Lessons

Lesson Info

Working the Shot

All right, so last little section here as we're getting close to the end, folks. I've shared with you a lot of the technical aspects of the shots and how they were taken. I wanted to share with you a few of my favorite shots and the behind the scenes thought process and other things that were going on, so we're not really concerned about what focusing mode you used on this, and that's okay if you have that sort of question, but this is more the thought process. If you remember back at the beginning of the class I was talking about the thought process. It's not so important that you ask another photographer what was your shutter speed and aperture because to be honest with you a lot of photographers get very tired of the question of what camera did you use, what lens did you use, what shutter speed did you use, what aperture did you use? Because, they're fairly meaningless when somebody else tries to take that away. Yes, I know there's something that you can get from it. The more intere...

sting question that the photographer would probably like to be asked is what were you thinking when you took the photo, or what led you to that photo? Now, I will have to say that myself, I love being asked what lens I used, what camera I used. I mean, I like that technical side, so don't think that I get offended by that, but what you want to be looking at when you're reverse engineering other people's photographs is how did they get to that photograph because I bet you they just didn't walk into the scene and go click and have that be the perfect photograph that got put on the cover of the magazine. There was probably a lot of work that went into it. All right, so one of my favorite photographs is one I'll just call Cuban Smile. We were at an event. It was like a Boys and Girls Club, and one of the elders there was just watching the kids and the dancing and the singing that was going on, and he knew I was off to the side shooting photos. He just had a really nice face, and the lighting situation is he was sitting under the shade of an outdoor canopy by a patio, and there was all this bright light that was bouncing, and you can see it reflecting off of his forehead there. He was getting in, liking the music, having a good time, but I wanted to see his eyes a little bit more. This is not a bad shot right here, but I always do love eye contact in a photograph, when you get that direct eye contact and connection, and I got this one nice little look, he's got this little smile and smirk off to me, and then he looked away, and that was the moment right there. I had to be ready, and I had to be looking, and as soon as I got that eye contact I got a shot. Now, okay so we'll get technical on you here for just a moment. This was shot with my standard travel telephoto lens which is the 70 to 200 f/4 lens. It's a great light weight, travel lens, but at f/4 it's not the shallowest depth of field, most perfect portrait lens. If you were a connoisseur of portrait photography you would be using the 85 millimeter f/1.2 lens because that would give you a shallower depth of field, so most certainly this photo would be better at f/1.2, right? Well, it just so happened that somebody in our group had the 85 millimeter f/1.2 lens, and I said, "Rae, could I borrow your lens for five minutes?" She goes, "Sure John," so we swap lenses, and I go back in position and I shoot it with the 85 1.2, and I get this shot which has this really nice shallow depth of field, but I never got the moment that I had here, so when it comes between having the right moment and having what is in theory the best lens I will take the best moment any day of the week. There's a lot of people who say, "Well, you can't do portrait photography at f/4. "You need to have a much shallower depth of field "because the photograph will be much better." Well, I supposed someone could always go in and argue, "John, you should have had the "for this moment back here." Well now, we all have to deal with compromises, and when you're traveling you have to make a selection of lenses, and it's not a very big selection. You got to go with what you have. Work with what you have. It's totally okay that it's not the best that money can buy or that you can afford, but if you can make it work you can get good shots. Look at that smile. All right, this next one is in Istanbul, a great, very photographic city. There's a lot of street markets there, a lot of action on the streets, so as a photographer it's a great place to go because there's just so much to see and photograph there. In the Grand Bazaar it's indoors, people walking all up and down, and I'm walking the hallways here, and I'm looking. It's chaos. It's absolutely chaos, and I'm trying to find some order in the chaos. There's everything that you can imagine in here, very very neat marketplace, but I was particularly drawn, and maybe it's because I have a history in running, I was really drawn to a lot of the shoe sales because they really put out some really nice displays. You can tell that they worked putting all these shoes out that were probably stored in a box at the end of the day, so there's just a really neat, fun pattern there. There's all these different shoe stores. Here's a smaller