Day 11 - Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

Banana cupcakes with a chocolate topping

Photographer's notes:

I knew I wanted an even yellow background so I headed for the yellow tiles in our kitchen. To knock out the bench I put the cupcake on top of a white ramekin. I shot reasonably close with my 24-70mm lens at 70mm and an f-stop of 4 - just enough to keep the cupcake in focus while allow the background to blur out. To get the even lighting I cranked the shutter speed to ~150, dropped the iso to 100 and relied on the flash (bounced off the white ceiling) to do it's ttl magic. After a few variations I peeled the cupcake casing down to hide the white ramekin and mimic a banana peel. After a few quick touch ups we ended up with the image above. 

Day 10 - Chocolate Cupcake

Chocolate cupcake

Photographer's notes - I wanted to go for something soft, classical, and old looking to help compliment this basic (compared to the rest of what wifey has been up to) cupcake recipe. This was just a chocolate cupcake, no extras. I settled on ambient light (in this case tungsten house lights providing even lighting through the room) and the piano to match the simple, brown colour palette and also for a bit of a classical feel.

I came up with the above 2 candidates. While they were taken with a slow shutter at an iso of 100 (so very clean noise wise) when I got them into lightroom I decided to add some grain to help enhance that old, classical feeling. This is the first image that I have wanted to add grain to and I feel that it really helps sell the story of the image in this case.

Day 9 - Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Chocolate and Peanut butter cupcakes

Photographer's notes - This photo took a while to come right. I knew I wanted a golden background and I knew I wanted peanut butter in the shot. The bit that took a while was getting the right balance of flash vs ambient light to make the normally yellow and white background take on a golden appearance compared to the background (the ambient light was tungsten so should be orange, the main light was an external flash coming in at about 45 degrees behind and to the left of the camera.)

In the end the messy, spiky glob of peanut butter was the winner out of a bunch of earlier, smoother candidates and the wooden chopping board benefited from the addition of olive oil to help bring out the golden colour.

Day 8 - Chocolate and Raspberry Cupcakes

Raspberry and Chocolate cupcakes were on the agenda today. They had a lovely pink icing and ribena was included in the recipe.

Photographer's Notes: This was another reaosnably accidental photo. I had intended to use a red ramekin, fill it with raspberries, and place the cupcake on top. In the process of doing this I grabbed a glass to help me sort through the raspberries. I felt that the glass was more effective and the rest of the above idea took shape.

This image also includes a little bit of photoshopping. As it turned out the chocolate ended up with a strange green and yellow tinge to it. I had to darken it up and shift the colour slightly to get it looking right.

Day 7 - Cinnamon Cupcakes

Cinnamon Cupcakes ended the first week of the 100 day cupcake challenge. They smell amazing and have a layered structure that is visible through the base of the cupcake in the photo above.

Photographers Notes:

This is a composite of 2 images. The first was taken before I made a massive mistake. The second image was taken after the massive mistake. I wanted a gradient going from a nice warm orange at the bottom of the image to black at the top of the image. I wanted to achieve this by using a flash to light the foreground and letting the background drop off to nothing. The warmth would be achieved through using our dining room table which has goldy coloured imitation wood. This all worked quite well in the first image. While that did look warm and inviting I decided I wanted to add some cinnamon to the shot. I figure I would sprinkle it through a sieve to create golden droplets against the black background. While this worked, and is included in the final image. I hadn't counted on how fine the cinnamon was and how quickly it would fall through the sieve. The consequence of that mistake was a table and cupcake drenched in cinnamon. While the cinnamon on the table and in the air looked quite nice the top of the cupcake was now solid cinnamon. It looked horrible. Luckily by this stage my positions were locked though so I was able to combined the top of the cupcake from the previous shot with the rest of the second image. The result it above.

Day 5 - Queen Cupcakes

Here we have a Queen Cupcake - a hyrbid of the batter from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess with the sultana concept from the Edmond's cookbook. It's the Nigella's cupcake recipe with some sultanas added. It looks like a scone but tastes sweeter.

