You rush to the local photo shop to pick up those great pictures you took on your last vacation. But what a disappointment they are! Some of the pictures are dark, others are washed out or out of focus. ‘It’s the camera!’ you say in frustration. But is it really the camera? Or is it the photographer?YOUR wedding, breathtaking places you have visited, friends who have moved away, grandparents and other relatives, your child’s first steps—all these memories can be captured on film at the touch of a button. How disappointing it is, though, when your pictures come out poorly—or don’t come out at all! No, a new camera is probably not the answer. The key to success is mastering the basic principles of photography.How Does a Camera Work?Simply speaking, a camera is a light-tight box with an “eye,” a lens, through which light enters and is focused to form an image on film. The surface of the film consists of light-sensitive chemicals that must receive an adequate amount of light to be properly exposed. Too much light and your pictures seem washed out. Too little and your pictures are too dark.When you take your picture, the shutter of the camera opens for a fraction of a second, allowing an image to form on your film. So one way of controlling film exposure is to regulate how long that shutter stays open. In normal daylight the average photo can be taken at a shutter speed of 1/125 second. Many cameras have a range of shutter speeds, but generally speaking you should use as fast a shutter speed as the light level permits. The longer the shutter is open, the more likely your picture is to be blurred by camera movement. In critical situations this can be prevented by mounting the camera on a tripod and releasing the shutter by a cable or the camera’s timer.Another way to control film exposure is to adjust the size of the lens aperture (also called f-stop). This can be compared to having your eye wide open, half closed, or squinting. It controls the amount of light that enters. Many lenses have a dial with various settings, or f-stops, you can select from. The larger the aperture, the more light that enters and the greater the exposure of the film. To confuse matters for the beginner, f-stop numbers are the reverse of the aperture size. For example, f-2.8 is a large opening; f-32 is a tiny opening. Many cameras now come with such features as automatic exposure control and built-in light meters that tell you exactly where to set the adjustments. Indeed, on some fully automatic cameras, all the adjustments are made for you. Such cameras may even focus for you!Which Film to Choose?As with cameras, there is an ever-changing variety of films available. A color negative film is used to make color prints. These are easy to pass around and relatively cheap to copy or enlarge. Another advantage is that because of its great latitude, or exposure range, even a poorly exposed negative will produce an acceptable print. Color-reversal films are used to produce color transparencies, or slides. To enjoy these, though, you will also have to purchase a projector and a screen. Slides are less forgiving and demand more precision in exposure. However, you can get good prints from them.Films differ as to their speed (sensitivity to light) and are rated by ISO or ASA numbers. Some are as low as ISO 25 and others as high as ISO 3200. A good general-purpose film would be ISO 100 Daylight, as this medium-speed film works well for normal shots taken in daylight. A faster ISO 400 film works well in low light situations, such as early evening, overcast days, and indoors. However, as a general rule, the slower the film, the sharper the detail it yields. Fast film tends to show grain on enlargements.
If your camera has a film-speed selector, it is very important to set it to the correct ISO or ASA number. Now comes the crucial point:
How to Make a Good Photograph
Most beginners take snapshots. They point and shoot. A seasoned photographer takes a little time and forethought and makes a picture. He composes it. Placing your subject or point of interest properly is called composition. No, lining up your subject dead center is not necessarily the best way. Notice how, in the example given here (page 26), a subject may become much more interesting when it is moved slightly away from center—say about one third of the distance from the top or side of the photograph. This is called applying the rule of thirds.
It is also important to isolate the subject from the background. A cluttered, or busy, background can distract the viewer’s attention from the subject. Is there a light-colored wall or some other neutral background that could be used in posing people? If an ideal background cannot be found, adjust the aperture to a wider opening (a smaller f-stop number). This will put your subject in focus, but it will blur the background.—See example, page 24.
To ensure good exposure, you can also bracket your shots. This means that if you take your photo at f-8 and 1/125 second, you can also shoot at f-5.6 and f-11 at the same speed. In this way, you allow for latitude in the lighting conditions. On the other hand, if maximum depth of field is desired, then bracket by increasing or decreasing the shutter speed (1/60, 1/125, and 1/250 second) while leaving the f-stop constant.
