News from Jim Zuckerman

February 2011

In This Issue

Black velvet

Birds in flight

Self Critique

Complementary

Photoshop Workshop

ON-LINE PHOTO INSTRUCTION-- with detailed critiques of your work

My new 4-week and 8-week courses begin again on Wednesday, March 9 at Betterphoto.com. To improve your compositional skills, for example, click here to check out the outline course to see if you feel this material is exactly what you need. The 8-week courses begin again the first Wednesday of January.

I have a new photoshop course called Photoshop: Thinking Outside the
Box.
You can click here to see the outline of the course. It is very different from my other Photoshop courses in the types of techniques I demonstrate (include 3-D), and it's a heck of a lot of fun.

Do you want to make money in photography? Want to feel more confident in using natural light outdoors? Interested in learning more about Photoshop (like putting fireworks in the sky or removing lens flare). Are you insecure about your exposure skills?

The way the courses work is this. Every Wednesday you receive a lesson that consists of text and photos, explaining various principles in photography, marketing your work, digital manipulation, or whatever subject you are studying. At the end of each lesson there is an assignment, and you have plenty of time to take pictures and upload them for my critique. You can use photos you did specifically for the assignment or images that you have taken previously.
On-line photo courses are like virtual classrooms but not in real time. Other students can see your pictures, read my critiques, and comment on your work. Similarly, you can comment on the pictures of other students. It is a unique and wonderful learning experience.

One of the great things about these on-line courses is that students participate from all over the world. In a single lesson's uploads, you may see pictures from Bryce Canyon or Brazil, or from Singapore or South Carolina. It's a very stimulating environment, and it will help you become the photographer or digital artist that you would like to be.

Portraits against black velvet

I just returned from Ethiopia (which is why this newsletter is late in getting to you) where I led the most amazing photo tour. It was both amazing and tough, actually. In the southern part of the country where the fascinating tribes reside, it was very hot. Several days were over 100 degrees. The dust was incredible, and sometimes vehicles 30 feet in front of my land cruiser would disappear from sight in the fine dust. The roads were among the worst I've ever experienced, and 75% of the trip was camping because there are virtually no hotels in the tribal areas.

Having said all that, the photography was second to none.

Many of the portraits I took are among the most compelling in my career. This trip was truly like going back in time 40,000 years.

One of the unique things I did to shoot the tribal people of the Omo River Valley was to bring a 2-yard piece of black velvet. When I told the members of my photo tour that I wanted to photograph these primitive people against black, they were dubious to say the least. They thought I'd lost my marbles, but when I showed them the first set of images on the LCD monitor on my camera, they all couldn't wait to take the same pictures themselves.

I had two people hold the piece

of velvet taut, and then I asked (through an interpreter) each subject, one at a time, to stand in front of it. Notice in each of these images the lighting is soft and diffused. I set this up in the shade of their thatched huts because direct sunlight didn't look good at all, even though we were shooting in the early morning and late afternoon. This background removed the people from their environment and made it look like a studio shot -- which in essence it was -- but the faces and the body decorations were so outrageous that I liked how the black velvet prevented anything in the background from distracting our full attention on the subjects.

The black velvet could easily influence the meter into producing images that were overexposed. Since meters want to make everything middle gray, when it detects black and the dark skinned subjects, overexposing them would produce more of a middle tone. Knowing this, I checked my LCD monitor every few shots. If the images I was taking were too light,

I simply used the exposure compensation feature on the camera to alter the exposures in 1/3 f/stop increments. I used daylight white balance, my standard setting for all my outdoor shooting, and these pictures were all hand held.

The brightest part of the sky was near the horizon because of the early morning lighting, and that created wonderful side light.

Several people in my group were shooting at the same time, and one of my strategies for capturing interesting poses was to let the subjects look toward the other photographers so I could photograph them from the side as if they weren't aware or self-conscious of the camera. The picture of the Hamar woman below is an example.

To get these pictures, my local guide negotiated a price for the village, and then I selected the people I wanted to shoot. I usually chose around 15 individuals, mostly women and children but a few men as well. The members of my photo tour could then ask the subjects to pose anywhere in the area -- in front of a doorway to their hut, by a tree, etc. All of our photo sessions went very smoothly, although I was warned that one tribe in particular -- the Mursi (wearing the lip plates) could be very difficult especially if the liquor truck had visited them the night before. But no such problems arouse and everyone got outstanding images.