Photographer's notes:
I wanted to go for a very English tea set-up. While Jess does have a suitable tea set I was horrified to learn that we didn't have any doilies. I also couldn't find a tea tray. I started out with 3 whole cupcakes on a saucer with the teapot and tea cup in the background. This looked far too busy and didn't actually show any of the sultanas. After a few attempts I cut the cupcake in half, added a sultana, and ditched the saucer.Things were starting to look good. With a bit more tweaking I managed to get some steam in the tea cup. This was achieved through pouring boiling water into the tea cup and using an external flash to backlight the steam as it rose out of the teacup. The finished product is a combination of 2 exposures. The dominant exposure is lit by the house lights and provides everything except the steam. The secondary exposure is the steam alone illuminated by the external flash. Everything else in the secondary exposure was well underlit to the point of appearing black. This made life easy in photoshop as the black ended up acting as an alpha channel leaving only the steam. In the end I was glad that we didn't have a doily or a tea tray, they would have added more unnecessary clutter and lead to a lot more mucking around.

Review - Peter Hurley - Art of the Headshot

Is Peter Hurley's Art of the Headshot worth the $300 pricetag?

To summarise what follows, probably. In fact if you're in a studio environment with more than one photographer shooting anything related to faces the answer is almost certainly yes.

Peter Hurley's art of the Headshot is 4 1/2 hours that you can spend with a top New York Photographer explaining his craft any time you like. While you might expect him to get bogged down in camera and lighting details or even stick to basic procedures he goes well beyond this. Instead he explains his complete approach and the trajectory of his career. From how he started out on his own as a natural light photographer to how he operates today charging $1100 per headshot shoot while working with a team including retouch and make-up artists.

Perhaps unexpectedly equipment and lighting set-ups end up taking a back seat to client-photographer interactions. In fact Peter makes the point that the reason he is a successful headshot photographer is that he is 10% photographer and 90% therapist. Rather than worrying about keeping his camera happy he focuses on making his clients comfortable.

While comfort is a key part of the therapy component of the shoot his therapy extends beyond this. Peter shares tips with his clients (and you the viewer) about how to create excellent photographs. For Peter this element of teaching is perhaps the most important aspect of his photographic therapy session.

Conveniently you are not required to take his word for this. As part of the DVD you are supplied with 6+ recorded headshot sessions. In these sessions you will see clients coached from average photos through to stunning photos as a result of the environment and education that Peter provides. Critically these sessions are not all performed with people who simply 'get' what Peter wants or how he wants them to behave. At times he encounters resistance and you the viewer get to see how he gets through that to reach the goals that he needs to achieve.

While this DVD has been marketed at photographers it could easily be marketed, perhaps in a condensed form, to models as well. The tips that Peter provides are the sort of things that models will be able to apply in most, if not all, of their photoshoots throughout their career. Check out the video at the bottom of this page for an example of one of the lessons.

However it's not all good news. Those who are taken aback by the pricetag might ask, isn't this the sort of information that I can get elsewhere for less than $300 or, in this modern age, for free? The answer to the question is yes... but. What Peter Hurley's DVD does is collect and assemble the information, that you will be able to find in pieces, in a way that not only works but has been shown to work. It's the difference between being able to find all the pieces necessary to make a car and having a fully functional vehicle. What is that difference worth to you?

While that point might be considered good news (in that you are getting some kind of value for your money if you do proceed with the purchase) the next point is cause for some concern. When Peter talks about equipment he stresses the importance of a pro-level dSLR as a minimum requirement. This is nonsense and probably stems from the fact that he is out of touch with the dSLR market (he admits to this but it is surprising that nobody on the F-stoppers team thought to question this point during the production of the video). Consumer level dSLRs would now be perfectly capable of performing the functions required for a headshot shoot and would be a much better investment for someone just starting out in photography than the pro-level equipment that will be outgunned by lower level cameras by the time the beginner has generated enough income to recoup the cost of their initial camera. As a reference point Peter shoots at a low shutter speed and at low ISO. Almost any decent consumer dSLR will perform well at these levels. If anything invest in a quality lens and a body that is good enough to get the job done.

