Introduction, Raw Scans, Neg Film, Highlight Compression, Slide Film, PhotoShop, Conclusion

Introduction

Some time ago I wrote a well received article about getting the most from colour negative scans with VueScan. Since writing the article my workflow has changed significantly, and these are the main reasons why:

• It takes far too long to profile the film base colour using VueScan, scanning isn’t fun at the best of times and I’m an impatient person.
• I’m now shooting a lot more colour slide film, and wanted something that would work equally well if I needed to tweak colour.
• I’m shooting 8×10 & 4×5 sheet film which doesn’t have an area of clear base that I can sample.
• I realised that the old method didn’t stop me having to tweak colour in PhotoShop, and that often the output was worse than from a film preset.

By chance A friend, Raoul Gatepin (Who is an awesome photographer) introduced me to the PhotoShop plugin, ColorNeg, and since then I’ve not really looked back.

ColorPerfect is the latest incarnation of ColorNeg (it amalgamates ColorNeg & ColorPos for slide film) and is the plugin I use on a daily basis, I’ll do my best to describe my workflow here using both text and imagery.

Note: this article does not cover Screen or Scanner profiling, both are critical to good colour workflow, it’s particularly important to ensure your screen is profiled otherwise how will you know if you are making good colour decisions?

Raw Scans

For ColorPerfect to work at its best we need to ensure that VueScan does not do any image processing on our scans whatsoever, for this reason we must save our scans as 16 bit RAW Linear files. Before going any further with this article you will need to own a licensed professional version of VueScan otherwise RAW output is unavailable.

I’m also very much of the opinion that sharpening, dust removal, etc should be done selectively and by hand in PhotoShop so I disable things like ICE & sharpening, here’s a quick run through of how I think you should configure VueScan.

The first thing I turn off in viewscan is the automatic saving of scans – I often find that the scan shows an imperfection that the preview does not, meaning I’ll discard the scan, so why waste disk space keeping a copy?

Although we’re going to save our scans as RAW files it’s important to keep VueScan’s Media setting configured to ‘Color Negative’. With this setting enabled VueScan scales the output of each colour channel so that they are roughly the same. There is typically 1 EV difference between each channel with red being brightest and blue darkest.

Increasing the number of samples helps to eliminate noise in the shadow areas of the scan, obviously the more samples the longer the scan will take so I opt for 3 as a minimum number to average out error.

Next you need to untick every format except ‘Raw file’ on the Output tab, be sure to leave Raw DNG unticked! Set the ‘Raw file type’ to ’48 Bit RGB’. I also like to set Printed Size to ‘Scan size’ to stop VueScan resizing the output.

Now that you have a baseline configuration for ColorPerfect you should save it for future reference. It’s time to start scanning.

Neg Film

Once you’ve scanned, saved and opened your image in PhotoShop you should have something looking a bit like this:

The orange cast of the film base is very apparent, our next step is to start the ColorPerfect plugin via the Filter menu in PS (Filter->CF Systems->ColorPerfect).

I’ve deliberately chosen a difficult film stock here, it’s a cheapo Boots Chemist 200 speed film, most branded films are a doddle to colour correct because the film preset is obvious but in this case some internet searching showed the film to be a Fuji rebrand. So with this in mind I simply chose the film base that gave the most natural looking colour – although you can see that there’s a slight magenta cast to the sky/neutrals.

You’ll notice that I have ringed the three areas of importance in red, film brand, film type, and gamma input mode. The Gamma Input mode should always be set to L for colour negatives (which should always be Linear 16 bit scans), the other setting of G is for use with positive files produced from Slide Film.

Again, this film stock is generic, and although we know the approximate brand we’ve no way for sure to know the actual film type. Even when we know the brand and stock, individual batches can be quite different from one another. The development process throws even more variance into the mix. In short, it’s quite obvious that the inbuilt profiles may never actually give us the best match when we know a film stock, let alone when we don’t. This is where a great new feature of ColorPerfect comes to the rescue, it’s a feature called Filmtype

You can see in the screenshot above that I’ve selected the ‘FilmType’ setting in the main dropdown. All that you need to do after this is find a neutral gray area in your image and click on it. For this photo I clicked about in the grey parts of the cloud until the overall balance was as close as I could get it. Now here’s the nifty bit, by dragging the main slider up and down ColorPerfect varies things just slightly, and typically somewhere in the entire slider range you’ll hit the sweet-spot.

