I’ve been contemplating writing a guide to photography for a while now. I see many questions regarding equipment and techniques on forums and see a lot of Bollocks being offered as “advice”.  This article is not open to debate, or merely my opinion, unless otherwise stated. I intend to write only facts and principals of photography and try to help the reader to use his own equipment to the full.

My website… My facts, My opinion. So there!

It is not intended as a debate about brands or equipment. I am a fan of Canon, have some Nikon experience and don’t really see any of the other common brands in the same league. I am uninterested in debating or discussing the cost and quality of Sigma or Tamron or any other 3rd party glass. It is very simple: Canon or Nikkor pro glass is expensive, but it is simply that much better. So many people buy Sigma to save a few pennies and get exactly what they pay for… Something cheaper than the best. Some of the terminology used may be brand specific, but each brand will have the same thing and your manual will be able to tell you what it’s called.

Perhaps I should start by explaining my relevant knowledge and experience as well as equipment owned and equipment currently used.

Who am I to talk?

I have been playing around with cameras since I was old enough to hold one. My dad had some nice equipment that I got used to and I mostly learned from photographers around me and being nosy.

When people find out that I am a photographer, the first question usually is: So, you photograph weddings then? Well... Ehmm... NO! I was the “director of photography” at my own wedding. One day I realized that when I was on holiday I was taking more pictures than when I was commissioned for photography. I also saw that I had a massive library of images sitting on my computer doing nothing. Since then I started planning trips to places I liked photographing, offering my services along the way and building up a portfolio.

When returning from trips I would work through my own images and offer them as stock to some of the most prestigious agencies. I have been a Getty Images and Gallo Images contributor for years. To date my biggest single sale of a photograph was thorugh Getty Images for US$12 500. I snapped a wide angle shot inside Canterbury Cathedral while waiting for my mother because I was bored... She is still asking for commission.

Although a photographer at heart, I enjoy writing and have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers in South Africa. I have this entire website dedicated to 4x4 and Overland travelling and am in the process of writing a book.

Apart from weddings, I photograph anything and am available for any length of project.

Equipment I have owned, and currently own.

The first SLR I ever used was a NikkorMatt belonging to my dad. This is a 100% manual, no battery SLR with a Nikon Mount. He never had very expensive lenses, but I made do with what was there.

The first camera I bought was a Nikon N2020 and some cheap lenses with it. I played around with it for a few years, not taking photography too seriously and then I started investing in more modern stuff.

I was working as a skydiving instructor in the UK and needed an affordable, lightweight camera to mount on a skydiving helmet. The lucky winner was a Canon Eos 3000 and a Tokina 19 – 35mm lens. It was a great combination and really affordable at GBP 400 for the whole thing.

I started selling more and more skydiving images and eventually upgraded the camera body to an Eos 33 before investing in my very first Digital SLR, a Canon Eos D3. It had 3.2 mega pixels and cost just over GBP 1 000 on EBay. There is a Billboard at the Blantyre airport in Malawi that was printed using a photograph I took with that camera… at 3.2 MP. At this stage I also had a few cheap lenses including a Tamron 60mm Macro, a Sigma 170 – 500 (Arguably the worst lens ever made by Sigma) and a 100 – 300mm which name I don’t recall. It may have been a Tamron.

A D10 replaced the D3 later and I added a Tamron 28 – 300mm lens with the idea of a one-lens system. Yeh right!

This is where Nikon came back into the picture. I had a trade agreement with Nikon and got hold of a D100 body (Then there flagship mid range DSLR), an 18 – 70 DX Lens, 24 – 120mm, 60mm Macro, 80 – 400VR.  I was so impressed with this that I got rid of all my Canon gear but the Eos 33 and one wide-angle lens that I still used for skydiving as the Nikon could not take a remote trigger without a battery back…  (What was Nikon thinking?) Making it too heavy and bulky for skydiving. I obviously wanted to move into DSLR’s for skydiving and invested on an entry level Canon 350D which was perfect for the application.

