Four In Line

This is the lineup 'Four in Line', not so long ago in Baltimore, Maryland.

Your ratings and critiques are invited and most welcome. If you rate

harshly or very critically, please submit a helpful and constructive

comment; please share your superior photographic knowledge to help

improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

Great image, John. The guy's head is just at the level the mannequins should have theirs. Beautifully composed.

As you know, I saw it coming, well before this guy came by and completed the scene.

 

I spotted a likely scenario as late afternoon light turned into evening darkness and just waited, as I figured out what you did, passers bys heads would just be at the level of the the mannequins' missing heads.

 

It was just a matter of getting someone to pass by with an interesting gait and the right height and capture him with good composition - in this case with equal spacing between the four figures - which was difficult to combine with getting the good fait (there were several failures and many, many 'groups' which were not suitable).

 

Of course, it was mainly a matter of time, when one plans a photo like that well ahead of time. (sometimes they never come to fruition, so the only ones you do see like this are almost always well-planned successes -- I just deep-six the failures that are inevitable, but mostly in a situation like this when I 'see' something like this, I get the capture).

 

I always love to see your comments (as I keep telling you), Liz.

 

John (Crosley)

John, another of your wonderful shots. Yes, I agree that it really helps to plan out shots like this. But I have had similar instances before and have missed out on potentially good shots due to improper camera settings. Did you take this shot in programme AE mode or manually? If it is the latter, I'd like to know about what settings you've used and how you knew they were okay for this shot. I suppose if it was in manual mode, you increased the apperture and set a really high shutter speed to compensate which would also minimise camera shake and freeze motion as well as it has in this case. Regards.

There is no special 'magic' in taking a photo such as this.

 

The first thing is to know that it was a 'setup' in that it just wasn't 'see, point, and shoot.' I saw, had time to figure out what I was going to do, and waited for the proper passerby.

 

That gave me time to experiment with exposure by taking several frames to 'zero in' on proper exposure.

 

While I could have done that with 'manual' or any other setting, I was using a 70~200 f 2.8 Nikkor zoom, so it had maximum light gathering ability.

 

This is a semi-silhouette scene with substantial lighting in the window - enough for a shutter speed of over 1/100th at ISO 400 to ISO 800 or higher, and image quality is not so important with a silhouette shot at night where detail is not so important, so I was not worried about setting a higher ISO on a D300 which has pretty low noise (I have not looked at EXIF info, but I have a recollection the ISO was set bout 800 or so, and the lens was wide open at f 2.8 or so or maybe one stop down from that.

 

I fired a couple of shots with groups of pedestrians to test my formulation, made appropriate adjustments with Easy Exposure Adjustment, and exposure was essentially 'set'.

 

In any case, I almost always shoot 'raw' as well as jpegs, so I have latitude in case I don't like the final rendering, and I can lighten or darken the whole scene and/or contrast, etc, somewhat 'to taste' without screwing up noise, etc., as one would with trying to do that with a jpeg.

 

Then the conversion to jpeg (and tiff for archive).

 

When you're out and about, with a digital camera, just use it as a light meter, and if you fire a test shot or two, you can delete those shots if they're not worth saving,

 

It's really very easy.

 

And if you need a spot meter, just set your camera to its 'spot meter' mode, and so forth. The only difference compared to a full light meter in general besides all the meter dials is there's no 'incident meter' function where the light falling on a subject is measured from the subject's point of view at the place of the subject as opposed to reflective light measured from a distance. Otherwise the in-camera metering function is perfectly adequate if you need that, say for 'manual metering' or other reflective modes.

 

But this was exposed first by Aperture metering, then adjusted a little (if at all) by 'trial and error' using Easy Exposure Adjustment, and processed in Adobe Raw Converter, which is pretty powerful (though it lacks certain functions which must be left to the regular Adobe Photoshop software, when necessary).

 

Hope that helps.

 

If you are not doing things like that, try it.

 

It'll become 'second nature', and surely will help you in the future make those more difficult exposure situations very, very easy to handle, and you can literally do it in ten or fewer seconds,once you become adept.

 

Please note that I prefer a vibration reduction lens, and I have obtained full extension (200 mm) captures with shutter speeds as low as 1/4 of a second or slower, much slower, but usually expect that the shutter speeds at full extension will become reliably good about 1/30th of a second. A new version is coming out with VRII, which promises to be even more stable.

 

However, that's just for the background; in this case, the point was to 'freeze' the man walking, and no V.R. lens can do that - that is the job of a higher shutter speed.

 

Best to you, Samrat.

 

John (Crosley)