ (technical term!) and produce a pure red green or blue pixel in the final image. One of the methods camera manufacturers use to get around this is to use a method called dark frame subtraction. In summary, once you have taken a long exposure, the camera then automatically takes another ‘exposure’ of the same length of time but with the shutter closed. This creates an image that is black, except for the pixels which have ‘blown-out’ to red green or blue. The camera’s software then subtracts these pixels from the real image to create a noise free image.
One of the problems with this method is that the same pixels may not blow out on the second image, the second issue being that after you have taken an 8 minute exposure, you have to wait around another 8 minutes until you can take another shot! This function can usually be turned off and I suggest doing so. If you shoot RAW then your RAW processing software will be able to take care of most of these pixels automatically, for those that are left over there is always the clone tool in PS.
Therein lies the advantage of shooting film, leave the shutter open as long as you want and you will not see a speck of long-exposure noise.
Safety
Time for the obvious stuff - thunderstorms are dangerous! Your safety will depend on a few things. Firstly, don’t stand in an exposed place or on high ground, say the top of a hill. Even though you may be some distance from the storm, there is still a good chance that a stray bolt will strike near you. If you are not the highest object around, the lightning is less likely to find you as the most appropriate path to the ground. I have not had to stand in the rain for any of my lightning shots. By using available weather radars and keeping an eye on the range and direction of the storm you can stay safe. The age old method of counting the time between the lightning bolt and thunder is a good way to judge the distance between you and the storm. It also gives you something to do while you are waiting - keep any eye on this and leave when the storm starts to get too close for comfort.
The storm featured in Nature’s Power was coming towards me, while the Throsby Creek Storm was heading left to right. In both cases, these shots were taken a few hundred meters from where I was living at the time and I managed to make it back inside a few minutes before it started to rain quite heavily.
Conclusion
What you’ll need:
- SLR Camera
- Tripod
- Remote shutter release
- Patience
- Luck
How to capture it:
- Compose well and shoot the lightning in context
- Use high ISO and larger aperture to determine the correct exposure
- Work out the equivalent exposure at f/8 and ISO100
- Take several shots witht the same composition
- Turn noise reduction off
The techniques for capturing lightning are quite simple but you need quite a lot of patience in order to get a good lightning capture. Not only do you need to wait until you have a storm that is suitable for your intended composition, you will have to stand in the cold for some time while you wait for the exposure to finish. I have a few sites that I have scouted out and I am just waiting for a storm to come along in the right place and the right time. Best of luck tryng to capture this remarkable feat of nature but don’t do anything stupid in the process.
Are you a fellow deviant?
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Robert Vine atDeviant ArtUp On RSS
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Finally Done!
Well, after a couple of month’s hard work the web site update is finally done. While there has not been any huge changes to the site’s style and layout, each image page now offers a larger preview of the print as well as a preview of the print fuly framed. Although it has been a long time since I posted any new images on the site, I have been quite busy shooting and there are five new images on the site today.
More images to come soon!
More updates
The web site update is continuing slowly, it is quite difficult work but more images are being updated on a weekly basis. A new photograph from Newcastle’s Bogey Hole graces the main page today.
Finally….
Well, it’s been a long time coming but today saw the culmination of around 3 months of working, testing and some intense contemplation as to the future of this site and my work in general. In December I bought a photo quality inkjet printer to see if the inkjet printer could deliver better results than the Lambda that I had been using. After two months of testing various settings, colour management profiles and paper types I was finally convinced that doing my own printing was going to deliver better results more quickly than sending away to a lab for prints.
For a long time now I have been toying with two ideas, one of these being that I could offer framed prints. After experimenting with a few companies that offer framing service, I finally settled on one that offered a good quality method to frame prints and send them out to the customer. Along with this I have decided to limit the sizes that the prints are available. There has been little demand for small and overly large prints so each print will now only come in one size. This is usually 12″ high with width depending on the aspect ratio of the image.
The second idea is whether I would limit the number of prints produced of each image. Making this decision was made more difficult by the fact that I had not limited print from the outset. Current owners of my prints will receive a certificate of authenticity shortly, stating the number of the print that they own. With production of prints limited there has been a corresponding change in pricing. While I have put prices up I still believe that these prints present exceptional value for money. I have not been able to find similar prints of this quality in a limited production for the same price. With the move to limited edition prints, I will be removing my images from stock photography use. This will further increase the value of the prints as, unlike some other photographers the value of quality fine art prints will not be lowered because the same image is mass produced on low-quality posters.
These changes have taken time away from uploading new images over the past month but I assure you that I have been out shooting! The inner working of the web site required a significant overhaul to make these changes. There are now two new photos on the site with the new size, price an framing options. I will be adding more images and changing the current images over the current weeks. If you want to order something straight away please get in touch with me, your patience is appreciated.
Teach Me To Take Better Photos…
I have been asked this question quite a few times now, the first time was on a group outing in Sydney. It was a mixed group with some experienced photogs and a few beginners in the group. The person who asked this question of me had a brand new expensive DSLR but had little idea of how it worked. So, I launched into explaining how to adjust the exposure, shoot in RAW mode, focus modes, histogram etc etc etc. Judging by the glazed over look in my new student’s eyes I could tell that none of this was making any sense but I sent her off anyway to try and put into practise what she had learned, while I quietly cursed my own inability as an instructor. Later that night the group got together to share some our results from the day’s shooting and I confirmed that I had been barking up the wrong tree when people asked me how to take better photos.
The automatic modes of today’s camera’s are very good, so even the most novice operator will have well exposed and focused images straight out of the camera. So my student did not get any better results by switching to manual mode and adjusting the exposure themselves - the automatic mode had been working well for them already. What even the most advanced automation cannot do for the photographer is point it in the right direction and compose an interesting image. Up until this point I was doing what most of the photography books and courses I have seen do - they teach the ’science’ of photography first, the effect of shutter speed and aperture on the image as well as the relationship between these factors that influence exposure. This is all well and good for the 1950’s when the light meter had barely been invented, let alone automatic camera modes. Back then you needed to understand these principles before you could get any result from your camera, let alone a good one. So, in the age where you can hardly buy a camera without an automatic mode (and not many beginners would buy an M series Leica!) and many low end cameras come without a manual mode do we teach exposure as the first lesson?
Explaining the rule of thirds in it’s most basic sense has become my first lesson when helping people to take better photos. Since I’m not a professional photography instructor in any sense most of my instruction is done ad-lib in the field. So I have found the quickest way to help someone with composition and rule of thirds s to tell them ‘don’t put everything in the middle of the frame.’ Then move on to dividing the frame into foreground mid-ground and background and giving each a third of the frame. Lastly, put your subject one third of the frame from the left or right edge and one third from the top. This is quick, dirty but very effective. Out in the field you can explain this practically and then send your student off on their own to practise. They beauty of digital photography is that you assess their performance out in the field and composition is easy to judge on a camera’s LCD screen. Most importantly, your student gains a noticeable improvement in their photos straight away and it is not too complex to explain or understand the basics of composition. When you consider that most novice photographers want to take better photos of their family, pets and snapshots of their travels, the composition lesson will be more appreciated than anything else you can teach them.
So, should we forget about teaching exposure? Of course not! But it should be lesson number 2, right after composition. For a novice, understanding exposure takes time, practice and demonstration in a controlled environment. None of which you have out in the field, leaving your student confused and frustrated that they are not achieving a noticeable result. The basics of good composition are simple to teach and learn in the field and you can notice the difference straight away on the LCD. Now that your student feels like they are getting somewhere, you can go into the more technical aspects of photography.