Lighting is also important. If there happens to be a bright background or strong light behind your subject (snow, sunny sea, or beach), this can confuse your camera and cause underexposure. The solution? Step nearer to the subject, and take an accurate light reading. Then step back to your original position, and shoot your picture at the chosen settings. Experienced photographers often use an electronic flash in daylight as fill-in lighting that removes the shadows created by bright backlight or heavy shade.
A bright, high sun projecting down on the subject (or directly behind) may produce harsh shadows under a person’s eyes, nose, and chin. If so, place your subject in the shade or use fill-in flash. You can even angle the sun directly behind or to the side of your subject to produce a halo effect as the sun highlights the person’s hair, as long as the sun does not shine directly into your lens.
Electronic flash has its limitations, since many flash units are effective only for about 30 feet [10 m] maximum. Therefore, trying to take a flash picture of a theater stage (as at a Christian convention) or of a city skyline does no more than run down your battery. Direct flash tends to create shadows or highlight facial blemishes. Solution? Try covering your flash (not lens) with a tissue or handkerchief to eliminate hot spots, or bounce the flash from a white ceiling. This will also require exposure compensation. You can place your subject against a darker background to cut down shadows.
The red-eye effect is another quirk of flash photography, especially with cameras that have a built-in flash. If you cannot separate your camera from your flash unit (such as by a mounting bracket), then have the subject look first at a bright light so that the eyes will not be dilated when you take the picture. Or have the subject avoid looking directly into the lens.
Revealing Portraits
A good portrait does more than reproduce a person’s facial features. It can give insight into the individual’s personality and character. To produce such fine pictures, you must master the mechanics of photography. This way you can concentrate on your subject, not on your equipment.
First, get your subject to relax. Use a telephoto lens so you can get a close-up shot without moving that intimidating camera in close. Appropriate music is relaxing. Talking is also another way to help your subject forget the camera and achieve a natural expression. Use questions to draw him out and evoke the emotions you want to capture. In photographing children, make it a game or tell a story. Let them be spontaneous and playful. Props may also help your subject relax. So pose a musician with his instrument or a worker with his tools.
A group photograph doesn’t necessarily mean arranging everyone into a neat row. Give them a prop—a chair or two—and arrange them around it, perhaps forming a triangular composition. It isn’t necessary for everyone to smile at the camera. Now look carefully at the scene before you press the button. Are clothes and hair well arranged? Are there distracting background elements? Is the camera angle the most flattering? (A camera placed a little lower than the face can shorten a long nose or de-emphasize a receding hairline.) Now go ahead and take a number of shots, and when they are developed, choose the best.
With a little effort—and practice—your camera can bring you much pleasure and help you preserve cherished memories, memories captured at the deft touch of your camera button!
How Photography Saw the Light
The story goes that the visitors of Italian physicist Giambattista Della Porta (1535?-1615) were shocked. On the wall in front of them, images of small upside-down people were moving around. Panic-stricken, the onlookers scurried out of the room. Della Porta was put on trial for sorcery!
SO MUCH for trying to amuse his guests by introducing them to a camera obscura—literally, in Latin, “dark chamber.” The principle on which the camera works is simple, but the results can be spectacular. How does it work?
When light enters a dark box or room through a tiny hole, an inverted picture of the outside is projected on the far wall. What Della Porta’s guests saw was nothing but actors performing outside. The camera obscura was a forerunner of the modern camera. Today you may be one of the millions of people who own a camera or at least have used the ubiquitous, inexpensive disposable camera.
The camera obscura was not even new in Della Porta’s day. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) observed the principle on which the camera would later work. The 10th-century Arabic scholar Alhazen vividly described it, and the 15th-century painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it in his notebooks. The 16th-century introduction of the lens enhanced the accuracy of the camera, and many artists used it for accurate renderings of perspective and scale. But in spite of many attempts, making the resulting images permanent remained elusive until the 19th century.
The World’s First Photographer
French physicist Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce possibly started his quest to make permanent photos as early as 1816. But his real breakthrough came when he was experimenting with lithography and came across a light-sensitive substance called bitumen of Judaea. Sometime in the mid-1820’s, he put a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera obscura facing a window of his estate and exposed it for eight hours. Not even the most inexperienced of today’s amateur photographers would be proud of the blurry picture of a building, a tree, and a barn that resulted, but Niepce had reason to be. His picture was most likely the first permanent photograph ever taken!
