Failure

I wrote this originally for a workshop I was teaching, and have shared it on a message board since then, and now here.

But when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don’t know if I can teach any of it. I don’t even know if I can do any of it half the time. It’s so much about failure, it’s so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you’re endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you. – Larry Sultan

It’s really easy to take a competent photograph. Buy a digital SLR, shoot a lot, get people to tell you how you are messing up and in a year, maybe 2, you’ll be producing pictures that are in focus and properly exposed, your skin tones will be decent and your images will follow basic rules of composition.

It’s really hard to take a good photograph.

It’s rather like writing. Learning to write a complete sentence that follows standard grammar is easy. Even learning basic rhetorical forms is easy, though it takes a bit longer. But being a writer, having a voice, saying something interesting and saying it well, that’s trickier. There are a lot of variations on My High School Vampire Lover for every Charlotte’s Web.

So what do you do, once you can turn out 30+ tidily conventional images from every shoot? How do you get from “here’s your kid, in focus, looking at the camera, and look how shiny her eyes are” to an image that moves not only people related to the subject but strangers as well?

You fail.

You push yourself out of your comfort zone over and over again and screw it up so badly you want to kick yourself. You mangle it. You make really, really awful images. You back up. You get closer. You copy people whose work you like in order to deconstruct what they are doing that speaks to you and then see if you can duplicate that element in your own pictures. You get in your head and ask what you are trying to say anyway. You get out of your head and shoot every day whether you are inspired or not. You flail around like an idiot. You try new stuff. You fail. Repeatedly. And then you don’t, at least a little. You fail less. And then a little less.

What can I say?

The Garage Light Exercise: A Photographic Exercise in Seeing the Light

Do you have a garage that has enough open space in it you can stand a person in it? If so, this will be easy. If not, less so because you have to track down a garage like place. Take your subject, meter, and stand them first with their face parallel to the garage door and shoot. Then turn them about 10 degrees. Follow them – the subject should be looking right at you. As you rotate them so their angle with respect to the door changes YOU move so you are still shooting them straight on. Shoot again. Repeat until they are at a 90 degree angle to the door and the side of their face is towards the door. Do a clean B&W edit of all the images, line them up and look at them together. When you look at the series you’ll see how as you turn the person their features become more or less defined by the way the light falls across their face.

Understanding Depth of Field | Taking Better Snapshots

Part 2 in a totally random series on taking better snapshots. Depth of field (DOF) is the term that describes how much of your image is in focus. This explains how it works and then runs you through a few exercises that will help you get the understanding out of your head and into your hands.

Imagine a pane of glass that is parallel to your lens. Everything inside that pane is in focus. Everything outside it is not.

Now, how thick that pane of glass, the focal plane, is depends on three factors:

1) How far away you are from your subject. The closer you are, the thinner the “glass”.
2) Your focal length. The longer your lens, the thinner the “glass”.
3) The aperture setting. The smaller the number, the thinner the “glass”.

People ask a lot “what aperture should I use for a group of 5″ or “a group of 12″. There IS no magic number. You need to get them all inside that focal plane (assuming you want them all to be in focus). You can do that by making the focal plane deeper by backing up, using a long lens or closing down your aperture. You can also do that by making them all stand in a straight line.

So, for this exercise you are going to need (sorry) about 5 volunteers. If you can’t round up people (which is, I admit, a lot to ask of people. “Come stand outside so I can take out of focus pictures of you…”) use chairs, bushes, potted plants, etc. You’ll need to be able to move them around a bit.

Use the same lens for every shot. This means we can’t change one variable, only how close you are and your aperture. Take the following shots and post with settings. SOME OF THEM WILL HAVE PEOPLE OUT OF FOCUS. You’re going to need to be outside to be able to shut your aperture way down; don’t forget to adjust your ISO/shutter speed as necessary for correct exposure. Don’t drop your shutter below 1/200 so we can completely eliminate any shake from the final results.

Now, if you want to be REALLY THOROUGH do each of the following 5 feet, 10 feet and 15 feet away from your subjects.

1. Line them up in a straight line, Stand parallel to that line.
a. Take a shot at f/1.8
b. Take a shot at f/4.0
c. Take a shot at f/8.0

2. Line them up in a loose grouping with 2-3 feet from front to back.
a. Take a shot at f/1.8
b. Take a shot at f/4.0
c. Take a shot at f/8.0

3. Group them in a classical portraiture “triangle”
a. Take a shot at f/1.8
b. Take a shot at f/4.0
c. Take a shot at f/8.0

4. Line them up parallel again and this time stand at the head of the line. Put your focal point on the person closest to you.

a. Take a shot at f/1.8
b. Take a shot at f/4.0
c. Take a shot at f/8.0

What this set up does…

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Tutorial copyright Stacie Turner.

Taking Better Snapshots

OK, so you bought the DSLR. It’s big. But you are still getting the underexposed pictures at the beach where your kid looks like she’s standing in a deep dark shadow while the ocean looks bright and beautiful behind her. This is starting to annoy you. What to do?

Taking Better Snapshots:  Part 1:  Learn to Shoot in Manual

Part 1: Take the camera off auto, put it in manual and learn to read the in-camera meter (or buy a separate meter or get very very good at eyeballing it).   Otherwise, you have a very expensive point and shoot.

When you look in the view finder you’ll see a grid thus:

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

The one in the middle is “correct” exposure, but for close ups of pale skin you actually want the slider a bit towards overexposure because some people are just whiter than the percentage of grey that the camera uses to determine “right”.

Part 2: Once you are in Manual get a stuffed animal or an apple or anything less mobile and more patient than a child and start taking lots of pictures, changing the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed settings for each one to see how the triangle of exposure changes the final picture.

ISO is how fast the film will record the picture. The higher the number, the faster the film. The lower the number, the crisper the picture will look.

F-stop is how wide your aperture is.  The wider the aperture, the smaller the number.  f/1.8 is a wider aperture than f/5.6.  The wider the aperture the more light will be let in, the shallower the in focus area will be, and the more the background will be out of focus.  It’s hard to nail your focus with anything smaller than 4.0 until you practice rather a lot.

Shutter speed is how long the camera lets in light. My hand is too shaky to handle anything below 1/125 th of a second.  The loose rule of thumb is take the size of your lens (say, 50mm), double it (to 100) and make sure your shutter speed has that number as the lowest denominator (1/100).

Part 3: Practice with your kids on an easy lighting day.  What’s easy?  Overcast.  When the sun is behind the clouds you won’t have to worry about shadows in their faces, bright sun patches behind them or backlighting.