HDR photography has been around for a while and continues to be a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ type of thing.

I am not one of those people who avoid HDR like the plague and, at best, I have dabbled around with multiple exposure images.  I do enjoy playing around with it and can most definitely admire the skill of photographers who create quality HDR photographs but is there not an argument for non HDR images?

What if we think of it this way.

An HDR image is made up of various exposures in order to create an image that closer resembles what we see with our eyes.  The reason for this is that your digital cameras sensor cannot see the same range of light that your eyes can.  In other words, by  taking multiple exposures you are trying to ‘fix’ the camera’s shortcoming in creating images that mimic what we see.

Now, instead of arguing whether HDR is an easy way to cheat the camera’s inabilities or a lazy way of photography let’s rather take another approach.

Why not embrace the camera’s dynamic range.  Yeah, use the camera’s inability to capture the entire spectrum from dark to light.

Check this out.  The photograph of a lion is an HDR image.

I created three differently exposed images from the original RAW file and blended them to create on high dynamic range image.  Looks realistic enough doesn’t it?  Another benefit is that the dappled shade is a lot less distracting when compared to the original image.

No problem so far but think about this.  Even though I did a very quick HDR composite I spent a lot more time on the computer creating the picture than I did metering, composing the image and clicking the shutter.  More PC time than actual camera time.  Yeah yeah I know.  It’s a necessary evil but do you agree with that?

Now coming back to embracing your camera’s limited dynamic range.  Compared to the above HDR image, what are your thoughts on the following photograph?

This is the photograph I was hoping to get when we saw the lion in Madikwe.  By metering and manually exposing for the highlights in the frame, in this case the lion’s nose, I ended up deliberately underexposing the darks in the frame rendering it as almost pure black leaving a dramatic and moody image.

Better than the HDR version?  Guess it depends on who you ask but I feel it is still a good image.

The important thing here is that there was minimal post processing done to this image.  No blending of exposures.  No S-curve adjustments.  It’s just a photograph.  Plain and simple.

If you know your camera it is not difficult to create dramatic exposures.  The difficult thing is to ‘see’ the subtleties of light which will translate to dramatically exposed images.  A shaft of light or dappled shade does not have to mean bad images.  Think about the light, expose correctly and you will find images everywhere!

There are arguments for and against HDR but whatever side of the fence you sit do not forget the basics.  Don’t forget what you can do with your camera.  Don’t forget photography.

What are your thoughts?

Gerry

This last weekend has been rather quiet from a wildlife photography point of view.

Even though we saw a few lions, elephants and rhino there was never a moment where I felt that ‘I need to grab my camera NOW’.  All the subjects we sat watching, or followed around waiting for photo opportunities, just did not seem to work out.  The light was wrong, the composition did not work or the inspiration of the moment was lacking.  Every now and then there were flashes of a visual moments but then it was gone again.  It is during times like this that you have to think and shoot slightly out of the box.

We were on our way to go and view and photograph some lions on a wildebeest kill when we stopped almost underneath a couple of White Backed Vultures waiting there turn.  It was about 17h00 in the afternoon and the entire sky was covered with a thick blanket of white cloud.  This normally makes bird photography a no go as the background just blows the image away completely.  With not having  had a lot of good photo ops I thought I might as well take a few moments to photograph the two avian scavengers.

My camera is normally on matrix metering, which means the camera averages out the various tones of the entire scene to calculate the exposure, but in this situation it would not have worked.  It would have resulted in an image in which the white background was rendered as a light grey color and the birds would probably have been closer to a black silhouette.  I quickly changed to spot metering which means I told the camera to use the middle 2% of the frame, in this case I aimed at the vulture on the right, to calculate the exposure.  This worked well as the two vultures was exposed perfectly even though the sky is blown out slightly; a necessary compromise for this kind of image.

Metering, and exposing your images correctly, is one of the things that can lift your wildlife photography to the next level and it is definitely something worth exploring when you next head out into the field.   If you find yourself in the position where you have a stationary subject try shooting it using the three different metering modes to see the results for yourself.  Yeah, you can do all kinds of touch ups in Photoshop but that is not the point.  The point is to try and get it right in the camera and then you we can start looking at exposure compensation but that is a story for a different post.

I have a hectic few days ahead so the posts might be shorter than usual but will make up for that next week when the world stops spinning around more than once a day.

More soon and remember to check your exposure!

Gerry

To take good wildlife photographs you have to have a lens big enough to scare little children!  ;)

You see, this weekend I decided to shoot exclusively with my Nikon D300 and a Nikon 80-200 f/2.8.  Limiting yourself to one lens is not only a great way to start thinking creatively about your images, rather than only the technical and gear related issues, but it also highlighted the importance of how a lens can affect the look and feel of an image.