One night my hole camera bag and 2 computers got “re-distributed” into society and after a lengthy fight and argument with Auto and General who made me feel like a criminal and almost did not pay out my claim, I had some money to buy new equipment. BTW, Auto And general as an insurance company was utterly useless and rude and I will never do any business with them ever again!

At this time I was also supplying images to Getty Images. They only approved 3 DSLR’s at the time and they were the Canon 1 DS, 1 DS Mark II and 5D. All full frame DSLR’s. They had no Nikons approved.

So my shopping list was:

Eos 5D

350 D

17 – 40mm L lens

28 – 135mm IS Lens

70- 300mm IS lens

100mm F2.8 Macro lens

300 F4 IS L lens

1.4 x converter

580 EX Speed Light.

I was happy… Or so I thought.

I sold the 350D to a friend and upgraded to a 400D for Skydiving. The 400D was not great so I did not keep it long. I sold the 400D, 28 – 135 and the 70 – 300 and invested in a 100 – 400mm IS L and 24 – 105 IS L. But I was not done yet…. I bought a used 1DS Mark II for a good price, sold the 300mm F4 and bought a 550EX Speed light used and a new 70 – 200 F2.8 IS L.

So my current kit is:

1DS Mark II

5 D Mark I

Vertical Battery Grip for 5D

17 – 40mm L

24 – 105mm IS L

100 – 400mm IS L

70 – 200mm F2.8 IS L

100mm F2.8 Macro

1.4 x Tele Converter

580 EX Speed light

550 EX Speed light

I might be happy now, but I’d love to upgrade to the 5D Mark II and 1DS Mark III. I do however believe that I now have the best combination of lenses possible.

Why Canon?

Why did I choose Canon? Well, let me put it to you this way: Canon is the only company who manufactures Cmos sensors. Not only do they manufacture the sensors, but also they manufacture the machines that manufacture the sensors. Canon is the only company who manufactures both cameras and printers. They seem to understand color and color intensity better than anyone else. If you compare their gear with the same speck gear from other manufacturers, you’ll find them the most affordable and their range has the biggest variety.

They actually employ a little Japanese scientist who’s full time job it is to study the eyes of insects to try and make their lenses better and let’s face it... White L Lenses looks cool and everyone recognizes them.

I don’t think other brands are bad, and Nikon surely has models that compare on par with Canon. I just prefer Canon as I prefer Toyota.

Some Science and principals

I’m not here to tell you about how to compose your shot. That part is simple… You look through the viewfinder and move the camera until the picture looks pretty. Then you push the button… The “Rule of thirds” in my mind is probably the most outdated concept in photography and should be ignored as much as possible.

There are 3 ways to manipulate the amount of light that gets to the sensor, or to make the correct exposure happen:

1: Shutter Speed.

This is the time, in parts of a second that the camera’s shutter is open when the trigger is pressed.  Most decent cameras have a range from 30seconds to 1/8000’s of a second.

Camera shake happens when your shutter speed is too slow for the lens that you have on your camera. It basically means that you are shaking enough to cause the image to blur because of the movement in your hands. Don’t confuse this with an out of focus photograph. A photograph that is out of focus normally has something in frame that is sharp. A photograph that is blurred by camera shake will not have anything in focus.

To avoid camera shake you shutter speed should be equal to or greater than the focal length of your lens. So if you are shooting with a 100mm lens, your shutter speed should be 100th of a second or faster.

The math gets a bit tricky with DSLR’s. Most of them have a 1.6 x focal length multiplication factor. (Nikon has 1.5x) It works pretty much the same as adding a 1.6 x Tele Converter to the lens which in turn multiply any movement in the camera by 1.6 times. This means that you need to take the focal length of your lens and multiply it by 1.6 to get to the true focal length and shutter speed needed. You do get special Digital lenses that counter act this 1.6 x factor, but they still seem to need faster shutter speeds than what the numbers indicate on the lens.

