Rozov’s lessons: kissing in front of selfies. Part 1

In this issue we start publishing series of articles by Georgiy Rozov dedicated to travel photography. They were written based on materials published in the book “How to Shoot. Live Photography”, but especially for our magazine, supplemented and reworked by the author.

Photo 1. A kiss in the background… from the “Rome for Kisses” series

Camera: Nikon D200

Lens: Nikkor 70-200/2.8 VR

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Aperture: f/2.8

Shutter speed: 1/640s

Exposure compensation: -1/3 EV

Focal length is 300mm.

Shooting in aperture priority mode and RAW. Center-weighted metering mode.

A young tourist with a girlfriend climbed up on one of the granite columns fencing off the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and, balancing on one leg each, tried to take a picture of themselves with a digital camera. The problem was, the guys had a very simple camera without a tilt screen. A guy wanted to blindly, without seeing the camera monitor, capture a passionate kiss in front of the famous fountain photo 1 .

It didn’t work the first time. The moment he fixed his hand on her lips, the hand with the camera treacherously changed its position, and the frame captured only the blue sky with a piece of the roof. The guy repeated the attempt several times before resigning himself to the need to simplify the task. Now both he and his girlfriend decided not to kiss, but just smile into the lens to control the shooting.

I was watching this from the opposite side of the fountain with a powerful telephoto lens. When you take pictures with these lenses you have to think about the sharpness of the picture. Telephoto lenses have a small angle of view, they are heavy and bulky, and shooting with them is like shooting with a sniper rifle: you missed the shot by breathing in the wrong way. Pressed the shutter button hard and missed again.

Photographers call such a blunder “a blur” because camera shake at the moment of shutter release causes blurring of the image due to the high angular velocity of moving objects in the frame window. In such cases you should have your camera on a good tripod, but genre photography implies instant response to the event and makes the photographer shoot with his hands. Tripod is a terrible brake!

It is a known rule of thumb: it is easier to get a sharp picture when shooting without a tripod if the shutter speed is equal or shorter than the focal length of the lens or the optical system. I used the maximum focus of my zoom – 200mm. The camera is cropped, which means that its sensor area is smaller than the area of a standard film window. In terms of 35 mm on film, or, as they say now, “full frame”, the lens focal length was 300 mm. Shutter speed was 1/640 sec, so it was close to the recommended shutter speed. I didn’t miss the focus.

Pay attention: only the figures of the main characters and those who are very close to them can be sharp. The rest is blurry. That way, the eye finds exactly what it’s supposed to find at a glance. I purposely opened the lens aperture all the way up. When the aperture is open it has the shallowest depth of field. In other words, only the narrow strip of space, which the lens focuses on, looks sharp. The more you shut the aperture, the wider the line of sharpness becomes.

In this case you can use the mechanism of vibro-compensation and, with little risk of getting grease, close the aperture by a whole fission. Not only would this not make the image better, it would also make it worse! On the contrary, you would lose a lot.

Imagine all of the subjects in this shot are equally sharp. The viewer’s eye would be helplessly searching for the inventive couple. A patient person might have been able to pick out what I wanted to show him from the pile of sharp objects, but most wouldn’t bother to look. If you can’t read a shot at once, you just don’t look at it.

And my heroes, after two or three tries, got their way and came down from the dais. Another tourist immediately took their place, took a picture of the fountain, and was very pleased with himself. That’s understandable. The vast majority of travelers take a camera on trips to shoot two types of pictures: “me in the background…” photos 2, 3 and 4 and “I was here” which is the same as “I am in front of…”.

Photo 2. Red Square

Camera: Olympus E-M5

Lens: Zuiko 12-50/3.5-6.3

Sensitivity: 200 ISO

Aperture: f/11

Shutter speed: 1/30 sec

Focal length: 74 mm film.

Shooting in aperture priority mode and RAW. Center-weighted metering mode.

Pictures of the first type differ from those of the second type only in the presence of the traveler himself in the frame, who is usually photographed by anyone who happens to be at hand. A tourist needs a camera just to have a visual proof of the fact of being in this or that place upon returning home.