one, but very neatly arranged. I mean, this is very carefully done. I give these guys a lot of cred for setting up these displays. It's really nice, but trying to get some sort of interesting action, and this is an okay shot. I'm okay with this. There was a shop right next to this that looked really nice. I liked all the way the shoes are pointing inwards, and so I'm waiting across the hall for something to go on, something of interest in here, and the shoe salesman comes in, and that's okay, and then he takes a seat behind there, and that doesn't look very good. I'm waiting around, I'm waiting around, and it's time to meet the group, and I just don't get the shot. (scoffs) It's a great spot. Now, I have to be very stealthy in doing this, 'cause this guy would probably catch on if I was just there pointing it. The little trick that I do, and we'll just imagine that the shoes are over here, so that's where I want to shoot the photo. (sighing) I'm over here just pretending to wait on something else. Now I got my camera and every once in a while I'll take a photo that I don't even care about just so that they get used to me. Oh, this person is standing there, they're waiting there. As soon as you stop moving, people stop paying attention to you. If you're back here pacing back and forth, people are gonna be looking at you, but as soon as you just stand there you start blending into the background, and people stop caring about you. Now I'm gonna shoot photos, and I really don't want to shoot a photo right now. I'm just waiting. I'm just getting everyone used to this is the guy that stands over here and shoots photos down the street, and then when out of the corner of my eye when things look right click. I'm just waiting for that one little moment when it's right, and it never got to be right, so I had to come back on another day. I came back and I stood in the exact same spot, and it was the same shoe salesman, but he moved to a different position, and of course I'll wait there for 10, 15, 20 minutes, and for that two seconds it's perfectly right somebody walks in front of the frame. That happens to me all the time. I have some of the worst bad mini timing of anybody I've ever met, but if you wait there long enough you get a nice clean shot. It seems like a shot, "Oh yeah, somebody just walked by, grabbed a cell phone, "shot that, and away they went." I probably invested about two hours in getting this shot. Call to Prayer. Not in Istanbul, but in Turkey. There's a lot of mosques that you can go in and photograph, and they're very interesting to be able to walk around and shoot. There's very beautiful interiors in here. We saw a lot of these interiors when we were looking at the symmetrical section. Looking at the roofs of these places is fantastic. Now, what I'm always looking at is what is different about this one place that I'm in? What can I work on that is slightly different? What was different is they had a very open floor plan that allowed photographers to go wherever they wanted, and people were there praying wherever they wanted, and you could really intermix, whereas in other places they put up a barrier, and you had to stand on one side, and there was really a separation, but here you could mix and walk around and be wherever you wanted and just be quiet about what you were doing. Don't make a commotion and so forth. I'm trying to look for something that brings order to all this chaos that's going on. There's men praying over at this one wall, and there's this one guy who's sitting just a little bit further away, and I love that character. Remember that penguin that's standing on the rock? That one penguin that's just a step away from what everyone else is doing. I don't know why this is jumping double here. So, one of the other little technical tips is I'm working with an SLR camera that has a quiet mode. Now, the shutter is not silent by any means, but it's slowing the shutter down so the mirror slap is less than that in a normal activation of the shutter, so normally when I'm doing travel photography I put my camera in the quiet mode. There are a couple of cameras, Sony and Fuji, that are 100% totally silent 'cause they're using an electronic global shutter which allows you to be extraordinarily discreet, but still I'm just trying to draw as least amount of attention to myself as possible, and so in this case I tried vertical. Vertical didn't really work out. I tried using super wide and getting back, and the subject was a little too small in the frame for me, but getting right about here especially with the other subjects in the frame just seemed to be the right balance. Noticing having this little bit of space on the right side of his head, so it's not touching the other character towards the front. That was one of my favorite shots from Turkey. All right, let's go to Miami. There is a mural district in Miami that is a lot of fun. There's just a lot of interesting graphics that you're gonna find on the street, and this is the Winwood Walls, Winwood Walls in Miami. There's a little gallery that you can go in, and there's all these different places. We saw this, remember, from the tilt shift section. This is where I used the tilt lens to correct for it. What I'm doing here is I am photographing an