To develop his method further, in 1829, Niepce entered a partnership with a dynamic entrepreneur named Louis Daguerre. In the years following Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre made some important progress. He used silver iodide as a coating on copper plates. This proved to be more light sensitive than bitumen. By accident he found that when he treated the plate with mercury fumes after exposure, a latent picture appeared clearly. This reduced the exposure time dramatically. When Daguerre later discovered that washing the plate with a salt solution prevented the picture from darkening over time, photography was ready to take the world by storm.
Presented to the World
When Daguerre’s invention, called daguerreotype, was presented to the public in 1839, the reaction was overwhelming. Scholar Helmut Gernsheim writes in his book The History of Photography: “Perhaps no other invention ever captured the imagination of the public to such a degree and conquered the world with such lightning rapidity as the daguerreotype.” An eyewitness to the public release wrote: “An hour later, all the opticians’ shops were besieged, but could not rake together enough instruments to satisfy the onrushing army of would-be daguerreotypists; a few days later you could see in all the squares of Paris three-legged dark-boxes planted in front of churches and palaces. All the physicists, chemists, and learned men of the capital were polishing silvered plates, and even the better-class grocers found it impossible to deny themselves the pleasure of sacrificing some of their means on the altar of progress, evaporating it in iodine and consuming it in mercury vapour.” The Paris press quickly named the craze daguerréotypomanie.
The outstanding quality of the daguerreotypes moved British scientist John Herschel to write: “It is hardly too much to call them miraculous.” Some even ascribed magical powers to the invention.
But not everybody hailed the new invention. In 1856 the king of Naples banned photography, possibly because it was thought to be associated with “the evil eye.” When seeing a daguerreotype, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed: “From today painting is dead!” The invention also caused great anxiety among painters who saw it as a threat to their livelihood. One commentator expressed the fears of some when he said: “Photography’s stringent truth to optical reality could nullify the individual’s apprehension of beauty.” In addition, photographic pictures were even criticized for the relentless realism with which they shattered cherished illusions of beauty and youth.
Daguerre Versus Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot, an English physicist, believed that he had invented photography and was thus taken aback by the announcement of Daguerre’s invention. Talbot had been putting silver-chloride-coated sheets of paper in a camera obscura. He waxed the resulting negative for transparency, placed it over another coated paper, and then exposed it to sunlight, thus producing a positive image.
Although initially a lot less popular and of inferior quality, Talbot’s process proved to have greater potential. It allowed for multiple copies of one single negative, and paper copies were cheaper and easier to handle than the fragile daguerreotypes. Modern photography is still based on Talbot’s process, whereas the daguerreotype, in spite of its initial popularity, proved to be a dead end.
Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot were, however, not the only contenders for the title of Father of Photography. Following Daguerre’s 1839 announcement, at least 24 men—from Norway in the north to Brazil in the south—stepped forward claiming to have invented photography.
Drastic Changes Caused by Photography
One social reformer, Jacob August Riis, early on saw photography as a golden opportunity to bring poverty and suffering to the attention of the public. In 1880 he started taking pictures of New York City slums after dark by using burning magnesium powder in a frying pan as a flash—a method not entirely without risk. He twice set ablaze the house in which he was working, and once his own clothes caught fire. His pictures are said to have been one of the reasons President Theodore Roosevelt undertook a number of social reforms when he moved into the White House. The persuasive power of a series of scenic photographs by William Henry Jackson also prompted the U.S. Congress in 1872 to make Yellowstone the world’s first national park.
Accessible to All
In the late 1880’s, many potential photographers were still held back because of the cost and complexity of photography. But in 1888 when George Eastman invented the Kodak, a portable easy-to-use box camera containing a roll of flexible film, he paved the way for unlimited amateur photography.
After exposing the roll, the customer would send the entire camera to the factory. There the film was processed and the camera was reloaded and sent back, along with the developed photos—all this at a fairly low cost. The slogan “You push the button, we do the rest” was no exaggeration.
Photography for the masses had been born, and the billions of exposures taken annually today indicate that its acceptance has never abated. And now, adding to its popularity, there are digital cameras that define an image in megapixels. They use a tiny memory stick that may hold hundreds of photos. High-quality prints can even be made using a home computer and a printer. No doubt about it, photography has come a long way.
