Last summer I took 10,500 photos of Italy, 99% of which were pictures of painting and architecture (I'm not very good about snapping people!) It's very time consuming and pretty distracting - especially if you're trying to absorb the atmosphere of the place at the same time. Nevertheless, I find it exhilarating, and it compels me to keep moving even when it's boiling hot and humid, and I haven't had food or drink in hours.
I thought I'd take a minute here to talk about my methods, since it is a fairly challenging photographic assignment, and one at which most artists are not very good.
First off, equipment. I don't usually bring my big noisy SLR camera with me- it's just too bulky and attention grabbing when photos are prohibited. I have found that my long zoom Nikon S9100 gets the job done pretty well in most situations. There's a newer version now- the S9700- that has even longer zoom (30x) and higher resolution, and you can pick one up for less than $300. With the camera lens retracted (turned off) it slips in my pocket easily, it has most of the controls I would wish for (other than manual focus, which would be nice,) and it can be set to total silence (nice when shooting in stealth mode). If I had loads of cash (I don't!) I'd probably get one of those shutterless mini-cams too. They are silent and smaller than an SLR, but have better optics and controls than the compact cam.
The biggest challenge I usually face is the lighting; most of the old buildings with painted walls are not very well lit, and often the details I'm interested in are high up or far away, meaning using zoom, which cuts down even more on the available light. So there's a few strategies to cope with this. Flash is not allowed in almost all of these places, and it is a very obvious giveaway if you use it. I do sometimes use it in remote places where there is no lighting at all, like some of the houses at Pompeii. Flash creates problems of its own with reflections on shiny surfaces, and it only works up to about 12 feet away anyways, so it's of limited use. Most of the time I manually set the camera to "no flash", using one of the outside controls.
Longer exposures allow more light into the camera, but they also mean the camera must be held still, and since tripods are not allowed in most sites, I often put the camera on some fixed object- a wall, column, or rail; preferably something that is not painted, so as to avoid adding to the damage that time has wrought on these fragile places. I am also accustomed to standing very still, holding my arms at my sides, and holding my breath when I take a hand held image. You can hold a small camera steady down to about 1/10th of a second- below that you are risking motion blurriness.
So how else can you keep from blurring? What happens if you leave a camera on fully auto is that it will want to expose to an average light amount, meaning that it will leave the lens open until it gets enough light to satisfy the sensors. If the room is dark, that means it will leave the lens open a long time, meaning there is more danger of blurring. The first thing I try is to manually decrease the exposure index, a feature which many cameras - even cheaper compacts- include in their controls. This means the camera will shoot faster, meaning less light, so the image will be darker, but I then adjust that using Photoshop after I have downloaded to the computer. I don't usually shoot in RAW mode (I probably should) because it takes a lot of memory to do so, but it does allow for even more exposure adjustment after the picture is taken. You'd be amazed at how much hidden information can be in a digital file just waiting to be coaxed out with a photo editing program.
The other option for increasing the amount of light available to the camera is to raise the ISO number, which you can do through the menu of most inexpensive cameras. This essentially makes the sensor more sensitive, meaning faster exposures, but it also increases somewhat the amount of digital "noise" the camera will pick up, so you have to be a bit judicious with it. If I was going into a very low lit place and didn't think i'd have much chance to balance my camera against some fixed object, this is what I would use. Otherwise I usually set the ISO on auto and use the exposure index to give me a quicker shutter speed.
One tricky factor with balancing your camera against some fixed element is that you often get strange angles and intruding bits in your shot. This is where familiarity with Photoshop (or another photo editing program) comes in handy. Photoshop has a very nice feature in its cropping mode that allows you to compensate for perspective distortion, essentially allowing you to pull the corners of the cropping box into whatever shape you choose to make the subject squared up. It can only go so far before you get distortion of the image, but it's very handy for squaring up an image of something that is high on the wall, or taken at an angle to avoid reflections.
Here's an example of a shot before and after I made adjustments in Photoshop:
I thought I'd take a minute here to talk about my methods, since it is a fairly challenging photographic assignment, and one at which most artists are not very good.