artist's work, and so photographically speaking I'm just documenting something else that's already there. If I get in really close you don't even see the edges of the frame, so I really can't lay claim to this being my artwork. I'm just documenting somebody else's artwork, so I like to have a little bit of fun with things, and so what can I do to play around with this. It ends up can you work with reflections, or can you work with other people in the environment? I didn't like this big old car in the front, but I liked the idea of a mural and then a reflection of another mural. I just wasn't able to get it cleaned up. It was too many cars and stuff in the way. Then I got this one which I liked, so just finding those smooth textures of the car and the color combine together. I waited around for trying to get a lot of these shots here. It felt like he was really punching him in the stomach there with the finger. I came across a collection of zebra striped buildings, and this looked really interesting. I tried a compression shot at one end. That didn't really have me satisfied. I went across the street, and I wasn't really able to get a clean shot because there was all these cars in the way, and this is one of those turning lemons into lemonade. Okay, so there's all these cars, and they're in the way. Can I use the cars in some way? One of the cars had a sunroof that I could use as a reflection, and I was really careful not to touch the car. Trust me, I did not scratch the roof of this car, but I did get extremely close with my lens to be able to get down really low in order to get a reflection in it. I like this image and it's pretty good. It's always nice. Remember when I said you want to clean up your image, get it as nice as possible, and then if you could add one little more element to it it can help sell the image. In this case, who could ask for a red umbrella on a bright sunny day in Miami? Perfect! I mean, I couldn't have paid her enough to come in there, put 'em off to the side. It's that extra little bonus element that's nice to have in a photograph. So, I knew that I was gonna be over in Rome, and I thought, "Well, I should probably go to the Vatican. "That seems like a pretty interesting place to go. "I'd like to go see the Vatican museum." I did a lot of search on Google to take a look at what's going on. If you're at home right now, do a Google search for Vatican spiral stairway, and you will come up with a page that has about 5,000 photos that are maybe 1% different than this because there is literally just a couple of square feet where you can be in order to shoot this photo, and everyone will end up with the exact same photo. Now, of course I wanted to get a photo without anybody in it, so I waited around to try to get a shot with nobody in it, but it's a little bit of a hollow feeling 'cause it's just yes, everyone else has shot the exact same shot. That's why you want to have time. We talked about one of the elements about getting good photos is having time, not being in a rush. If you're in a rush and you've got to get down and you've got to leave, you don't have time to be creative, so you say, "Okay I'm gonna spend the next half hour "looking at this stair way. "How can I photograph it in a different way?" I'm gonna go down to the bottom, photograph it back up. How does that work? I'm gonna go back up to the top. I'm gonna try to photograph it with the skylight on it. I'm gonna go halfway down. I'm gonna start experimenting with verticals because we have some very nice beautiful lines here and some great textures, so these are all just somewhat failed experiments at trying to find something that'll lead to something better, and I like these lines. It needed something more, and I found that if I backed up and I got a bit of the staircase or the railing that was right near me I got a line that was going in the opposite direction, so once again we're breaking that. This is the, what are we talking ... The pattern breaker in this case. It's that line going the opposite direction that I liked, so I'm trying the vertical with it, and do I like people in my photograph or not? If they're the right people I love 'em. If they're not the right people I don't want 'em there, and I don't like to Photoshop them out. I want to actually capture it without the people there. The red umbrella, I love the lady in the red umbrella. That is fantastic. I didn't have the lady with the red umbrella here, okay? So, I'm just trying to catch different things. Up here, this one on the right I'm catching the top roof, and once again this is like that magician's trick. We're losing the illusion here, so I want to crop that out, so I've got to be a little bit more careful. I tried off to the left, that didn't really work out, a little bit more down to the right. Just all subtle different versions, and now that I've blocked out that top I like that 'cause it's a cleaner pattern in there, and my favorite shot in this case was when there was a break in the moment, and there was no people going down. If you Google the Vatican staircase you're not gonna see any image that looks quite like this. There are some that are kind of there, but I felt okay, good, that I had got something different than everyone else had. Once you