10 secrets of great summer photography
GET SET FOR SUN! CHRIS GEORGE REVEALS 10 OF HIS FAVOURITE PHOTO TIPS FOR GETTING GREAT SHOTS DURING THE LONGEST DAYS OF THE YEAR – AT HOME OR ABROAD.
SUMMER MAY SEEM like the best season for photography... but few pros would agree with this, even if they did not agree on which particular season was better. While the warmer weather and sunlight are looked forward to by people who live in temperate climates – for photographers the summer months are scorned upon because of the harsh overhead lighting, the ridiculously early dawns or the overpowering green of the vegetation. Us photographers can be a miserable bunch, can’t we?
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
But there are plenty of reasons why the camera enthusiast should be happy that summer is here – the first of which must be the long hours of daylight. You can shoot dramatic landscapes and cityscapes in the heart of winter – but those moments where you luck out with the light are hard to come by; and some days everything is just grey, before turning to darkness midway through the afternoon. The longer the day, the more chance you have of great lighting conditions – whatever the weather – stacking the odds in favour of your nailing a worldie of a shot.
The second reason is that every season is unique, and particularly so when it comes to matters of nature. Summer brings with her a cornucopia of flowers that we don’t see at any time of the year, making this the most colourful time of the year in the garden. And the multitude of multicoloured blooms also brings out butterflies, bees, and migratory birds. For the nature photographer, summer is therefore one of the busiest times in the calendar.
Third, the summer brings a number of seasonal outdoor events – rock festivals, cricket, country fairs and much more – each offering great opportunities for the photographer. Warmer weather signals the time for outdoor activities big and small. It is the best time of year for mountain treks or a stroll in the country – with your camera in your backpack, of course.
Last but not least, for many of us summer is the time for a well-earned holiday – a chance to unwind, rest, and discover new places. And for us photographers, it is this time of work or study that gives us time to really engage with our photography, to try out new techniques, and be at one with our camera.
Here on the following pages are ten techniques or mantras that are designed to help anyone get the most out of their picture-taking over the summer months.
1 Compress the colour Use your telephoto lens to squeeze the maximum amount of colour into the frame.
Colour is the essence of summer, and is therefore a key theme to your images at home or abroad. The trick is essentially a simple one: you use the longest telephoto setting that you have available in your kit bag to squeeze colourful objects into one image.
It’s a technique that works particularly well in a cottage garden – letting you see the layers of colour that the flowers provide in one frame, without having to show the lawns, paths and other distractions that a wide-angle lens would force you to include. Similarly, with a field of poppies this perspective ensures that the large gaps between blooms are not made apparent. When travelling, it proves a great technique for use in markets – compressing the exotic piles of fruit or pottery into a colourful composition.
PICK YOUR SPOT
You need to ensure that you focus on the right point in your frame, however. With a telephoto, you will not get everything in focus, so don’t even try to maximise sharpness with a small aperture. Let parts of the image blur out. But make sure that you pick the best-looking flower in the field as the one that’s in focus: this will be the one thing that is spotlit by this technique.
2 Use the shadows Sometimes the best pictures are lurking in the shadows, particularly on a sunny day!
The sun rises higher in the sky during summer than in the rest of the year – and this can be a real problem for photographers. Once the sun has risen more than 45° above the horizon, you end up with top-lighting: everything is lit from above, and you don’t have the soft shadows that help to show the three-dimensional shape and texture of a scene. Cloud cover can help, diffusing the sun to create more of a softbox effect – but on a blue-sky day, much of the day can be written off for architectural or landscape photography.
The solution is to head to the shade. Using the shadows cast by buildings you get a soft, even illumination – which is created by light reflecting off walls, roads or the sky itself. These shadowlands are perfect for portrait photography. Bright sunlight creates unsightly shadows on people’s faces, and forces subjects to scrunch up their eyes in an unflattering way.
