Veteran National Geographic photographer Nick Nichols.

Talent is a given, but it has to be said that everything else counts for about 99 percent of success. I mean, you've got to have the talent, but then you've got to be able to sell yourself, you have to be focused, you have to be able to take rejections, you have to deal with cultures, deal with places. You have to be able to sleep anywhere, eat anything, and not be afraid of disease.

You need to be exploited. You have to work hard for somebody else for low pay early in your career. That's how you learn. I got my start with a guy named Charles Moore, who's a famous Civil Rights photographer. He did the pictures of the German shepherds attacking people in Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin Luther King being arrested. He's just got an incredible body of work about the Civil Rights movement. He's from the same little town as I am in Alabama, and when I was in college there, I knew his pictures, but I didn't know who he was—I didn't know he was from that town.

Anyway, word got out that this famous Life magazine photographer was coming back and he was going to come over to the school to visit, and I latched on to Charles like a puppy dog that decides it's going to adopt you.

He said, "Well, don't go to graduate school, come out to San Francisco and be my assistant." When I got out of school I got in my car and drove out across the country and went to his house. I only assisted him for a few months because he introduced me to the people that made my career take off. I learned more in a few weeks working for him than I had learned all through school. You can just learn so much so fast.

But you're getting exploited while you're doing it. These two guys who just went to Africa with me, Nathan and Frederic, they worked on my farm for four months at $10 an hour beforehand. That's not nothing, but Nathan is a qualified carpenter and he could have made $20 an hour. I just said, "Look, that's the way it is. If you want to do it, OK." And what I was trying to see out of that was what kind of teamwork they'd have and if they would be too competitive with each other, because they both want to be photographers at National Geographic. I don't get assistants to load my cameras; they've got to have skills like changing tires, and eating bad food, and climbing in trees. It's not like assisting a fashion photographer; my assistants have to have a lot of wilderness skills.

As he was leaving my office the first time we met, Nathan said, "I would swim through lava to work for you." And I thought, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. He wasn't saying, I love you, I love your work. Instead, it was, I'd love to work for you. So he put it in the right context. And when he and Frederic did work for me, the guys worked 16 hours a day and didn't care about themselves, about their own work or personal lives. And that's what I expect. Because that's what I did for Charles Moore in that certain period.

There are lots of ways that being exploited can add up to learning a lot about outdoor photography. For example, if you're a boating guide on the Grand Canyon, that's not being a photographer on the Grand Canyon, but it gives you access. One of the best photography books that ever came out of the canyon was by John Balustein, who was a dory boatman. Well, he was a photographer who wasn't making a living so he ran the river for maybe six years and made these great pictures.

As a photographer, you want to have a niche. You want to have something that's special to you, that you care most about. And not necessarily something exotic. You can't afford to go back to exotic over and over again. If it's in your backyard, you can. It needs to be something that you're just totally committed to, and it doesn't matter if National Geographic is going to publish it; you're going to do it anyway. You're driven to do it anyway.

I photographed caves for a hobby as I was growing up and learning photography in the South. As I matured as a photographer, I became well-known as a cave photographer. Then this cave was discovered in New Mexico called Lechuguilla, and it's incredibly spectacular. And I was the only one who could photograph it to the level of National Geographic. That's what brought me in the door. And once I did that story, which was a cover story, it just blossomed from there.

What got me to that point was passion. Passion is infectious. The day I walked into Manhattan with Charles Moore, I left with an assignment. I was 25 years old, I was freaked out, I left my cameras in the taxi, but I went to a new magazine called GEO that was just starting up and they gave me an assignment. I showed my pictures to the receptionist, and I ended up showing them five times that day—I got all the way to the main editor.

Simply taking images can be very fulfilling to the soul, but when you say that you want to make a living at it, be a magazine photographer, that's when this hard edge comes in. When you want to be published, and you want to have people buy your pictures, and give you assignments, another level of commitment comes in. You really have to be obsessed with making images.

YOU OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES: For hot shot Nick Nichols, "it's about getting important things onto a rectangle."

