Photography Tips

We were just in London to see the Leonardo show. I pulled out my camera for the first time since I went to Istanbul to spend a few days in a tutorial with Kemal Nuraydin of the Istanbul Photo Workshop, a training experience I highly recommend, by the way. Yesterday I was out in Paris taking a few more pictures and remembered, oh yeah, somebody asked what I learned. I don't know. Maybe my head is spinning from all that travel. It took me a while, but here, finally, is the answer.

First, I don't think Kemal would think much of this picture. Nor do I, except that I like it anyway. It is close to the picture I wish I had taken.

We were at Saint Paul's, where they have an ongoing demonstration -- tents all over and in England they let them stay up. Mayor Bloomberg, we should not be getting reminders on what freedom of assembly means from anywhere on Earth, much less the country we revolted against. Remember when they were the oppressors?

Okay. Back to photography. Lesson One. Do not do what I just did and take a photo on the fly. If you want to photograph something in any kind of serious way, plan to spend some time on it. In this case, adding one more tent to the mix and staying for a week would not be too much.

This was an interesting group of people, from what I saw, well-educated, well organized and with no serious prospect of a job. What was scary was not that folks were camping, right outside St. Paul's. It was that these people, who even in scruffy mode appeared to be eminently hirable,  have had their careers stopped in their tracks by the still unchecked greed of a few. These folks and many others are out of work for the foreseeable future so others can have a bigger megayacht, buy a fifth house, or impress their friends by paying a record price for, say, a shark in formaldehyde.

Okay. Back to photography. Lesson Two. Find a topic that interests you, so that during that day or week or forever, if the topic is something like your kids, you will continue to be motivated to delve more deeply into the subject and to find ways to document it well.

Did I mention that Kemal was editor of National Geographic Turkey? He was, and they were well-served, too. So these comments are either general comments on photography or related to NatGeo-type work. If you want to do, say, fine art photography, I guess you would document your own imagination as if it were something out in the world.

Lesson Three. Practice time is important. Learn your camera controls so well that you can change them in the dark. You never want to have to stop and wonder how to make sure the subject is backlit, or the shadows are right or anything technical at all. When you are working, you want your whole focus to be on the subject.

Lesson Four. Do whatever it takes to change the angle of your image. Raise the camera, lower it, whatever, but avoid the "stand and deliver" thing. That is what I was trying above, not that it worked out so well.

Lesson Five. Get the best equipment you can afford.

Lesson Six. Get a great small camera, so you will always have something with you, even when you are not on a project. Kemal has the new Sony hybrid. Another instructor that was with us for a day, Tomas Tomaszewski, uses a Leica. I guess this suggests a Lesson Six-A, which is that, even though you might separate your serious work from your "on the fly" stuff, you never stop looking for pictures.

There was plenty more that he had to say, but that's enough for now.

Street Performer in Toulouse

I am constantly taking these photos. These street performers are everywhere, but I never fail to be amazed by their grace and athleticism. But, bravo Lynn, how often do I get arm, face and butt all in focus? I wish it were the start of a trend but truthfully, probably not.

I am getting hooked on my iPhone camera. Seriously, it's my little secret. I took this through the entry window at a building on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, not far from the Champ de Mars.

Well, okay, it's not your typical picture of Paris. And right across the street is the wildly photogenic Pagoda theater, so what is up here? Actually, not much. I just liked it. Somehow I like the image of autumn and the repeating pattern of the leaves and all. Sometimes that's all it takes for me.

4th of July, El Cerrito

How strange it feels to be in the States for the Fourth of July. Here is a little girl at the local park festival.

Paris

I hope you all have an endless appetite for photos of the Eiffel Tower. I took this one tonight through the peace monument, at the opposite end of the Champs de Mars. As you can see from the broken safety glass, peace doesn't stand much of a chance these days. I have become interested in the camera in my iPhone. I find that its limitations can be used to create photos that I just would not take with my much fancier Nikon.

Antietam

Add I am in Paris, so of course I am thinking of the States. I took this photo about a year ago, when Robert and I were visiting our friends Mike and Pearl. I like the patterns and colors. It is difficult to think of this as a battlefield; it just defies the imagination.

