In Focus: Medium Format as a Wake-up Call

About a month or so ago, I decided to try something new to me in photography: medium format film. This week I’d like to discuss what medium format is, and the effect that the switch back to film after a long time shooting digital has had on my photography.

Medium format is a larger film than the ubiquitous 35mm we’re all familiar with. It comes in various flavors (eg. 645 and 6×7 among others), but they all share one side of 6cm in length and use the same “120″ size film. Medium format has been around since the beginning of last century and has been first choice for many areas of professional photography where the very best quality prints are essential.

These days though, affordable high-resolution digital cameras have all but supplanted medium format in the more dynamic kinds of professional capture such as at weddings, where digitals adaptability and flexibility give it a distinct advantage. However, medium format film is still very popular in areas of pro photography where you have time and/or control over the conditions such as shooting landscape or in the studio, and also with those to whom photography is art to be viewed in a gallery.

But more important than what medium format actually is, is the effect the switch to film has had as to how I personally practice my photography.

On the down-side, the camera shares the issue typical with most film cameras – once the film is in you can’t change it. In addition, it’s big, heavy and doesn’t exactly get out of the way of your photography. The camera I use is totally manual – I have to set the aperture, shutter speed and focus manually – meaning off-the-cuff opportunistic shots are almost totally out of the question. Also a roll of film is about three times more expensive than 35mm and only yields 10 frames.

There is a flip-side to this. Once the shutter fires, I can’t take it back, I can’t immediately see what I’ve got, and there is a definite price tag on each shot. This is the flip-side? It is. As it turns out, this has been of real benefit to my photography. It has forced me to think about each shot much more carefully than when shooting digital.

With a DSLR you are free to take multiple pictures – different compositions, choices of aperture and exposure, etc. – but with medium format I have to consider every single shot in much more detail. I’m not free to just fire away carte-blanche, choose the best and delete the rest. I typically get one chance only to get the best photograph and I try to make quite sure I’m going to get it. Sure, I’m not as productive, but my percentage of keepers has increased two-fold over what I was getting with my DSLR.

This isn’t a film vs. digital issue, it’s all about attitude and approach. Shooting film, especially a more expensive format like medium format, forces close attention on technique – your choice of aperture, focal point and especially composition. I highly recommend grabbing a film camera once in a while as a wake-up call.

Weekly Winner: Brad Church

Nice repetition there Brad.  Pity they cropped it…

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In Focus: Develop Relationships

On Saturday evening I had dinner with several friends that included a couple of fellow Seoul Photo Club members. These guys were photographers with much more experience than I, with time spent behind cameras all over Asia and the sub-continent. The conversation turned to (surprise) photography in Korea. One of the topics we discussed was how difficult it is to capture Korea meaningfully in a photographic sense.

It was difficult to put a finger exactly on why this is. After all, we all have Korea with plenty of temple shots, palaces and traditional markets. But as good as they might be, these photos often aren’t much different from what any tourist with a camera might capture.

The consensus seemed to be that vacation-style snaps will be all you produce until you actually develop some kind of relationship with this country.

This relationship could take many different forms, but let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.

I was talking to another member of the SPC from Busan last week. He spends a bit of time in his local traditional market being perfectly visible with his camera, even if he’s not actively taking pictures. Over time he’s become part of the furniture and is able to take photos comfortably with the willing consent of the locals – capturing them naturally and getting images not normally available to the furtive outsider.

He had developed a relationship over time with a group of people.

I’ve had numerous experiences like this myself and I can relate a very recent example. I take my film to a lab in Chungmuro in central Seoul for developing, and while waiting the hour or so to pick up the negatives, I enjoy a beverage at a nearby convenience store (as one does). Directly opposite where I relax in a blue plastic chair is a very small men’s clothing store. Because I am there once or twice a week, camera prominent on the blue plastic table, the 74-year-old proprietor of that shop knows what I’m about. Recently he asked me to take his picture standing in front of the suit-festooned facade of his little shop and we shared a drink after.

These situations are photographic gold and are next to impossible to get if you are just breezing by or attempting to operate in stealth mode.

These two examples reinforce what we discussed over dinner – acquiring a benign profile or developing some kind of relationship with people or a particular area, camera prominent, will present opportunities that when captured will powerfully and meaningfully reflect the time you have spent in this country. In addition, the character and atmosphere of your photographs will set them apart from the usual vacation fare.

Also, keep that camera visible. Often just the act of extracting a camera out of a bag will send a signal for people to be on their guard – a visible camera tempers this natural reaction in many people.

