Getting It Right In Camera

I started out my photographic life shooting landscape images on transparency film or in other words slide film. It taught me early on how to get the images I could see and transfer these onto the film I was using. It taught me to get it right in camera.

I guess now with the digital age somethings are easier, and I guess this has helped many people to become better photographers and this is a good thing, but with all the advancement has also come a big setback. What is it you say?

Well simply put I hear so many people say "I'll fix it in Photoshop" or afterwards using whatever post editing software they use. Certainly photoshop has many powerful tools to help with images but why do I have such a dislike for that saying.

Remember back I stated that in film days (which I still use by the way) we didn't have the choice of trying to fix the image later. Transparency film had a very narrow latitude to work with and it was either exposed correctly or it was in the trash.

I'm a firm believer that if the image isn't right then no amount of photoshop or any other program can or will fix it, as the old saying goes "garbage in garbage out".

So what's that got to do with the image of Craig's Hut. Well this is one of those images that setting up for a couple of minutes to take the shot has resulted in an image that basically went into lightroom has small adjustment to colour balance made and then was exported straight back out. This image is as shot in camera, and I'm going to explain how.

In landscape photography I carry a very bare minimum of filters, in fact I only have three different types of filters, I carry a Polariser, a couple of Neutral Density filters and a set of six Graduated Neutral Density filters, or ND Grads as they are known, and it's these last ones I will talk about with this image.

The image on the right shows what the filters look like. Typically half of the filter is of neutral density which transitions, either abruptly or gradually, into the other half which is clear. It is used to bring an overly-bright part of a scene into the dynamic range of film or sensor. For example, it can be used to darken a bright sky so that both the sky and subject can be properly exposed. And this is exactly what they were used for in the image of Craig's Hut.

When placed over the top portion of the sky they block the light coming through to the film or sensor. In this image I exposed for the foreground of the image but in doing so the sky that had this wonderful pink hue was over-exposed and had lost all detail and colour. A common practice these days is to take multiple images, exposing for the different parts and then blend these later in photoshop or do a HDR image. Both these take time at a computer and well I would prefer to be doing other things. HDR's can often look very fake. Using these filters to adjust in camera takes as long as the exposure and NO computer work later.

I used two filters stacked with this image, a 2stop and 3stop soft. The soft transition means the filter is not noticeable in the final image and another small trick I use is to wiggle the filters up and down during the exposure also. Simply something that has taken a few seconds in camera, can and has saved a lot of work later. The small tweaks I have done are no more than a couple of enhancements, I got it right in camera.

Learning to do this will improve your photography a hundred fold, learning to see the light and knowing the limitations of your film or sensor will teach you how to shoot the light and capture with the camera what you see.

Until next time, shoot the light.