Five things to look for in abandoned buildings

I will return to my post about black and white photography soon, it was quite an ambitious post and I’ve spent the last month on-and-off thinking about the last six reasons. I’ll break it up with five points about photography in derelict and abandoned sites, as I’ve become more interested in this since getting a new ultra-wide-angle lens (not used in the above photo, which was taken last year). Below are a few things to look out for if you decide to venture camera-in-hand into some derelict buildings yourself, but you’ll have to find your own inspiration, I can’t help you with that.

Man’s work being reclaimed by nature
Maintaining a working building is a constant battle to keep nature out, but as soon as maintenance stops, nature wins. Buildings which have been empty for some time will be full of nature’s reclamations. Examples to look out for are lichen, moss, plants and even in some cases, trees growing in the middle of buildings, climbing plants look particularly good working their way over girders and stairwells. The animal kingdom has also staked a claim here so look out for insect nests or evidence of feral cat colonies.

Obsolete technology and vintage items
Sites which ceased to be occupied many years ago tend to be filled with the technology of that period, as well as other items which put a date on their abandonment, such as newspapers, magazines and styles of decor and furnishing. These can be fascinating in themselves as well as lending context to your photos. For example, look out in office buildings for old computers and printers, it will all help the storytelling aspect of your photography.

Patterns of decay
As things decay they become overrun with organic patterns which contrast with the straight lines and sharp edges of human construction. Peeling paint, mould, damp and rust all form interesting textures, or patina as it is called. Patina is a favourite of many photographers shooting dereliction so look for the most interesting examples in the site you’re exploring.

Left in a hurry
Some of the most provocative images from abandoned buildings are those that show signs of the normal activity that took place in a building prior to its abandonment. Desks with paperwork still on, canteen tables with trays and glasses left on tables, in the right circumstances it can look as though the building was abandoned very quickly, people dropping whatever they were doing and making for the exits. The key phrase is ‘as though’, if the building was really left in such haste you should perhaps question the logic of you being there.

Patterns of light and shadow
Broken ceilings and walls allow shafts of bright sunlight to penetrate where a lack of artificial lighting leaves most of the interior very dark. This creates fantastic opportunities to create dramatic photographs using shadows and highlights; a technique called chiaroscuro. In particular look out for shadows cast by jagged holes and the skeletal girders of the building, and shafts of light visible in dusty or humid interiors.

Finally, remember a building doesn’t have to be abandoned to be derelict. I have found numerous scenes of decay and grit in my home town in perfectly operational, if poorly maintained buildings. So keep your eyes peeled for these as well as the true abandoned sites. If anything they are easier and safer to gain access to. If you’re interested in really throwing yourself into this then I would recommend checking in at one of the many online communities of urban explorers, for safety tips and help on sites in your area, 28 days later is a good example of a UK based community.

10 reasons to go black & white – Part 1

Black and white photographs once dominated the photography scene for technical reasons, either because colour photography was yet to be invented, or because colour film was expensive and difficult to home-process (even as a student photographer in the early noughties, we shot in black and white because that was all we had the equipment to develop and enlarge). Now, even though digital photography has relegated black-and-white to a mere option in post-processing, it remains popular; and not just as a way for lazy photographers to make a dull or bad photo interesting and moody, but as a valid medium used by some of the top photographers in the world (this is my blog so I’m using my photograph to illustrate it but I don’t pretend it is a particularly outstanding example of the art form). It saddens me that to many photographers it is now just an option, to be thought of later and rarely considered from the start, as you would have to with black and white film. I would have to concede that I don’t necessarily agree either that you should have a fixed idea of what the image you are creating is at the moment you shoot and deny later flashes of inspiration, post-processing is after all part of the art; but there’s a difference between a light-bulb moment and an afterthought, or even worse, an afterthought that is also a cliche.

You can buy whole books on black and white photography, I have neither the skill nor the space to compete with them in this small post, so I just want to extol the virtues of the monochromatic and hopefully help provide inspiration to other photographers by summarising what exactly you can do with black and white. I have 10 points to make, I’ll make four here and six in another post later.

1. Make it all about form
This the number one thing about black and white which all books emphasise. The eye is drawn to contrast and in a colour photographs, parts where there is a lot of contrast between colours stand out and the photo becomes about them. Remove the colour and you will look at the image in a whole new way, contrasts which draw the eyes are now those between light and dark, and more importantly, between different shapes. If this is what is interesting about the photograph, then you don’t need colour, so in the interests of brevity, leave it out.