Beyond this it is important to recognise that this DVD is about headshots. This means the techniques that you will learn will be useful for photographing people. Typically people on their own. Typically people from the shoulders up only. In fact the advice that Peter gives out during the DVD is all about the face and how to make it look its best. Now, don't get me wrong, faces are very important and these tips are extremely valuable but if you are expecting something more than this you won't get it. in this sense the DVD does what it says on the box - it tells you how to take a great headshot. While you can take some of the photographic lessons and apply them to other settings the headshot is where the focus stays. If you try some of the body positions Peter suggests in a full length shot you will end up with some very odd results.

Ultimately then whether or not you should buy Peter Hurley's art of the headshot depends on what you expect  to be able to take away from it. If you are happy to take away photo related tips that focus on enhancing the faces of your subjects with little focus on any other body parts then this DVD is a no brainer. If you want to know how Peter Hurley runs his business, built his business, lights his studio, sets up his camera, selects clothes, guides make-up artists, or runs an individual session then this is well worth the money. But if you are looking for anything beyond this, such as how to take a great group portrait, and do not have the imagination or ability to take lessons learned in one area and apply them to another keep you money in your pocket. This is a DVD about taking great photos of individual faces that show a connection with the subject. While the rules can be applied to multiple subject shoots that application is left to you.

Making your own photobook

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/post-printing/how-to-make-an-elegant-photo-album
Lately I've been getting a bit frustrated with the delivery times for photobooks so, when I get some time, I'm going to have a crack at creating my own.

I'll be using this page to collect links to photobook making guides that look like they could be useful.

On Page SEO for Photography Websites

One of the biggest challenges in optimising a photography website for google (or any other search engine) comes in creating quality on page content that search engines can read. Unlike you and I google's spiders don't see the internet with the human eye. They read it the same way that a computer reads it, as a set of instructions.

Unfortunately this means that google doesn't read your photo of a beautiful sunset as a photo of a beautiful sunset. Instead it reads the name of the file that contains the beautiful sunset, the written information on the rest of the page, and any other code that is built into your website. As such if you want your photography website to be found on google it isn't enough to load your page up with plenty of lovely photos, you must also load it up with plenty of words describing those lovely photos.

Filenames/Image Titles

At the simplest (and most overlooked level) you can rename your photo files (the .jpegs, .pngs or whatever you're using) to reflect their content. Instead of having a file called DSC00042.jpg use a file called Sunset.jpg. You can use underscores or dashes to break-up the words in your image file titles as well. For example you might like to call your file Auckland-Sunset.jpg if your photo shows a sunset in Auckland.

Alt Tags

The next level is the alt tag. the Alt tag is what is displayed to the user if the image cannot be displayed. Here you can include a description of what the photo is of. For example you might like to say something like "A golden sunset in Auckland New Zealand". As a side note this is also what will be read out to vision impaired people who visit your website.

Image Captions and On page text

With those out of the way we break into what people typically think of when you say on page content: image captions and on page text. Captions are spatially linked to images and this can be reflected in certain coding languages. It is likely that google will use image captions to identify what an image might be of for indexing in image search. As such image captions should describe the content of the image they are closest to. You may like to reword your alt tag and use it here.

On page text is less directly related to individual images. It is the written content on the page and often provides information related to some underlying theme between the photos on the page. For example if I post a gallery of property photography images like this one I include information about the property itself while mentioning that I am available for real estate photography in Auckland. In that body of text I signal to google and other search engines that the content on that page relates to property photography in Auckland increasing the odds of getting listed in google search for relevant search queries.

You may also notice that there are a few keywords on those pages. Those keywords are there because those are the words that I am interested in ranking for (property photography, real estate photography, and Auckland). You may also notice that those words are mentioned as naturally as possible. While they may be repeated from time to time I am not trying to ram them down google's throat. Why not? If google wants words and I know which ones I want to feed it surely more relevant food would be better right?

Wrong.

Remember that google is trying to simulate human search using computer algorithms. In order to do this they pay a lot of very clever people a lot of money to teach google to read like people do. If you stuff your page too full of keywords google will pick up on this now or in the future. Watch the Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video below for a clearer explanation.

Comments

The final option is comments. One of the key benefits of comments are that they can be generated by other people. As such you are essentially outsourcing your SEO work. One of the key downsides is that they are generated by other people and can actually do nothing for or damage your SEO if implemented and moderated incorrectly.