Image stabilizer lenses help a bit. Understand that as with all photographic equipment, you get what you pay for. So the el cheapo IS lens will not be in the same league as the IS L lens. (The white one) The lenses manual should tell you how effective the stabilizer is. On some of my L lenses I have 4 stop stabilizers. This means that I can hand hold it at 4 stops less than the focal length. So 100mm I can hand hold at 4 shutter speeds slower than 100th of a second. Cool yah?

When shooting moving objects you may want to use a slower shutter speed and pan the camera at the same speed as the object to create a background blur. There you can get away with shutter speeds slower than the focal length of the lens without image stabilizers.

While on the subject of stabilizers… Some manufacturers have a built in stabilizer in their camera bodies. It’s a gimmick and works similar to video camera stabilizers. If you can imagine a frame that is slightly larger to what you see through the viewfinder, the camera moves that frame around to compensate for your movements and digitally stabilizes the image that way. It does work, but any digital process will have some negative effect on quality.

Some old ballies will tell you that they have “soft hands” and can hand hold at slower speeds. Seriously… Their eyes are just so bad that they don’t realize their images are soft.

2: F-Stop or Aperture and Depth Of Field.

I would assume that by now you know what it is, but let me explain really quickly anyway: Aperture is the size of the opening in lens iris which will dictate how much light comes through the iris for the time that the shutter is open. The higher the number, the smaller the hole, the lower the number, the larger the hole. We use aperture to manipulate depth of field and achieve correct exposures with a set shutter speed.

So let’s say you want to use a 100th of a second shutter speed and pan your camera to photograph a running giraffe. If there is a lot of light, you may need to close the aperture to prevent over exposing the image. If done correctly, the background will be blurred, so depth of field is not important. Or, you want to use a 1000th of a second shutter speed to photograph the Fish Eagle taking of, so now you need to open the aperture up all the way to achieve that shutter speed.

There is a direct relationship between aperture and shutter speed. So 125th of a second at F5.6 will give you the exact same exposure as 250th at F4.5.

Now on to depth of field (DOF)…

DOF defines the parts of the image that is in focus.  You will notice that all decent wildlife portraits will have the eyes of the animal in perfect focus, but not necessarily the nose or the tail. You may also notice that the ground in front of the lion is out of focus and so is the background. This makes the image very three-dimensional and makes the subject (Lion) stand out even more. Landscapes are usually the opposite where most if not the entire image is in perfect focus.  A fairly new style of image is called “Animalscapes” where you basically put the animal in its landscape, or use the animal to define the landscape image. DOF is obviously quite important there.

Now those wildlife images are usually taken with a very long telephoto lens, which inherently has a very narrow DOF. For example, on my 400mm L lens I will have to go to F32 to get decent DOF and as you can imagine, the shutter speed won’t easily be high enough for me to hand hold that. And that’s not even keeping the movements of the animal in mind. For photographing my two Golden Retrievers I have noticed that I need a minimum shutter speed of a 500th of a second because of their fast and constant movement. That usually results in F4.5 or F5.6.

The most important thing when photographing animals is that their eyes are in focus. Especially long nosed animals. It is so easy to focus on the tip of the nose when the animal is looking at you or simply the body when the animal is standing side on. But if the eyes are soft, the image will never be satisfactory. It is obviously important to have your camera’s focus point set on a specific point and locked when you press the shutter release half way… I’ll discuss this in the next section.

On wide-angle lenses the DOF is usually very wide, so on my 17mm I can get perfect infinity DOF with F6.3 and F3.5 still won’t give me the narrow DOF of a telephoto.  Life gets interesting when you start using wide-angle lenses for wildlife and telephoto lenses for landscapes. Elephants, Giraffe and Buffalo make great subjects with a wide angle if you can get close enough and then the DOF is not so important provided that you have the animal in perfect focus.

Mountains in the background of something can be “pulled into the image” to appear much closer and bigger than what they really are by using long telephoto lenses. To achieve that DOF you need to use a tripod and the highest aperture the lens has.