2. Suddenly dark shadows and bright highlights are a virtue.
When taking photographs, normally (with many exceptions) you will be trying to avoid blocked shadows and blown highlights (areas of the photograph which are so bright or so dark as to appear pure black or pure white). They can look a bit unnatural and detail within them is lost. However with black and white, because black and white are the main elements of composition and you don’t expect to see shades of colour in the highlights land shadows you can get away with them to an extent. Like in my photograph above, shooting straight into the sun the sky was always going to be blown with blocked shadows in the hills, and this doesn’t look right in colour where we don’t expect to see pure blacks and whites but is perfectly acceptable in black and white,

3. Grey skies become natural.
Dull grey skies often ruin an otherwise strong photograph. I’m not talking about dramatic, cloud formations or stormy skies, but flat overcast days. The quality of light can actually be quite good, but the background will be this grey slab, which can jar against some (not all) colour compositions. However, with black and white photography, it doesn’t matter what colour the sky is, so if you have a photograph which would be great if it weren’t for the grey sky, try it in black and white. It might still be boring, but at least it won’t jar.

4. Filters, a new way of looking at colour
Shooting in black and white doesn’t mean you can just forget about colour altogether, when you convert a colour image to black and white you can select how light or dark certain colours will become. When using black and white film this was achieved by placing a coloured filter over the lens, so for example, a red filter would let more red light through than blue, resulting in blue objects appearing darker, commonly used to get wonderfully rich dark skies. When shooting digitally you will shoot in colour and then convert to black and white, and it is at this point you can replicate the effect of coloured filters and experiment with filters of any colour you desire.

Oh how I wish for snow

It’s well into February now, and I’m still yet to see a good blanket of snow. Even the fell-tops aren’t always wearing their usual white covering. One day a few weeks ago I went up Catbells and it was positively warm! This is a practical joke the weather is playing on us after everyone went out and bought snow tyres. Usually by now there’s been a week when the country has been snowed in, travel chaos and all that stuff. I don’t care about the chaos though, I just want snow. I fear there’s not going to be any now though. It’s almost spring.

I’m particularly keen to see some snow as I want to take some more wintry scenes in an effort to get a good seasonal spread of stock photographs. I have a few decent ones, but even of them few of them are good thick snow, and when trying to sum up a season in a photograph it helps to get a bit extreme. With winter you want the experience of looking at the photo to be enough to make people want to don their warm jackets, build a snowman or curl up in front of the fire with a glass of Baileys. The colours are especially important. Winter is all about blue and white, but when there is no snow, the russets and crimsons of the fellside bracken can look a little too warm, too autumnal.

Cumbria looks especially good in snow, without the usual differences in vegetation and colour distinction between rock and grass, mountains become abstract sculptures, less Constable, more Van der Rohe. Bleakness has a beauty in itself, the feeling of dread it creates being a powerful emotion. The snow even forms its own weird and wonderful shapes as it drifts and covers walls and trees. Like a black and white photo, the monochrome effect is to make shape and form the main elements. I don’t feel I’ve really done justice to it though, the best thing I can say is that it just looks very beautiful. The photo above was taken in 2008, we need more days like that.

Coping with being put on the spot

Often, when people know you’re a serious photographer they will expect you to be able to take a photo of anything in a few seconds and it look amazing. They expect your photos to be that much better than the ones they take, but they expect you to just put the camera to your eyes and snap away without a second’s consideration in the same way they do. You of course know that there may be other factors which make things difficult, it’s too dark, or too bright, or too contrasty. The background is uninspiring, you haven’t time to compose the shot in your head properly, or play a bit of trial and error. Normally you would take a bit longer to get things perfect but they aren’t willing to pose for that long, or you’re worried they’ll be thinking ‘well I could have done it too if I’d had five minutes to set it up’. Well if you know a few key skills, combined with a little knowledge, some forethought to prepare for when you might be expected to take photos like this and (unfortunately) the right equipment, you can still get impressive photos.

This advice, by the way, is also useful for situations when you know that for other reasons, the opportunity to get the shot will be fleeting. It was essential to know this kind of stuff back when we were shooting film and every exposure had a price, but since going digital, many of us, including those of us who could get great shots with film have fallen back on a tactic of trial-and-error, knowing the only constraint is time.

Firstly, nothing can substitute for a deep understanding of your exposure controls, a skilled photographer can make a good guess at the correct settings and will instinctively know what sort f combination of exposure and aperture to go for. However in the spirit of making the best use of modern technology I will recommend aperture priority (or Av) mode this allows you to set the aperture and the camera does the shutter speed based on its internal light meter.

Use the aperture to control the exposure, with this you can narrow it to allow for bright scenes or widen it to make up for dark scenes. Widening it also has the useful effect of throwing the background out of focus (what compact manufacturers irritatingly dress up as a special feature called background defocus).