Things still aren’t quite right, the contrast looks a little off, so now it’s time to adjust Gamma.

Change the main drop down setting to Gamma, then simply adjust the main slider until the blacks look about right. That’s it. Often these changes may be marginal, but it’s what feels right that is usually best.

So now that I’m happy I simply click ‘OK’ and use PhotoShop to ultra fine tune colour and levels.

Highlight Compression

Another great feature in ColorPerfect is the ability to compress the highlights in your image, essentially, this stops highlights being blown when you are trying to boost shadow detail. This is important because although colour negative film has a dynamic range which is often in excess of 14 stops, a typical positive image (be it on screen or print) has far fewer. Naturally you’ll need to represent as much of this information as you can but in a non linear fashion.

The above example exhibits significantly blown highlights. I’ve ringed the highlight compression box, this consists of 3 settings, these are, from left to right: the number of stops correction(or off), range of values, & the image percentage being blown out/clipped. So, for this example you can see that the compression is off, the range is 220 (default), and the clipping percentage is 18.86%

Simply by setting the compression range to 0.2 stops I’ve reduced the percentage of blown out pixels from 18.86% to 7.3%. I’ve deliberately chosen to leave a reasonable percentage of blown pixels because otherwise the image can start to look pretty flat. I believe that blacks and whites should almost always be clipped to some extent – have a play with the feature yourself and see what looks best to you.

Slide Film

This section is under construction.

PhotoShop

When I’m finished with the image in ColourPerfect I may want to fine tune some things, usually this will be levels work and fine tuning of colour. I must admit that I find the PhotoShop interface much more intuitive to work with than that of ColourPerfect so I tend to use it for fine tuning even though most of this can easily be achieved in the plugin.

Firstly I apply a ‘Levels’ adjustment layer (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels…)

Next I correct any overall cast by adjusting neutral colour balance with a ‘Selective Colour’ adjustment layer (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Selective Colour), in this image you can see that the greens have a bit too much magenta in, so I remove as many points of magenta as are needed to achieve a good overall balance to the greens:

Finally I adjust sky colour by making a white colour collection, you can see in the screenshot below that I had to drop out some magenta and boost cyan. The key is to always try and make the smallest corrections possible otherwise you can end up with clipping somewhere else in the gamut, and that normally leads to posterised colour.

As I mentioned above you can also make these adjustments within ColorPerfect using it’s colour correction (CC) filters – however, one benefit of doing this in PhotoShop with a selective colour layer is that you can easily revisit the adjustment layer to make changes. ColorPerfect is what I term a ‘destructive’ process, by this I mean that once you click OK you can’t go back without starting from scratch on the original scan.

And that’s pretty much it for PhotoShop other than any selective contrast and sharpening work I would normally perform

Conclusion

ColorPerfect saves me a lot of time when using VueScan. Before my use of ColorPerfect I had to perform time consuming exposure locking and film base colour sampling all because VueScan has very limited film profile support. Even after carrying out these long correction procedures, I was still having to fine tune colour in PhotoShop: and sometimes it was more course than fine tuning.

So now I have the best of both worlds, I can use my preferred scanning software, and spend minimal time in post production. I figure I spend about a minute per image correcting colour, and ColorPerfect is usually just a few seconds of that time.

I am quite sure that far more can be done with ColorPerfect, and I’ll update this article as I discover new techniques, and perhaps offer contrasting views if I believe that the same can be done more quickly in Photoshop. If I had one wish, it’s that ColourPerfect could be an adjustment layer rather than a plugin. But nothing is ever perfect.

I do hope that this is of use to some of you and please remember that you’re very welcome to post your own workflow and process improvement suggestions right here.