The image on the right, of one of the Kgala males in Madikwe,  was shot at a focal length of 200mm and an aperture of f/2.8.  Pretty standard lion image but let’s just look a little further.  Too many people will not even have ‘wasted their time’ in taking their camera out the bag to shoot an image like this because the background will be blown out and this will make for a horrible image.

The reality is this…

Quite often, and especially in summer,  you will find big cats like this lazing in the shadows to try and get away from the scorching afternoon sun.  This will almost always lead to the background areas, or at least some part of it, to be burnt out as the yellow grasses catch the bright African light.  So do you take the picture or not?

Absolutely!  If you know your camera all you need to do is to switch over to spot metering, even centre weighted metering might work, and meter off the area between the lions eyes.  This will then tell the camera to expose the image correctly based on the tawny color of the lion in the shade.  That’s the point isn’t it?  To make sure you present a well exposed, sharp image of your subject?

Yes, the background might be burnt out in ares but this might not be a bad thing.  Wait… hear me out.  In a light image your eyes will always be drawn to the dar areas and vice versa.  In this specific image, with quite a bright area in the top of the frame, your eyes are automatically drawn to the slightly darker areas which is the lions nose, bottom of the mane and tip of the tail.  Looking at the image don’t you find your gaze jumping between these three points?  That’s why you need to think about your image before and meter correctly.  It should not just be ‘just-another-camera-setting-I-don’t-understand-completely-so-won’t-bother-about-it-too-much’ situations.  It makes a difference so use it!

If the highlight are to burnt out for your liking you can always use the correction brush in Lightroom to recover just a touch of the detail in the areas to give it a little bit more life.  Did not need to do to in this image but at least the option is there!

I seemed to have digressed.  It happens.  Back to the lens.  Do you know how your choice of lens affects your images?  I am not referring to how far you can zoom in but rather to the compression effect and how a fast lens, such as f2.8, will affect the image.  Compression refers to how a zoom lens bring all the parts of an image together.  If you shoot an image of a lion with a big tree in the background, a telephoto lens will pull those two subject closer together, rendering an image that show the lion closer to the tree than it really is and thereby keeping you visual story tight.  On the other hand, a wide angle lens will push the various aspects further apart creating depth in an image.  There is no right or wrong but if you want to take your photography to the next level you need to play with various lenses so that you can ‘see’ the type of image that lens will render even before you click the shutter.  Hey, even the playing around part is fun and you will learn a lot.  Will be looking at this in a bit more details in future posts.  Speaking of lenses, during the weekend I also had a chance to play with a Canon 7D with a 200mm f2 lens.  All I can say is WOW!!  A kid in a candy store has nothing on me!!   More on that later!

Aperture is another important aspect to keep in mind both when choosing a lens and when shooting wildlife.  Yes, a fast lens, such as the f/2 mentioned above, will be able to ‘eat’ light when other lenses start struggling but it goes way further than that.  How will an image shot at f/2 differ from a image shot at f/11?  The short answer is – completely!  The way the background gets rendered at the various aperture settings is huge and the look and feel of the resulting images is also quite dramatic and something I will be looking at in a bit more details when I take a few days off from the 18 December.  Also looking forward to sitting back, having a drink and working through a lot of the images I have not had a time to look through and process.   Time for myself… hmmm!

Have a whole lot of different topics I want to write about in the coming weeks and into the New Year so if you have any suggestions or requests let me know.  I also have some fantastic guest bloggers coming up during the next few months so stay tuned.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Gerry

Whether people who are viewing your work know anything about photography or not, exposure is important.

It is up to you as the photographer to make sure you produce correctly exposed images time after time and not just shoot and hope for the best.  This is probably one of the more difficult for someone just beginning in photography to understand and get a compete grasp on.  This is where metering comes in.

Keeping it basic – metering refers to the process whereby the built in light meter in a camera determines, based on the amount of light reflecting off your subject, how to expose the image.  This is all fine in a world where all photographic subjects reflects the same amount of light but this is not quite the case.  Different surfaces reflect light in different ways and most cameras will try and even out the various degree of lighting in order to deliver an ‘average’ exposure.  This might not be such a bad thing if you have an even spread of objects, dark to light, in your frame.  It will however lead to unexpected and disappointing results if you are faced with an image which is heavily occupied by purely light or dark images.

Most DSLR cameras have various metering modes which allows you, as the photographer, to guide the camera as to how the image should be exposed.

The three main metering options are:

• Matrix Metering Mode(Nikon) or Evaluative Metering Mode (Canon)
• Centre-Weighted Metering Mode
• Spot Metering Mode(Nikon) or Partial Metering Mode (Canon)

Each of the above metering options functions by assigning a weighting to different regions of your frame where the areas with higher weight is considered more reliable and will then play a more important role in the final exposure of your image.