Visit the Seoul Photo Club on Flickr and experience the many different relationships photographers from all around Korea have with this country.

In Focus: To Flash, or Not To Flash

In recent years, flash photography has gained an undeserved reputation as a last resort, a tool exclusive to the snap-shooter. Something we use to blind our friends in dimly lit nightclubs with the resultant unflattering photos blanketing Facebook. They are often characterized by blown-out all white facial features and deep, shadowed backgrounds. Not cool. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

The flash, even the built-in version that comes with most consumer cameras, can be a very useful tool and can indeed help you capture moving images. The trick is understating your light. That’s the light that’s coming out of your little flash and the light that’s already present in a scene (a.k.a. ambient light) – be it sunshine, the light of the moon or the hot fluorescent stage lighting at a Wonder Girls concert. What you most often want to achieve with flash is good balance within the scene – blasting one element of the frame with flash and leaving the rest in darkness isn’t cool, but avoiding this is simpler than you might think.

Understand that there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do to a dark background with a single, on-board flash. You can control the light you send out to your subject, but in a cavernous club, a church or a Buddhist temple you simply don’t have enough power to bring the whole scene up to proper exposure levels. This is where one or more dedicated flash units become invaluable.

Using a dedicated unit – often called a strobe – you can bounce light into the ceiling or off of a wall so it cascades down over your scene evenly, dropping soft, even light on your subject and carving out shadows that will give everything a 3-D look. You want to light up the entire room, from front to back? Put two strobes on light stands and place them in opposite corners of the room, trigger them remotely (Flashwaves and Rembrandt triggers are affordable Korean makes) and delight at the studio-level quality of your light. You’ll be doing celebrity weddings in no time.

It’s a myth that flash is best served in the dark. The next time you’re out shooting under the sun and you find the shadows and the contrast too much to deal with, don’t ask your model to rush into the shade so you can fire away in the even light. Your on-board flash unit is plenty strong enough to cut through the hard shadows and you’ll come to realize a facet of photography often ignored by the casual shooter: the beauty of the fill flash. Try it out for yourself. Underexpose a little and hit your foreground subject with fill flash. The result will showcase an evenly lit subject and dramatic, textured background – perfect when snapping friends at a temple or on a mountain. Without even realizing it, you’ll have become a strobist yourself.

By Shawn Parker

Weekly Winner: Chris Mockford

Cool Yin/Yang captured at a Buddhist temple.  Well seen Chris.

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Weekly Winner: Jeremy New

Dramatic concert capture Jeremy, nice.

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In Focus: Coping with Low Available Light

What do you do in the dark? Or to be a little more specific, when you are out there with your camera, how do you cope with situations that are a bit dim, such as a city street at night or the interior of a bar? It’s a no-brainer, right? Just pop up the flash and we’re good – our subjects are well lit, no problem with blurry slow shutter speeds, great!

But have you noticed in these flash-captured pics that your subjects are often harshly lit, or the background is very dark, or all the character and feel of the situation has been washed away?

You could purchase a clip-on flash unit, which would give you a bit more control over the light you supply, but we’re going to look at an alternative, that when employed effectively, can deliver stunning results, otherwise unachievable.

Low available light photography is shooting in very low light conditions using only the illumination that the environment provides. Basically, all you need are a fast lens, a high ISO and a steady hand.

The kit lens that came with your DSLR is likely to be too slow to be effective; we need a fast lens with an aperture of at least f/2. The lower the f-number, the more light gets in and we need as much light through that lens as we can get. An aperture of f/1.8 is good and f/1.4 or even less is better (but much more expensive). Fortunately, most camera manufacturers make a relatively cheap but fast 50 mm lens ideal for this kind of photography.

Once we have a fast lens we need to get out of auto mode. If we let the camera make the decisions, then it will make choices that don’t suit our purposes such as popping up the flash or selecting a shutter speed that is too slow. Aperture priority mode is the way to go, as we want to stay locked onto the aperture of our choosing.

Select a high ISO value. Not a problem with today’s DSLRs – anywhere from 800 ISO upwards will be ideal. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive to light the camera’s sensor becomes.

In practice, what we can do is this: set the aperture at 2.8, the ISO at 800, look through the viewfinder and depress the shutter half-way. The camera determines the shutter speed and displays it in the viewfinder. Now we can make adjustments if necessary. We’re looking for a shutter speed that we can hand-hold without blur from camera shake. Anywhere from 1/8th (with a steady hand and practice) up to 1/60th are typical in these low light conditions. If the shutter speed is too slow we can raise it by going to an aperture of f/2 or f/1.8 and/or raising the ISO value again. A little knowledge on how to use exposure compensation is also useful for tweaking the shutter speed.

