The Colour Blue

It’s been a memorable winter. Some four inches of snow fell on 22 December and we woke to snow piled everywhere, even on the smallest branches of the apple tree. Even the washing line supported a tiny snowdrift, bisecting the view of the silent garden with a pencil-thin white curve.

We went out with the cameras of course - and later with the cross-country skis. The movie mode capturing our wobbly progress down a gentle slope that the downhill skis would turn their tips up at. Any unusual snowy activity is bound, sooner or later, to be interrupted by excited dogs keen to join in with the fun. We stayed out for hours. This sort of weather, it’s a good idea to carry the compact camera in an inside pocket. It keeps it warm and dry. Falling into the nearest snowdrift can be fun, but you risk damaging the camera if it is an outside pocket. I’ve had the lens stick open when the battery is chilled below working temperature, so you also need to think about keeping the battery - which drives everything from focusing, to image capture - warm and cosy.

You need to keep your coat zipped up against the chill wind. But you also need instant access to the camera for the close-up, action-packed, snow-on-the-dog’s-nose type of shot. How we photographers shiver for our art!

After several more days of light blue skies, deep blue shadows on snow, paths and pavements turned to sheet ice. The cars were still snowed in and we had to walk everywhere. Night-time temperatures plummeted. We woke each morning to a temperature inversion with the lake shrouded in mist, a fat grey cloud as reluctant to get up as we were.

Standing at our usual viewpoint, we could sample a range of cameras by offering to take pictures of couples from Kent and Nottingham who had toiled up in their wellingtons and parkas to see the view. The ad hoc toboggan run down Brantfell was treacherous. This morning after low, low temperatures and another light dusting of snow, everything was silver white and grey. A lone photographer plodded past with some impressive SLR gear and a large tripod slung over his back. Good luck to him, I say. He’s not going to get too much peace and quiet once the dogs reach the upper slopes of our temporarily alpine resort.

Fungal Foray

Nearly every morning we climb our local hill, Brantfell. Nearly every morning I have my camera with me. The great thing about taking the same view throughout the year is that it is different every time. You get the seasonal changes and you get the changing light.

At the end of November we also got the weather - lots of it. Not that you could see much from the vantage point. We squelched up the slope on the one dryish day in a fortnight of the heaviest rainfall ever recorded. The radio that morning had carried an interview with a local VIP suggesting that Cumbria was not the place to visit. Bridges had been swept away and even the fell rescue services had been drafted in to help with the clean up. The message was to stay off the fells. If you got into difficulty, there would be nobody to come and rescue you as they were all at full stretch already.
The view didn’t look much different - the big field at the farm was flooded and the lake looked a little bit fatter, self-satisfied really, as if by flooding people out of their homes and businesses it had reminded us all that we weren’t in charge. We’d been rung by hoards of kind friends, concerned that we might have been affected. It was a guilty pleasure to be out in fresh air - the bit that wasn’t doing waterfall impressions. The mud on the path was a minor inconvenience.

Damp conditions, especially in autumn, have a habit of bring out the fungi - as the residents of Cockermouth may yet unfortunately discover in their homes. It’s dropped out of the news media, but there is a local fund to help some of the people unlucky enough to be still mopping up this Christmas. The fungi I encountered on the Brantfell walk were more benign and quite beautiful when photographed with the macro setting against the light. The delicate architecture is revealed of these fragile structures, but you may be required to flatten yourself on damp and muddy grass.

Fungi spread by distributing millions of tiny spores and as a group are often thought to be sinister. On walks you’ll quite often see quite innocuous fungi kicked over. The bigger the cap or fruiting body, the more it seems to be a target for the destructive instincts of some walkers. I’m keeping the location of a 20 foot ‘fairy ring’ I once walked to, a closely-guarded secret. A fungal circle of this size has probably been undisturbed for tens of years.

The type of fungi which pop up from under damp floorboards obviously need to be eradicated fast. But some types perform an important role in decomposing organic matter. Certain fungi are familiar as food, usually cling-wrapped and on supermarket shelves though if you know what you’re doing you can find them in the wild. Some are valued for their medicinal properties. Worldwide there are a staggering 1.5 million species of fungi. I just hope that the Armitt Trust archives that were also flooded didn’t include Beatrix Potter’s delightful mycological watercolours.