If the scene (or rather the parts of it you hope to capture) are particularly bright or dark, then you can adjust for this using the exposure compensation. For example, if you’re hoping to capture the ambience of a darkened room, your camera doesn’t know this and will try and set the shutter speed to elevate the brightness of the whole scene to a neutral grey, resulting in a slow shutter speed and hence motion blur, as well as an overexposed scene. In this case you would set the compensation to something like -1 or -2, telling the camera to go a stop or two below what it thinks is right. An alternative might be a photo of a snowy scene or a newborn in white swaddling, in this case go the other way and set the compensation to a positive number.

If this still isn’t working, or if you have excessively bright or dark areas in your photo which aren’t important to you but are are throwing off your camera’s meter reading, then the next stage is to change the metering mode. By default most cameras use what they call ‘matrix metering’ or ‘smart metering’ which try and identify bright and dark areas and guess what you want to expose for. My alternative recommendation is spot metering. This uses a small area in the centre if your image to set the exposure. Assuming this area isn’t the best place to take a reading (the best place would be a neutral tone, midway between black and white) point the camera at a better tone which you want to appear neutral in the image (perhaps something on a person’s clothes fits this requirement) hold the shutter button halfway, recompose, shoot.

I will also recommend keeping ISO set to manual and to 100 for the best quality photos, however if a dark scene is your problem, and you are already shooting at maximum aperture, don’t be afraid to bump the ISO up. I reckon 400 to be the maximum usable ISO, on my camera at least, newer cameras will perform better and better at higher ISO ratings.

Of course keep an eye on the shutter speed your camera selects. Most cameras have some kind of warning that appears if a shutter speed which is too slow for handholding is selected. The general advice is that it needs to be faster than 1/200 of a second to handhold but I believe you can get this up to 1/125 if you have a steady hold. Otherwise see above, you’ll have to widen the aperture or increase the ISO.

Finally there are a few bits of kit, which if you have, I would recommend keeping with you for these types of situation. They will really increase your ability to overcome common factors which make photography difficult.

Have a ‘get you out of a tight-spot’ lens. Mine is a Sigma 30mm f/1.4; a ‘fast’ lens (i.e. one with a wide maximum aperture, meaning a low f-number) with a standard focal length (on most digitals this is around 30mm). I went with a prime (fixed focal length) lens as these provide better image sharpness, for the money anyway, and especially at low focal lengths, the cost of a zoom lens with excellent image quality and a maximum aperture of f/1.4 will raise more than a few eyebrows.

Have a flashgun. This will enable you to fill in the dark patches in excessively contrasty scenes (for example, a person backlit by the sun). The pop up flash on your camera can also do this, but a flashgun is much better at it. It’s more powerful and can be directed and bounced off other surfaces to reduce the harshness. In the interests if convenience I recommend getting one with TTL (through-the-lens) functionality compatible with your camera. This will allow the flash to take its meter readings direct from the camera.

Finally, a tripod is invaluable for those times where you can’t do anything more to get the shutter speed within handholding territory. Unfortunately they aren’t always as convenient to either carry around and set up, so perhaps won’t help you much in those on-the-spot moments. You can, however get a good portable tripod or other support, something which is sturdy enough to carry your camera. You may have to look for other things such as tables or walls to get the height required for many photos but it will be a useful addition to your on-the-spot kit.

I hope this is of some help to you, if anything I think it shows that there is no replacement for knowledge, and the more you know the better you will be able to react to quickly changing situations, and the more mentally prepared you will be for those moments when a friend says ‘hey can you get a great picture of me in front of this landmark, but make it quick’.

When is a photograph unedited?

Today’s topic of discussion is the extent to which a photograph has been edited as this often comes up when photographers are critiquing each others’ work. In particular most photographers like to sneer upon any photograph which they see as over-edited, saying that either they get their photographs right in-camera and don’t need to edit them, or that the photo they are looking at doesn’t represent reality.

I’m not going to give my opinion on this, I just want to inject a bit of reason into the debate. So let’s get one thing straight, when is a photograph ever a perfect representation of reality? My reasoned argument is ‘never’. For one, reality is three-dimensional. When you represent a three dimensional scene in two dimensions it has already been ‘edited’, choosing which lens to use and how wide to set the aperture are editing choices and they affect the two-dimensional image. Even your own eyes only create the perception of three dimensions by combining two 2D images. Secondly, reality moves, or rather it only exists in an infinitesimally small time-frame. A camera captures the changes in reality over a measurable period, the shutter speed.

Thirdly, images have colour, all reality has is different wavelengths of light, colour doesn’t exist, your brain makes it up. Why else would blue and red (physically speaking two of the most different colours) mix to make violet, a colour even further from red than blue is? That’s like saying the average of 1 and 5 is 6! Real colour isn’t a wheel, it’s a line. Your brain makes the wheel and your camera and your computer or your film enlarger copy this effect.