First off, equipment. I don't usually bring my big noisy SLR camera with me- it's just too bulky and attention grabbing when photos are prohibited. I have found that my long zoom Nikon S9100 gets the job done pretty well in most situations. There's a newer version now- the S9700- that has even longer zoom (30x) and higher resolution, and you can pick one up for less than $300. With the camera lens retracted (turned off) it slips in my pocket easily, it has most of the controls I would wish for (other than manual focus, which would be nice,) and it can be set to total silence (nice when shooting in stealth mode). If I had loads of cash (I don't!) I'd probably get one of those shutterless mini-cams too. They are silent and smaller than an SLR, but have better optics and controls than the compact cam.
The biggest challenge I usually face is the lighting; most of the old buildings with painted walls are not very well lit, and often the details I'm interested in are high up or far away, meaning using zoom, which cuts down even more on the available light. So there's a few strategies to cope with this. Flash is not allowed in almost all of these places, and it is a very obvious giveaway if you use it. I do sometimes use it in remote places where there is no lighting at all, like some of the houses at Pompeii. Flash creates problems of its own with reflections on shiny surfaces, and it only works up to about 12 feet away anyways, so it's of limited use. Most of the time I manually set the camera to "no flash", using one of the outside controls.
Longer exposures allow more light into the camera, but they also mean the camera must be held still, and since tripods are not allowed in most sites, I often put the camera on some fixed object- a wall, column, or rail; preferably something that is not painted, so as to avoid adding to the damage that time has wrought on these fragile places. I am also accustomed to standing very still, holding my arms at my sides, and holding my breath when I take a hand held image. You can hold a small camera steady down to about 1/10th of a second- below that you are risking motion blurriness.
So how else can you keep from blurring? What happens if you leave a camera on fully auto is that it will want to expose to an average light amount, meaning that it will leave the lens open until it gets enough light to satisfy the sensors. If the room is dark, that means it will leave the lens open a long time, meaning there is more danger of blurring. The first thing I try is to manually decrease the exposure index, a feature which many cameras - even cheaper compacts- include in their controls. This means the camera will shoot faster, meaning less light, so the image will be darker, but I then adjust that using Photoshop after I have downloaded to the computer. I don't usually shoot in RAW mode (I probably should) because it takes a lot of memory to do so, but it does allow for even more exposure adjustment after the picture is taken. You'd be amazed at how much hidden information can be in a digital file just waiting to be coaxed out with a photo editing program.
The other option for increasing the amount of light available to the camera is to raise the ISO number, which you can do through the menu of most inexpensive cameras. This essentially makes the sensor more sensitive, meaning faster exposures, but it also increases somewhat the amount of digital "noise" the camera will pick up, so you have to be a bit judicious with it. If I was going into a very low lit place and didn't think i'd have much chance to balance my camera against some fixed object, this is what I would use. Otherwise I usually set the ISO on auto and use the exposure index to give me a quicker shutter speed.
One tricky factor with balancing your camera against some fixed element is that you often get strange angles and intruding bits in your shot. This is where familiarity with Photoshop (or another photo editing program) comes in handy. Photoshop has a very nice feature in its cropping mode that allows you to compensate for perspective distortion, essentially allowing you to pull the corners of the cropping box into whatever shape you choose to make the subject squared up. It can only go so far before you get distortion of the image, but it's very handy for squaring up an image of something that is high on the wall, or taken at an angle to avoid reflections.
Here's an example of a shot before and after I made adjustments in Photoshop:
 |
| Here's the original shot, taken from an angle to avoid reflections of the natural light, and dark because I had suppressed the exposure index (and because it was a rainy dark day too.) |
 |
| Here's the after: I straightened out the angles using the "Crop" tool in Photoshop, including checking the "perspective" box so that I could adjust for the off angle of the shot. Then I used the "Levels" control to adjust the light and color of the image. I also used the "Unsharp Mask" filter, which actually sharpens the image without distorting it too much. |
Great art but maintain this.
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