Photography Tips

This past fall, after deliberating for about 5 years, I joined our local photography club.  This is a group of over 100 photographers of all levels, from professional gallery represented artists to some who only use phone cameras.  They have weekly classes as well as a guest speaker once a month.  I run our modest sized art guild and have found that monthly meetings and a couple of workshops a year constitutes a lot of work, so I have been very impressed.

I have no plans to make photographic art.  I take photos primarily for 2 reasons.  One is to document important life events, such as travel.  The other is to collect reference material for my paintings.  An occasional photo serves both purposes.

Since diving into the world of digital photography I have tried to learn to use a camera that is much more complicated than my phone (a Canon Rebel- not high end but has the necessary features)   I am beginning to understand some basics that will help my reference photos.  If you are a skilled photographer it's time to stop reading this and patiently await my next post.  😜

Here are a few things that have helped me so far, though I have much to learn.

#1  The moving water problem

I took a photo of a little waterfall using my iPhone a few years ago while on a hike.  I painted this from the reference.  You can click on the image for a larger view.

I liked the light in the painting which I pushed a bit, also the color.  But the waterfall looked weird.  The camera automatically selected a fast shutter speed which froze every droplet of water.  This is not how we see waterfalls.  I studied some examples by other artists in my files and saw that they painted the water fluid and misty, like they really look to us. Here was another case of my being a slave to a photograph.  Recently I reworked the painting to make the water look more fluid.

There are many ways around this problem, e.g. paint it on location or use your memory to avoid painting it just like the photo.  Take a video and use it to refresh your memory.  You can also change the way you take the photo.  I'll get back to the phone in a minute, but my Canon has a mode (Tv on my camera, or shutter priority) that allow one to change the shutter speed (with automatic adjustments of the f stop and ISO).  Here is an example-

In the photo below I chose a shutter speed of 1/1000 second, very fast.  You can see the distinct droplets in the fountain.

Here is the result when set to 1/20 second, much more fluid.  This got the result I wanted and wasn't slow enough to require a tripod.   With a tripod very slow speeds can be used for a variety of interesting effects, though when pushed to the extreme the results might not look natural.

Back to the phone, you can get around this by shooting in "live" mode.  The icon is at the top of the screen in the camera app in an iPhone.  If that is not what you have you can google this.  Older phones might not have this feature.  Once you shoot in "live" you can blend photos of moving water into one image which achieves a similar result.

#2  Paying attention to depth of field (DOF)

"The camera lies" is a common phrase used by artists and photographers alike.  We have two eyes, the camera has one.  When we focus on something in a scene our peripheral vision gives us a lot less information about what surrounds it.  Our eyes also handle high contrast situations much better than a camera can.  DOF is the depth in the scene that will be in sharp focus.  Generally speaking, a large depth of field will keep most everything in focus.  A narrow one will blur things up close, in the distance or both.  Here is an example of a narrow DOF-

For this close up photograph I set my camera mode to Av (aperture priority) and chose an f stop of 5.6 which resulted in a narrow DOF.  This simulates the way our eyes see a focal point or area of interest with less detail elsewhere.  It won't work for a vast landscape where it is best to use a large DOF in order to see what is in the distance.  For appropriate circumstances this is an something to keep in mind.  The camera makes hard and soft edges because of the narrow DOF.  For fun I tried to paint this pretty much as is.

#3  Editing Basics

Back to the issue of high contrast, dark shadows in photos may be completely black with no information.  Bright areas, such as the sky, may look white.  I have talked about this in previous posts.  There are so many ways to edit photos now.  Editing in the phone is getting better all the time and is easy to do.  Editing in Photos on a Mac is very good. Lightroom, Photoshop and Luminar are even better.  Lightening shadows and lowering the highlights may be all that is necessary for a decent reference photo.  See my previous post with an example of this using the editing program in Photos on an iMac.  Taking reference photos

I have learned that shooting in "RAW" increases the editing possiblilites.  This setting in my camera is in the main menu under image quality.  Jpeg files compress data that is no longer retrievable.  In RAW everything is saved.  The down side is that these files take up more space on the camera card and hard disc, but it is easy to switch to RAW just when needed.  I use it when I am shooting in very high contrast situations.  I can then pull more information out of the dark shadows and bright sky when editing.

My apologies to the experienced photographers who hung in here.  This discussion was meant to give information to those less experienced (such as myself) about taking reference photos for paintings.

Thanks for reading!

P.S.-  I thought artists had too many temptations to spend money on equipment.  But the photographers, wow!