Gallery Pick of the Week
Instead of just showing pretty pictures only, here we have space for contributors to discuss their images every week.
This is a great opportunity to get some insight from the original photographer and the content is entirely open. It could be anything from the personal feeling of the photographer about the image to any photographic techniques or location knowledge he/she would like to share with our visitors.
Gallery Pick of the Week > November 2010
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My Photographic Heritage, 26/11/10, Pele Leung If a photo is worth only $1 each in the current living standard, $150,000 is still a fairly large amount of money. Of course, I am confident that my photos are worth much more than a dollar each. |
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Reaching the Extreme Distant Horizon, 19/11/10, Pele Leung You may think I am mad to carry a stone but being mad is an effective way to make differences and breakthroughs. There is only one thing that can be swapped with my 400mm stone in those mountain trips and its name is "tripod". |
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Better Ways to Show Your Photos, 12/11/10, Pele Leung In the current rocketing era of digital photography, everybody seems to be snapping any subjects in anywhere at anytime with whatever digital image capturing devices in their hands. Now it is not uncommon to bring 10,000+ digital images home... |
Pele Leung - My Photographic Heritage, 26/11/10, Pele Leung
Although technologies have been improving dramatically and exponentially in the last few decades, living forever still seems to be an unreachable dream. In Australia, male expectancy is only 79-year so in theory I should be vanished within the first half of the 21st century. It is not a sad issue and I have never worried about this coming event. Although it seems be too soon to talk about and prepare for my after-life matters, sometimes I do think about the future of my photographic heritage.
Based on my current shooting rate, taking my 100,000th photo is no longer a distant dream. If my prediction is right, I may be able to reach my shooting target of 500,000 (half a million) photos in the end. According to my current photo-keeping-ratio of 30%, the actual number of useful photos is only about 150,000. Although it is well below my shooting target of 500,000, 150,000 is still a sizeable number. If a photo is worth only $1 each in the current living standard, $150,000 is still a fairly large amount of money. Of course, I am confident that my photos are worth much more than a dollar each.
In addition to the value of my photographic heritage, my second consideration is who should own and run my photographic library afterwards? Naturally my wife is my first preference. While we are in similar age, I am afraid a second backup person is almost required shortly afterwards. The whole thing could be even more complicated if I want to set any photo usage restrictions with my photos. Perhaps I could simply resolve the whole issue by making a will with a lawyer.
With the consideration of all the hard work in building up my photo library, I really want my photos, at least the best part of it, to be seen and kept forever if possible. There are all sorts of ideas in mind but I guess time will tell.
Perhaps I am the only photographer with this concern in mind particularly at this early age. But I think this is an important issue to many photographers particularly to those who believe they have owned a valuable and large photo library (or heritage).
Pele Leung - Reaching the Extreme Distant Horizon, 19/11/10, Pele Leung
"Why are you still shooting? To me, apparently all views are blocked by the power lines! Do you see something interesting?"
"Yes, I do. Can you see the distant mountain top with mist?" I replied.
One of my tour mates was curious of why I was still shooting while most views nearby were blocked by some power lines. In fact, the mountain top was located miles away and could be reached by an ultra telephoto lens (400mm+) only. The good thing was that the distant composition came with no power line blockage as long as you had such a long lens.
70mm vs 400mm coverage
Although ultra telephoto lenses seem to be useful mainly for sports and wildlife photography only, they are also very handy if you are a travel or landscape photographer. An ultra telephoto lens is particularly useful if your destination is in mountain areas. This long shooting weapon does not just help you to reach the distant horizon but also gives you a complete different view out of many ordinary minds.
In the old days, I had never owned any long 400mm+ lenses. The first time I saw someone using an ultra telephoto lens for landscape photography was in the Grand Canyon. While most people around were playing with their ultra wide and wide angle lenses, a guy was shooting mad with a long gun. In my early age of photography, I did not realise the power of ultra telephoto lenses in landscape photography and thought this guys was doing the "wrong" thing. Yes I was naive!
Today I carry my 400mm lens, sometimes even with an extender, for most of my mountain photography travels. For some mountain hiking trips, I would prefer carrying an ultra telephoto lens to bringing an ultra wide angle lens (such as 17-40mm). The reason is simple, I can always shoot and stitch images if I need wider coverage but long distant scenery can be effectively taken by an ultra telephoto lens only. You may think I am mad to carry a stone but being mad is an effective way to make differences and breakthroughs. There is only one thing that can be swapped with my 400mm stone in those mountain trips and its name is "tripod".
Stitched from a few 400mm images that were taken in the portrait format
In a recent overseas photographic trip, I was the only person carrying a tripod among a group of 40 people during a side trip. Don't laugh - they did not carry their tripods because it was raining (more a drizzle). Guess what, it stopped raining as soon as we entered the valley. You could imagine how "good" it might be for hand holding your camera in a situation that I was shooting mainly in 1-second shutter range. Of course, some people could still make it with F2.8, ISO 800/1600 without polarising filter but this is another story.