get the shot that you came for, that trophy, then do something that you haven't seen before. Create your own. All right, I think this is my last one, and this was in Turkey. We had a lunch break, and we ended up at this rug shop that sells rugs, so we had some people on the tour that were looking at rugs to buy, and we go into this room, and the carpet salesmen come out, and they're like, "What do you think about this rug?" They come out again. "What do you think about this rug "and this rug and this rug?" Suddenly, the whole room just became filled with all of these throw carpets, which were being thrown, so it was the perfect term for that. You know, I really didn't need a rug. I got my rug last year in Morocco, got a beautiful Moroccan rug, a small one, but you know, it's a beautiful one, and so I went around, and I was photographing other little details, getting bored, not really shooting. As I watched what was going on, I was like, "Oh my gosh, there it is. "There it is. "Do you see the shot, folks? "There is an awesome shot right there!" I was thinking, I called somebody over and said, "Do you think I could get up in the rafters here? "Is that strong enough? "Is there electrical wires up there? "Is there a way I can get a camera up there?" So, we had to ask some favors in, and we found a ladder, so that I could go mount my camera up on top, and it just didn't look strong enough that I wanted to go up there. It was just one of those places. I'll put my camera up there, but I don't know if I want to go up there, so I mounted my camera up there, and I had a wireless remote. I got this camera triggered up there, and I wanted to shoot straight down on this pattern that I did not create. It was just created in front of my eyes, so you can see my feet here, and I'm using the 11 to 24 millimeter lens, so this is a very wide lens because I'm trying to get as much of this room and as much of the carpet as possible, so there I am. There's my selfie shot for the whole class. One selfie shot, please allow me one selfie shot in the class. I'm just checking to see if the camera is actually firing there. Then I had a couple of subjects come in here, but I had to be really careful 'cause that lens is so wide. It sees off to the side, so my favorite version of that image should be coming up in a second here, and there we go. The neat thing about that is you see this rug right here? That's in my hallway right now. (laughing) I felt so guilty for asking them for the ladder and asking them to all these things. I'm like, "Okay, I'll take this one here," but it's a great memory. Now I have a photograph and the rug that was in it, so I think that's a good story there. All right, so let me wrap this up as to what I think makes a great photograph, so this goes into you got your photographs, and you're trying to judge is this a good photograph or is it not a good photograph, and here's the criteria that I use. It's both beautiful and it's interesting, and this is the soul and the intellect. I like to be satisfied on both levels, so what these have in common is I need a good subject. I like something that has content that I can think about that's beautiful in its own right. I'll let you know right now my definition of beautiful covers a wide range of stuff. I have seen pictures of garbage, I have seen photos of muck that is gross, but it's beautiful at the same time. There's a lot of things that will make you look at the world and go, "Okay normally I wouldn't like that, "but graphically, photographically "I can see the beauty in it." What is beautiful? Things that have very good light to them, things that are composed well, and the real key to photography in my mind is photographs that are taken at the right moment. What's interesting? Things that are new that you haven't seen before. We always like to be exposed to new information. Everything's been shot, right? Well, having a new perspective, photographing it sometimes physically from a different point of view, or maybe you're coming from a different point of view, and the way that you see a subject is gonna be different than somebody else. What else is also interesting is adding a little bit of mystery by sometimes not showing too much of that subject, so we also talked about shooting it a little bit tighter, but if we had to be honest about what is unique about photography, what makes photography different than writing or sculptures or any other type of art form of communication, and it is the visual moment. That's what we can capture that no other art form can in quite the way that photography can, and so if you have a moment that has a special time to it, that is what you really want to get recorded. That's where photography will have greater success than anything else. In a lot of art forms they talk about staying true to that art form. That's what we do best is capturing moments, so be aware of those moments, anticipate the moments, be ready for the moments. All right John, well I know we are coming up here on the end. I think I have one final question for you, and it may have been one that you've already shown us, but the question is from Isogen, "Just curious, what's the longest time "not including time lapse that you've spent "trying to get a shot, to get that