I have a print available for purchase through Nova Gallery.

The print is taken from my work in progress series 30 Something.

Introduction

Put yourself in this scenario, you have just received an e-mail about one of your online photos, the sender would like a hi-res copy for print (be it a competition entry/client/magazine/whatever), this is great news, but where did you put the original media??? If you’ve been taking a lot of photos for a while you could be wading through an awful lot of files or film to find one image, and that’s time that you either don’t have or could better spend on something else.

This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) comes into its own. In this post I will describe the methods I use to store and catalogue my photographs in order that I can quickly locate the original media for any print or digital file. These methods add a very small initial overhead to storing your photos, but deliver an easily searched and cleverly indexed image catalogue.

For my purposes I use some software called Iview MediaPro, but Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, or any other photographic/media cataloguing software will work just as well. In order to use this method successfully you will need to have some of this software installed on your computer.

Organising your files

Folder Structure

I organise all of my files in a very simple, but very powerful hierarchy of folders on my hard drive. The folders can easily be archived onto other media and backups can be taken at any point.

I have a folder for each year. The folder format is: YYYY

In the year folders I have a folder for each shoot based upon the year month and first day of the shoot. All of the digital originals and film scans for that shoot go into this folder. The folder format is: YYYYMMDD_Location_Subjects_OtherInfo

In the shoot folders I have a folder where I keep all edits, in my case PSD files. I DO NOT catalogue edits. The folder format is: EDITS

© Ben Anderson

File Names

Digital cameras do pretty well at giving your photos unique file names, but some will re-use the same filenames after counting though a particular range. By storing your shots in ‘shoot folders’ as described above it’s very unlikely that you’ll get duplicates in one place that will overwrite one another. Cameras insert a lot of metadata into the headers of your files, this metadata can describe exposure, time, date, image resolution, camera model, and much more, all of this is information that your catalogue software will import.

Film scans on the other hand contain none of this information, if you’re lucky you will get the scan date/time and scanner model. It is VITAL that you use a numbering system for your scans. I use a very simple but, again, very powerful system which I will now describe:

I store all of my negatives in film binders, be they 135, 120, 4×5, or 8×10. Each binder is numbered, the first being 0001. The negatives are inserted into archival film pages. Each page is numbered, the very first page being page 00010001 (the first 4 digits are the binder number – this stops pages being put in the wrong binders later), each individual frame is simply the frame number on the film. So, if I scanned frame 9 on film page 1 from binder 1, it would be named 00010001-9.tif This makes it exceptionally simple to locate an original film frame from a scan.

Cataloguing

File Import

Every time I add original files into a ‘shoot folder’ that folder gets imported into Iview MediaPro – it’s just a drag and drop, the tool itself only ever keeps one catalogue copy of a file so dropping the same files in more than once does not create duplicates in the catalogue. This means that if you ever forget to add something you can just drop your entire folder structure in again, all the missing content will get added.

Adding Value

Now that my catalogue knows about the files, I want to record some additional information about them.

Star rating – Each photo gets a quality rating from 1 to 5 stars (* -> *****), you can use this later to thin down the catalogue, or simply to pick out your best images.

Colour coding – At import time I generally do not assign a colour code, I do this as I work though processing the shots from a shoot, here are the codes I use:

Yellow – This is the default colour, it means that the image has been tagged, starred and, obviously, colour coded, but no post processing has yet occurred. Assigning this colour as I process the images makes it easy to identify any images I’ve missed – especially handy when importing files from the past that I forgot to add, the newly added images will have no colour coding.

Green – the image has been post processed (so a PSD should exist in the EDITS folder)

Red – the image requires some post processing/is of interest.

Orange – the image has previously been post processed but needs working over again

Tagging – this is where the real power of a catalogue lies, by tagging effectively you can easily and effectively search your files for common elements. I tend to add names, objects, film type, location, and anything else I think might prove useful later.

What Now?

Locating Original Media

Now that you have catalogued all of your originals, how do you exploit it? Easily, whenever you make an edit, make sure you follow your naming convention, keep the original filename or add the name as a tag to wherever it gets uploaded. Write the filename on the back of your prints. It can’t get much easier than that, now you will always be able to quickly find the original media for any of your edits.

