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Issue 40 : February 2015

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Happy New Year! Welcome to the first issue of New Zealand Photographer for 2015! It has been a great summer and the weather has been kind to us.

I hope you all enjoyed some R&R over the holiday break and got some valuable shooting time in − perhaps using the new gear from Santa? Have you made any New Year’s Photography resolutions?

Maybe there are a few aspects of your photography you want to improve on or you want to get better at editing your photos; anything that keeps you inspired, taking photographs and learning has got to be a good thing. This issue features the third instalment of Allan Cox’s series on the art of Macro and Paul Conroy sheds a little light on T-Stops. We also feature Photographer Michelle Frances who shares some of her beautiful storytelling images.

Enjoy!

Hollie WightmanResident JudgeNZ Photographer

Happy New Year!{

ABOUT Whether you’re an enthusiastic weekend snapper or a

beginner who wants to learn more, NZ Photographer is the fun e-magazine for all Kiwi camera owners – and it’s free!

EDITOR Hollie Wightman, hollie@nzphotographer.co.nz

GROUP EDITOR Richard Liew

ART DIRECTOR Jodi Olsson

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES Phone Jennifer Liew on 09 522 7257 or

email jenniferl@espiremedia.com

WEBSITE www.nzphotographer.co.nz

NZ Photographer is an Espire Media publication

Hollie Wightman

PCL’S NEW IPHONE AND IPAD APP FREE WEEKLY TUTORIALS!

New Zealand’s premium photo lab, PCL IMAGING, has made its latest evolution into the palm of your hand. They have launched this month the iphone and ipad app

which allows users to edit, enhance and order photographs directly from their phones.PCL has been a photographic industry leader for over 40 years and once again is enabling photographers with the latest technological development. The app itself is a direct result of another technology PCL has been using for several years called ROES or remote order entry software. This software was made available for MAC or PC and has been used to by thousands of happy customers.

PCL will be holding weekly tutorials for the new app for their customers and if you mention this article you can join them for a free cupcake, espresso photographic print. The relaxed tutorials will take place at PCL every Thursday at 11am.

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Next Month's Competition: Abstract

GET SHOOTING AND WIN!Photographers - This is a great opportunity to improve your photography skills and get some feedback from professional photography judges in a safe and friendly environment. Here's what's up for grabs:

• The winning image on the cover of the next issue

• A high quality print of your image and cover to immortalise your achievement for your grandchildren, courtesy of PCL Imaging

• $50 cash

• And of course, bragging rights and the envy of your fellow NZ Photographer fans!

Check out next month’s theme and enter at www.nzphotographer.co.nz!

WIN!

There can be quite a bit of creative licence with this one! Good luck! Entries Close 20th of February. The Winning cover image is by Steve Harper - Wonderful

Year for Pohutukawa, Lumix DMC-GF2, 14mm=28mm, 1/500, f5. Congratulations Steve!

Rules: Images submitted must be no older than 12 months from the date of publication of this issue. Entry to the competition is $5 and you can enter up to five images. Images must be no more than 100 dpi and no more than 1600px wide. Save them as jpgs in the prefered colour space of Adobe RGB (1998). If you don't know what this means, don't worry, but do Google it...●

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Welcome to my third article on macro photography. If you spent time over the Xmas period lying on the ground, I hope it was because you were

giving macro a go and not because you had over indulged

in Xmas cheer. I finished last month’s article talking about

extension tubes and getting your macro images sharp. I’d

like to carry on with those two points in this article.

As I said last time, I believe extension tubes are one of the better ways to give macro a go without spending lots of money. They use the principal that a lens is focused closer by moving the lens, or more precisely, the optical centre of the lens, further away from the camera. The further away it is, the closer it will focus. Extension tubes go between the camera and lens, to put even more distance between the two, so the lens can focus even closer.

PART THREE: Macro PhotographyBy Allan Cox www.nzphotoworkshops.com

Young Weta grooming. Taken with an 85mm lens and a 36mm extension tube.

