ISO 160, f/10, 31mm, 1/15 secs, tripod, manual focus

Inspired by a Practical Photography video on still life, I experimented with this wooden mushroom with a variety of backgrounds. I don’t have any fancy lighting equipment so I had to hold a desk lamp in place and find things to prop up the backgrounds. And in the shot above, the “things” were actually my sister and my mum…

For many of my shots, the strong light from the desk lamp was harsh and left sharp highlights as you can see above. In the first shot, the lighting was too flat (maybe because it was far away?) and the background (a waistcoat) wasn’t big enough to fill out the frame with that pattern placement. In the second photo here, I’ve actually changed the background colour in Lightroom from yellow that to help the mushroom stand out. Although I like the shadow, the mushroom doesn’t stand out from the background enough on the left, the tones are too similar.

ARGH!

Actually I found this photography frustrating and stressful. Where do I begin? Having to hold lots of things at awkward angles, slightest movements knocking your shots out, Constant readjustment of tripod and camera angle, out of focus shots, most shots looking flat and uninteresting, uninspiring backgrounds…. it all wound me up and made the experience feel like a lot of effort for little reward. The Practical Photography guy made it look easy, though he had a proper soft light and a top-down angle on his subject, plus experience! Perhaps when I’m wiser and more experienced I will enjoy this kind of photography more? Also I’m not sure if my lens choice was correct. 18-45mm at the far zoom end? I could have used my 80-200mm (which would have meant being half way across the room to get it in shot), or my 20mm pancake which would have been harder for framing.

ISO 160, 34mm, f5.5, 1/125 sec, tripod, manual focus

In the end the best images came from shining the light through art paper, naturally bouncing up to light the mushroom from below. I increased the exposure in Lightroom to show more under the mushroom cup, also adding contrast and boosting shadows to add drama. Although I didn’t realize my original vision (mushroom in a green landscape!),  instead I discovered something far more interesting which made the shoot worthwhile once I saw it on the big screen! Mushrooms from hell!

If anyone has any thoughts or advice about still life photography, especially if you’ve found frustration like me, or want to talk about my lens choice – please leave a comment!

ISO 200, 35mm, f5.5, 1/250 sec

Here’s my darling mother last week. The sun was just about to disappear at this moment and so I took some quick snaps of mum with the last of the light. Note the reflections from the glasses disturbing the eye, lesson learned there! Our walk hadn’t been very successful, some places I thought would be cool turned out to not be cool – I literally ran up the hill in the last 5 minutes of light to try and get a memorial cairn photo, only to find the cairn was too fat in any good shots. Stop building big memorials, think of the photographers, people. Except when I die of course. Then I’m going to have a massive memorial that you need to photograph from space.

The sun started to go. When the light’s low, normally this will happen:

Although the background’s alright, my subject’s gone dark. I could have increased the ISO here (or fixed it in Lightroom) but I wanted to try fill flash to solve the problem. I’ve not tried it before so it would be good practice, and help in my quest to blind my mum. So I forced the camera to fire the flash and experimented with different settings as it got darker and darker outside. The background was too dark in my first shots but upping the ISO to 400 solved that and I got a fairly balanced shot (the other settings were the same as the daylight one):

Try to ignore my mum’s grimacing…

Of course that’s far from perfect but it’s about as good as I’ll get from a standard flash. Pros use flashes on cords, tripods, softboxes to diffuse the light and so on. Again the glasses are a big problem, even worse with flash reflections. I didn’t want to make mum doubly blind so I didn’t make her take them off. A bit of post-processing in Lightroom brings the image out nicely with some contrast boost:

In fact I had to darken the picture overall for this, so originally I should have underexposed I guess. I’m looking forward to trying fill-flash a bit more on my travels! Any further advice on fill-flash and exposure balancing welcome, just leave a comment.

ISO 160, 18mm, f/10, 1/100 sec

Once again I donned my backpack and went walking to practice golden hour photography. Walking is very low on the list of things I want to do after eating three plates of food – but this is the best time for outdoor shots so I forced myself out. After all, for the past 3 months in Scotland most evenings have been spent staring at a dark grey sky or at windows dripping rain (I like to think they’re Susan Boyle’s tears), so we have to make the most of it – and I need the practice!

Earlier in the week I’d gone on the other side of the valley at this time, only to be disappointed. For all my preparation, I hadn’t factored in the sun dipping behind hills on its descent and casting a huge, ominous shadow across half the valley. Proof you shouldn’t rely just on golden hour calculators, you need to figure out what the sun’s going to be hitting in its path when it’s so low!

“Hssssss” trans: “You’re cool”

Although I was just passing this scene to head further up the hill, the loch was so still that the reflections caught my eye. I had no interesting foreground, but then the swan family swam the whole loch to come and say hello (“hissssss”?). Swans aren’t known for their kind manners but even with a signet in tow they just doddled around nearby, didn’t hiss and my life didn’t become a low-budget Birds climax as I’d feared. I had to work very fast before A: I was attacked or B: they sodded off.

Rapidly setting up my tripod turned out to be a waste of time; it wouldn’t go low enough to get the foreground in. So I whipped the camera off and got some handheld shots before the swan decided I wasn’t a threat, or didn’t have any lovely bread – and swam away with its family. One of those unexpected but good photo moments.

ISO 160, 45mm, F/11, 1/20 sec, Tripod

I charged up the hill with the light ticking away. Ultimately I got the kind of valley landscape I wanted and this starburst effect also appeared when I shot above f11. Some other things I learned:

• Take a fleece – it gets cold quickly after the sun goes down up there!
• Although in landscape photography I’d been told to use maximum aperture (f22), my f22 pics weren’t the sharpest. I researched this and apparently diffraction affects the image at this level, making it soft. Each lens has a sweet spot for sharpness and for mine it’s around f11 – even for large distances.
• Don’t keep your mum hanging around in the twilight too long, she gets grumpy.