For me, it's not about travel, it's not about having fun—it's always been about a fascination with getting important things onto a rectangle. I'm totally driven by the fact that my pictures have something to do with making national parks, that they can speak for things that can't speak for themselves. There's value that comes from being published. If I kept my photographs in a shoebox, they certainly wouldn't save any gorillas. And that's really my mission.

I do have the best job in the world. I'd like in some ways to keep it a secret. But, you know, the richest person on Earth probably tries to have a vacation that is in some ways like my job, and he can't do it. I think about Mick Jagger, because the Stones were always my heros, and I think, Wait a minute, with all the money they've got, they all go buy houses on boring beach islands and lay in the sand. If they go on safari, they can't get out of the Land Rover. I was trying to think of it, the richest person on Earth having a better deal than I do, and they can't. Because even with all the money on Earth, you can't buy the intimacy that I get with the subjects I'm approaching. My job is to look intimately at things. It's got lots of negatives, but I don't care. Three times a day somebody says that to me: "Hey, Nick, you must have the greatest job in the world." And, of course, that person wouldn't know I have that job unless I was bragging about it.

Posted in 0 comments Posted by cheewooi at 7:08 AM  

Taking control of Exposure
David Pike

You cannot rely on your light meter - whether it is a TTL meter or a hand-held unit - despite the claims from camera and light meter manufacturers. All light meters suffer from the same basic problem, they assume that you are photographing a medium toned subject and that you want this to be shown as a medium tone in the final image.

There is no doubt that modern light meters are trying to get to grips with this problem by building in better assessment of colour and using micro-chip processors to compare light readings within the frame to a database of sample exposures and then using this 'experience', to set the most appropriate exposure. However, they have not yet cracked it and it is still important for you as the photographer to take control of exposure setting - light meters are very useful tools, but they are not infallible.

The starting point for exposure setting is the exposure suggested by your light meter but there will be many circumstances in which you will have to adjust the exposure suggested. This is often referred to as exposure compensation and there are several ways that it can be done:

a) Manual adjustment
b) using the exposure compensation dial
c) using a mid-toned subject
d) changing the film speed

Grey seals at Donna Nook, Lincolnshire These two photographs show the importance of understanding how parts of an image can affect the overall exposure. The brightness of the seal pup has led to an uner-exposed image in the lower picture. I used the compensation dial to 'add' exposure to achieve a more pleasing result in the upper image.

The Achilles heel of light meters
The problems of exposure setting start with the fact that all light meters, including through the lens (TTL) in-camera meters assume that the tone of the subject that they are measuring is a mid-tone.

As a result, the exposure setting suggested by a meter reading will render the colour of the subject as a mid-tone - tone in this context refers to how light or dark the colour is - regardless of what the actual tone of the subject is.

Understanding tones
Given that light meters are all calibrated to return an exposure as a mid-tone, understanding what is mid-toned and what is not is a useful photographic skill to acquire.

Grey Wolf (captive), The Wild Bunch Ranch, Idaho I had the metering mode set to spot meter and the darkness of the wolf's coat has led to an over-exposed image in the left-hand picture. In the right-hand picture I used the exposure compensation dial to 'subtract' exposure, to achieve a more pleasing result.

Mid-tone is not limited to the medium-tone grey that is often recommended to determine an appropriate exposure, mid-tone can be applied to any colour. The skill that you need to master is to recognise what is a mid-toned yellow, blue or red etc. There is no easy way to do this, but practice is important and can be done anywhere, with or without a camera.

The next step, having learnt to recognise what mid-tone colours are, is to then learn how to judge the difference between the colour-tone of a subject and the mid-tone. This is not too difficult if you think about a colour-tone scale. At one end of the scale the colour tone fades to white, while at the other end it gets increasingly dark, becoming black - again this is true for any colour. The mid-tone of the colour is half way between the two.