In fact, bringing an ultra telephoto lens alone may not solve your problem unless you know how to use it properly. Ideally using a bean bag with such a long lens is the best way to avoid vibration but sometimes it is not easy to make an effective composition with a bean bag. Therefore, the next obvious option is to use a tripod. In addition, using a remote shutter release (or timer), tripod collar and mirror lockup are also crucial. It is even better to shoot with faster shutter speed such as 1/60" or shorter. The safe shutter speed is also subject to the wind speed.
Isolated morning light by a 400mm lens
Isolated mountain details by a 400mm lens
Overall, using ultra telephoto lens does not just simply help us to reach distant scenes but also push us to think differently. Thinking differently is one of the best ways to achieve creativity. Sometimes going for the extreme could be the best way to go forwards. Remember, no pain no gain but I leave it for you to make your own judgement.
Pele Leung - Better Ways to Show Your Photos, 12/11/10, Pele Leung
Sunset at Yea, Victoria
In the current rocketing era of digital photography, everybody seems to be snapping any subjects in anywhere at anytime with whatever digital image capturing devices in their hands. Now it is not uncommon to bring 10,000+ digital images home after a one-month photographic journey. Arguably we all help to produce what some people called 'digital junk'.
Regardless of who you are, master photographers or amateur snappers, the outcome could be problematic. Needless to say, processing and storing the massive digital images would be a big problem to most people but the worst outcome is that your audiences will be the victims if you intend to bombard them with massive number of images. Your clients or friends probably will not appreciate your great effort. So what should you do to keep your images and presentation in the best quality. The following suggestions may give you some ideas to start with.
1. Think before you shoot
If you really want to improve your image quality, think-before-you-shoot is probably my best advice. Take your time to approach your subject but shoot fast if the right opportunities appear. If you really follow this think-hard-but-act-fast approach, the number of images to be taken should be reduced dramatically but the good thing is that the ratio of good images should increase accordingly.
2. Only present your best images
If you really follow this advice, all your audiences would start to love you. You may start to receive positive feedback from them because they have more time to react if you cut down your image volume in multiple folds. To your peers, suddenly you become a star as they had never noticed that your image quality could be up to this high standard. Remember less means more and do not be tempted by the unlimited disk space provided by your web image storage providers.
3. Categorising and displaying your images
This is more for displaying images on digital devices. Many people naturally group and display their photos by types. For scenic photos, this may mean by the type of scenery. eg coastal, forest, Outback etc. In terms of variety, sorting by type is not exciting as not many audiences like to see similar stuff repeatedly. However, if the display is more for commercial purpose, displaying by type could help the buyers a lot if they are looking for an image from a particular image category. For people who simply want to share their trip images with others, displaying their images in chronological or location order would be a natural way to go. In terms of the image orientation, keeping the same image aspect ratio is the most pleasurable to view when running in a slideshow. If this is not possible, grouping and displaying the images in the same orientation would make the presentation less distractive.
Moon rise at Yea, Victoria
4. Digital still image or print
Although digital presentations via Internet are so convenient to most of us, the print media should still has its place. The feeling of looking at a large print in your hands or from a distance is actually quite different from watching the same image on your computer monitor (especially for a small screen). This experience may not be as impressive as seeing the real thing on location but it is certainly somewhere half way through. However, due to the wide spread of Internet, sharing images on web is almost unavoidable. So if you don't have a web space somewhere, find one.
5. Breaking the dimension
Currently showing still images on screen is the dominant approach. However, regardless of how fancy your album might look, your images are still only in 2D or 3D. To break this barrier, every serious image presenter should consider multi-media presentation formats. Image slideshow is not a new concept but many photographers are still ONLY doing the click-previous-click-next approach for showing their images. In fact, image slideshow alone is probably not enough to impress people and adding image animation and music would definitely take your presentation one step ahead.
6. How to create a better multimedia slideshow
By itself, it is a large topic and we do not have space here to explore the whole thing. However, the following tips may get you to the right track from step one.
- Do not over use the fancy transition effects and the best choice is still the traditional fade-in-fade-out approach.
- Animating your images on screen certainly makes your presentation more dynamic. In fact, the most important thing to be achieved is to guide your audience's focus to follow what you want them to follow. However, over using animation effect could reduce the impact of the effect. Moreover, not all images work well with animation so the effect should be used occasionally and carefully.
- Presentation music should be chosen carefully otherwise it will create more damage than enhancement. The art of using music in your presentation does not simply stop there after loading the musical piece in your software. In fact, the majority of workload is to synchronise the images with the music or vice versa. Tuning slide transition to the right musical bit is certainly an art by itself. If you are not ready for applying the music synchronisation technique, that's fine but you must at least ensure the music finishes with your last image slide in harmony.