I blogged earlier about how to pick a camera for adventure travel, and I now want to take the next logical step, which is to talk about how to use the camera optimally. I’ve traveled with a lot of “photographers” who turned wonderful adventures into photo-marathons for themselves, their partners, and even their traveling companions. I don’t want to do that, and you shouldn’t either. If photography is your only reason for traveling, then frankly you should be reading stuff other than mine.
When you head out on a trip, you should have a strategy for taking the classic types of shots you get while traveling, which are wildlife/action, scenery, and indoors/people. That’s what one of my previous blogs covered, so I’ll assume that you’ve read that and made your choice, at least in your mind. The question now is what to do when you’re out there to get the best shots while still being a traveler and not just a photographer tethered to the gear.
The key principle in good photo-travel is perfectible in the field, perfect in post-processing. In the pre-digital days when you couldn’t see what you shot till you got back and had the pictures processed, most people had to try to get everything right in the camera. That’s where all the discussions about “bracketing”, “composition”, “exposure compensation” and so forth come from. I learned all that in the (many) years I shot with film, which for those who don’t know me means up to the late summer of 2002. It never hurts to learn stuff, and most film techniques are still useful today under some circumstances. However, digital is a new era and if you shoot digital like you shot film you’ll come away with less than you could have obtained by being a digital shooter.
To do that, your goal is to get an image from a scene that can be converted into the perfect picture with a bit of post-processing. It’s not to “take the perfect picture”, but to prepare for it. I’m going to start by explaining what “perfectible” is, and then talk about what to do to fix something that’s out of range.
The first step in being a digital shooter is finding out how to view something called a “histogram”. A histogram is a graph that shows how lighting is distributed across the shot you took, from pure black on the left side to pure white on the right. The shot below shows what a histogram looks like, though the details and exactly how you get it depend on the camera.
You may hear that the “perfect” histogram is a bell curve centered around the middle of the graph. That’s an oversimplification and one I recommend you forget. Instead of looking at what a perfect one might be, learn to understand what your own will tell you.
First, most histograms will have some “main area” where most of the image falls, a bump or whatever on the graph. The position of this bump will generally tell you the overall lighting of your image. If your histogram bump is pushed left you have a dark-ish scene. If it’s pushed right, you’ll have a light-ish one.
You want to watch for spikes in your histogram either on the extreme left or right. A spike on the left, against the left end of the graph, means that you’ve got some dark areas that are totally black and will show no detail. A spike on the right means some areas are pure white and will show no detail. Your goal is not to have either of these things, because you can’t pull details out of somewhere they’ve been totally lost, and part of post-processing is recovering detail where you want it.
Your camera, particularly if you set “matrix” metering, is going to try to give you the best exposure available, but in adventure travel there are a lot of variables to worry about. Exposure is made up of three factors—how much light the lens will admit (lens opening, or aperture, or f-stop are all used to describe this), how long the shutter is open (shutter speed), and how sensitive the camera’s CCD is to light (ISO). If you’re not shooting with a long telephoto lens (over 150mm in 35mm equivalent terms, which factor in your camera’s “crop factor”) then you can probably set everything to AUTO and have a good chance it will all work for you. Point and shoot.
With longer lenses (which means most of mine, and yours too if you want close-ups of critters) you have to worry about the camera-shake and other issues I outline below. The camera might pick too slow a shutter speed and generate a lot of motion blur or shake. For that problem, as I explain below, you have to use “S” or shutter priority and set a minimum shutter speed.
My own approach is to use “M” or manual mode, which lets me set both shutter speed and lens opening, and the camera then picks an ISO setting. To avoid having to set up each shot by diddling with all the settings, what I do is to “set for conditions”. I’ll put the camera up, push the shutter button down half-way (or take a shot if the camera doesn’t show you all the settings when you do the half-push thing). I’ll say, “OK, I like f7.1 most of the time, and for this particular lens and what I think I’m going to shoot, I like 1/500th second for shutter speed.” I see what ISO I get with that combination, and I can either adjust something to do better or let it go. When I take a shot, at first opportunity, I’ll check the histogram to be sure I picked well.