The ability of film to capture tones is limited, and on slide film, the difference between burnt-out white and detail-less shadows is about five stops. This then is the full range of our colour-tone scale. Bright white therefore lies 2½ stops from mid-tone in one direction and dark black lies 2½ stops from mid-tone in the other direction, looking something like this:

Japanese Crane, Hokkaido, Japan Knowing how your camera will react to different conditions is important. In this image the white snow is almost full balanced by the very dark background. I found through experience that the matrix meter on my F5 gave a good exposure setting - on brighter days I found that 'opening up' from the suggested exposure was necessary.

white
	Very light	+2.0
	Quite light	+1.5
	Lighter	+1.0
	A bit lighter	+0.5
	Mid-tone	0
	A bit darker	-0.5
	Darker	-1.0
	Quite dark	-1.5
	Very dark	-2.0
Black

The terms used in the table may seem a little trite, but these are the phrases that I use in my head when I assess the tone of a colour.

So how do we use this scale in exposure compensation. We know that the exposure set by the camera's TTL meter will render the colour of the subject as a medium-tone. If this is what we want, then we take the picture. However, if we want to show the subject as a different tone (either to reflect reality or for creative effect) then we will have to adjust the exposure to achieve the desired result. If the subject's tone is between mid-toned and white then we need to increase the amount of light striking the film (open up) by perhaps one to one and a half stops. This will mean increasing the aperture and/or slowing the shutter speed by the required amount. The opposite would apply if we want to achieve a result darker than mid-tone (stopping down).

Spring Beech leaves, Lincolnshire These two images of freshly opened leaves of a beech tree demonstrate that it is not just bright whites and dark browns and blacks that can throw a TTL meter off balance. I shot the upper image using a D1 camera set to spot meter with no compensation - the bright greens of the leaves led to an under-exposed image. The lower shot was taken by adding 1 stop through the exposure compensation dial.

Manual Compensation
Lets imagine we have to photograph a bride in a white dress on a sunny day. The camera's TTL meter assumes that everything is mid-toned and therefore sets an exposure that renders the dress a dismal grey in the final picture, since we want a white dress we have to make some adjustment.

We know we want to add light to the image to brighten it, but how much? Using the scale above we also know that if we go to extreme, 'opening up' by 2½ stops, then we will get a featureless white dress, with no detail. To retain some detail therefore we want to increase exposure - by 1½ or perhaps even 2 stops. Lets imagine that we are shooting with Fuji Provia 100F (ISO 100) and the camera has set an exposure of 1/250 at f22. To adjust the exposure by two stops we would either 'open up' the aperture to f11, or slow the shutter speed by two stops (to 1/60), or by opening up the aperture and slowing the shutter speed by one stop each.

The opposite adjustments would have to be made if we took a meter reading from the groom's black morning suit - the camera would render this as a dull grey and the amount of exposure adjustment would depend upon how dark we wanted to make the suit.

The important point in these examples is that it is the photographer, not the camera that is in charge. The photographer is setting the exposure to achieve the desired result in the final image. The camera's meter provides a starting point for setting exposure - but not the final exposure for taking the picture.

Using the exposure compensation dial
Many modern SLR cameras now have an exposure compensation dial. This significantly simplifies the whole issue of adjusting exposure and allows the camera to remain in auto-exposure mode.

The exposure compensation dial is marked off in half or sometimes thirds of a stop, usually up to +3 and -3 stops. To use this method of exposure adjustment all that you have to do is determine what level of adjustment you believe is appropriate and then to 'dial in' that amount of compensation. To increase exposure by one stop you turn the dial to +1. It cannot get any simpler than that.

	Kamikochi, Nagano Prefecture, Japan I use the exposure compensation dial most of the time to adjust exposures. This shot on a clear winter's day was taken with an addition of one third of a stop dialled in using the exposure compensation dial.

Using mid-toned subjects to set the compensation
Another method of setting an appropriate exposure is to take advantage of the camera's assumption that everything is mid-toned by taking a reading from a mid-toned subject. The critical point with this approach is that the mid-toned subject has to be in the same light as the subject that you want to photograph. The exposure suggested by the camera's TTL meter is then either locked in by pressing the exposure lock button, or noted and reset manually after re-composing on the subject that you want to photograph.

If we return to our wedding group - the bride's mother is wearing a mid-toned blue dress. It is a simple matter, therefore, to put the cameras meter on to spot mode, take a meter reading from this dress, press the exposure lock button, recompose on the bride and shoot. Remember that if the light changes (for example due to clouds in the sky or changes in the position of the subject) a fresh reading from your mid-toned subject will have to be taken and used to re-set exposure.