Top Tip:

When using a tripod, be sure to turn the Image Stabilizer off. If you don’t, the stabilizer itself will cause camera shake and your images will be blurred. You also need to either use a remote trigger or the timer of the camera. Pushing the normal button with your finger will also cause the camera to move and the image to be blurry.

Any lens wants to focus from near to far. It is impossible for a lens to be focused on the mountain background and still have the Rhino in the foreground in focus. It is just not possible. So when using a wide DOF, be sure to set your focus point on the part that will be closest to you, then recompose and take the shot. Most decent SLR’s has a “DOF preview button” located just next to the lens mount. Your manual will tell you where it is and how it works.

3: ISO

ISO determines the light sensitivity of the sensor. In film people used to use something like a 400ISO when using telephoto lenses and 50ISO when doing portrait studio work. With DSLR’s you can set the ISO on the camera between every shot, which is really handy, but has some limitations. Obviously the more expensive cameras cope better than the cheaper ones. Nikon’s top models go up to 6 400 ISO and copes with it beautifully and Canon’s top models go to a whopping 25 600 ISO. I regularly use a 1 600 ISO on mine with great success.

Getty Images will only approve images of ISO 600 or less from the pro model cameras, which is magnificent if you keep in mind that they would only accept up to ISO 200 slide film three years ago.

Light Metering and exposure compensation

If life was perfect we would all have had the time to measure our light with an external light meter against a non reflective neutral grey card right in front of the face of the animal we want to photograph. Alas, it is not, so we have to do with what we have.

In nature we still have non-reflective neutral colors we can use and with the complex way modern DSLR’s measure light, we really have no excuse for bad exposures. I often use the green of grass or trees or the brown of a dirt road or sand bank to measure my light from.

Cameras have 3 exposure settings called: “Spot Metering”, where the camera uses only the centre focus square to measure the light with. So if that happens to be on a sunspot on the water, or the shadow part of the elephant’s ear, your exposure will be way off. The second is called “Centre weighted Metering” where the camera usually uses the centre third of the screen to measure the light and has the same dangers, but bigger margin for error as the spot meter. The third way is called “Matrix metering” where the camera uses a great many points inside the frame and works out an average and most correct exposure for the whole image.

All modern DSLR’s have an exposure lock button. So you can take an exposure reading of something next to your subject, push the lock button, recompose and the exposure will not change. This is especially helpful when taking photographs of dark animals like Buffalo and Elephant or ethnic faces or white birds. All these things normally need a 1/3 to ½ stop underexposure or overexposure on the cameras metering to give you the correct exposure in the image.

You could set your exposure to automatically over or under expose by a predetermined amount. Your manual will be able tell you how this works. This is very handy when you intend to spend some time with a herd of dark animals or flock of white birds. Just remember to set it back to normal when you’re moving on.

Focusing

All modern SLR cameras and lenses have auto focusing. Auto focusing is faster, more accurate and more efficient than any manual focusing can ever be. The camera uses contrasts and colors to perform this task. The more expensive the camera and lens, the more efficient this process is. If the camera is struggling to get to a focus point, it is called “hunting” and is usually because there is no contrast or light for the camera to focus on. Blue and grey skies are notoriously hard to focus on.

When you look through the viewfinder of your camera you will see a series of squares, generally concentrated around the centre of the screen. When you press the shutter button half way, you will notice that one of more of those squares light up red and usually the camera will make a beep sound to indicate that it has focused and is ready to take the photo.  In 99% of situations, the best setting to use is to select the centre focus point only. This way you can “aim” your focusing accurately every time.

If the camera does not get and hold its focus point, it is probably set on something called “All Servo” focusing which is designed to help with action photos of constantly moving subjects. The focus setting you need for most situations is called “One Shot” with “AF Lock” On this setting you will be able to aim your selected focus point at the leopard’s eye, press the button half way, then recompose to make the best image before pushing the button all the way to take the shot. On this setting the camera will not re focus as long as you keep the shutter button half way pressed and keep the eye of the animal in perfect focus. Obviously if the animal moves, you need to go through the same process again.