Recall that google can only read what is written on the page itself. This is important if you are using an external  method of generating and collecting comments. The Facebook comment box being the clearest example. If google is unable to see the comments they might as well not exist for SEO purposes.

Now also recall that google does read what is on the page and uses it to decide what your page is about. If you end up collecting a lot of comments that don't add to your page's content or accurately reflect or describe what is on the page they might as well not be there. To make matters worse if you get a lot of irrelevant comments than can lead google to believe that your page is less about what it would have thought your site was about than if the comments weren't there. For this reason it is good to be able to moderate your comments. This allows you to control the quality of the content that users are supplying and also helps stop any spam getting through.

The Standard on Page SEO tips

Beyond this the standard on-page SEO tips still hold true. Use page titles and headings sensibly. Use them to highlight your keywords but avoid using them for spam. Use the meta description to suggest a relevant snippet to google. While google might not use it many other search engines will and google will check it out in the same way that it looks at your page content, page titles, headings etc. Meta Keywords on the other hand are less useful for google but may still be useful for other search engines.

Quality Content

Finally (but arguably most importantly) focus on producing quality content. If you produce content that people will find useful they are likely to share it. If they share it they are likely to do so by linking to it. If they link to it someone has just created a backlink for you and backlinks are what will really bring google's spiders to your site. In terms of quality content for photography you may like to consider the following options

• How to articles
• Reviews
• Descriptive galleries of your personal work
• Blog posts detailing some aspect of your business (blogging of images from individual weddings is a popular example)
• Clear information for your clients (such as details around pricing - an often overlooked element)

If you aim for qaulity content the keywords should come fairly naturally meaning you won't need to worry about sending your content into spam land.

The Next Step

The next step is off page SEO. This revolves primarily around link building and can apply to different pages on your own website as well as pages built by other people. In most cases you will get the most bang for your buck by targetting inbound links from other people's pages. Off page SEO will be covered in more detail in a future post.

Impossible Photos - Discussing Digital Art

Digital Art is the art of creating photos that cannot be taken with a camera - the creation of impossible photos.

Erik Johannsen is interested in what you can do with a photograph after the shutter button is pressed. He felt that traditional photography was limited to essentially being in the right place at the right time. He felt that anyone could do that and he wanted to do more (arguably though anyone can do what he does as well, it will just involve more work in post than 'simply' taking a photograph).

So why not abandon photography completely and pick up a paintbrush instead? Photography portrays a level of realism that other mediums do not offer, or at least do not offer as readily. It is the subversion and manipulation of this realism that Johannsen enjoys and requires in his art.

Successful subversion primarily requires planning - knowing what you want the end product to look like before you begin so that you can collect the pieces necessary to complete the puzzle. Key considerations include perspective, lighting, colour, contrast, brightness, and how you will make the end product appear as a seamless solitary image despite the fact that it's made of many different images.

Becoming Successful in Photography - Art Streiber shares his thoughts

Here Art Streiber shares his opinion on what it takes to succeed and reach his level in photography. Key to this is the idea that the building of your brand and the building of your brand is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Part of this is the way in which you will develop. You can expect to develop in a stepwise fashion, going up in sudden bursts, rather than at a smoother constant rate.

YOU MUST BE COMMITTED TO THE CLIMB

You must shoot, maintain your archive, market yourself, and pay your bills in order to survive and, ultimately, thrive.

You must know your market. You must know your clients. You must put yourself in front of these people through marketing yourself and your skills to them. If you can identify people who will be your clients in the future and market to them before they are able to buy from you.

One way to do this is through your personal work. Personal unpaid work can demonstrate your skills to future clients but, more importantly, unpaid work can become paid work if the subject of your images becomes worthy of wider interest/publication.

Chase Jarvis - His Road to here and some extra guests

Backwards

Chase got where he is backwards. He didn't assist anyone. He didn't study photography formally.

Quitting

Chase quit medical school, a PhD program, and sport to do what he loved. He wanted to create things.