Changing film speed
The final method of adjusting exposures is to take advantage of the fact that all exposures are set in relation to the film speed. Lets assume that the appropriate exposure determined by metering off the bride's mother's dress is 1/250 at f11 with Fuji Provia 100F (ISO 100).

The meter reading from the bride, however, is 1/250 at f22 - a 2 stop difference from the appropriate exposure. To adjust the exposure we need to 'open up' by 2 stops. This can be achieved by changing the ISO setting in the camera, to make the camera believe that there is a slower film loaded. In this example, the ISO setting would have to be 25 (a 2 stop change from ISO 100). In response to the slower film setting the camera will either widen the aperture or slow the shutter speed by 2 stops, thereby achieving the desired exposure.

Conclusion
The camera does not know what you want to achieve - an auto-exposure camera may set the exposure for you, but it is not necessarily going to set the appropriate exposure. The camera's auto-exposure setting is only a starting point. In order to achieve an appropriate exposure, an exposure that renders an image as you want it, then you have to take control of the exposure and compensate for the camera's inadequacies.

Posted in 0 comments Posted by cheewooi at 5:50 PM  

Flashgun Workout Colin Leftley

	Bounce Having the choice to position the flash allows creative control. Look at the shots closely and you can see that different lighting effects all have something to offer. All were produced with just one hand-held flash unit.

Many photographers overlook the creative potential of hand-held or off-camera flashguns treating them like they're just big versions of the one built into the camera; they use them when the light gets slightly dim, or just for high-days and holidays. But with a little thought, and a bit of effort, there's a good chance that your accessory flash unit may be able to do a lot more for you and your photography.

Side issue

If you fit your flash into the hot-shoe of your camera life is very convenient and fuss-free. But you may have noticed how flat-looking the resulting photographs are, in particular people look washed out - like they've just emerged from a particularly dismal winter, even when the shot was taken on the first day of August. Let's be honest, direct flash is stark and unflattering and best avoided at all costs.

Just treating yourself to a simple flash extension cord is one simple and inexpensive way of improving flash photography. By holding the flash up and to one side of the camera greater depth and modelling will be revealed by the lighting on the subject. If your camera and flash are fully dedicated this lead may still offer through-the-lens metering and will deserve the title of TTL cord. This makes flash exposures more foolproof, especially when the position of the light is unusual, but for simple off-camera flash work the auto feature on the flash head should work fine with the lead simply synchronising the shutter to the flash.

With the flash suitably connected to the camera experiment with different positions of flash compared to the subject. To some extent this will be limited to the length of your arm, which in practice will be more than adequate. In instances when you feel you'd like to move the flash out further, enlist the help of a friend or mount it somehow on a spare tripod or lighting stand of some kind.

Soft option

Moving the flash off-camera may create more modelling and more interesting shadows but the small size of the light source relative to the subject will unavoidably create a hard edge to shadows. For a spot lit effect this is of course great but may not be what you intended. At its simplest you could try lightly diffusing the flash with a hanky or similar and see what results. But such ad hoc arrangements may be tricky to repeat consistently, and care needs to be taken to ensure that the heat from the flash tube doesn't surprise you and melt or burn your diffuser of choice! Treat yourself to a diffuser or mini bounce attachment that will fit neatly over your flash tube in seconds. Many attach using Velcro™ or in the case of hard plastic diffusers, these push over the heads of the flashgun.

Obviously the larger the diffuser the greater the toll paid in light loss. With zoom lenses of modest maximum aperture this may be significant so check what the loss factor is and weigh this against the aperture you're likely to be able to use at your chosen shooting distance. If the loss factor is not given or if you are working with a DIY diffuser, then do a few simple test shots to see what the effect is like - this may seem like a waste of film, but it could save disappointment later. Diffusing the light with clip-on attachments is certainly a convenient and effective way of improving your flash photography but if you've more time, and are prepared to take the trouble, try taking the bounce flash option.