This article wasn’t written for a backpacker, it was for a backpacker/photographer. I’m sure that for my readers the most interesting part starts already after the need for this type of pictures is satisfied. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to shoot or capture the background. Not at all.

I’m in the background..

Portraits are easy to shoot if you know how. In this case it is important to remember that a portrait is a picture of a person, and the background should be a background for the portrait, not the main subject of the frame. Portraits are divided into close-up, half-length, and full-length.

In a close-up portrait it is customary to include the subject’s head or part of it. The waist-length portraits are shot waist-deep, and the full-length portraits are a joy to shoot in their natural fullness. A human being is portrayed with all his/her body parts without any exclusions, which doesn’t cancel the necessity to frame the shot in such a way that there would be a lot of people in the picture, and not a lot of background.

My wife took photos of me in Coliseum photo 4 .

Photo 3. Me with the Colosseum in the background. Black and white version of photo 4

Camera: Nikon D200

Lens: Nikkor 12-24/4

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Aperture: f/5.6

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

Exposure compensation: +2/3 EV

Focal length of a 30mm film.

Shooting in aperture priority mode and RAW. Center weighted metering mode.

Photo 4. Me in front of the Colosseum. The original color file with the sky blown out. photo 2

Camera: Nikon D200

Lens: Nikkor 12-24/4

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Aperture: f/5.6

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

Exposure compensation: +2/3 EV

Focal length: 30 mm film standard.

Shooting in aperture priority mode and RAW. Center weighted metering mode.

What looked like a very simple subject actually concealed a couple of secret traps. Without knowing about them beforehand, it is easy to make a mistake. There’s a thing called dynamic range in photography. No sensor, not even the best one, can capture the details in the highlights like the sky and shadows of a scene at the moment. Had I relied carelessly on my camera’s automatic system, I would have gotten an almost black silhouette against a background of light but still fairly clear sky. No one could distinguish the eye expression in this picture.

With the advent of digital cameras, the process of solving such a problem has become easier. Just one click on the camera joystick and you will see a histogram on the screen, a graph showing the number and distribution of different pixels in the picture you have just taken. The histograms show the location of dark pixels on the left and light pixels on the right. If a steep mountain has grown on the left side of the graph and the right side of the graph is empty, it means that there are many dark objects in the frame, but few gray and white. You have to look at the object you’re shooting and decide if it’s like that on the ground?

If your eyes confirm the histogram, you can take more pictures. If it looks like a mountain of black pixels representing the mid gray concrete walls of the Coliseum, you should have exposure compensation of +1 aperture. The histogram for the next frame will move to the right, and the black walls will be lighter. Ideally, the entire histogram curve should fit within its boundaries. But that’s not always the case.

In this case, the sensor was not able to show details in the sky. I had to neglect them to get the right image of the least illuminated parts of the frame. That’s where my face and the slightly out-of-focus background are most precious to me. I turned on the center weighted metering and adjusted the aperture to +2/3. As a result, the sky is blank. There are no pixels containing information. But the face is nicely shaped.

At home, when I was preparing the file for printing, I did what I had already planned when I took the picture: I chose an image of a gray autumn sky from my photo library, put it on top of the portrait layer, turned on the lighting transparency and used a mask to erase the unwanted pixels. The result is a picture that accurately represents what I saw with my own eyes. Since I didn’t like the color of my face and the Colosseum, I decided to convert the frame to black and white photo 3 .

Here I was

You can’t avoid this place for a tourist. The Trevi Fountain is the largest in Rome. It was built by the architect Nicolo Salvi, commissioned by Pope Clement XII. The background for the fountain was the facade of the Poli Palace where Zinaida Volkonskaya lived in the early 19th century, and whom Alyssa called the “queen of muses and beauty” . With. Pushkin . The fountain is huge, and the square is not designed for crowds of tourists from all over the world. There is room only for Neptune, who seems to be riding out of the central alcove of the palace, standing in a shell harnessed with hot horses. Each tourist considers it his duty to throw two coins into the fountain: one to come back and the other to make his wishes come true photo 5 .