My work Flow

Let me start at the very beginning… A very good place to start…

Before I leave my house I have to decide which equipment to pack. When going to the bush, there is obviously not much need for a backdrop and studio lights. When doing a portrait shoot there is also not much need for a 400mm lens… As a rule I always try and cover all my basis, so I normally take most of the toys with me.

For overlanding and wildlife I take both the camera bodies and all the lenses. My lens combination gives me a scope from 17mm to 560m and a macro lens that often comes in very handy. I have 16 gig in CF cards, a fast card reader and my trusty MacBook.

Just a quick note on cards: If you look at a price list you can buy a 4 gig card for very little money, and the same make card at the same size with a different rating for three or four times more money. The extra money is for the speed of the card. If you forget about buffering and writing speed while the card is in the camera, the most important thing there is the speed it takes to download the card onto your computer. I used to buy cheap cards and they normally took around 45 minutes to download. My current CF cards take about 4 minutes for 8 gig. That is the difference!

I set my cameras on Aperture Priority and I always shoot in RAW. Oh yeh, and I ALWAYS shoot in RAW.

When I see something I want to photograph, my brain asks these questions:

Which focal length do I need?

Do I want DOF or not?

Do I want a fast or slow shutter speed?

Can I hand Hold or do I need a support?

Will the camera work out the light, or do I need to measure my light off the subject?

Have I mentioned that I shoot in RAW, ALWAYS IN RAW!!!!! I don't bother changing White Balance on the camera, as it is never 100%. For example: Cloudy setting on a canon has too much green, where shady setting on Nikon has WAAAYYYYYY too much brown...

I take a lot of photos and do experiment with exposures and framing. I see this as being too lazy to edit... But when it comes to working with my images on a computer, I am not shy with deleting ones I do not like 100% before even converting them.

I shoot with Canon; so can use either Photo shop CS2/CS3 or Canon Digital Photo Professional (Which is free with Canon SLR cameras)

In Digital Photo Pro I tweak the exposure if need to, as well as the white balance and sometimes the sharpness. I never "tweak" more than 60% of what the software says it can do as I have found that when viewing the image at 100%, you can see the edges getting fussy or noise developing if you do. If you did not shoot in RAW, you can not do this…

Picture styles are the next thing I look at. You can only change this on the camera before shooting, or afterwards if you shot it RAW. This is quite a new concept for me, but I am WILDLY impressed by it! It is basically designed to make tweaking curves and color adjustments idiot proof and has much the same effect as using different tinted slide film for different situation. I never had vast amounts of experience with Slides (Too young), but I do remember always using Fuji Velvia for landscapes because of the nice green and blue tint it had. This is similar. The most impressive thing is how it gets skin tones 100% correct every time in Portrait Picture Style.

Once I have done this, I batch process all the images into Jpegs at 600 x 400 px and 300DPI. This does not waste hard drive space and if someone wants a better quality, I can easily process that one image at a bigger size.

All this can be done in Photo shop as well, but at a much slower pace.

I also LOVE my MacBook! Almost as much as my 1DS Mark II... I do not allow Iphoto to import all photos. I simply copy and paste from my memory card onto the hard drive, or external drive. From there I find it in Digital Photo Pro and only import the low res Jpegs into albums, which makes viewing easy.

Anything I do with images on the MacBook is easy! If I want to mail them, the Mac resizes them automatically. If I want to put them on my website, Iweb resizes them and works seamlessly with Iphoto. If I want to back them up, MobileMe works seamlessly with Iweb and Iphoto. If I want to edit them slightly, I can do so in Iphoto, but it is as easy to "unedit" them again if you want to go back to the original Jpeg.

Lastly, I archive the RAW pics only on DVD's or external drives...

I also have a PC desktop and an Acer 21" wide screen LCD monitor. I always make sure that the background color on my monitor is black; there is something that is white around the photograph on the screen and that the light in the room is not "false" as this helps with editing as well.

I hate editing photos!