Transparency

- Information should be free
- Sharing trade secrets
- Blogging
- Youtube videos
- A rising tide (of knowledge) floats all boats

Villain

Sharing lead Chase to be vilified by his peers and the old guard. They were worried that what he was doing was taking money from their pockets and putting it in the hands of a 14 year old with a D40.

Now is the time for change

Content creators are now also distributors. That is what the internet has done for photography, video, and other sources. This is what makes the audience of hundreds of thousands possible.

Time for a new culture around creativity

Move from old art to social art, create content and context
interdisciplinary
participate
interact
symbiotic
everybody can win
incomplete without another person participating in some way

An opportunity for ecosystems

This collaboration requires a place to occur. In can be a physical location or one based online. If you provide a space for a community to thrive and a way to draw people in you can create a healthy creative environment like the Best Camera community.

Why do this?

It's good for you. It helps your soul, it can help your career. and it can help you develop your own creativity.
It's good for the world. Apparently creativity has been plummeting since the 1990s.

Jasmine Star
Top 10 wedding photographer in 4 years with no formal qualifications
Quit a law program to become a wedding photographer. Started with a simple Canon camera (20d) and a kit lens.
Zack Arias remembers her from a course he ran because she had excellent people skills, sent him cards, and had her brand in place before she even had a lens in her hand.

Joey Lawrence
Self taught pro Photoshopper and Photographer from 16
No formal training. Made home movies since childhood. Started photography with local bands. Crafted his portfolio to make it look like he had worked more jobs than he actually did.

Rob Haggart
Photo editor
The definition of photographer is changing. You are no longer restricted to being a shooter of still images. Create value with your images and your equipment in anyway that you can. Break out of the cog mode of thinking and working.

Zack Arias
Simple Gear for amazing photos
Also succeeded by doing things backwards, by not using the typical path in terms of gear etc.
Don't fear your clients. They are real people who are often under a lot of pressure, try to understand their needs and feel free to discuss your approach with them to reach a common understanding.
Jobs have 3 kinds of value - economic, creativity, opportunity

Vincent Laforet
dSLR filmmaker
Usually a late adopter but an early dSLR filmmaker, nothing makes him feel more alive than sharing.
The career paths that used to work often no longer exist.
Fear is the worst thing in life. It will freeze you up.
You aren't born with talent. You cultivate it.

Chase Jarvis
Photographer
You develop your look by taking a lot of photos.

Chase Jarvis - Lego Camera

The combination of Digital RevTV, Chase Jarvis, and a Lego Camera was always going to be a solid bit of fun. Rather unexpectedly though it is also a valuable learning experience. If you watch the video you will find that Chase inadvertantly, perhaps habitually, talks through his approach to each situation and explains how he will work around the limitations of the lego camera. He does this by anticipating the shutter delay, figuring out what the approcimate focal length is, and even building upon the basic system through the use of external flash and an ND filter.

For those unfamiliar with the triggering trick here's how it works. Most external flashes have a slave mode. When the external flash is in this mode it will fire whenever it detects that another flash has been fired. The other flash doesn't have to be particularly powerful either, it just has to be powerful enough for the external flash to see it. Here then the external flash (the SB-900) is triggered by the lego cameras flash giving Chase control over an external flash.

The ND filter is required because when the lego camera is in flash mode the settings lock to correctly expose the image for the lego camera flash. The external flash is stronger (brighter) than the lego cameras flash which then leads to the image being overexposed. The ND filter acts like a pair of sun glasses for the camera, cutting down the amount of light that enters the lens bringing the image back towards a correct exposure.

The Magic Numbers of Photography - How Focus works

Lately I've been getting interested in the principles behind photography (think physics). One key part of this is focal length and the idea that focal length is the distance from the front of the lens to the image sensor (for digital cameras) or film (for film cameras). The focal length is also the point at which light passing through the lens becomes focussed. This should mean that lenses of a given focal length should only be able to focus on objects at a particular distance. To put it another way lenses of a given focal length should not be able to have variable focus.

Yet we know this isn't true. All of our lenses have a focus ring and they all allow us to control where focus is without changing the focal length...

Or do they?