There are many situations where fill-in flash can help cope with contrast. Here the natural light created an unwanted silhouette even though the shot was taken digitally.

Bouncing with confidence

Especially for indoor photography, bouncing the light or your flashgun off nearby walls or ceilings can make a huge difference to the quality of your flash-lit photographs. In this way you can affect both the direct and the quality of the light reaching your subject. It's worth mentioning here-- especially if you haven't yet treated yourself to an accessory flashgun -- that biggest is best. Bouncing light around even a modest sized room takes its toll on light output and may give you grief, especially if you work with slow speed film. So aim for a metric guide number of around 40 plus, and avoid fancy features if this will help keep the flash head within budget.

Swivelling heads are useful if the flash doesn't offer TTL metering, as it keeps the sensor pointing in the right direction and allows the camera to be mounted on the camera. But, in practice it's easy enough to hold a flash head in one hand as you fire the camera with the other, especially if you can use autofocus and if you have auto winding (for film users).

Digital users will benefit greatly here as their first bounce flash efforts can be quickly reviewed and fine-tuned along with the 'correctness' of the exposure received by the camera. If you have this option try the three flash lighting techniques on a few subjects and judge the differences for yourself.

	Metz 45 CL-3 flash was used to bounce light off the ceiling and the auto setting on the flash was adjusted to be one stop wider then the cameras aperture. This created -1 stop off fill for a fairly natural-looking result.

Occasionally you may come across a situation where not suitable bounce surfaces exist! The room may have bright pink walls or a black ceiling, for example. Here keeping a fold-out reflector like those available from Lastolite™ handy may pay dividends; you can bounce flash off your panel once it's suitably positioned.

Filling you in
For coping with high contrast backlit situations there is very little to beat the convenience and effectiveness of fill-in flash. Here the flashgun is made to work in harmony with the available light to brighten otherwise dark shadows. The trick is to arrange the flash to under-expose slightly so the shot doesn't look over-lit. Achieving this has never been easier, thanks to automation, and there are a few ways to get there.

Simplest of all is to use the flash compensation facility available on some modern cameras. Set it to -1EV to begin with and see how it works out for you. In certain circumstances you may want a more subtle result and this figure may need to be varied to suit. It takes just a little experimentation to see what works for you in given circumstances. Once again, digital shooters have the advantage when it comes to experimenting to see what works. The balance struck between flash and ambient lighting is also affected by the overall exposure given, so bracket your shots slightly to gain the right effect - you may want a slightly over-exposed background when shooting into the light to maintain a bright sunlit effect.

If you have a simpler set up and have an auto flash with its own sensor, then fill-flash is still pretty straightforward. All you need to do is set the camera at a particular aperture using manual or aperture-priority metering, say f/8, and then set the flashgun's aperture to f/5.6. In this way the flash will deliver one stop less light than is needed for you camera's shooting aperture and you have the deliberate under-exposure you desire! A flash unit with a good range of auto aperture settings is useful here as is a camera that syncs with flash at fastish shutter speeds of 1/250sec or so; digital cameras are less limited here.

Water droplets create facntastic patterns and shapes but move very fast. Here I connected a Metz 45 CT-3 to a Fuji Finepix S602 Zoom and shot these drops hitting water in a wine glass. The flash was about 30cm to one side and was aimed at the white background which ensured minimum output and minimum flash duration.

Action-packed potential

The potential of even the humblest flash unit to freeze movement goes unappreciated by many photographers. Simply by ensuring that your flash fires at its minimum burn will provide you with a device that allows you to capture fantastic studies of movement which would otherwise be beyond our visual grasp. To do this simple place the flash unit off-camera so the sensor aims towards a white surface or a mirror. Light output will be low so small subjects placed close to the flash tube work well, especially if you use slow film or modest ISO settings. Water droplets, sowing machines in action, insects in flight are now subjects within your grasp just as long as you can time the event. Once again, digital shooters will benefit from being able to quickly preview their results.

Fill-flash with an auto gun is easy to achieve by making the flash deliver, say, one stop less light than is needed for you camera's shooting. A clear calculator dial is useful and a unit with a good range of auto aperture settings helps.