If you have a histogram without the spikes on the left/right ends, you’ve achieved your first goal, which is salvageable exposure. It’s time to move on to the next, which is focus. Nothing is going to redeem a picture where the subject is out of focus. All modern digital cameras will focus automatically, but that doesn’t always work. There are too issues; no focus lock and wrong subject.
“Focus lock” means that the autofocus has locked on a subject. It takes a bit of time for that to happen, and when it doesn’t happen the whole scene is likely to be out of focus. If you look at an image by previewing it after shooting, you can usually tell if you have a whole-scene problem in a glance. Take some time to settle before you shoot to prevent this, or get a camera/lens combination that autofocuses more quickly.
The wrong-subject problem is caused because your camera doesn’t know what you think the subject is. Every camera will have some mechanism either for you to tell it what you’re shooting or for it to tell you what it thinks you are. Usually this is done by having a square or series of squares in your field of view. For some cameras, you put the square(s) on the intended subject and for others squares appear over what the camera is going to focus on.
The biggest wrong-subject problem is what’s often called “front-focus”. There’s some piddling branch or leaf or blade of grass in the picture between subject and camera, and this creates a lovely high-contrast edge that the autofocus locks on. It’s hard to see the problem with a quick glance, so zoom in on your subject to see if something in front of it is really where the camera focused.
The final of my three killer problems is motion blur. You take a picture of a running deer and get a blur. Obviously you can’t fix that in post-processing, so you have to be sure you don’t do it in the first place. That means either shooting subjects that aren’t moving fast, or using a fast shutter speed (short exposure, shown by a big number like “800” or “1000”) to stop the action. To look for motion blur, check the trailing edge of a subject you were shooting (the edge away from the direction of motion) to see if you have a sharp edge there. If not, you have blur.
OK, if these are the three problems, what are the solutions? There are none that are perfect, but there are things you can do to reduce your risk or the impact of the problems.
Exposure problems come either because the camera didn’t read the lighting correctly or because the scene has too much contrast between light and dark areas, what photogeeks call “dynamic range”. The former problem can be addressed by two basic techniques—changing your metering mode or doing exposure compensation. How this is done will depend on your camera, but the basic ideas are common.
Metering mode tells how the camera picks exposure. Most cameras today have what’s called “matrix metering” which means that they read light from all over the scene and try to pick an exposure that doesn’t create those spikes at either end of the histogram. If you have the spikes then metering failed, and you may do better by adjusting. Spot metering means you meter on the specific thing in the center or under the little “focus” box. Center-weighted metering means you also consider nearby parts of the scene. You can try changing metering mode to see if it works for you, but this is a menu item on most cameras so it might take too long.
Exposure compensation means tweaking the exposure from what the camera metered. If you apply positive compensation you’re going to make the scene lighter overall, moving your entire histogram to the right. That’s good if you have a spike at the left end. Negative compensation makes the scene darker overall, or moves your histogram to the left, which is good if you have a spike on the right edge.
The obvious question is what to do if you move the histogram and just create a spike on the other side. That’s the “too-much-dynamic-range” problem. You’re going to lose detail somewhere. You have to decide where to lose it. Another option is to use some high-dynamic-range option. Nikon’s cameras have something called “Active D-Lighting” which tries to compress dynamic range to save highlights and shadows. If your camera supports bracketing you can use that feature to take two or three pictures at different exposures, and you can combine them in your photo editor later on. Bracketing only works with something that’s not moving or is moving very slowly, obviously, or the position of your subject changes between shots.
Be wary of your ISO when you’re diddling exposure. Generally, cameras will generate more “noise” at higher ISO settings, so if you have too fast a shutter speed and/or too small a lens opening, the “right” exposure will require a high ISO. You know when it’s too high when your images take on a kind of grainy look. Sometimes you have no option but to accept it and run noise reduction software, but if possible try to keep your ISO in a “safe” range. I can’t offer much guidance on that because it’s different with each camera, but generally under ISO 800 will work for adventure pictures on decent cameras, and generally anything over ISO 3200 is going to need some noise reduction. Some cameras will provide it, but it’s best to do that in post-processing.
