I hunted through here for a photography thread but couldn't find one, so I decided to start my own.

An understanding of photography can be a real bonus for people working in all other art and creative fields, particularly 3D design. The underlying principle of photography is light and understanding how light works is also one of the keys to creating realistic 3D objects and environments. So the first two photos I've posted here rely on light in a very obvious way, while the third one is more related to depth of field. If you've created a scene in 3D, but find it seems flat and "not quite right", then think about your use of lighting and depth of field.

Although I've kind of focussed on the relation between photography and 3D design, feel free to post any photos here - artistic, photojournalistic, whatever - 'cause I'm sure we can get something out of it.

The view to the city at sunset from the shores of Changchun South Lake in Northern China.

An Australian Air Force loadmaster mans one of the rear doors of a C-130 Hercules while firing flares at night.

My niece a couple of years ago.

 

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Got a friend who's a photographer, does a lot of work with bands over here. It's amazing to see how little difference the gear you're using makes to the end result, and how much of a difference understanding how the gear works can make. Just knowing how the relationship between shutter speed and aperture size (and how to compensate for changes to one with changes to the other) can turn a shot that could have been taken with a disposable camera into a work of art. The other thing I've learned from looking at his stuff and watching how he's progressed from when he started is that if you take a shot with an aim to digitally enhancing it to make it look better, you're wasting your time. When you push the button and open the shutter, make sure that the shot you're getting is the one you want. In this respect, it's better to start off working with film so you can't afford to get your shot wrong and you can't fix it if you do - you learn to discipline yourself, only taking the shot you want instead of taking 10 and picking the best one, and before you take the shot you already know what you're going to get.

I'm no photographer myself, but that has never stopped me taking a shiteload of photos. Digitals with high capacity cards are great for that. I'm not into the whole SLR thing, I like being able to put my camera in my pocket and not look like a tourist when I walk into a bar (until I open my mouth and get the gender of Beer wrong). But you can still get decent enough results with a point and click if you know what you're doing. I don't. I can prove it too. Here's a couple of terrible photos and what I learned from them :

1. No matter how cool the shot is and how little time you have to take it, take the time to get it right. Let the damned camera focus, for a start.... It's better to miss it entirely than to come this close and *** it up.

2. Sometimes, if someone nudges you at exactly the right moment, it looks deadly :

3. Understand that your flash can only illuminate for about 15 feet in front of you and everything else will be black, including those amazing breakdancers :

If, like me, you can't take a decent shot to save your life, then forget all that crap I already said about how the important component in getting a photo is you, not the camera. That's not true for people like us. What you need is a camera that has :

• a rotatable LCD so you can shoot round corners, over your shoulder and into the sun without blinding yourself
• a camera that has anti-shake so it doesn't look like Michael J Fox was behind the lens
• lots of automatic settings that will figure out the aperture size, shutter speed and all that jazz so you can just keep clicking and filling up your cards.
• Lots of optical zoom and megapixels so you can feel like a big man. 
• Trees! Always get a bit of a tree into the top of the shot for framing rather than leaving a whole load of empty sky. Everything looks better with a bit of a tree in it. Seriously. Hell, look at the last post - can you imaging that first shot with no tree? Now imagine the other two with a little bit of tree action going on - sweeet!

That way you may still have nothing but crap photos but you'll have a lot more fun taking them.

Can't comment about composition, painting with light or using the camera as a gateway into your subject's soul, so I possibly should not have blundered into this thread. Too late now!

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I really like the colour in that second photo, Nunberry, it's just a shame about the motion blur. I'd love to see how it would have turned out if you hadn't been pushed at the wrong time. Some motion blur in a shot can be a real magical thing, but of course there still needs to be something looking clear and in focus to give the viewer something to look at. But bands at concerts are just about the hardest thing to shoot, because you're working in a dark environment, usually a fair way away from the thing you're trying to photograph and they're always moving (it doesn't help when someone bumps you either). That second photo in my original post was tough because I couldn't use any flash and the entire interior of the aircraft was blacked out - you couldn't see anything in between the flares going off - so I had to rely entirely on a slow shutter speed and a high ISO (which accounts for the heavy grain) to pick up the light. Plus the aircraft was moving and flying evasively at the time so keeping the camera still enough to get a clear shot was tricky. It was one of those occassions when it's acceptable to just take as many shots as possible and it was definitely handy that I was using a pro DSLR that could shoot more than 30 frames continuously just by holding down the shutter. Of the 20-or-so shots I took while they were firing the flares, only two came out at all useable and this was the better of them.

Here's one of my shots where motion blur really worked for the image:

It was a very bright, sunny day, so I could have shot it at a much faster shutter speed, but doing so would have lost all the motion blur in the crowd and the propellar, making the aircraft look as though it was just strangely hovering stationary above the ground.