The softer lighting found in the shadows on a sunny day is perfect for pictures of the locals or your family – and keeps your camera clicking through the harsh hours of the middle of the day.
3 Make a plan for sunset Whether you’re on holiday or on a day out, plan to be in the perfect place come sunset.
The best light in summer is undoubtedly at the beginning or the end of the day. Dawn during the height of summer can be far too early for most of us – particularly when you’re on holiday. So plan where you will be during the golden hours of sunset – where the lower angle of the light creates better modelling of buildings and the landscape, and the colours get warmer.
There is a popular myth that the sun sets in the west. But it’s not just the time of sunset that varies throughout the year: the exact point that the sun falls below the horizon also changes by as much as 90 degrees. There are some great apps nowadays that can help you accurately pinpoint where the sun will be for any place in the world (such as the excellent LightTrac, www.
lighttracapp.com). But if you don’t want to be a slave to your smartphone on vacation, just make a note where and when sunset is on your first day, then plan to be in the right place ready.
Choose a spot with a view that maximises the potential of a great sunset – and if there is a taverna nearby, so much the better!
Ensure that you are close to your subject so that the flash effect can actually be seen.
4 Flip the flash A flashgun is not just for after dark: it can also be your best friend when the sun is shining.
Flash has an amazing ability to change the look of your images – but particularly so during daylight hours. On a cloudy day, fill-in flash increases contrast and boosts colour, helping to make subjects stand out from drab grey surroundings. On a bright day, a flash allows you cut through the shadows – on a person’s face, for example – essentially reducing the contrast of the image to give a much more pleasing result, and adding a sparkling white catchlight to their eyes.
A flashgun is not as powerful as the sun, so ensure that you are close to your subject so that the flash effect can actually be seen – don’t stand more than a pace or two away, and use a wide lens if you need to.
A camera’s built-in pop-up flash is more than adequate of doing this trick – but a separate flashgun with more maximum power will give you more creative control. By varying the shutter speed, ISO, flash power and aperture, you also alter the relative brightness of the backdrop against the flashlit foreground, for dramatic ‘strobist’ effects.
5 Go high and low Hunt out ways to get high and low, so you return from your travels with fresh perspectives.
It is all too tempting to shoot all of your images from head height: after all, this is how we all usually see the world. But you will get fresher images, and add variety to your portfolio of pictures, if you keep trying to find ways of getting your camera higher or lower wherever you go.
Lie down on the ground to photograph that busker in the street, or climb up that hilltop to give yourself a bird’s eye view of the town. As they say with so many things in life, you will get more out the more effort you put in – even when you are on holiday!
Changing the camera height, even by a relatively small amount, can make dramatic changes to the backdrop. The busker is framed against a blue sky with a worm’s eye view, or against the pavement if you can find a wall to stand on – and both are better than having other tourists in the shot.
For city architecture, finding a multistorey car park or rooftop terrace you can shoot from means you are not forced to look up at cathedrals and skyscrapers – and you’ll minimise converging verticals.
6 Keep backdrops clean A wide aperture to big up the bokeh is not enough if you want to be rid of all distractions.
Keep an eye on what is going on in the background. It is easy to concentrate on the subject of your shot, and not realise that there is something behind it that is ruining what you thought was a perfectly composed scene. With their longer-than-ever focal lengths and super-wide maximum apertures, modern lenses have helped make blurred ‘bokeh’ backgrounds very popular with photographers – but limiting depth of field is not always enough. A blurred tourist wearing a purple cagoule will still provide a nasty background distraction, even if you use f/1.4 with your beautiful 85mm prime; and that branch sticking out of the kingfisher’s head will haunt you in your otherwise perfect shot, even if you did shoot it wide-open with the big end of a 150-600mm zoom.
With a DSLR the eyepiece doesn’t preview the blur for you, so you need to compose in Live View, or shoot an image and check it on-screen. With CSCs, you get a more accurate viewfinder preview. But either way, scour the background carefully, and adjust your camera position if you need to ensure the backdrop is clean: a slight change in camera angle is often all you need.