On Course for Better Images

At this time of year the colour brochures arrive with their exhortations to sign up for the latest autumn courses. Apparently, “Cumbria is full of exciting arts and cultural experiences if you know where to look...”. Certainly the 48 pages of Your Cumbria testify to that! So we should all be making sure we get our three (or more) artistic and cultural experiences per year. Just like the fruit-and-veg thing, it’s good for our health.

The County Council insists we need to get more creative because it will have the effect of “bringing people together; building pride in communities; developing new skills...” Excuse me - but didn’t I just hear the faint echo of “lifelong learning” - the catch phrase which was current in adult education a few years ago, before the funding was switched elsewhere?

When I first ran classes in digital imaging, there were no other similar courses in the county. People sometimes came from quite a distance away to attend - Ipswich once - I remember. Now virtually every adult education centre and community centre has a course on digital photography, or digital imaging. I’m not knocking it. It’s great to see this catch on. There are a wealth of courses on digital imaging, with times and locations to suit all levels and requirements.

So what should you expect to learn on a digital camera course? If you have owned a digital camera for a short time you may not be familiar with some of the menus and buttons on your camera and how they can help. It’s the basic technical stuff that you need to know first, as well as how to manipulate and improve images on the computer.

For digital photographers who are well versed in the basics, the principles of using light, learning to compose and more advanced techniques on the camera and computer are the thing. Now a second wave of learners who have outgrown compact cameras are demanding more advanced courses on SLR cameras.

Access to digital technology which is affordable, has changed the way images are taken and viewed. It has put the recording of everyday life, formerly the preserve of the professional, within reach of anyone who has a digital camera, or camera phone. Crucially, you can now review how that image is presented almost immediately.

When you cluster around the photographer and are invited to view the resulting picture on the LCD screen, something new is going on. ‘Chimping’ as it is sometimes called, never existed before the advent of digital cameras. We have all become picture editors, making artistic and cultural judgements. If you don’t like it, just take another frame, or ask for the offending picture to be deleted from the camera’s memory file.

This is light years away from the relationship between photographer and model in the 1890s, when a subject might have to pose motionless for a portrait. Look carefully at those old photos of your forebears and you will see the pillar or table supporting them, so they could hold the pose without moving.

But is photography artistic? In 1865 Thomas Le Clear shows two small children posing for a photographer. The joke is on the photographer - he and his young models have become the subject of the painting. Degas painted a ballerina in a photographer’s studio in 1875 beautifully capturing the quality of the light.

Ever since photography appeared on the scene there has been a debate as to whether it is a creative art or not, and whether it shows reality. My opinion is that it blends art (the visual bit) with science (the technical bit) perfectly, and that viewing a photographic exhibition or attending a digital imaging course should definitely count towards one of your three cultural experiences.

By signing up for courses this autumn you are increasing your digital skills, as well as doing your bit for arts and culture in your local community.

Picture This!

Our handsome hero, pursued by a couple of crooks runs down the street, dodging the market traders and cyclists. The camera closes in to show the beads of sweat on his broad forehead, the sun in his
eyes, as he desperately tries to escape his evil pursuers. Suddenly our man dodges through a doorway and into a shadowy alley lit by a single yellow bulb. He flattens himself against a pillar, as
the baddies race by in the street outside. The noise of the pursuit fades. He has escaped! We see the relief on his face.

Notice anything? Replay the scene again in your mind taking particular note of the lighting for each shot. Full sunlight in the street, partly shadowed under the canopies of the market stalls, a
sudden change to the shadowy alley where our hero hides, then back to the sunlit street, before finally closing in on our hero’s handsome face, lit by the single bulb.

The eyes-and-brain combo are amazing, adjusting as they do, for a wide range of lighting conditions. For instance just because I am reading a book by the light of a tungsten bulb, doesn’t mean I
immediately assume the paper has suddenly gone a strange shade of yellow. I know the book has white paper. But take a digital photograph of this scene without adjusting for white balance and I
might find that because of the light source the page, and possibly your face, does indeed look quite yellow in the image.

Any digital camera, apart from the most basic, will probably have a white balance (WB) menu that includes the
following: full sun, cloudy, tungsten, various sorts of fluorescent and something called evaluative white balance. You just need to sort out which icon to use. You could leave the camera set to
auto (AWB) of course, but why not explore? Try changing to the manual settings and you can discover how to take pictures that will need less retouching, saving time on the computer.

