Shooting

Less can be more when you want to create different looking images.A basic tenet of photographic composition urges photographers to fill the frame with the subject. While this strategy works well most of the time, there are situations when a minimalist approach can give a refreshing new slant to your creative vision.

By Alex Cearns.
Great travel photos tell a story by opening our minds to interpretation and allowing us a glimpse into the lives of others. By considering each image as an individual story we can transform visually stimulating locations, landmarks or scenes into visual drama and a more intense experience for the viewer.

Reflections – whether wildly distorted or perfectly rendered – are a lot of fun to explore.

Almost since the first point-and-shoot digicams were invented, camera manufacturers have come to the aid of novice photographers by providing pre-set exposure modes to help them select appropriate aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings for popular photographic genres. The first of the ‘Scene’ pre-sets were for portrait, landscape and sports photography. But it wasn’t long before night portrait and night landscape pre-sets were added and it’s not uncommon for modern cameras to provide separate pre-sets covering fireworks, candlelight, sunset and dusk and/or dawn.

While point-and-shoot cameras automatically pop up their flashes when light levels are low, a surprising number of serious photographers avoid using flash wherever possible. However, used properly, additional light sources can extend your picture-taking opportunities and result in better, more engaging, pictures. The trick is to know what add-on lighting to use and when to use it.

In this article we investigate some popular creative shooting techniques including panning to capture a sharply-rendered subject against a blurred background; flash blur by combining slow shutter speeds with flash exposures; very long exposures for landscapes, seascapes, and architecture; and using ND filters for blurring exposures to reduce the visibility of moving objects and to add motion blur to subjects.

Long exposure photography is often associated with ‘fine art’ pictorialism because it enables photographers to achieve surreal and unworldly effects, often from quite banal subjects. Most cameras aren’t designed specifically for long exposure photography but you can obtain worthwhile results with appropriate equipment and correct exposure and focusing.

In this article we’ll look at some of the underlying technical issues you need to consider when shooting action shots. These will influence the quality of your action photographs and how they can be used in the future.

Taking pictures after dark requires the same key controls as you would use in daylight – but they may be pushed to their technical limits in some situations. Understanding these limits enables you to modify your shooting practices to produce interesting and technically competent photographs.