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If you grab your camera and go and play, I think you will find that things will fall into place. It is actually important that you do try. A critical part of learning is the doing. You wouldn’t trust a pilot who had only ever read about landing a plane would you?

As they are just hollow tubes, with no glass in them to degrade the image, the potential sharpness of the final image is determined by the quality of the lens that you use the tubes with. Extension tubes normally come in sets of three and you can use one or a combination of more than one, to get varying amounts of macro effect.

The total amount of macro effect is determined by the ratio of the extension that you have added, compared to the focal length of the lens you are using it on. Adding 30 mm of extension between a 50 mm lens and the camera, will give a greater macro effect, than if you added in the same 30 mm between an 80 mm lens and camera. The good extension tubes have electronic coupling to allow auto focusing, aperture control and exposure metering. We will use the aperture control and exposure metering, but not the autofocus.

Autofocus is turned off for macro. With normal photography, e.g. photographing a person, to determine how big the person is in the frame, we either zoom in or out, or walk in or out. We then focus the lens − either manually or with autofocus − to make the person sharp. With macro, these roles are swapped. We use the focus and the amount of extension added to determine how big the subject is in the frame (with a dedicated macro lens the focus gives us the extension so we just use the focus). Then we move the camera in and out until our subject is sharp. This might all sound complicated, but it’s just recognising that focus and extension are linked.

You will soon get your head around macro tubes, and focusing by moving the camera, once you give it a go. With macro, we are caught between a rock and a hard place as far as sharpness is concerned. Technically speaking, getting a sharp photo is one of the more challenging aspects of macro photography.

On the one hand, because we are focusing very close to the camera, our depth of field, i.e. how much we have in focus, is wafer thin, with most of our photo out of focus. At the same time, macro is a form of magnification. And with any magnification, as well as magnifying the subject, it will also magnify any camera shake. So if we set a large number aperture e.g. f16, to get more depth of field, our shutter speed drops and we get camera shake.

On the other hand, if we set a small number aperture (e.g. f4), to get a faster shutter speed, our already wafer thin depth of field, becomes even smaller. The two standard ways to solve this dilemma are either to use a tripod or flash. I would recommend that you get a good tripod and that you use your tripod properly.

Using it properly means using it with a cable/remote release and using it with the mirror lock-up function, or exposure delay mode on your camera. Whenever you use a tripod you should use a cable/remote release, otherwise you will move the camera when you push the shutter button and introduce blur into the photo from that movement.

Using a cable/remote release to trip the shutter eliminates this movement. However, there is still a small amount of vibration introduced into the system by the camera itself, when the mirror on the camera, is flipped up just before the photo is taken (mirror-less cameras don’t have this problem).

We get around this by either using mirror lock-up or exposure delay mode. In mirror lock-up mode (not to be confused with ‘lock mirror up for cleaning’ which is quite different) you push the shutter button once to lift the mirror and then a second or so later. This is when the vibration of the mirror going up has died down, you push the shutter button again to take the photo.

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Exposure delay mode does it all in one go. You push the shutter button; the camera lifts the mirror, waits a short while for the vibration to die down, and then takes the photo. Every camera is different as to which of the above two functions that it will have and how easy it is to access them (some of the entry level cameras have neither). You’ll just have to go and look, yes, you may have to use that dreaded user manual.

I will say though that most Canon models have ‘mirror lockup’ buried in the custom functions menu, but it can be easily added to the ‘My Menu Settings’ (green star icon, far right). Go into ‘My menu Settings’ and select ‘Register to my Menu’. You’ll find ‘mirror lockup’ near the end. When people come to one of my weekend workshops, one of the first things I will often do is go around to the Canon users and add it to their ‘my menu settings’. That way, it is right there for them. Nikon have it easier to access − or not at all. We use a cable release and mirror lock-up whenever we are using a tripod, but it is especially important when doing macro.

Often macro subjects are close to the ground. Most tripods don’t go close to the ground with any ease! When using a tripod for macro, it can be an exercise in frustration, trying to get the tripod in the right position to photograph your subject. Most books will tell you to invert the centre column of the tripod and hang the camera up-side-down from the bottom of this inverted centre column.