By telling the camera what sort of white light you are subjecting it to a more accurate colour balance will be achieved. Try the tungsten setting anywhere indoors, and you’ll see the colour range
go cool, shifting into the blue part of the spectrum. The camera is compensating for all that yellow light you’ve just told it is present in the scene.

The cloudy white balance setting with its fluffy cloud symbol isn’t just for overcast days. It can be used anywhere shady. You can photograph where the available light is indirect
- even in a church or indoors. I’ve used this setting to get acceptable images when firing the flash would be useless, or worse, unwelcome. With flash the portrait in the selection on the right would have strong reflections on those spectacles.

Fluorescents come in two basic types: one with a pinkish tinge and one with a bluish colour cast. To picture the effect of each of these, just think what havoc could be caused if the wrong
fluorescent light was used at the butcher or in the frozen food store.

Evaluative white balance is useful too, but you will need a bit of extra kit - a handy piece of white paper, or card. Change the setting to evaluative, point the camera lens at the card and press
the shutter. You have now set a marker for the colour white. The next time you press the shutter the camera will re-balance the rest of the colours using the white setting as a starting point. It’s
that easy. It’s as if you’re the film director shouting “Lights, camera, action!”

For the L of it

Walking past the local camera shop on Valentine’s Day, I saw they had decorated their wares with little hearts. Romance was in the air and I was trying to remember when I first fell in love.

I vividly remember taking my first photo with my mother’s Box Brownie. It shows two boys posed wonkily against a wooden fence, the horizon tipped at an angle, the whole thing fuzzy from camera shake. I was hooked. The seductive click of the mechanical shutter confirmed I was in control of the technology. Also as photographer I was (briefly) in control of my two older siblings.

The Box Brownie required a certain amount of expertise when loading film. Under no circumstances could the awkward roll film be allowed to unwind itself in the bright sunshine. Things progressed when I acquired a Kodak Instamatic with film cassette that could be dropped into the back of the camera. The results were less than totally satisfying artistically speaking. Some imagination was required to see the family cat, a blackish dot in the midst of a tangle of grass, as a wild animal stalking its prey through the jungle, but I had that imagination. Unlike my permanently unimpressed family.

I progressed on to a sturdy Canon A1 which a relative picked up in Singapore. It included a variety of gadgets - lens doublers, close-up bellows, a wide-angle lens and an excellent telephoto or two. I regretted that my pocket money did not stretch to the Canon fisheye, but the rest of the kit saw me through art college. Like the other students I visited Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire where William Henry Fox Talbot made some of the very first pinhole exposures. I had a brief dalliance with my own hand-made pinhole camera, but the modern cameras felt much more sophisticated. Photography had come a long way since those early days hadn’t it?

A love affair with cruising rapidly down snowy mountains on skis meant that something less bulky than the A1 was required. I purchased an electronic compact in the shape of a slightly pricey, but beautifully engineered Contax T2. I saw the same model in an engineering display in the Science Museum a year later. The very first version of Photoshop software had now arrived and I now had the option of having a digital version of my transparencies saved to CDRom when processing the film. Manipulating photos on computer put me back in the creative driving seat. But the roller-coaster ride was not over. After a couple of encounters with borrowed digital cameras, I cast aside my beautiful Contax, and took up with a little Canon Ixus which has been my faithful companion for the last three years.

With all this rapid technological change it is easy to be dazzled by the latest development. When running courses, I frequently take my old Box Brownie with me. Cameras still have lenses, shutters, viewfinders (well some do), a compact and portable box, image counter etc. Photography is not just about how many megapixels your camera packs. It’s about having luck, finding locations, looking, using light and yes, about capturing life and loving what you do.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-lacockabbeyvillage

The White Stuff

The recent heavy snow may not be totally welcome because of the disruption it caused, but it does represent a fantastic photographic opportunity. The snowman the kids built in the front garden is a precious memory. Close-ups of frosty grasses and icicles hung over streams are evocative of winter days. Cloudless blue skies and white fells are perfect for a weekend photographic expedition to the hills.

But taking a digital image represents a technical challenge for your camera when there is a lot of the white stuff about. Think about the light. Even when overcast, there is more of this around than usual if there is snow. Too much light bleaches the scene and makes for disappointing images with little detail in the highlights.