7 The witching hour Pick your moment when you shoot city lights: the best time is not in the middle of the night.
Cities take on a new identity after dark. And even if the weather has not been kind during the daylight hours, there is always the promise of great images during your evening excursions – particularly if you have packed your tripod. But don’t leave your night photography too late. The best time to shoot floodlit buildings and nightscapes is soon after dark, rather than in the dead of night. What you want to achieve is getting some colour in the sky, rather than ending with a completely black backdrop – and that’s a matter of timing.
In order to ensure that the sky is not too bright and that you can see the lights, you do need to wait until after sunset, of course. But what you are waiting for is the perfect time, sometime between civic and nautical twilight, when the sky will still record as blue in your images and create a coloured backdrop to the lights. This happens sooner the nearer you are to the equator, and the nearer you are to the winter solstice. The sky often looks black to the eye even if it doesn’t in the camera’s long exposure, so you need to take images to check you have the perfect shade of blue.
8 Pack a polariser A polarising filter is not just for water and windows: it’s the perfect way to boost colours.
If there is one accessory you should take out with you in the summer, it has be a polarising filter. It might not be the most obvious choice, but it’s the secret weapon that can really give your shots the real edge at this time of year. Unlike a tripod, a polariser is easy to pack, so you can find room for it in any camera bag.
It is best-known for helping you remove reflections from windows or stretches of water – a particularly useful trick in the town or country in bright conditions. But it’s the ability of a polarising filter to saturate colour that makes it particularly useful when you are out and about during the summer. Paintwork, stone walls and foliage all reflect clouds and neighbouring structures – but with a polariser you can eliminate this unseen haze, creating images with greater saturation. There is also the polariser’s ability to strengthen the blue of a summer sky, and accentuate the shape of clouds. Just remember that the filter works better in some directions than others (anywhere along an arc 90 degrees from the sun), and that the effect is variable, from subtle to strong. Simply turn the front element of the filter until you get the degree of saturation you want.
9 Into the light Want to test your photo skills, and gamble big? Go against the grain: shoot into the light.
Shooting into the sun creates some of the most dramatic shots of summer. The skill is in dealing with exposure in these backlit scenes. With sunsets, the answer to wait until the sun is as near the horizon as possible, where its light travels through more of the earth’s atmosphere, creating a softer, lower-contrast scene.
An alternative is to go for a silhouette. Forget about trying to get the exposure right for the subject: instead, set the exposure so that the sky is correctly exposed, and the subject becomes a bold black outline. The secret here is to choose your angle so the subject is still recognisable – a portrait shot in profile tends to work better than one shot face-on.
With shots taken nearer the middle of the day, shooting into the sun can create a scene that seems to have too high a contrast to be captured successfully with one exposure. A clever trick here is to take a high-key approach and let areas of the the image burn out, so that they have no detail. This bright, overexposed approach may seem to break all the rules – but it conveys the warmth and brightness of a summer’s day or a hot climate.
10 After the storm Learn to look at rain as the promise of great lighting conditions to come.
Sunny days define summer, but rain at this time of year shouldn’t dampen the photographer’s spirit. In fact, a good downpour can be a very welcome thing for a number of reasons. Rain rarely lasts all day due to the long daylight hours – and it is the conditions that occur just after the shower that you are waiting for. (For that reason, always take your camera, no matter how unpromising the conditions seem.)
For shots of landscapes and cityscapes, the rain washes out dust particles from the atmosphere – and without these particles, you get less haze and can see further, making this the perfect time to shoot panoramas; you will be able to see clearly for miles.
Watch out too for the dramatic lighting effects you get straight after a summer storm. When the sun comes out, it kisses the scene with golden rays, but the dark clouds in the distance create a grey background, helping to accentuate the colours of the scene. With practice, you can anticipate this happening, and ensure you are in the right place when the clouds break, with the sun over your shoulder.