Scalability

If you take a LOT of photos, perhaps you are a pro or have simply just been shooting for a LONG time, you can split your catalogues into smaller chunks, each catalogue can contain just a year, a month, or even a single shoot. IView allows catalogues to be catalogued, so you can create a master file for the rare occasions where you need to search your entire body of work (or a smaller subset)

Conclusion

You now know how to effectively keep track of your photographs, so get to it, the sooner you start the better. If you have a backlog of photos to be catalogued it will be daunting, but you may find some gems you’d previously overlooked or forgotten about. Have peace of mind that you will always be able to find your original media.

© Ben Anderson

I got the first set of negatives back from the lab (Peak Imaging in the UK – use them, they are superb), and here is my first ever 8×10 photograph. The ‘model’ is my friend griffleriff (aka Stephen Griffin), the inverted quotes signify a bit of an in joke

© Stephen Griffin

I’ve finally completed putting together my 8×10 gear. The last bits required to complete the puzzle were a Sinar Pan/Tilt head, a heavy duty Slik Professional 4 tripod, and a big laptop bag (TechAir 5504 – it’s superb), I use the bag for the film holders and general shooting paraphernalia.

© Stephen Griffin

So, with the gear all now being in place I’ve been able to get out and shoot on 8×10 film. Careful packing has allowed me to get all the parts of the P2 into my smallish rolling peli case, this has made it so much easier to get the camera to location than when I was lugging the huge peli 1650 about – no more of that!

I recruited my friend Griffleriff (Stephen Griffin) to come along as an assistant/Sherpa but he decided to take these photos of me using the P2 instead – no wages for Griff!

© Stephen Griffin

What I hadn’t counted on is how much of a dork I’d look whilst I was shooting with this thing Or perhaps I’m just kidding myself and I don’t require the camera to look dorky….

© Stephen Griffin
See the results here…

See my photos on flickr.

I no longer use this method, click here for my new ColorPerfect method

Introduction, A Few Simple Options, Film profiles suck, Scanning

Using The Histogram, & The Finished Article

Introduction

Hamrick Software’s VueScan is perhaps the most flexible and powerful piece of scanning software available to photographers today. Many people fall foul of its myriad features and options – it can be quite daunting when you first start the software and begin to explore the different option pages. I’m going to explain how to get the best out of VueScan with the minimum of fuss, the least fiddling, and the least deviation from the software’s default options.

If you’ve already got the software installed (at the time of writing the latest version is 8.4.70), then now is perhaps a good time to reset the options to default, you can do this from within the file menu “File->Default Options”

A Few Simple Options

The first thing I turn off in viewscan is the automatic saving of scans – you’re probably going to want to do things like adjust white balance, white point, and blackpoint before committing your scan to disk, so there’s just no need to have this option enabled.

You’ll also want to turn on VueScan’s histogram Graph, you can do this from the Image menu “Image -> graph b/w”, or by hitting ctrl-2. You want the b/w graph because this allows you to adjust white and black point using 2 graphical sliders (explained later in the article).

Film profiles suck

VueScan comes with some pre-configured film profiles, you may think that these are just great, but in reality they aren’t – they just take control away from you, and will more than likely deliver a scan that just does not come up to scratch. Why? Because each and every roll of negative film you shoot has it’s very own slight variations in both manufacturing tolerance, exposure, film fogging (heaven forbid), and most importantly development. All of these combine to change the film’s base colour density – so by choosing a preset you are using a ‘best guess’.

The good news is that there is absolutely no reason to settle for a best guess, and this is because VueScan will allow you to sample the base colour of your film directly. These tips are available on the VueScan homepage, but I’ve combined them with some screenshots to make it even more clear. So without further ado, here’s how it’s done…

Firstly you need to preview your film. Click the Preview button! When the preview finishes you should select an area of clear film between frames (or in the film leader). If the ‘Lock Exposure tickbox is ticked, untick it (see the picture below this one)

Hit the preview button again, when the preview finishes tick the “Lock exposure” tickbox.

