Single-Serving Photo

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the “focal length reciprocal rule” and it occurred to me that not all of my readers may know what that is. Rather than find someone else’s article about it (of which I’m sure there are many) and link to it, I thought I’d just write my own.

The goal of the rule (which is more of a guideline than a rule, actually) is to give you an idea of whether a photograph will come out blurry if you’re holding the camera in your hand. It is a somewhat simple formula to determine how various camera settings combine to compensate for camera shake. I use the rule constantly while I’m out shooting because I don’t like to bring a tripod to most places and there’s no use bringing home a whole CF card filled with blurry photographs.

Not only will I explain what this reciprocal rule is, but I’ll give you real examples of how to use it in the field. (more…)

The Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration (or MAIFE, as they abbreviate it) is located smack in the center of Mystic, Connecticut, and the area they call Old Mystick Village (that’s not a typo…). The whole Mystic area is one of the hottest tourist spots in Connecticut (it wouldn’t be a reach to say it’s the only tourist spot in Connecticut), and the Mystic Aquarium and nearby Mystic Seaport are popular summer destinations for Connecticut families and visitors from out of state alike.

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The aquarium is ripe with photographic subjects. Tank after tank of exotic, colorful fish; beluga whales; touching tanks filled with sea stars, coral, and so forth are all dying to be made into beautiful images. On a busy day like Saturday, the first day I went, you’ll be surrounded by people wielding their point-and-shoot cameras like claymores, blasting their body-mounted flashes directly into the tanks.

The greatest challenge to photographing at the aquarium (this applies only to the indoor tanks) is getting enough light. Even the most brightly lit tanks provide much less light than you think, most often because your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness and your brain is working to normalize everything you see.

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For this trip, I brought only my Canon 50mm f/1.4, which I kept at f/1.4 almost the entire time. I often had to push my 5D to its highest sensitivity, the equivalent of ISO 3200, and even then I couldn’t always get a shutter speed fast enough to handhold for the shot, much less to freeze the motion of a quickly swimming fish. The aquarium will definitely put your skills and your equipment to the test.

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In an ideal world, such as a sponsored shoot (not to imply that assignments are often, if ever, ideal), much brighter lights and possibly even softboxes might be employed to make the scene more technically feasible. If I had my way, I would place a single softbox or flash with diffuser above the tank where the standard light source is located and fire it with a PocketWizard or similar. Light that comes through the surface of the water has a wonderful, shimmering quality to it that most people recognize immediately.

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Of the 180 or so photographs I made on this excursion, only about five of them were good enough to toss up here. The major problem was, as I said before, not getting enough light. Even when the classic “focal length reciprocal rule” indicated that I should be able to handhold the shot, the fish I was trying to capture was moving too quickly. My problems were compounded by the 50mm f/1.4 being a fairly mediocre lens and suffering from a good deal of chromatic aberration and vignette (which I don’t mind too much, but it bears mentioning).

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I attempted to use Lightroom’s “lens correction” features to fix the chromatic aberration, but rather than having one of the two “classic” (and somewhat subtle) forms of aberration, the lens demonstrates what is often referred to simply as “purple fringing,” which means you’re basically out of luck. Add to that the fact that most of the images were pretty blurry and you can see where I’m going with this. That having been said, I think these five photos are fairly nice catches (no pun intended) out of a big group of rejects.

Digital photography makes it possible for artists to create effects and apply treatments to their work that were once impossible in traditional photography. Is this an advantage that should be compensated for in competition and critique? Do digital photographers and traditional photographers have equal footing? Would the pioneering photographers who led the surge into traditional photography embrace today’s digital technology?

My opinion is that digital photography is, and should be treated as, entirely comparable and identical to traditional photography. Although the differences in process and technique bear investigation for the ambitious viewer and may play a role in serious competition and critique as parameters for comparison, they have no more bearing on the effect of the work as would the brand of pencils used by an illustrator.

In the field of art, competition and formal review should command the examination of an artist’s basic choice of media and execution. While even the casual viewer can deepen the experience of a piece of art with knowledge of its process, that information is only helpful insofar as it expands appreciation or increases understanding; all artwork is comparable given only the experience of it intended by its creator.

To give an example of what I mean, consider two paintings. Each painting was created with different types of paint and different brushes, one on canvas and the other on paper, one representational and the other abstract, one lacquered and the other not. Can these two works of art be compared objectively as paintings? My gut says they can. The majority of casual viewers would never seek out these differences because the two works can be compared and contrasted, fairly and completely, simply on the basis of their appearance.

Similarly in photography, two photographs may appear very much the same but may have been created in vastly different ways. In traditional photography alone, a myriad of chemicals and materials are available to the artist. Comparing two photographs, one traditionally printed and the other digitally created, should pose no problem to the viewer; only in formal competition and critique should this piece of information carry any weight, and that is also true for the painting example given above.

Digital photographers find themselves, in many cases, having to defend their work on the basis of its production methods rather than its artistic integrity, and it saddens me. When, in the history of art, have its methods come under such scrutiny? Producing new work in new ways has always been a core value of the field of art as a whole.

What is saddening is not that a photographer would spend time and energy defending his or her craft, for that seems to me a noble endeavor. What saddens me is that anyone would spend time and energy criticizing digital photography, in particular, on the basis of its process rather than its results. Few other fields of art come under such scrutiny; perhaps because many fields of art are less commercialized or because they occupy areas of the art world not very well traveled by the mainstream. Whatever the reasons may be, I hope that the future brings a greater acceptance of digital photography as a photographic methodology, not to be treated differently than the many ways in which light has been captured and reproduced in the past.

Again, I’ve been withholding! I’m so very sorry. In late March I took a day trip to the Roger Williams Park and Zoo in Rhode Island to see what all the fuss was about. Actually, it was the last weekend before the price went up for “peak zoo season,” so it seemed like a good diversion.

I shot with the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS nearly the entire time. It was challenging to get good exposures in some of the buildings at 400mm, but the 5D produces such pleasing and acceptable noise even at ISO 1600, it wasn’t a total loss. I plan to do an article comparing the noise between the 5D and much older 10D, but for now just enjoy these crazy animal photos.

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

I may post more from this set later on; I’m still combing through them. You may also notice that my photos are now linked over to my actual gallery. This allows me to keep all of my stuff more organized and it also allows you to purchase prints of the ones you like without having to e-mail me about it (although I would still love to hear from you if you have anything on your mind.)

Cheers!

I walked along a few random trails at Mohegan Park up in Norwich today, snapping anything I thought looked promising. This is a fairly good example of how bright, mid-day light can still be completely usable (if not indispensable) when shooting under the forest canopy.

For this one, I made sure the sky wasn’t visible and compensated -2/3 EV; perfect tonal range.

This one’s one of my favorites. During the conversion to black and white I darkened the yellows and lightened the greens to emphasize the contrast on the ferns’ leaves in the foreground.

Here are a couple of cutesy ones.

In this piece, a creative vignette adds drama and depth to an already shallow depth of field.

I love tree bark.

I swear I actually found this lying there, just as it is.