SCENE (SCN) modes are packages of settings for particular photographic situations. Even on the simplest camera you will have a few. Look at the dial on the top, or possibly in the picture-shooting menus. Many compacts and bridge cameras have a snow setting, helpfully indicated by a friendly snowman. This setting will prepare the camera for the extra light reflected back from the snowdrifts. If you can’t find this, try the beach setting with its palm tree, desert island or umbrella symbol. White balance (WB) settings can also help, especially if you have the ‘evaluative WB’ type, but this is a subject in its own right for another time.

On larger cameras there are some other settings you can look at. Try adjusting the digital film speed - that’s the ISO settings. You might recognize from when you used to buy rolls of film. For very bright, snowy conditions go low. A setting of 50 ISO should help and you’ll get pin-sharp detail too.

Of course the first rule is to get the picture. Take your first image on the AUTO setting and let the camera sort it out. This picture may be a little unsatisfactory, but at least you’ve got something for the album, and you can always adjust it on the computer. Now try bracketing the exposure, that is making an exposure to either side of the normal setting. The EXP scale runs from minus 2, through the normal setting at 0, to plus 2. The plus side lightens and brightens dull, overcast scenes revealing more detail in the shadows. For more detail in the over-bright snowfields, try changing the setting to minus 0.5, or minus 1 in the manual (M) mode. The LCD screen at the back of the camera will show you what works.

There are other challenges to the digital photographer in cold snowy conditions. I love snow, particularly when combined with a heady mix of clear mountain air, alpine peaks and ski runs. A couple of years ago, having just completed a long descent, I stopped to take a digital picture. Removing the camera from the outside pocket of my jacket, I pressed the power on button, and as usual the lens whirred into position. And stopped. Nothing worked. The camera would not focus, the shutter did not fire. The lens stayed where it was and would not retract. The camera was in suspended animation. I knew the batteries were fully charged. What I had not calculated for was the cooling effect of my swift descent. The problem was soon solved with a quick stopover for a hot chocolate in a warm cafe. I kept the camera in a warm inside pocket after that and had no further problem. Would that my skiing technique was as easily sorted.

Digital Daze

I am about to buy a new digital camera and I’m feeling a little confused. If I was buying my first digital it would of course be simpler. I’d be aiming at finding one with the minimum number of whistles and bells, the digital equivalent of the old Instamatic. Compact cameras are just what they say, compact. Sorted? Not quite. These days even the slim jims of the digital world pack a such bewildering array of features, that beginners very often leave the camera set to Auto, and hope for the best.

I already own a slender, silver box, tastefully inscribed with the Canon logo and the words IXUS 400. I can already hear the camera techies beginning to scoff, but it really has been very reliable and takes nice pics. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the one I’ve posted here. Despite its 4 MegaPixels and 3 x zoom, it’s a nice, friendly camera with good, clear menus. These days, the average mobile phone has more MP than this. I bought it four years ago and back then it had an impressive spec. In the classes I teach it has been really useful tool when explaining white balance, ISO or whatever, up to now.

Lately, there have been more questions about DSLR. That’s Digital Single Lens Reflex, the ones where you see the image through the glass optic at the front and lenses can be swopped over. These are different to bridge cameras, which can look a lot like a DSLR, though smaller. With prominent lens at the front, prism hump, hand grip and lots of manual controls, bridge cameras have a lot to recommend them. But you would be well advised not to try and take the lens off, as they have a fixed lens. Even with a bridge camera, you may still see your beautifully composed image through the lens rather than a viewfinder. If it has one.

Bridge cameras pack more features than compacts and give you more control over the picture-taking. Like compacts, they can be quite competitively priced. People who have started on these two types now want to graduate to the larger format. Even non-professional photographers have begun to branch out into more serious photography. It has never been so easy to make images and you don’t have to get complicated. Some of us just want to go further, do more and print larger.

Compact, bridge or DSLR, even if you know the type of market you are in, there is a bewildering array to choose from. Manufacturers do love to use long words. I’ll demystify some of the jargon and help you decide what’s important in choosing and using your digital camera to its full potential in future blogs. Think of it as learning to speak Digital Camera.

Meanwhile I think I’ve just spotted my next camera.