One photo subject that’s particularly frustrating to many travel photographers is scenes that are supposed to be dim. Interiors, sunrise/sunsets, and even some pictures of something lit against a darker background can look stunning but photograph like junk. The camera will often “normalize” the light, assuming you want average luminosity for something. You can use special modes (“Night”) in some cases, or use exposure compensation, but remember that unless your scene generated a histogram with one of those fatal spikes on the left side, you can dim the image in post-processing till it looks the way it should.
If you have a focus problem, the first thing to try to do is refine the way the camera focuses. Many digital cameras have an “Auto” setting where the camera tries to detect the subject. That works great for most scenery shots and people shots, but for wildlife the critter is often small with respect to the rest of the picture so you’ll have to abandon the auto approach in favor of picking a focus area (the center is the most accurate).
If even single-center-point focusing is missing, the subject may be small enough that the camera is picking up something else. The only way to fix that is to try to get the focus point on some part of the actual subject, by focusing on something about the same distance away as the subject (a branch a bird is sitting on, for example) or by manual focusing. Most people will be unable to manual-focus easily without a camera assist like a subject area magnifier, so try the other approach first.
Motion blur problems are probably the worst of my killer three only because a moving subject that causes one has probably moved away from being photographable by the time you’ve tried to reset your shutter speed or something. The moral there is to anticipate motion where you can. If you’re shooting lions and looking for action, don’t go in with a slow shutter speed.
The problem is that most people set their cameras on “auto-everything” and lose the ability to control shutter speed. Rather than do that where you think an action shot is coming, see if you have a “sport mode” or “action mode” you can set. If not, then your best choice is to set the camera for shutter priority and set a shutter speed. Moving subjects will require at least 1/500th, and fast-moving ones up to 1/1250th.
A special case of motion blur is camera shake. Even a stationary object can show motion blur if you move the camera while shooting. Most people do this with telephoto lenses, but almost any camera/lens will show some motion blur below 1/50th second.
Boosting shutter speed gets rid of camera shake too. A rule of thumb is that the minimum shutter speed is equal to the 35mm equivalent focal length of the lens, meaning that if you have a 400mm lens on a camera with a 1.5 focal multiplier, you have a 600mm lens and need a 1/600th second shutter speed.
Some lenses and cameras have image stabilization (Nikon calls it “vibration reduction” or VR) that will improve camera shake problems. A good Nikon VR lens will give you, so the material will say, “three stops”. What the heck does that mean? Well, if your calculated shutter speed based on effective focal length was 1/600th, each “stop” means cutting that in half. That means 1/600th becomes 1/75th of a second (most cameras won’t shoot that so it will be either 1/60th or 1/100th).
The other option is to stabilize the camera by using a tripod, monopod, beanbag, or just holding it on or against something convenient. Tripods work well down into multi-second exposures. Monopods will work perhaps to 1/5th second, and sitting on something will work for shutter speeds down to perhaps 1/10th of a second.
The last point to consider is the most controversial, composition. Even in the early days of digital cameras, photo enthusiasts used to pay a lot of attention to composing their scenes. That was because early cameras had low megapixel resolutions so you couldn’t crop much if you planned to print the image. If you’re looking to view something online, or if your camera has 18 megapixels or more, the best strategy is to shoot wide and crop for composition. Get the picture you want inside the picture you take by zooming out just a bit, then crop to your boundaries.
If you’re going to make a video from your images (as I do) and if your camera won’t shoot still images in 16:9 form factor (mine won’t, at least in Raw), then you’ll have to crop each shot. That means making sure you keep that imaginary 16:9 frame in mind when shooting. Otherwise you’ll be unable to crop your shot for video without losing part of the subject.
My comment on “Raw” formats here is important too. Any adjustments you make on a compressed (JPG) image are going to cause issues compared to the same adjustment on the same image in Raw format. Cropping JPGs heavily is particularly problematic, and as I said in my piece on camera selection, there’s little value in getting a camera with more than about 12 Megapixels if you shoot JPG because you’ll compress away the extra detail.
All of this sounds complicated, but it actually makes things simpler. With practice, you can learn to grab shots quickly so you get good pictures and still have plenty of time to enjoy the scene around you.