I decided to test this out by slapping my 50mm prime lens onto my camera then setting my camera up on a tripod in my lounge. I then took two pictures, 1 with the focus ring set to the furthest distance possible (infinity), the second with it set to the closest distance possible (in this case 45cm). The results were surprsing and gratifying at the same time.

Photo taken with focus set to infinity

Photo taken with focus set to 45cm

As you can see in the images above the field of view has shifted between the 2 photos. In the first case with focus set to infinity we have a wider angle of view than the second case with focus set to 45cm. The changing focus has changed the focal length.

This is surprising because:

We expect fixed focal length lenses to maintain a constant focal length. Clearly this is not the case

This is not surprising/is gratifying because:

It fits with the basic physical principles of how light can be focussed on a surface

It fits with what you SEE happening when you adjust focus on a lens (the lens moves away from the sensor when focussing on close objects (increased focal length and a narrower angle of view) and towards the sensor when focussing on distant objects (decreased focal length and a wider angle of view)).

The Magic Numbers of Photography - Calculating the F number

F numbers or F stops are an important concept to grasp in Photography. The F stop that you select will have important implications for your depth of field and the amount of light that enters the camera. But where does this value come from?

F numbers express the relationship between the focal length of a lens and the diameter of the opening through which light can pass (sometimes called a pupil or iris). The F number for any given lens is obtained by dividing the focal length by the diameter of the opening.

If they are equal the F number is 1.

If the focal length is smaller than the opening the F number is less than 1.

If the focal length is greater than the opening (the most common scenario) then the F number is greater than 1.

Now the truly interesting part about F numbers is the way that the relate to the amount of light that enters the lens. While doubling the shutter speed halves the amount of light that enters the camera doubling the f number more than halves the amount of light entering the camera. This is because the F number is related to the diameter of the opening while the amount of light that enters is determined by the area of the opening.

To illustrate this point we will compare the area and diameter of the opening for 3 F stop values in a 50mm lens: 1, 1.4, and 2.

F = 1

Diameter = 50/1 = 50mm

Area = 25 x 25 pi = 1964.29mm

F = 1.4

Diameter =  50/1.4 = 35.71...mm

Area = 17.86... x 17.86... x pi = 1002.19mm

F = 2

Diameter = 50/2 = 25mm

Area = 12.5 x 12.5 x pi = 491.07mm

NB:// This relationship holds for any focal length as F numbers take the focal length into account. 50mm simply used as a concrete example.

As it turns out in order to halve the amount of light that enters the camera you need to increase the f number by the sqaure root of 2 (1.4-ish). This is why the standard F stop scale goes:

1 - 1.4 - 2 - 2.8 - 4 - 5.6 - 8 - 11 - 16 - 22 - 32

Each value is an approximation to the preceding value multiplied by the square root of 2 (1.4-ish)

F = 1

Diameter = 50/1 = 50mm

Area = 25 x 25 pi = 1964.29mm

F= Square root of 2

Diameter = 35.53...

Area = 982.14

Now if you're super inquisitive you may be wondering why the square root of 2 is the magical number. If you're also super observant you may have noticed earlier that the change from an F number of 1 to an F number of 2 reduced the area by a factor of 4. If you extend that out to an F number of 4 the area is 16 times smaller than when you have an F number of 1.

F = 1

Diameter = 50/1 = 50mm

Area = 25 x 25 pi = 1964.29mm

F = 2

Diameter = 50/2 = 25mm

Area = 12.5 x 12.5 x pi = 491.07mm

F = 4

Diameter =  50/4 = 12.5.mm

Area = 6.25 x 6.25 x pi = 122.76mm

What's happening?

Every time you double the F number, by going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 4, the amount of light entering the camera reduces by 4 times (or 2 squared). 

If you quadruple the F number, by going from 1 to 4, the amount of light entering the camera reduces by 16 times (or 4 squared). Turning this around if you wanted to decrease the amount of light entering the lens by 16 times you could quadruple your f number (4 is the square root of 16). If you wanted to decrease the amount of light entering your camera by 4 times you could double your F number (2 is the square root of 4). Finally if you want to reduce the amount of light entering your camera by two times (i.e. if you wanted to halve the amount of light entering your camera) you could increase your F number by ~1.4 (~1.4 is the square root of 2).

