PhotoReviewA U S T R A L I A

SEPT-NOV 2010

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ISSUE 45

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Inspiration

Earth 5

15Photo Review AUSTRALIA ISSUE 45 � www.photoreview.com.au

Inspiration

Louie, Mutitjulu, 2009

InspirationInspirationInspiration

On the road that runs from Petralia Sottana through Gangi and Nicosia to Cesarò, a car pulls away from the shoulder, drives slowly along for a few kilometres, before stopping, turning around and coming back to where it began. A few minutes later, it pulls away again to repeat the exercise.

Perching half way out the rear window, the sole passenger is holding a Hasselblad medium format camera and seems to be taking pictures of something off in the distance.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination, typical landscape photography practice. Not only wasn’t there a tripod in sight, but the car’s movement was essential to photographer Jane Burton Taylor’s project.

‘It sort of happened by accident,’ she explained. Four years ago she’d been in Sicily on a photographic research trip. ‘I was running late, the sun was going down and I wasn’t allowed to stop and take pictures. So I was taking them from the car.’

Although she works with film, on this occasion she happened to have a digital camera. ‘I saw the blur and I thought, “oh that’s interesting...It’s almost as though you can capture the essence of the country more from blurred images than if you stopped and took a photo”.’

As images sometimes do, the snapshots she captured

that afternoon stayed in her mind. By the time she returned to Australia, it was clear to her that she needed to explore a strangely illuminating relationship between stillness and movement in landscape photography.

‘I went back the following year,’ she said. ‘I decided to work on this idea of stillness and movement — to photograph from a moving car, to get the blur, but also to get the stillness that you get from the long distance.’

Before returning to Sicily, Burton Taylor developed her basic shooting technique by having a friend drive her through the countryside around Bowral. Standing up through the car’s sunroof, she said, ‘I decided I wanted to have one point of stillness in the photo and [to do that] I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with how fast to drive the car. I’d find areas of country that were particularly lovely or evocative and I’d go back and forth shooting.’

‘Because I was using a Hasselblad, I shot Polaroids to check my light was right — obviously I’d take handheld light readings too — but I’d shoot the Polaroid just to make sure I had my technical settings correct [so that] the exposure and the combination of movement and stillness was going to work.’

Such was the nature of her approach that it wasn’t always possible to exactly recapture the same image twice. ‘The frustrating thing is that I got some fantastic Polaroids that I never replicated with film — you don’t have a lot of control when you’re moving.’

‘Normally I did about three passes to try and capture the image — depending how patient my driver was. I’d shoot a roll and then I’d have a second back ready and I’d get the driver to stop so I could load the new roll.’

In the digital age Burton Taylor’s approach may perhaps strike some as unnecessarily complicated and difficult. ‘I came from a tradition of using film,’ she said. ‘I just found using digital

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY DOESN’T NECESSARILY HAVE TO INVOLVE TRIPOD.

By Don Norris

BRIGHT IDEAS FOR SHOOTING IN LOW LIGHT LEVELS.��������������

How do you set up your camera when lights are low? Switch on the flash? Adjust the ISO sensitivity upwards? Reach for a tripod? These

are all valid reactions and all have their ‘plusses’ and ‘minuses’.

Low light levels can occur at any time of day; not just at night. And they can be found indoors or out (eg, on overcast days and during storms). Unless your subject is near a window or under bright artificial lighting, almost any indoor situation will require longer exposures when you want wide depth of field. You may also need to deal with mixed light sources and balance daylight against incandescent or fluorescent lighting.

Shooting in low light may also mean shooting at slower shutter speeds, so you need to adopt strategies to prevent camera-shake-induced image blurring. The following options are available:

tips for Shooting tip:

Low-light photography

(Left) This photograph by Neil Medland shows the benefits of in-camera stabilisation. It was taken with a Pentax K200D using the 18-55mm kit lens set at 18mm. The smallest lens aperture (f/22) and ISO 100 sensitivity were used to provide a slow enough shutter speed (1/2 second) to blur the moving water. Neil says: ‘actually forgot my tripod on this day so I sat the camera on a towel on top of a rock and set the self timer to two seconds.’ The added stabilisation was enough to create this successful shot.