You're spot on about the key component being the person taking the photo rather than the gear, although to take really photos under any conditions you do at least need a camera that can have all its settings adjusted manually. For example, imagine if that first photo in my original post had been taken with a camera using an automatic flash. All that great contrast on the rocks in the foreground where the sun is hitting only the parts of the rocks that are angled toward it would be lost in the illumination and the image would look much flatter. But a decent compact camera can do a lot. Reuters photographers actually carry a simple Canon compact digital as a backup kit when they go away somewhere, so if their $30,000 Digital SLR kit gets broken or lost, they still have something to shoot with and they know it can create images enough for print in any magazine in the world. That said, you do need a SLR kit if you want to get serious about photography. A compact camera's zoom lens is not the same as a 200mm or 300mm lens on an SLR. There's a reason those lenses cost several thousands of dollars and the most expensive ones really are noticeably better than the cheapest. But you can easily blow tens of thousands of dollars on the dream camera kit, so you have to work out what you can afford. The news is that these days there are some great low-end SLRs available, such as the Nikon D-50, which will get you started for less than $1000. One of the key abilities the SLR gives you over the compact camera is that it takes the photo the very instant you press the shutter - there's no delay. When you're shooting action, it's just about essential.

On using flash, it's important to understand what flash is for. If you rely on the flash to illuminate your subject, then you're always going to end up with those boring, colourless photos that everyone takes at parties. You know the ones, where the foreground looks like everyone's standing under a flourescent light and the background is black. The key with flash is to use it to enhance the light that's already there. It helps to have a speedlight, which allows you to dial back the amount of flash you use or even aim the flash towards another surface and bounce the light onto the subject. In the third photo from my above post, for example, I bounced the flash off a children's whiteboard that was off to the right side of the shot, just splashing a gentle light over her face rather than a head-on blast from the speedlight. What flash really allows you to do is equalise your scene. So, for example, if you're shooting someone standing in the shade with a background that's in the sun, then you can adjust your shutter speed and aperture for the illuminated background and then use your flash to illuminate the foreground to the same level. If you're shooting someone with a dark background, then you need to slow your shutter speed to allow it to pick up the background light and use your flash just to make the foreground slightly more illuminated and sharper.

I'm going on a bit. I'll leave it at that and let some other people post some cool pictures.

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 Niiiiiice.

Although, I'm curious as to how you could get such a crystal clear shot of the plain and still blur the crowd, who I imagine are moving a hell of a lot slower (I thought it was purely down to a narrow depth of field focused on the plane but the blur on foreground and background appears to be fairly uniform rather than the gradual fade-in/out I'd have expected. ) Actually, it raises an arguement I'm always having with my girlfriend (who does have an SLR and expensive lenses etc.) - what's your feeling on the morality of taking that shot, then taking a shot of the crowd in perfect focus and splicing them so the whole thing is crystal clear? Granted, it would rob the shot of a bit of drama but there'd be less granularity on everything but the plane so you'd get the impression of a sharper image.

Regarding SLRs, one of the reasons I picked my Point & Click was that it has full manual control without the pricetag (or quality, let's face it) - I figured I'd use that to learn the ropes so that when I graduated to an SLR it wouldn't be a waste of time. Turns out though that I'm one of those people who can't be arsed moving off the Automatic setting, so instead I saved myself about 700 euro SLRs aren't for everyone. As an example, that friend of mine who does music photography got a mail from an aquaintance asking for guidance. He sent over a bunch of photos and asked for advice on how to edit them to make them look more professional. They looked like shots taken with a bog-standard compact - nice but nothing to dislocate your jaw bone over. When he was told, politely, that you can't take even a fairly nice sows ear and photoshop it into much of a silk purse, and that the key was learning to actually use the camera he replied "But I'm using the Automatic and the sport setting. What more can I do?". I agree, you can't do serious photography without one, but you can do some pretty mediocre photography with one if you don't know what you're doing.

I will now shut up as I have no photos to show off. This, I suspect, is not the time or place for holiday snaps.

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Really nice pictures, all i really do is take picture of bands.

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That's a great shot, Maggot. It's a shame about the red eye, but that really can't be avoided with a direct flash. That's something else a speedlight is for - by bouncing it off other surfaces or diffusing it you eliminate to possibility of red eye. In fact, even using the speedlight directly usually won't cause red eye, because the flash is separated from the camera by a several inches. Red eye, for those who don't know, is caused by light from the flash going through the pupil and bouncing off the retina, back through the pupil and into the camera. The reason it's red is because red light waves have a longer wave length than the other colours, so they're the only light waves that manage to make the journey all the way through your eye to the retina and back. Sunsets are red for the same reason - because the light is passing through more of the Earth's atmosphere to get to you, so more red light waves make it through than other colours.

On that shot above, Nun, I did it by fixing on the plane and following it as it was coming in to land. I was using a 300mm lens, so i was a fair way away from the plane. The shutter speed was at about 300 or so, so the motion was enough to give me a bit of motion blur, but so long as I kept a constant pace with the plane, it would come up clearly. On the splicing thing, you could do that for your own purposes (although with this shot I think it would lose something), but if you were shooting for a magazine or newspaper (as I was), you would have to mention in the caption that the photograph had been digitally altered, as a point of ethics. However, if you really wanted the crowd to be shown in clear focus, it would be easier to just take the shot at a higher shutter speed, given that it was a bright sunny day.

