More Shooting Techniques

More Shooting Techniques

by William Lulow

I have often spoken about my approach to shooting images wherever I may be. Whenever I travel, one of the first things I do is to think about the kinds of images I want to make. Sometimes ideas will just come to me. Other times it takes a while to come up with something I wish to photograph and how I want to do it. It’s kind of like writing song lyrics. Sometimes they just come when I’m thinking about a particular subject.

Not too long ago I was talking to someone who had just had a cancer diagnosis and was waiting to hear how her tests went. I had an idea about writing her a poem and happened to be listening to “The Waiting” by Tom Petty. It was a song I was trying to learn on the guitar. All of a sudden some alternative words about her “waiting” for the test results just sort of flew into my head and I wrote down the lyrics I made up to Petty’s song. I think it took me about ten minutes to write all the verses (of course the chorus was Petty’s). Then I spent some time reworking them a bit, but the process was fairly quick. That’s how it happens sometimes.

The same sort of thing happens when you are making images for yourself. Sometimes you can walk around a place or get an idea for a still-life image and and it will just hit you. Then you will know exactly what kind of picture you wish to make. Other times you can begin with a concept such as color, for example and you can then set out to look for scenes that contain that color.

One other thing I have noted before is that the cameras in iPhones have gotten quite a bit better of late. I am often just walking around and my phone, naturally, (or not so naturally) is with me in my pocket. I have also noted previously, that if you are careful about how you use your camera phone, you can often come up with some very usable images. As I mentioned, if you use a tripod, you can get some really great shots, many of which can be edited with the phone itself.

Neither of these images was made with a tripod, but they were carefully composed nonetheless. So, like song lyrics, images sometimes just present themselves and you have to be ready to capture them with whatever tools you happen to have at the moment.

Now you have to keep in mind that today’s iPhone iterations come with a variety of controls you can use to perfect the capturing process. But, most of them function to “deselect” the AUTO mode. In other words, any automatic function of any camera serves to take the decision-making process out of your hands and lets the camera’s computer chip decide for you what kind of image you want. That’s kind of backwards. YOU should be making those decisions unless you are simply snapping away, not caring what the result is as long as it takes a reasonable likeness of what you are aiming at.

So, you can actually select a focus point to your image by tapping on the AE/AF tab on the camera. This enables you to select a focus point.  You can select whether or not you want to use a fill-in flash, but remember on an iPhone, the flash doesn’t fire immediately when you want to take the picture. It goes through the auto-focus first, then fires it. Something that can be quite disconcerting. You now can photograph in “PORTRAIT” mode (on the newer iPhones), which automatically uses a slight telephoto lens to give you more of a close-up effect. There are actually third-party apps you can use with the iPhone that will allow you to focus the camera manually, if you wish. One is called “Focos.” (I have tried this one and it has an aperture adjustment scale just like a DSLR. It accesses all your photos and is probably more like using your camera on manual). Another is “Yamera” and “RAW+”. All of these apps are basically set up, as I said, to override the automatic setups on your camera phone which should tell you something. If you want to make really stunning photographs, you need to think more, use a manual mode and get rid of the supposed ease of taking pictures.

However you like to make images, first comes the thought process and/or the inspiration. Then comes the process of translating that into visible pictures that can be published somewhere. That’s how it should work.