Hit the preview button once more, when the preview finishes tick the “Lock film base colour” tickbox.

With these simple steps you have calibrated your roll of film. You only need to do this once per roll, it can be a pain, but it will save you major headaches in post processing.

Scanning

Now that you’ve optimised VueScan for your current roll of film, you’ll want to go ahead and scan some photos. A lot of people like to keep the film borders and frame numbers in their scans, I think this is a complete waste of time – it will also give you more hard work setting levels in post processing because your beautifully crafted photo will be competing with the levels of the border & bright yellow frame numbers. The answer is simple: use the frame crop box to highlight a scanning target just within the borders of each frame.

When you’re happy that you’ve got the frame correctly selected hit the Scan button.

Using the histogram

Now that your scan is in memory you can do some adjustments, there are 2 main ones you’ll probably want to do, the first of which is using the histogram to produce a nice flat image which can easily be adjusted in PhotoShop. Drag the sliding pointers to left and right so that all elements of the graph are between them – if you want to clip some areas then adjust accordingly.

The final adjustment you may want to make is the white balance – find an area in the scan which is neutral and right click on it (hold down control on mac). VueScan will automatically adjust white balance, if you picked the wrong area just try again until you get something that looks correct — You’ll probably only want to do this once per roll (or once for each set of photos with the same lighting conditions) to ensure your scans are colour matched. Double right clicking resets the auto white balance.

The Finished Article

So now it’s time to save your frame, click on the disk icon or use the save image option in the file menu.

Hopefully you should now be able to successfully scan colour negative film and be sure that you’ll get consistent results. You’ll need to use Curves and Levels in PhotoShop to get the best out of your scans. Good Luck!

Part 2 – Environment, Isolation, Empathy, Diversity, & Story

Click here for Part 1.

6. Environment

This section is closely tied with Location in part 1. Almost everything we do is governed by our environment, and much of our behaviour is also a product of the environment. Parkour could arguably be said to be a product of Lisses (the birth place of parkour) and its modern, concrete, urban landscape. With that in mind it doesn’t take a genius to realise that we should probably show some environmental aspects in our own photographs.

Fortunately, depicting a subject within its natural environment is a sure fire way to add depth and foster emotional attachment to your photos, that’s something we should capitalise upon. As an example, take a look at the photograph of Ben below. Whilst the group were on the move from Leeds International Pool to another favoured location Ben told me that he had been tattooed with a parkour emblem. Now for me this is a pretty hardcore statement which really underlines Ben’s commitment to the discipline

So, how best could I show his tattoo? A close up shot? No. We happened to be on a foot bridge overlooking the location where my, perhaps most notable, photograph, Leeds Leap, was taken. Light bulb! By taking a photo of Ben looking out at the view I could immediately gather together the following ideas: parkour as an urban pursuit, the spiritual nature of the discipline (free your mind), the inspiration and start point for my own parkour photography, the power of Ben’s conviction, the tattoo itself, and the cyclical nature of things — the pool is soon to be demolished.

The environment is all around us, duh, make use of it, it is a powerful tool that can be used both very easily and very effectively to add character and strength to your photos.

© Ben Anderson

7. Isolation

Isolation is really the counterpoint to environment. The idea here is that you should totally direct all of the viewers’ attention on the subject and nothing else.

On occasion the message you are trying to get across is so strong that to have anything else in the scene will only serve to dilute it. One very simple trick is to make sure the background is very simple, a wall, the sky, the ground – something uniform. Or even something so boring or at odds with the subject that it immediately makes your message stand out.

Colour can play a very strong role in achieving subject isolation. If you had a traceur dressed in green doing a move then it wouldn’t be a good idea to shoot them against grass or some trees would it? Instead find a red background, brick works well. Conversely red shirts against green work superbly.

Even though you are isolating a subject, you can still let some environment creep in to add depth, take a closer look at the photo of Devin below.