Most books are written by people who have read about, but have never done macro photography! Yes sometimes this works, but it comes with its own problems and is certainly not the silver bullet many authors make it out to be. If you are thinking of seriously getting into macro, then I would suggest a tripod that goes flat to the ground, with a centre column that can go horizontal (see photo).

This horizontal moving centre column can be used to help get the subject into focus. At this point in time, we can tweak the focus by manually focusing the lens, but a major change in focus will affect the size of our subject and so it’s composition. (For critical focusing I’ll use a focus rail and live view focusing: next month’s lesson!).

A lot of the challenges that come with using a tripod are eliminated with the use of flash, but flash brings its own unique challenges, (which I’ll deal with in a future article) so you will end up using a tripod in some situations and flash in others and sometimes both at the same time. I hope all of this is not too daunting. If you grab your camera and go and play, I think you will find that things will fall into place. It is actually important that you do try. A critical part of learning is the doing. You wouldn’t trust a pilot who had only ever read about landing a plane would you? ●

Two tripods that go flat to the ground, with centre columns that can go horizontal: the Benbo and the Manfrotto (not to be confused with the MeFoto).

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When is f2.8 Not f2.8?By Paul Conroy www.paulconroyphotography.com

Consider this scenario. You have two identical cameras, one with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens attached, and the other with a 70-200mm 2.8 lens. Set both

cameras to aperture priority at f2.8 and ISO 100 and the lenses set to a focal length of 70mm; and all other settings identical, including the subject and lighting.

It wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption that the shutter speeds should be the same; after all the settings

are identical, right? You certainly wouldn’t be considered a fool to think so, however this isn’t always the case.

Indeed the settings are identical, however, a lot of photographers are unaware that a more accurate measurement is the T-stop, which is the f-number adjusted to account for light transmission efficiency. F stops are a measured constant across all lenses and are calculated using the formula:

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For example, if a lens’ focal length is 20mm and the diameter of the entrance pupil is 10mm, the aperture diameter is f/2. Conversely, T-stops account for light transmission efficiencies which are affected by the number of lens elements the light passes through to reach the sensor.

The large variety of lenses on the market, have different numbers of elements along with glass quality which in turn impact on the overall T-stop value. In fact most lenses which have a light transmission value of anywhere between 60%-90%.

To simplify this, the T-stop of a lens is the same as the f-stop would be if the lens transmitted 100% of the light it was meant to. The reality is that no lens will transmit 100% of the light, so the true aperture is the T-stop value. In the original scenario, the Canon 24-70 has a T-stop value of 3.0, whilst the 70-200 has a T-stop of 3.4. So with identical settings on the camera, the 70-200 lets less light onto the sensor and would consequently need a longer shutter speed. If you want to know the T-stop value for a particular lens a good reference site is here. ●

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NZP: How would you describe your photography style - what kind of ‘look’ do you try and create?

MICHELLE: I am a Storytelling Family Photographer. Storytelling photography is similar to photojournalism in the way it tells stories and documents real life. I love telling and celebrating the stories that make every family unique and beautiful! I don’t pose, I don’t tell my clients what to do; I just document their everyday life in an organic and artistic manner. I long to show families that what they view as the mundane and ordinary parts of their lives are actually the most beautiful.

NZP: How did you first get into photography?

MICHELLE: It all started with my love of music! When I was younger I’d go to all the concerts of my favourite bands and I started taking photos with my little point and shoot. I loved documenting their shows and it all progressed from there!

NZP: What or who inspires you?

MICHELLE: The artist who is currently my biggest creative inspiration is the writer and illustrator, Dallas Clayton. He inspires me to dream big dreams, to be honest, vulnerable and courageous in my work, to love deeply and have loads of fun enjoying this journey called life.

FEATURE ARTIST

MICHELLE FRANCESwww.michellefrances.co.nz

Michelle Frances is a Storytelling Photographer based in Auckland capturing beautifully real moments of family life. Michelle was kind enough to share some of those images and talk to us about her work style.