There's really nothing wrong with using the automated settings on the camera. Most pro photographers use some of the automated settings some of the time. The only people who don't are the really old pros who grew up on the old film SLRs that required everything to be handled manually - so they're more comfortable doing it that way - and people who are new to photography and think they have to adjust everything manually all the time to call themselves a "real" photographer. The latter tend to screw up half the shots they take because getting it right all the time on manual settings takes years of experience and practice. Modern cameras (SLRs and most compact digitals) allow you to choose which settings you want to handle manually and which ones you don't want to think about and can let the camera deal with. When I'm taking a lot of shots in a short time frame, I often use the Aperature Priority setting, because I want to be able to control the depth of field but I don't really care about the shutter speed as long as it doesn't go too low. Working with fully manual settings is best only in a studio environment, where you have complete control over the lighting and you can sit back, relax, adjust all your settings exactly how you want them and then take the shot. If you try to work manually in an environment that's constantly changing, you'll screw it up some of the time (unless you're one of the aforementioned old pros).

Here's a shot where I needed to manually control everything, and could do so because of the nature of the situation.

This was taken during a caving expedition I was covering. I couldn't use flash because I wanted all the light to be coming from the centre of the pic, where the headlamps were pointing. I had to slow the shutter more than usual because I couldn't lower the F-stop too far, else I'd blur the foreground guys too much, and I raised the ISO to about 500 (the ability to manually adjust ISO from one shot to the next is one of the biggest advantages of digital over film) to get a bit more light. The light from the headlamps wasn't enough to get an auto-focus fix, so I adjusted the focus manually as well. Then I just told the guys to stay really still.

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That top image looks especially cool, Maggot. How'd you get the moving fish to show up clearly in such a dark environment?

Here's a couple of photos I took the other night to celebrate GF's new hat. I'm trying to learn more about studio photography in terms of use of lighting, since most of my previous photography work has been photojournalism using natural light or otherwise not importing my own beyond the flash.

All these photos were taken without flash, using a 17-35mm F2.8 Nikon lens, mostly at an F-stop around 4.0-4.5. Shutter speed was about 15 for most of it.

 

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School is easy for me at the time... Get your ass out and take some photos.

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Looks like it's just you and I, Maggot. I normally don't do much photography of static objects, because I find people more interesting, but I have a few examples here to go along with Maggot's work above, with some explainations of the techniques (if, in fact, anyone other than we two is actually reading this thread ).

The angle you choose is important in all aspects of photography, but especially in still-life and object photography. The fact that an object may be interesting in and of itself is not really the point - you're trying to create a photograph as a piece of art, not of a piece of art. That means finding an angle that achieves some artistic purpose.

This string of Chinese lanterns isn't really anything special on its own and a straight shot from a few feet away wouldn't do it any favours. Getting right up underneath it gives it a sense of perspective and makes it something worth looking at.

The iconic, wide-angle shot of the entire, uncovered Terracotta Army has been done to death, but I find the unique, individual warriors much more interesting. Taking this shot with a low F-Stop to blur out the background helps to isolate the subject.

One word - framing. Shooting a scene through a window, a keyhole of trees or some other frame can create an interesting image of almost any scene.

Finding an angle that melds together several unconnected objects into one scene can create a very interesting image.

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Sorry for the double post. I forgot to mention above one really important technique for this kind of photography, which always produces results. It's illustrated in this photo of mine and the dockside seagulls photo in Maggot's post above.

Patterns. Look for and photograph patterns - they always come up brilliantly in a picture. The angle you choose depends on what you're photographing, so try to work out the best way you can show that it is a pattern. There are plenty of different angles from which I could have shot this scene, but I think most people would agree that no other angle would have been as effective.

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My best photo ever.

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Really nice wall with all the little
plants growing in it. Who's that in
the water?

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It's my dad in the water, i took it like 5 years ago in spain.

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Oh shoot, I'm a little late. Some very very nice photographs here.
JimboWelcome, if you ever come back to these forums: Thanks a lot for all the information you put in this thread about photography. It has been very interesting!

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The only thing worse than beating a dead horse is betting on one.

Some very nice photos here.  Especially Maggot's best one he posted a few posts up. 

Here's one I took while I was in Ireland. 



I'm not much of a photographer. 

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Here some I took while I spent a week diving in Roatan, Honduras:

One of my favorite underwater night shots, a basket star:


The view looking out from where we were working:


This stingray had just surfaced from under the sand, wish I had a video of it:


This one is simply stunning, two massive sponges, they were at least 15' tall:


A cleaner shrimp inside of a sponge:


Thats all for now, I'll put some up later though...

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The Bag:

Can I have a raise?

Waow, some great photos here
Just a couple I took whilst in Guatemala, resized...


Taken through a coach window as we were driving around a lake


(shame about the telephone wire things)

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Here are a few of my nature and animal shots

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There comes a time in every young mans' life when he must realize that life is hard and so is he.

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Name; PPL GOOOOO!!!



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