Also, to argue over whether am image represents reality presumes that what we saw with our eyes when we took the photograph is reality. Your brain in fact edits the image far more significantly than the most talented photoshop user can. It rubs out details which aren’t important and enhances those that are, it also takes several ‘exposures’ and combines them to create an image which appears perfectly focused and perfectly exposed everywhere (and then discards the stuff you aren’t interested in), to you, your eyes seem to have infinite dynamic range and depth of field, this is your brain at work. Removing unimportant details is a striking one, even professionals are often surprised to see a bin, or a white van stuck right in a conspicuous area of a photo when they didn’t notice it at the time. The reason they didn’t see it was their brain removed it, the same effect you get with this well known optical illusion. In this case, you can leave the bin in to ‘represent reality’ or you can edit it out to represent what you actually saw, and why not make the sky bluer while you’re at it.

Finally, your camera doesn’t necessarily even show the raw data exactly how it hit the sensor (although if you shoot in raw mode you can retain much of it). The computer in your camera probably sharpens and enhances the photo as well as adjusting for white balance, fitting the raw data into a colour space (more on these later, possibly), and maybe compressing it to a jpeg, and when you start using filters the edits can occur before the light even enters the lens (which is much better way of making the sky bluer that the example in the last paragraph).

Taking all this into account, it doesn’t appear to me as though the pure ideal of an unedited photograph exists, and if it did it would look nothing like the scene the photographer saw. I can only apologise unreservedly for ending up by giving an opinion too. So where do we draw the line? This I definitely won’t give an opinion on as this is a value judgement, but some of the arguments people give are still valid. There is a point where the craft of using photoshop is more responsible for an image that camera craft, and most photographers (myself included) prefer the camera craft. In addition, some edits are better than others, it is better to get the right exposure in-camera than get it wrong and fix it using photoshop, and it is also better to make the sky bluer using a polarising filter.

As for the photo at the top of this post, it is the best example of editing I can find in my portfolio, it is located in Liverpool and anyone who Iives there and is interested should print it out and go play spot the difference with the real building. I’ll give you the first two for free; the real building isn’t black and white and is surrounded by other buildings (after all, the way I’ve framed it is also an editing choice).

What makes a professional photographer professional?

I thought I would kick my blog off with some thoughts on one of the most heated debates among serious photographers, that of the difference between amateur photographers and professional photographers.

This question was asked over at Digital Photo School some time ago and I foolishly checked the ‘subscribe to this thread’ box. Even now I still get a couple of emails a week telling me there is a new reply. My friend Dave Wilson felt motivated to comment on his blog in response to suggestions that there was no point hiring a professional to cover a wedding when there are so many skilled amateurs who will do it for free. It fires passions because many good amateurs feel like professionals look down their noses at them while many professionals feel threatened in a world where anyone can pick up a camera and start calling themselves a professional photographer. Both sides get defensive.

The line between an amateur and a professional is very blurry. I’m not aware of any professional photographers for whom it isn’t also their hobby, while there are many people who call themselves amateurs despite having done a bit of paid work. When an amateur photographer posts on Facebook ‘I’m now selling family portrait sessions’, no great change has just taken place. Similarly, when two photographers, one of whom is a professional wedding photographer, go on holiday together, there is no reason to expect that the wedding photographer will take better travel photos than his amateur friend. Notwithstanding how subjective quality is, different people are good at different things and many people attain excellent quality without ever wanting to carve a living out of it.

So there is no big difference between the professional and the amateur photographer and many photographers fall in both camps, the difference is between professional and amateur photography. Amateur photography can be of anything, where professional photography is restricted to what someone is willing to pay for. This post has been leading to the following example, last week I was out in the pouring rain photographing used cars for a dealer. It was unpleasant, but I persevered because it was my job (note: professional photography is often very unglamourous), had I been photographing cars because that was my favourite subject, I would have packed up and come back on a better day, instead I got my raincover out and cracked on with it (note: I came prepared).

Professional photography doesn’t have the luxury of opportunism that defines amateur photography, you photograph whatever is required of you, not whatever pops up when the conditions are right. However you must be well prepared, adaptable and determined to get the photos the shoot calls for. This is the answer to the question, it isn’t one of quality; an amateur photographer (or a professional taking amateur photographs) has nothing stopping her from taking outstanding photographs of her favourite subject, but when you’re just taking photographs for the fun of it you can afford to pick and choose or just go home if rains. I’m not saying professional photography can’t be glamourous, but I’ll discuss that in a separate post.

Picture is unrelated… Sorry

Now with WordPress

This is just a test first post to make sure this new blog is working. However… if you would like to know how to get a WordPress blog to show up on a Clickpic site then check out this link. It turns out it’s pretty simple, though you may want to play with the formatting settings to get it right.

John Ahern’s guide to linking WordPress and Clickpic.