In fact this concept pops up a lot in photography and is known as the inverse square law.

Landscape Photography - Waiting for the light and capturing the luck

Today I got to put a couple of lessons I've learnt into practice with some landscape photography. These lessons were:

- Photographers Capture Luck

- Photographers Capture (and see) Light

- Photographers Capture these things with Cameras

The luck component, mentioned by David Oliver in a talk I attended earlier in the year, usually comes from being in the right place at the right time. Today's opportunity came about on a trip back to Auckland from a location scout in the Coromandel. Out of the corner of my eye, on the side of the road, I spotted something that I quite liked the look of, pulled over, and found the right spot for what I felt was the right shot.

The seeing and capturing has two parts to it. You have to be able to appreciate what light does and recognise when things are going to look pretty - this enables you to recognise the lucky combination of subject and lighting when it occurs. This sounds simple but is actually something of a stumbling block. I have included 2 images below to make the point that without the light the image isn't anywhere near as interesting. This image needs the contrast that the sun punching through the clouds to the left of the frame provides. When the sun is fully behind the clouds the light is flat, even, and uninteresting. To make things worse in order to compensate for the reduced light in the second image the exposure must be increased. Regardless of how you do it you end up blowing out the sky and losing some of the clouds and the blue of the sky.

Finally perhaps the most important component of the bunch is the fact that I actually had a camera on me. Having your camera on you as much as possible (preferably at all times) is a lesson worth learning. Think of all the photo opportunities you will be able to snag.

The Magic Numbers of Photography - How Lenses Work

While you probably know that you should put your money into your glass and you probably know that a longer focal length translates to a more telephoto/zoomy lens you may not know how the numbers written on the outside of your lens relate to the underlying physics or even how the lens ensure that images end up on your sensor/film rather than somewhere else in space. These things are worth knowing as they feed into deeper concepts further down the line. Luckily, they're actually very easy to understand.

A Basic Photography Lens

A basic photography lens has 2 key properties:
- It is a converging lens
- It has a focal length
Both of these properties are shown in the diagrams that are commonly used to represent lenses

Photography lenses are converging lenses

Photography lenses are converging lenses. This means that light entering the lens bends (or converges) toward the middle of the lens. This is an important property of lenses as it is this convergence of light that allows images to be captured on the film or sensor that sits behind the lens. This convergence also contributes to the circle of confusion associated with light coming from any single source.

Photography Lenses have a focal length

The focal length is the distance between the lens and the point at which light entering the lens converges. In the case of cameras this doubles as the distance between the lens and the film or sensor as we want the light to converge on the film or sensor in order to be able to take well focussed images.

So far so good. But how do all the numbers and moving parts fit in?

The Role of the Focus Ring

The Focus Ring allows the photographer to adjust the point at which the light rays converge after passing through the lens.

Zoom lenses

Zoom lenses have a variable focal length. While this could be achieved by moving the lens further from the film or image sensor it is usually achieved (at least in part) through the inclusion of additional lens elements in the zoom itself. These additional elements bend light inwards (converging) or outwards (diverging) as required.

The 1:X number - The Aperture Number(s)

This number (or these numbers) show the F number associated with the largest aperture(s) for a given lens. In the case of prime lenses or zoom lenses with a constant maximum aperture only 1 value will be shown. In the case of zoom lenses that do not have a constant maximum aperture the range of aperture values will be shown. Aperture values themselves are a ratio of the diameter of the opening compared to the focal length of the lens (focal length/Aperture diameter). The 1 in the 1:X represents the focal length of your lens while the X represents relative size of the aperture. In a 1:1 lens the aperture's maximum diameter is equal to the lens's focal length. As the X gets larger the diameter gets smaller.

Zoom Lenses and Variable Apertures - Why?

Remember that the F number is the ratio of focal length to the diameter of the aperture. Unless elements inside the lens are compensating for the variation in the focal length the F number will have to increase as the focal length increases.

The Magic Numbers of Photography - Calculating Your Circle of Confusion

Despite sounding like group therapy for dementia patients the circle of confusion is a remarkably simple concept to grasp. It is often talked about as an unfocussed spot of light produced from a cone of light.