A couple of other tips to get the most out of low light are to ensure that your subject doesn’t have a bright light source close behind them, and if you can get some colored lights behind your subject (perhaps down the road or a bit further down the bar) you will get some super background effects.

It takes a bit of skill developed through practice and a little patience, but the results can be truly amazing.

In Focus: What the EXIF??

Think of the EXIF data as the pencil and paper of the pre-digital days. Before the digital era, the photographer had to manually record the settings of each shot so he or she could look at their photos later and learn what worked for a given situation, or what combination of settings produced what effects.

These days it’s a breeze — no pencils in sight! When you take that shot, a great deal of information is written into the image. Much of the data is of no real practical use as far as the average photographer like you or I are concerned, but some of it is extremely helpful. Things like the aperture, shutter speed, focal length and ISO value are all available to be referred to later — sometimes it could be much later. Occasionally I’m looking through my archives on Flickr and I think “That looks good, how did I do that?” The EXIF data is there and I just click through and find out.

For those new to technical terms and important but initially difficult-to-grasp concepts like the relationship between aperture and shutter speed, the benefits of this information are much more immediate and valuable. As soon as you take your shot you can check the EXIF data right away in-camera and perhaps compare to other shots you have just made. For those new to photography this is very useful, especially while out there shooting.

Having your data available to you through an image sharing community like Flickr is convenient, but it’s also good to check out other’s EXIF information too. You might see a photograph and think “I like that motion blur, I wonder what the shutter speed was?” If the photographer has retained the EXIF data in the file, you can check it out for yourself.

I say “retained” because sometimes the data isn’t there. Images from film cameras don’t provide EXIF data of course, and some image editors have an option that strips out the data when saving for the internet to keep the file size as small as possible — so beware of that when saving your files.

So keep an eye on your EXIF data, it’s an important part of learning about your camera and the more technical aspects of photography in general. But any amount of EXIF data is useless if you aren’t actually producing it, so get out there get shooting and see you in the Seoul Photo Club on Flickr.

In Focus: Overcome the Intimidation

Any camera can be intimidating for the budding photographer and this is especially true with a new DSLR. All the buttons and options, terms such as aperture, depth of field, white balance and custom functions all conspire to overwhelm and confuse those new to photography. It seems like you need to have some sort of specialized training or qualification to use the thing successfully.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Photography is really very simple and you don’t need to understand white balance to capture spectacular images. To be sure, it helps to be aware of what your camera is capable of and the relationship between aperture and depth of field, but photography is an art, not a science. It’s a common mistake for enthusiastic newbies to get caught up in camera and lens technology and this takes their focus off what is really important – what you see.

The crucial part of photography has nothing to do with custom functions and happens before you even lift the camera to your eye – the ability to see a composition or recognize an opportunity. Make no mistake, knowing what effect the ISO setting has in the photographic process is of course important, but that or anything else isn’t anything you can’t learn from your camera’s instruction manual, the internet or in casual discussion with a more experienced photographer over a cup of coffee.

However, to engage in a little more creativity and leverage your artistic ability and opportunism, it is of benefit to know a little more about how the technology comes together. So take your time with your camera and experiment using a bit of trial and error.

One of the great advantages of shooting digital is the ability to easily take as many photographs as you like and delete them later. For example, invest an hour or so of your time in Aperture Priority mode and see for yourself what effect the different aperture values have on your images. You will be surprised how much you can learn just on your own and the best part about it is that all it costs is a cup of coffee while you sit in the coffee shop on a Sunday morning, play with your camera and take a few notes. Perhaps the best part of this approach is that as you learn you will develop your own unique style and way of seeing the world through the viewfinder.

The Seoul Photo Club is a valuable resource for photographers anywhere in Korea, a place to share ideas, get advice and learn a little about the art of photography. Our members are always ready to lend a helping hand to those wanting to get their heads around different aspects of photography.

After all, everyone was in the beginner’s shoes at some point, and we’re all prepared to pass on the free advice we got when we were there. Get out there, experiment, seek a little feedback and above all keep shooting.

The opening of the Seoul Photo Club/Expat Living exhibition “This is Korea” on Saturday evening was a great success. Many thanks to all those who came along and contributed. The exhibition runs until mid-October at Gallery Cafe Ohoo in Hongdae, so if you haven’t checked it out, drop by to enjoy the pics and perhaps a quiet cup of coffee as well.

Capturing Korea

A nice article from the Herald promoting the exhibition and the club.

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