Everyone takes pictures here. Today it’s mostly telephones and digital cameras. I didn’t see the results of that shot of the inventive lover photo 1 , but I can quite accurately describe the image. He took it with a point-and-shooter. Not expensive, but not quite toy-like either. The zoom on those lenses at wide open can hold two heads of lovers embracing and a bit of the background.

So in the picture you should see a part of Neptune and a half circle of an arch right from behind the heads of the foreground. The background should be pretty readable in spite of the long distance from the foreground. These lenses have a large depth of field because the sensor is small. In short, the photographer should get a close-up double portrait against the background of a piece of fountain.

Photo 5. Trevi Fountain Panorama

Camera: Nikon D200

Lens: Nikkor 17-55/2.8

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Aperture: f/8

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

27mm focal length of film standard.

Shooting in manual mode and RAW.

Photo 6. Trevi Fountain

Camera: Nikon D200

Lens: Nikkor 12-24/4

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Aperture: f/8

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

Focal length of 18 mm film.

But to shoot the fountain itself and the more so the area, our hero could not so easily. A soapbox lens cannot capture the entire subject. Especially a square with a palace and tourists around. Nowhere to go. It needs an ultra wide angle lens – a lens with a view angle of about 100 degrees or more. Something like my Nikkor 12-24. But even these optics could not cover the whole area at once. Only Poli Palace with its fountain and a bit of crowd in the foreground were in the frame photo 6 .

Shooting in aperture priority mode and RAW.

They zoom in on close objects and zoom out on distant ones. To get not only the fountain area in the frame, but also the tops of nearby houses, I had to raise the lens axis above the horizon line, i.e. to tilt the sensor plane relative to the vertical. The foothills of the houses are big and the tops are sharply narrowed. You get the feeling that the houses are falling down. This is unfamiliar to the beholder’s eye and irritating.

Is it possible to avoid blockages? Available at. When taking a picture, for example, you should get as high as possible, at least to the second floor level. Keeping the lens axis perfectly horizontal, all the vertical lines in the frame will be vertical and parallel. The optics have to be expensive, i.e. with corrected aberrations. Special shifter lenses are used for such cases.

They have a larger image diameter than conventional optics, and have a mechanism for shifting the optical system relative to the center of the sensor. A camera with this lens has to be held horizontally on a tripod to keep its vertical alignment. And then without changing the position of the camera move the optical unit of the lens upwards so that the tops of the roofs of the surrounding houses come into the frame. These lenses are expensive and heavy, but the main thing is that I did not have such a miracle at the time.

I did get the square, though, and the quality of the image only improved as I panned it. The final picture photo 5 is made up of 5 vertical frames shot in sequence from left to right with a Nikkor 17-55/2.8. The actual focus was 19mm, which was 28mm in the full-film format. It’s quite a wide angle. These lenses have an unpleasant feature for stitching panoramas together.

Subjects that are the same in the center of the frame and on the periphery don’t look exactly the same: towards the edge, a circle becomes an oval. In order to sew the neighboring shots together more or less inconspicuously, I had to shoot with an overlap of 30%, and then the seams would be much closer to the center than to the edges of the image.

If the foreground is not too obvious, there is no real need to set the camera on a panoramic head, or to rotate it by nudal point. Even without a tripod, you can get by. I, for example, climbed up on a granite column and, trying not to change the position of my body and head, carefully and very quickly took five pictures.

In short, I worked with a tripod. Beforehand, I turned off all camera automation, switching it to manual mode. It is necessary to do it to get the segments of the future panorama with the same density and color temperature. Only in this case, computer automatic programs will be able to sew the blanks qualitatively.

You have to shoot panoramas in the city not only quickly, but with some reserve, preferably repeating the images at least twice. You have to hurry because there are a lot of people in the frame who are moving in space. It can easily happen that I have the same objects in two neighboring panorama segments. If you shoot quickly, the risk decreases and duplicates are useful for deleting the double in case it appears on two panorama segments and for copying a part of another file in its place photo 7 .

Photo 7. A panorama of the Trevi Fountain

That’s what the pre-production panorama shots looked like. They were stitched together with Photomerge, the program built into “Photoshop”.