Category Archives: Photography

How to Draw With Light

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The other day I came across some images from Life Magazine, showing Picasso drawing with light. It looked like a fun project, and since my daughter is currently studying light at school, I persuaded her to play along. The result is above. A few people have asked how we did it so I thought I would write a brief “How to”. It’s not difficult, but you will need some specific equipment to make this work.

What you will need:

  • A camera with manual controls. Specifically, you must be able to control the shutter speed, and preferably also switch off the autofocus.
  • Some sort of off-camera flash. I used another camera.
  • A completely dark room.
  • A willing assistant.
  • A torch or other light source.
  • A certain amount of patience. We didn’t get this right first time.

Instructions:

You need to put a camera on a tripod, or some sort of stable surface, and set the exposure to, say, 10 seconds, or however long you think you will need. Manually focus on the subject. It helps if you can do this so that the camera doesn’t ‘hunt’ while it tries to find something to focus on. It also helps to set the ‘ISO’ ‘film speed’ number, rather than leave it on Auto. We settled on ISO 1600, but you will need to experiment with your setup.

Get your off camera flash ready. You will need to experiment with placing it to get the best result. In the image above the flash came from below and to the right, casting a nice big shadow on the wall. If you don’t have a flash gun of some kind, you can use another camera. You’ll need to experiment with making that work. Some cameras use a red light to assist the autofocus, while others strobe the flash. You need to switch all that off somehow.

Switch off all the lights, and in darkness, open the shutter. At this point the subject waves the light about. Arrange beforehand where your subject’s hand will stop. When she or he reaches that point, fire the flash, which exposes the rest of the room. Everyone then holds still until the shutter closes.

It took some experimenting to get the ISO right, and the positioning of the flash, but most important is to communicate while the shutter is open and you are floundering around in the dark. If we do it again we’ll use a less bright light I think. We had a lot of fun with this experiment, and I think the picture has come out pretty well. To see what is possible when a great photographer and a great artist come together to do this, take a look at the efforts of Gjon Mili and Pablo Picasso below. We had to experiment a lot to get this right, but of course in 1949, they were working with film.

More Picasso images at Retronaut.

Photographing Zoo Animals

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Professional wildlife photographers have it easy. Long lenses, fancy cameras, and a jeep for a fast getaway if things turn nasty. If they manage to avoid being eaten, they stand a good chance of getting an unimpeded view of whatever it is they are photographing. The rest of us are limited to shooting big game in the zoo, with all those bars and high strength glass panels in the way.

Photographing animals in zoos can be frustrating, but that doesn’t mean your pictures have to be disappointing. Here are a few simple things you can do to make your zoo pictures more interesting, and in most cases you won’t need a fancy camera.

1. Switch off the flash

This is probably the most important tip of all. Quite often in zoos you see people taking pictures using the flash, but the last thing you want is a great big flash of white light bouncing back at you from fencing or glass. If it’s too dark to take a picture, you are out of luck, and firing the flash won’t help.

2. Include people

Don’t try to pretend you are in the Serengeti or the jungle, a zoo is interesting enough in itself, especially if you visit with children. This picture was taken with a compact camera in the tiger viewing area at Dublin Zoo earlier this year. I made the subject of the picture my daughter, and because I focused on her rather than the tiger, almost all you can see of the glass is the scratches made by the tigers. This snapshot catches the girl’s excitement very nicely, even though the camera was struggling with the light.

3. Make the bars part of the story

For these pictures of owls, taken at the owl sanctuary at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria, I used the fencing to frame the birds. It might take a bit of trial and error to get the autofocus to pick out the subject through the fence, and if your camera has a manual focus function you should use it, but the effect can be quite striking.

4. Try to focus past fences and bars

This is the only thing in this list you may not be able to do with a compact camera, especially if the animal you are photographing is close. To make the bars disappear you need to get close in to the fence, focus on the animal itself, and make the depth of field (the distance between the closest in focus item, probably your subject, and the one furthest away) as shallow as possible. In 2009 I wrote a more detailed post about how to do this on my old blog. As you can see here, the fencing in the foreground, between the owl and me, has almost completely blurred away to nothing, leaving an apparently clear view of the bird. This one was taken on a fancy-ish camera, a Canon 550D, also at Muncaster, but there is no trickery here, just a picture through a fence.

5. Plan to adjust the pictures later

Before cropping:

There are so many simple tools for editing photos these days it is slightly perverse not to use them if the outcome will be a better image. Services like Instagr.am have made messing around with images, adding effects and filters, easy. At the most basic level, even a simple crop can make a difference. If you go out knowing the limitations of your camera, and accept that you are going to have to adjust the image later, you will feel more free to take pictures even if they don’t look great straight away. I knew that the zoom on my little camera wouldn’t be able to pick out this tiger very well, and although I can’t make a wall-sized poster out of the image below, the cropped version is a big improvement on the one above.

After cropping:

Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

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A couple of weeks ago we had a day at the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire. It’s one of the more established preserved railway lines, with conspicuously well kept locomotives and rolling stock. It’s well worth a visit for its museums, and also because one of the stations on the line is Haworth, the childhood home of the Brontë sisters. This serious-looking fellow is taking a break in the sunshine before resuming his duties as guard on the train in the background.