11/15/07

I can put a polarising filter on, to combat glare -- a common problem -- and to beef up colours on drab, low contrast days.  Then there's the problem of matching the exposure of the sky to the land -- note all the early shots with blown-out white skies!  The downside of the polariser and the neutral grad is that they both cost light, which increases the shutter time -- a real problem when shooting from inside a rocking boat.  A tripod is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.  So, new for 2005 was a 28-135 mm IS (image-stabilisation) lens, which effectively buys back the 2 stops lost to the filters.  I liked the results I was getting and for 2006 replaced my Sigma 70-300 mm with the then new Canon 70-300 mm IS, which has 3 stops of steadiness!  (The newest generation of IS lenses add 4 stops of steadiness!)  The addition of a true wide-angle lens, a Sigma 10-20 mm, in 2006, opened up new opportunities, and a 100 mm macro allowed for close-ups.

After a period with a neutral grad filter to balance up sky and land, I switched to doing a double conversion of the RAW file.  Process it once for sky, then once more for land, then merge the 2 in Photoshop.  Much less hassle than fiddling about with ND grads in the boat.  About 50% of the shots in 2007 will have been done with double RAW conversions.  Spot the joins?

The biggest single advantage of digital is the number of shots you can take for free.  If you need one good one, don't take one shot.  Take 100 and pick the best.  It is guaranteed to be a shot in a hundred.  After 3 years of flawless use the Canon has racked up over 17,000 shutter cycles.  A bit of a change from one spool of 24 frames per year!

The oldest shots on the club outings page were the first tentative ones with the old Kodak.  Hopefully, you will see an improvement with the later attempts.  My own personal demon remains the amount of sharpness I put on.  All digital images are recorded a bit on the soft side - a result of the way the image is captured.  You can improve the look by various ways, and over the past 5 years I must have tried them all.  The best I have come across so far is a plug-in called Power Retouche.  The main problem is how much to add, so the image looks crisp, but doesn't look un-natural.  I think this is probably the area I have erred in the most.  What looks good printed at 300 pixels per inch may not look so good on a monitor at 72 pixels per inch.  What looks good on one monitor may not look so good on another.  If I had the time to spare, I think I would go back and re-do everything before about mid-2005 to reduce the amount of sharpening.  Oh well, it's all part of the learning curve.  Feel free to give me feedback if you think I am still over-sharpening.  I will gladly cut it back a bit more.

The other thing that has changed with time is the size and quality of the JPEG you can present.  In the early days, put anything more than a couple of 30 KB images on a page and you got an earful from people about how it took them 5 minutes to download it.  Well, you don't get much in terms of dimensions and file compression for 30 KB.  Now that a decent proportion of people have a nice big monitor and nice fast broadband, I think I can get away with putting 4 or 5 images in the 100 KB class in each report.  That gives a lot more scope for presenting something worthwhile.

For anyone who is new to digital photography and is struggling to make files small enough to send as email, here's a bit of advice.

The other bit of advice I can't help but feel compelled to dish out is this...  If you are taking a photograph of someone holding up a fish: GET A SMILE ON THEIR FACE!!!

About 9 out of every 10 photographs I see that feature an angler holding up a fish are spoiled by the fact that the angler looks like he has lost a tenner and found a pound.  Doesn't matter how good a fish it is.  If the angler looks like he's just been given terrible news, you can't focus on the fish.  Just say to them, "SMILE!" -- even if it is forced, it will still be a thousand times better than a soor coupon.  It's not the angler's fault.  That's how folk pose until someone says, "Smile!" to them.  As the photographer, that's your job.

OK, while I am off on one, here are another couple of tips I have picked up...

Go back to the soor coupon photo for a minute.  See those 2 rectangles of wasted space down either side?  Get rid of those by turning the camera 90 degrees onto its side and taking shots like this one in 'portrait' mode.  That's why it's called portrait.  Before you take any shot, you need to choose the best orientation of the camera to fill the viewfinder with the subject.  If it's taller and thinner than it is shorter and fatter, turn the camera 90 degrees.  And I bet it's a long time since anyone called Stevie tall and thin!

Having turned the camera on its side, you'll find that you can then get closer to your subject, so eliminating the dead space and filling the frame with your subject.  Some famous photographer once said their top tip was, "Get in close.  And when you have got in really close... get in closer."  Or something like that.  Anyway, it was good advice.  Compositions that describe a letter 'L' (either right or wrong way round) are naturally easy on the eye, and 'angler with fish' is a good one to arrange into that shape.

On the wider issues of angling photography,  I have come to appreciate the shortcomings of trying to do it all from a boat.  For a start, forget about all the fancy effects you can achieve with slow shutter speeds.  They are right out, save for the odd accidental success.  Then there's composition.  Two of the keys to good composition are the placing of foreground interest, and the use of leading diagonals to lead the eye into the frame and to give a perspective, helping to create a 3-D effect.  Both bloody difficult to achieve when all you have to fill the bottom half of your frame is water.  Uniform, ripply water!  However it is challenging.