My setup for these pictures can be seen below. It was very simple, but very effective in producing incredible portraits.

SELF-CRITIQUE

The ability to accurately access your work is crucial to improving your picture taking. To honestly (and even brutally) self-critique your work is a fast track to becoming a better photographer. I offer this feature in my newsletter to inspire you to do the same with the pictures you take.

I like this portrait a lot. I did the opposite of shooting against black velvet -- I shot directly into the sun. By exposing for the girl, I let the background sky completely blow out and become white. I overlooked one thing, though.

If you look at the bottom of the image -- from the mid-point on her breasts downward -- you can see some lens flare. This shouldn't have happened, and I should have known better. You can always see this in the viewfinder, although in my own defense, the sun was blindingly bright and it was hard to see.

Nevertheless, I should have expected it. When you shoot toward the sun and the sun is placed just outside the composition, lens flare can be avoided by using a lens hood or by simply blocking the sun from shining on the front glass element of the lens with your hand. However, if the sun is included in the composition, the flare can't be avoided. It must be removed in Photoshop.

In this case, the sun was just outside the frame and I could have used my hand to protect the lens. I was shooting fast, though, and trying to photograph as many of the tribes people as I could. At this point, the only way to mitigate this kind of flare would be to select it with the lasso tool in CS5 and then select Image > adjustments > hue/saturation. In the dialog box, I would choose 'yellow' in the submenu and then, moving the saturation slider to the left, I'd desaturate just that one color since the flare is mostly yellow. That would do a good job, although it wouldn't be 100% perfect.

Qualities of a complementary background

Backgrounds are underrated. They have more influence on the success (or failure) of a picture than you would initially assume. A complementary background is usually one that:

1. Is the same tone or darker than the subject.

2. Doesn't have pronounced graphic lines (like the horizon or a pole or branch) that take attention away from the subject.

3. Is completely out of focus with little or no definition such as in the picture of the maribou stork, above.

4. Is not busy, messy, or confusing.

5. Doesn't have distracting white highlights, such as the sky seen through the leaves of a tree

In the photo of the macaws below, the background is both messy and it has distracting white highlights. This makes the image a failure even though the experience of watching the noisy birds was fantastic.

In assessing your work, you must leave emotion out of the equation. How much you might have enjoyed or been moved by an experience has nothing to do with how good or bad photos are. The photography must be judged on its own.

Capturing Birds in Flight

One of the most difficult pictures to get is a great shot of a bird in flight. It's nice to get a picture of a bird that's perched on a branch, especially if it's unique and especially beautiful, but there's nothing like capturing one in flight.

There are strategies I use to do this. Every bird photographer develops his or her own methods, and here I wanted to share with you what has worked for me.

1. Assuming you want to freeze the bird's motion, use a fast shutter speed. Shoot wide open (meaning choose the largest aperture on the lens) because that gives you the fastest shutter speed given the ISO and the light. Depth of field is a luxury you must sacrifice for shutter speed. Use a speed at least 1/250th of a second, although 1/500 to 1/1000 is better. Raise the ISO until you have a fast speed. I hate to go above 400 ISO, but if the light is low, you'll have no choice.

2. If you have a heavy telephoto lens, shoot from a tripod. A head like the Wimberly is ideal -- it moves smoothly and takes all the weight of the lens and camera off your shoulders and arms.

3. Set the autofocus points so all of them are activated. Don't only use the central point of focus because as the bird flies, inevitably it will move off that point and the AF mechanism will go haywire as it tries to focus on the sky. This will cause you to lose the shot. If you don't know how to set these AF points, check your camera manual.

4. Use the multi-shot function on the camera so you can take many frames in a brief amount of time. That way you can capture many wing positions.

5. If the bird is flying toward the camera or away from it, pre-focus on a spot ahead of the bird's movement and start shooting just before the bird reaches it. My experience is that the AI servo mode isn't capable of tracking a fast moving bird in flight.

6. When you see a bird perched, watch it through the lens and eventually it will fly. Pre-focus on a spot in front of the bird where you anticipate it will fly.