Santa Monica Pier Using a Tilt Shift Lens

Click here to see what I’ve discovered so far…

Super Macro of a California Poppy using a Powershot S2

Recently I met Alexander Black, a professional photographer who has dived deeply into the world of super macro photography. Super macro is the ability to focus to 0 distance from the lens. That’s right — it can focus on an object in direct contact with the lens (when I went to the pro camera shop looking for a camera with super macro, they insisted such a thing did not exist).

Super macro opens up some interesting possibilities; if you look at Alexander’s website, you’ll see what I mean — the photos look like abstract art, and combine beautiful forms and color.

Initially we were looking at buying the Canon Powershot SX10, and were tempted (ok I was, Sandra didn’t care) by the addition of 1080p video on the Powershot SX1, but unfortunately neither of these were in stock at our local store. They had an Olympus SP-590, but the Olympus was considerably more expensive than the SX10 and did not have HD video like the SX1, so…

I looked on eBay, and scored a Canon Powershot S2 for around $100, the cheapest solution by far. I figured Sandra and I would have a chance to play with this feature, and if we liked it spend the extra money — or perhaps would discover the 5mp “old tech” was just good enough. Sandra has been playing with this camera all day.

The above photo was my first serious attempt at using this camera, judge the results for yourself. When I get a chance to build a serious gallery, I will. Oh, and other than reducing the size, the above photo has not been altered in any way in Photoshop (no color adjustments at all).

Palm Canyon Oasis at Anza Borrego

Sandra and I packed up our cameras and favorite lenses and headed to Anza Borrego State Park, an immense desert wilderness. There we joined a group of student photographers that combined learning about the natural history of the area with learning about how to take better pictures.

Take a look at my gallery here!

Here are the most important things I learned about photography while there:

• Lighting is the most important ingredient for any photo.
• Always shoot on manual exposure, otherwise you don’t control the lighting.
• The lighting level should be set to maximize the details of the subject of your photo, too dark and too light areas outside of that are less important.
• Every photo should tell a story, this is the basis of composition.
• Make your exposure a little darker to get blue skies, also shoot away from the sun.
• Get up early!
• Control depth-of-field, which often means carrying a tripod…

Digital SLR’s have much larger sensors than their point-and-shoot counterparts, which give them much smaller depth-of-field for a given aperture size (f-stop). Sometimes this is desirable, you can put the focus directly on your subject and blur the foreground and background, like this photo here. But this is not always desirable, when you are taking a landscape photo you often want the entire shot in focus — you need a very large depth-of-field.

To get a very large depth-of-field you need to use a small aperture (a large f-stop) like f16 or f22, which also means there is less light falling on the sensor, so the exposure needs to be longer. And a longer exposure will only work if you take it on a tripod, you just can’t handhold a 1/4 second exposure even if you have image stabilization. So you need a tripod.

This is also true for macro photography, I have the wonderful Canon 180mm f3.5 Macro lens, but taking a photograph of a nearby small object at f3.5 will result in a razor-thin depth-of-field: if you are shooting a photo of a bee, only part of its head will be in focus, and the rest blurred. So, again, you need a very stable platform for your camera — a tripod. Unfortunately that won’t stop the bee from moving, so for insects I do bump the ISO up as much as I can even in bright light so I can narrow the aperture (increase the f-stop) and maintain shutter speed.

So: serious photographers use manual exposure, and own a good tripod.