Matrix Metering

This type of metering tells the camera to average the exposure over almost the entire viewfinder frame.  It is recommended by most camera manufacturers for all round photography and probably what most beginners will use when starting out.

The image on the right shows the coverage area in black that will get used during Matrix or Evaluative Metering.

For wildlife and nature photography this is the kind of metering you will probably use for all round shooting until you are faced with a scene where you have a large contrast of textures and colours in your frame.  At this point you will have to decide what the focal point of your image is going to be and expose for that specific area of the image.

You must however be aware that this type of metering can be quite unpredictable as the camera’s built in light meter will do all the necessary calculations in order to produce the ‘correct’ exposure.  If you want more control and more predictable outcomes you should start working with centre-weighted metering.

Centre-Weighted Metering

During this type of metering the whole frame gets used by the camera to determine perfect exposure but preference is given to the centre of the frame – as seen on the right.

Initially this type of metering, along with Spot Metering, might be more difficult to use but it will give the photographer a lot more control over the exposure of the image.  This kind of metering is ideal for close up portraits of animals and bird photography as the centre area, where your focal point will be, will be the area which the camera uses to determine the exposure for the image.

For example, if you are trying to photography a bird with strong back lighting your camera will, if you are using matrix metering, average out the scene and underexpose the entire image to compensate for the bright background.  This will result in your focal area, the bird, being underexposed and rendered as a silhouette.  By using centre-weighted metering you can make sure your focal areas is exposed correctly.

Spot Metering

During this type of metering the camera takes a very small area, around 2% of the entire frame, and uses this area to calculate exposure.

This type of metering takes centre-weighted metering a little further in that the photographer can be a lot more specific with which critical areas need to be used by the camera when exposing the image.  Both centre-weighted and spot metering can be extremely useful when you are trying to create interesting exposures, when the you are faced with unusual ambient light and and when you shoot sunset and sunrise landscapes.

You must remember that cameras, however ‘clever’ they are becoming, still cannot match the human eye and creative insight the photographer brings to the art of photography.  When you, as the photographer, overrides the camera’s determined exposure you can use the exposure compensation on the camera to alter the exposure to suit your desired outcome.  As you progress with your own photography this is something you will feel more and more comfortable with.

I personally always keep my camera set to centre-weighted metering as this gives me the freedom to guide the camera toward exposing for my focal point.  During the last few minutes of sun light, when the light is changing all the time I might switch to matrix metering but this will of course be determined by what the subject is and what exactly I am trying to do with the image.

Example 1 – Matrix Metering

Nikon D300, Sigma 28-200 @ 100mm, 1/400, f/5.6, ISO 400, Matrix Metering

In the above example I was flat on the floor at the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens as I was taking pictures of Ziggy, one of my two new 12 week old Boston Terrier puppies.

After a few trial runs I was happy to go with matrix metering as I saw that by filling the frame with Ziggy and the grass there were no excessively dark or light areas in the scene and that the camera would probably get close to what I would consider good exposure for this shot.  Overall the entire frame is well exposed except for the very tiny area on the front left foot.  This is however not sufficient to detract from the scene and the camera’s matrix mode did a pretty good job on this one.

Example 2 – Centre-Weighted Metering

Nikon D300, Sigma 28-200 @ 150mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO 400, Centre-Weighted Metering

The above image of my sister’s new 4 month old bulldog was taken using centre-weighted metering.  As ‘Seun’ was running the same path all the time, chasing other dogs, I new more or less where he would be passing.

The problem was that the trees in the background were not uniform and every couple of meters the trees would break to leave a gap where the strong late afternoon light made for a very difficult exposure problem as I panned along with his movement and the ever changing background light.

I was lucky that the background behind the trees ended up begin quite small due to where I took the shot but better safe than sorry and by using centre-weighted metering I was able to make sure that ‘Seun’ was properly exposed as he was the obvious focal point of the image.  I guess that is the end of a very basic look at metering and how you could use it when planning the exposure of your images.  If you have any thoughts, comments or questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

As you can see from the above examples I am currently in Johannesburg and have been spending quite a bit of time with a different kind of wildlife.  Adele and I are currently on leave and will be taking our two new boys, Ziggy and Rocky to the Vaal River for a few days worth of rest and relaxation.  Looking forward to kicking back and perhaps getting a few nice river sunsets and sunrises.

Will be back later this week with the Weekly High Five which should prove to be a difficult one to choose as there have bene more than a hundrednew images uploaded during the last few days.  Make sure to visit the Photo-Africa Stock Library to view some great African Wildlife & Nature image.

As always I look forward to hearing from you.

Until next time.

Gerry