If you think about how light travels through a lens and the cones that it produces in doing so it soon becomes clear that the circle of confusion produced by objects at different distances from a lens will produce different circles of confusion when the recording medium is at different distances from the lens. Any combination that creates a circle of confusion that is too small for our eyes to resolve appears as a single crisp spot and is deemed to be in focus. Any combination that produces a larger circle of confusion is deemed to be more out of focus.

In this way the circle of confusion is related to the depth of field. Any circle of confusion that produces a finer resolution than our eye is deemed to be in focus.

As the circle of confusion essentially relates to the image that gets recorded on a sensor or frame of film it is calculated in relation to the size of the sensor or frame of film. Commonly the diagonal length of the recording medium is divided by 1000 or 1500. In the case of a Nikon APS-C sensor the value obtained by dividing the diagonal by 1500 is 0.019

The Magic Numbers of Photography - Calculating Depth of Field and the like

Over the years, in addition to an interest in photography, I have developed an interest in science. I love reading about and discovering the relationship between different variables and there is nothing more exciting than when that relationship can be boiled down to a clean equation. Luckily for me Photography is essentially applied physics and, as physics is also in love with equations, this means photography has plenty of lovely equations for those keen enough to be interested in them. As I am not a formal student of photography I have not been exposed to these equations so I am currently collecting them as part of my learning process and also with an eye to a wee project I'm working on.

Calculating Depth of Field

Depth of field is something that many amateur photographers express an interest in. Often they will tell you that an image has great depth of field or a lovely shallow depth of field but it is far rarer for them to say that the depth of field is 143mm. Depth of field refers to the amount of an image that appears to be in sharp focus. It has depth because the image is produced by light bouncing off objects in the real world. The distance from where sharp focus begins on an object to where it ends on an object gives us our measure of depth. Hence, depth of field.

While most photographers quickly learn the general relationship between focal length, aperture, subject distance, and depth of field physics allows us to specify it exactly. That being said the first step to making this determination comes from defining something else, the circle of confusion. For our purposes, we will use the circle of confusion value for an APS-C (crop) sensor.  0.019948

The next step is to determine the hyperfocal distance of the lens. The hyperfocal distance is the point at which an object at infinity appears sufficiently sharp when photographed. It varies with focal length, aperture, and the circle of confusion and is defined below:

Focal Length²/(Aperture x Circle of Confusion)

While hyperfocal distance alone tells us little about the depth of field produced by the factors mentioned ealrier it is calculated first as its value is required when calculating the nearest and furthest focal point. The distance between the nearest and furthest focal point being the depth of field.

 Nearest Focal Point = (Hyperfocal*distance to subject)/(Hyperfocal+(distance to subject - focal length))

 Furthest Focal Point = (Hyperfocal*distance to subject)/(Hyperfocal-(distance to subject - focal length))

Depth of Field = Furthest Focal Point - Nearest Focal Point

Getting a Photography Website to Page 1 of Google

If you found this web page chances are you found it using google.
Furthermore you probably clicked on it because it was ranked high enough on google for you to see it.

How can you get a similarly high google ranking for your photography site? If you have done a bit of reading about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how it can help in improving your google ranking you've probably found that most people suggest that the basics of SEO are fairly simple. You increase the number of inbound links to your website and optimise your site for google. While both of these things are entirely correct the challenge in optimising a photography site lies in understanding that what we have been taught about images doesn't hold when we talk about google; rather than an image being worth a thousand words most images on the web aren't even worth one.

How then can you take your photography website and increase its google ranking? The tricks lie in transorming your images from mere coloured pixels to information rich, quality content.

1. Image Titles


2. Alt Tags


3. User Comments


4. Captions


5. On page Information

6. Off page inbound links

Beyond these standard points you should also consider what you're trying to get to page one for. If you're just starting out you're not going to get to the number one spot for any highly competitive search term. For example chasing after the search term Wedding Photographer will be a spirit crushingly impossible mission. Instead try to focus on something specific, preferably something that makes you unique. This could be the geographical area in which you operate, the way you shoot, or even the way you write. Once you develop one foothold it will be easier to create others.