������� ���������A tripod is usually considered the best

camera support because it provides the greatest stability. Sports and wildlife photographers often prefer a monopod, which is less bulky and easier to carry. However, monopods only stabilise the camera in one direction so other strategies are often required as well.

If you don’t have a tripod or monopod at hand, anything that helps steady the camera, such as a wall, table, rock or tree branch, will give you sharper photos of stationary subjects. Many photographers carry a beanbag to put their camera on in such situations as it protects the camera body while preventing it from slipping.

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38 Photo Review AUSTRALIA ISSUE 45 ■ www.photoreview.com.au

�������� �������Image stabilisation has done a lot to help photographers take sharp pictures in

dim lighting. It doesn’t really matter whether the stabilisation is built into the camera body (sensor-shift) or into the lens (lens-shift or optical), although lens-based stabilisation is slightly more effective. Neither type will affect the quality of the image. Depending on their focal length and/or zoom range, most stabilised lenses will provide between two and four f-stops of shutter speed advantage over an unstabilised system.

The rule-of-thumb for hand-held shooting with unstabilised lenses is to use a shutter speed at least equal to the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens you’re using. For example, with a 400mm lens, you need a shutter speed of at least 1/400 to get sharp hand-held shots. With a stabilised 400mm lens, you can take sharp pictures hand-holding it at 1/100 or even 1/50 second.

� ����� ���������� �Virtually all digital cameras provide a range of ISO settings that usually start at ISO 100

and range up to ISO 800 or ISO 1600. Large-sensor interchangeable-lens compact cameras may go as high as ISO 6400 and professional DSLRs can reach ISO 102,400! However, the ISO limit should be seen as the point by which image noise is quite obvious and, therefore, such high settings are best reserved for situations where the high ISO setting is the only way to get the shot.

If you’re shooting with a small-sensor compact digicam, it’s best to avoid using settings above ISO 400 because the resulting pictures are almost certain to look grainy because of image noise. Some shots may also become slightly blurred as a result of noise-reduction processing.

With DSLR cameras the larger the sensor, the higher the ISO number you can use before noise becomes obvious. Cameras with ‘Four Thirds System’ sensors (18 x 13.5mm) can usually deliver good results up to ISO 1600 but most produce noise-affected images at ISO 3200. Cameras with ‘APS-C’ sized sensors can sometimes reach ISO 6400 before noise becomes visible. But you need a ‘full-frame’ (36 x 24mm) sensor to shoot with ISO settings above this point – and noise can usually be seen when shots taken at ISO 6400 and above are enlarged to A3 size.

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(Left) A tripod is vital for really long exposures after dark. This 35-minute exposure was taken with a 10mm lens on a Canon EOS 40D body. (f/7.1 at ISO 200.)

(Below) This photograph by Tim Swavley required high sensitivity settings. It was taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V camera about 70 metres underground. There is no natural light in this environment so the light source came from a portable battery powered flood lighting rig. (4.25mm focal length, 1/4 second at f/3.5, ISO 3200.)

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39Photo Review AUSTRALIA ISSUE 45 ■ www.photoreview.com.au

Jackie Ranken, EOS Pro Photographer.

“I took some colleagues to Milford Sound for the day. The weather was ominous, but that’s the best way to experience the Fiord, and yes, it was raining! I decided to take refuge under the canopy of a beech tree, and started to explore the patterns of light through the branches. With the wide angle lens on my EOS, the tree branch above me appeared distorted and became huge, neatly filling the precipitous sky. Looking for the right shot, I noticed one of my colleagues walking with his umbrella raised. It was just what I needed to give me a sense of scale. Stop! Was my polite request. Click. Oops, I noticed the umbrella just touching the edge of the mountain side. Poolie, just hold the umbrella a little higher please... Click click. Thanks.”.

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