Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I have a confession to make. I often shoot in aperture priority mode.
I’m a reasonably competent photographer with a solid grasp of the factors that drive exposure, but I don’t want to fiddle with multiple dials when I just want to take a photo. There are, of course, exceptions. I shoot manually when using strobes or stars, but those niches don’t represent the bulk of my photos.
Getting used to the sheer number of technical terms and numbers in photography can be pretty overwhelming for beginners. There are a lot of them out there. But you don’t really need to know about all of them from day one. But there are some that you’ll want to learn and understand first.
You’ll hear these terms quite often if you hang around other photographers or partake in any of the photography groups on Facebook. They might confuse you at first, but this video from Apalapse goes through 25 of the most important and breaks down exactly what they mean.
Along with normal how-to articles and essays, I’ve always liked reading and writing very technical, nitty-gritty articles about photography — sometimes, articles on topics that rarely come up while actually taking pictures. In fact, I usually don’t even use my own sharpest aperture charts in the field, as useful as they are, since I don’t like carrying around charts. So, then, does all that technical stuff matter? Is it even worth talking about in the first place? These questions are very important to ask, since most people don’t want waste their time on topics that are unnecessary for their photography — do these articles actually help? There are no easy answers, but a recent trip I took to Death Valley makes a compelling argument for why some of this highly-technical information really does matter.
Photographing light bulbs is a long established photographic technical exercise. They present pretty much every lighting problem a photographer can face. You have to deal with reflections, refractions, surface brightness, and even illumination from within the bulb itself.
Brazilian Photographer Alexandre Watanabe decided to take the familiar light bulb a step further this time, though. To photograph it perfectly on either black or white isn’t easy. To be able to do it on both and present it so well is very impressive.
Up front let me say “field curvature” is not that pesky problem where images with straight lines in the frame seem to bow in or out as you move towards of the corners, that would be distortion, which comes in two core flavours, barrel and pincushion, with moustache as a somewhat recalcitrant but rare third option. There is a relationship between distortion and field curvature, but we won’t be getting into that in this article.
Field curvature can be a right little bastard, causing time dilation, warping gravitational fields, interfering mercilessly with photons and fooling with quantum calculations…..well actually it won’t do any of those things but it can indeed be tricky if you don’t know what it is and how it might impact on your photos.
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