El Cerrito

Yes, it's true. I do occasionally pull out the camera at home. Right now I'm getting ready to take Tracy's boys to Cooperstown Baseball Camp. That means pictures, and plenty of them. What better way to practice than on the local Little League?

Sausalito

I took this with my iPhone, my favorite new toy. We were at Cavallo Point for lunch and the afternoon light looked so nice. The iPhone camera doesn't have the finesse of my Nikon, but used in the right way, it is definitely good enough.

Istanbul

It's Sunday morning. Time for a religious image. These dervishes are performing for tourists, so I have no clue whether they consider this part of their practice, or whether they are even Sufi. I was surprised that they allowed photos during the performance.

Chiang Mai

I can't believe I haven't done an elephant photo yet. Back in 2007 I went to a week-long elephant camp. It was one of the great experiences of my life. I had two elephants assigned to me -- one to ride and one just to fool around with. This little guy was neither of them, just a little baby that I went to visit one morning before school started.

Sens

We wanted to see Sens Cathedral. The parking is pretty difficult around there, so we drove and drove and finally came upon this side street that was actually not so far away from the cathedral and the square it faces. The local preservation committee has a pretty narrow view of what constitutes "heritage," focusing on landmarks to the exclusion of much else. I was happy to find this little bit of bygone ordinary life.

Halong Bay

I had been wanting to try kayaking for years, so when I got the chance, I took it. It was great. I need to do more. This photo was taken at the kayak outpost that Indochina Junk keeps on Halong Bay. It was my great privilege to be the old lady American tourist, free to take snapshots, if I wanted, while my guide did the heavy rowing. Next time, I won't be so lucky...

Hong Kong

I was at the hotel, waiting for friends, when I saw this little dance recital. The hotel had set aside a space in the main lobby, so about 30 girls and a couple of boys had a captive -- and captivated -- audience. They were good.

Dijon

Are these kids cute or what? They are just some group of students in Dijon, but they look like they could, at any minute, lose those tacky orange t-shirts -- why are they wearing those anyway? -- and try out for an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. I'd like to think there was a time in my life that I looked that good but no, probably not.

Santiago de Compostela

The church at Santiago de Compostela opens onto a huge square. The other three sides are bordered by the City Hall, the University and an old hospital, now a Parador. If you go out the side door, you see a lovely small square with a huge fountain. There is a shop selling silver souvenirs and the street that takes you to the office where you turn in your pilgrimage papers, if you are of a mind to do that. It is well suited to sights like these street performers, who were actually doing ballroom dancing without being drowned out or ignored. Today I would be braver, and get right up there for a close shot, but on that day, this was the best I could do.

Cluny

We were on the trail of medieval France. It led to Cluny. We knew that there wasn't much left, but we had no clue what had taken its place. It turns out that the grounds of the old monastery have been turned into an engineering college. We had the good fortune to arrive on some sort of initiation day, featuring the students in their dress lab coats. Each coat was unique and remarkably lacking in French imagery and verbiage.

Isle of Skye

Well, we were on the ferry, halfway to the Isle of Skye. All around me folks were either getting seasick or out with their cameras, jostling for the best position to get a shot of the storm. While other images I took during my five minutes of jostling are more wet, I think this one is the most dramatic.

Luang Prabang

Laos gets more foreign aid than you can possibly imagine. Most of it stays in the capital and is spent on enormous government buildings and, most likely, the government workers that fill them. The actual work is done by privately funded NGOs. The "government" orphanage in Luang Prabang receives about 10 cents per day per child, for food, housing, clothing and education. This is supplemented by private donations. They make every penny stretch in a way that I have never before seen. Show above is the orphanage garden, a major source of food for the kids and surely worked by the students themselves, when they are not in class.

Istanbul

This is a little cafe at a ferry stop on the Asian side of Istanbul. This is how I think of the city: relaxed, urbane, not so full of itself that it recoils at a little scruffiness. As unreconstructed country people come into the city it is changing, but I hope there will always be unpretentious places where an woman with no headscarf and no chaperone can meet a friend for a drink with no one taking any particular notice.

Paris

I might as well start with the obvious, a photo of my favorite building in my French neighborhood. I just wish the twinkle lights had been on.