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www.michellefrances.co.nz

NZP: What is typically in your camera bag?

MICHELLE: I like to keep things simple, so right now I just have my Canon 5D mkII body and my Sigma 35mm f/1.4. (I love to shoot wide!) .

NZP: What is your favourite photography accessory?

MICHELLE: I don’t currently have any photography accessories, but one day I’d love to get an underwater housing kit for my camera. I love the water so shooting kids while they’re enjoying a splash in the pool would be really fun!

NZP: What has been your biggest obstacle starting your photography business?

MICHELLE: I think the biggest obstacle has been learning to stay true to my vision as a photographer while also trying to build a profitable business. There are so many different types of photography projects that all require different photography perspectives for their needs. So in my efforts to find paid projects, if I try to change the way I work to meet the varied requirements it’s not going to produce authentic and meaningful work, and it won’t be fulfilling for me either.

I love this quote by Gregory Heisler which sums it up well: “Shoot what you can’t help but shoot. If you shoot what you can’t help but shoot, they’ll be your best pictures. And because they’ll be your best pictures, they’ll be the pictures people respond to, and what’s great about that is when they respond to them, what they’ll hire you to shoot is more of what you can’t help but shoot.”

NZP: Do you have any tips or advice for photographers just starting out?

MICHELLE: I think I would encourage them to remember that becoming a good photographer isn’t only about learning all the correct techniques. Although it is great to know how to get the best images out of your camera, it is also important to know what you want your images to say, what you want to convey through your photos, what you want people to feel when they see your pictures. Take some time out to explore what it is that makes your work unique and what your vision is. Having a clear idea of what your vision is will help you to have direction and confidence when you are shooting!

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And I also really recommend spending time doing things outside of photography to inspire your work – go to a sculpture exhibition, bake a cake, try writing a piece of poetry, go swimming, whatever you want! Like Chris Orwig says, “To take more interesting pictures, you need to become a more interesting person. Developing your work is about developing yourself.”

NZP: Can you tell us about a favourite image you’ve taken or favourite photo shoot?

MICHELLE: Oh, it’s so hard to pick one image or even just one shoot because I love all the families I’ve had the privilege of documenting; they’re all so amazing and unique! I eventually decided on this image though because for me it captures all the energy, mischievousness, and fun of childhood.

Two kids wrestling on the floor, another jumping on the beds, and of course the necessary toys and mess. It’s real and it has frozen this moment of time when all the kids love playing together, when the girls shared a room, when they were small enough to see into the mirror on the little dresser − I could keep going − love it all!

NZP: Where would be your dream photo-shoot location?

MICHELLE: I only shoot in clients’ homes and I love it so much! Family homes are filled with so much joy, laughter, occasional tears and most of all, love, huge amounts of love. Most of the memories you’ll have of your children will be within the walls of your house, so there really isn’t any better place to document and capture those memories to treasure for years to come.

I know that family homes can also be messy, with toys scattered on the floor, dishes stacked up in the kitchen sink, piles of laundry waiting to be folded and that it is easy to believe that those items make your home less beautiful, it’s easy to think that your home is less special because it doesn’t look like the perfect pictures on Pinterest.

I also struggle feeling like my life is too plain and boring, so I understand those feelings and I am especially excited when my clients show great courage by inviting me to preserve their mundane yet incredibly beautiful memories in their homes!

So my dream photo-shoots are located anywhere in the world, in the homes of families who embrace the beauty that is found in the ordinary and imperfect parts of their everyday lives.

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NZP: What are you looking forward to next? MICHELLE: I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to meet more wonderful, authentic families

and tell their stories! And I’m also excited to keep learning my craft and keep developing my vision – there’s still so much more to grow in! ●

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Wonderful Year for Pohutukawa by Steve Harper

Lumix DMC-GF2, 14mm=28mm, 1/500, f5.

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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place ... I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them” HAVE YOU SUBSCRIBED TO

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