moment?" (sighing) I'm trying to thing of this. I mean, there's certain places that I've gone back to over and over and over again. I know that I have hiked into particular locations several times, and this is why it's really good to have a love of what you're doing because in some cases it doesn't matter whether you actually get it. You enjoy the process of doing it, and so normally a question like that would be pretty good because I'd be able to say, "Oh it took me forever and it was horrible. "I had to wait forever to get the shot." But, I usually enjoy the process. There is this pain of waiting. Just in the time section I wanted to get some time lapses shot for the light section. Excuse me, the light section, so I was shooting a time lapse of the sunrise over Seattle which means you got to get in position when it's perfectly black which was 5:00 in the morning, which means you've got to get up at 4:00 in the morning. Then you've got to shoot all the way through sunrise, so I'm sitting on this bench, and I can't go up very far 'cause the camera is right there, and I'm sitting there for two hours, it's freezing cold out, and you're just waiting, but you're like, "You know what? "I'm getting something out of this. "I'm liking this." I really don't have a good answer to that question, but if you love the process it doesn't matter. Going back to the Cuban Smile picture, I love that. To get the eye contact, I'm curious from your perspective when traveling around how did you ... He obviously knew that you were taking photographs of him? Correct. So, how did you do that without making it awkward or weird or what was the process? Well, we as a group were invited to be there, so there was a number of photographers around, and so one of the things was I try to make people as comfortable as possible, and so I'm not taking too many photos. If I was taking your photos right now, and I was just going (clicking) that would be very nerve racking. It'd be like, "Why is this person "shooting so many photos of me?" So, not taking too many photos, and maybe taking other photos around like, "Yeah, you're not that important." Every once in a while going around, and if you can catch someone's eye and say, "yeah," they know what you're doing, and if they're okay with it then that's good with me. I like to get that non-verbal hey, how you doing? You know, give them that little head nod that says, "You're looking good, "but I'm gonna get your photo." They're like, "I know I look good." (laughing) So John, how do you know when you're done? You've shown a lot of different techniques to use to really explore a space and see it differently from other people, see it differently, and just focus on different things, so when you go into an area you can spend forever looking at it in different ways. How do you know when you're done and it's time to move on? That's really tough. It usually helps when I can go back for a second time. There's a number of locations where I was at for several days, and I would go out, and I would shoot, and then I would come back the next day, and it's always interesting coming back on that second day 'cause it's what's gonna be different. How much is gonna be the same, and how much is gonna be different? When you have that opportunity to come back for that second time you can start to get a feel for the variants. How much does it vary from day to day? Sometimes it's like, "Holy smokes, it's totally different." You know? It's not nearly as good. More often than not when I have a good experience in a location, and I go back to it it's not as good, and there is sometimes a gut feeling. There is a picture from Moraine Lake, and I was using the example of a split neutral density filter, and there was a beautiful lake in the foreground and some mountains in the background. I'd Googled, and I'd seen some photos from that location, so I had a feeling of the range of what I might see because you're gonna see terrible photos, and you're gonna see some of the best photos you've ever seen when you Google a location. When I go there and I shoot some photos and I come back, and I'm like, "No, this looks terrible," I know that it's got better potential, and I had to come back about four times before I felt pretty confident, so it's usually the experience factor. I know when I was new into photography I didn't even know if what I shot was good, and I remember being at the college newspaper, and I would have an assignment, and I'd have to go shoot one particular thing, and then we'd have a thing called enterprise art. Shoot whatever you want, bring it back to the newspaper, get names, get descriptions, be prepared to write a caption, so every once in a while I'd bring back my negatives, and I'd have my editor look at it. He's like, "Oh, there it is, nice shot. "We're going on this cover on this one, John," and I'm like, "What, what? "I don't even remember what you're talking about." So, that does come through experience, and that's personal experience shooting, and that's reverse engineering everyone else's stuff. Listening to photographers, seeing what they think, and developing your own opinion. So, that comes with time. I can't just give you this is gonna happen, and this is how you do it quickly. That'll happen with experience.