Posted in 0 comments Posted by cheewooi at 5:48 PM  

Flash Modifiers
Peter Madeley

I nearly always use other accessories with my flash heads to either soften or concentrate the light.

Diffusers/Softeners

Many flashguns come supplied with so called diffusers which do little more than block out some of the light coming from the flashgun thus reducing its power, increasing flash recycling battery depletion times. The only true way to soften a flash is to increase the size light source.

The best known commercially available bounce device is the Stofen OmniFlash (£10). This is the small white box so often see on the press photographers flashguns. They work by scattering the light in all directions both upwards as well as forwards. I modified mine so its back surfaces have silver paper glued to them to bounce the light forwards rather than back though I believe I have now found better solutions to the light softening problem. With non-TTL flash units it is necessary to set the flash head to 45 degrees to avoid underexposure caused by light from the Omni hitting the external auto sensor of the flash. In TTL models it gives a better feathering wrap around of the light in the range from close to about 15 feet from the subject. The Omnis are now available in warming and green (strip light balanced) versions.

The Lastolite Micro Apollo (£30) is a lightweight softbox with a 15x20cm front panel which increases the size of the light source.

The box attaches by Velcro strips to the flashgun. There is about a 2stop light loss so this device is best used for photography close to the subject. It is a great way to get really soft lighting for close-ups on macro subjects because the light source is larger than the subject, so highlights are more controlled and the shadows open up. It's a one size fits all type gadget with two pull out arms which fit the head at the side, the same place you put better beamer velcro strips, a bit unwieldy but it does work.

Bounce flash

For greater range photography to about 7m a bounce card is a useful device. These can be bought, though it’s easy to make an A4 sized one from white card and use a heavy duty elastic band (actually I use the band from my flash extender) to hold it to the flash head. I angle the flash at 45 degrees so that some light bounces from the card directly to the subject and the rest goes up to the ceiling increasing the size of the light source still further. The bounce card clearly works better indoors in rooms with low, pale coloured ceilings. A coloured ceiling can produce a colour cast to the photograph. This organist shot was taken with a 550ex from the right hand side and a 420ex slaved on the left. Both had light enhancing attachments. The main flash used the A4 white bounce card and the slave flash had a piece of A4 paper draped over the head to reduce the flash output.

Beyond a distance of about 7m flash diffusers of all sorts tend to become ineffective and straight on flash works best.

Focusers/Extenders

These devices use fresnel lens to concentrate the beam of light from the flash to increase the flash range. I have come across two options of extenders

Kirk/Lepp – Project-a-flash

Walt Anderson Flash Extender – nicknamed Better Beamer

I use the Better Beamer (£40) which secures to the head of a flashgun with a wide elastic band. Comprised of two arms and a fresnel lens, the Better Beamer adds about 2 stops of light output to your flash by concentrating the flash pattern for more depth of field, greater flash reach or quicker recycle times. Because such a focus area of light is produced extenders should be used with telephoto lenses of 300mm and longer. The beamer is simple and quick to set up and folds flat for easy storage. It is a good idea to use the Better beamer of a flash bracket but alignment becomes very important if you want uniform illumination when using a long telephoto lens.

Warning for Those Using Fresnel Lens Flash Multipliers

Be warned if the sun's rays are focused through the lens onto your flashgun then a burning smell may result with the outcome that a little brown hole appears in your flashgun. This is not good news!!

'It can happen, it has happened, it will happen again'

Arthur Morris’ recent Birds As Art On Line Bulletin contains tales of flash damage and burns to people’s skin. It might even be possible to start a fire if the conditions were right. It would be a good idea to remove the fresnel lens when carrying a camera in the open or leaving the camera unattended.

I love my beamer but have had some difficult ensuring the aim is accurate enough to hit the subject. Pressing the Test button on the flashgun will show if the flash is hitting the subject but be careful if you only are likely to get one shot before your subject takes flight.

http://www.moose395.net/gear/bb.html

http://www.naturephotographers.net/tdg0502-1.html

http://www.birdsasart.com/faq_flash.html (discussion of flash distances)

Posted in 0 comments Posted by cheewooi at 5:47 PM