© Ben Anderson

8. Empathy

Whenever you approach a subject photographically you should bear in mind the implications of any photographs you take. For example, parkour is non competitive, so you should definitely not take a photograph that appears to portray it as such. Similarly, parkour is not a team discipline, and although traceurs train together it would be questionable to display parkour moves performed in tandem or give the appearance of teamwork. Of course this is not the case for photos of Acro.

Again I’ll refer back to some of the other subjects, Anticipation, & Rapport, you can only truly empathise with your subject if you are knowledgeable about it – ensure that you are. By depicting your subject with empathy you help to engender rapport with its practitioners – this is a feedback loop that can lead to some great insights and future benefits.

Although photography will always be exploitative to a certain extent, you can minimise this by helping to portray the goals and dreams of your subjects’ practitioners. Remember that you as a photographer are also being exploited by your subject – it’s a two way street. Don’t be evil – ever!

© Ben Anderson

9. Diversity

Shoot everything.

When you start to look critically at everything which is happening around you, then you will start to see things that would not normally be apparent: forms, the play of light across a face, how the shape of a person interacts with the environment, perhaps a juxtaposition of your subject and something as banal as a commercial banner. There are interesting photographs everywhere, even in the most mundane every day places. By framing them with your camera’s viewfinder you freeze them in time and allow them to be shared with others. If you’re not taking a photo then you’re missing an opportunity.

Eventually as your eye becomes more familiar with this mental ‘framing’ of the world you will know when to shoot and when to wait for the truly sublime: we all have the ability to transcend our everyday existence, catching those rare moments is what you should aim for – people don’t want to looking at boring photos.

Originality is perhaps the single hardest thing in photography, but it always keeps you on your toes, and working out a new and refreshing way to show something is reward in itself.

© Ben Anderson

10. Story

Telling a story is perhaps the single most difficult thing to do with photography. Much can be learnt by looking at cartoons and film story boards, think of the key ways in which each ‘frame’ interacts with its neighbours, flow, form, rhythm, are all important. Consistency of style and format are also paramount (I’ve broken this rule myself in my parkour set so far!) – you should also either use all B&W or all colour photos, or aim to have sections of all the same.

Think about the everyday aspects of your subject, the journey, buying a ticket, mucking about on the bus, the meet, stopping for food, all the little ‘boring’ every day things that happen can help to punctuate a larger body of work and most importantly ground them in the understanding of the viewer — this connection with the viewer is important, never forget it.

© Ben Anderson

Parkour photo set on Benneh.Net

Part 1 – Equipment, Technique, Anticipation, Rapport, & Location

When I was a child my grandad bought a Canon T90 SLR, I was transfixed by it, ever since then I knew I wanted to own a decent camera.

A couple of years ago I was finally able to afford to buy myself that ‘decent’ camera, a Canon 350D DSLR. Stumping up the cash was the easiest part, I had no idea just how little I knew about taking photos, I’d always used fully automatic point and shoot cameras up until then.

By chance a colleague introduced me to the website Photo.Net, and for a while the forums on that site provided me with new insights and ideas for my photos. By reading everything and looking at all the examples others were posting my photography improved rapidly.

As soon as I realised that I could recreate some of the stunning photos that I was seeing in magazines I was hooked, and I started to look for things to shoot that nobody else, or at least, very few people were doing.

I’d been aware of Parkour for some time, having seen the BBC trailer (video above) and a few photos in magazines – I had no real understanding of what it was, or the difference between, say, freerunning and tricking, they were all just the same thing to me.

Then one day while I was parking my car at work I noticed some kids climbing up the building opposite, I saw one of them size up a gap and immediately knew that he was going to jump, the penny dropped at that point.

© Ben Anderson.

The result was ‘Leeds Leap’, one of the winners in Tate’s How We Are Now flickr competition. I knew that the jump was being taped by the kids and thought it likely to appear on youtube, a quick search turned up a link to WYPK’s website, www.frpk.co.uk (now defunct, see them on myspace), and I was able to get in touch so that I could go shoot some more photos of them.

That was the start of my education about Parkour, tricking, freerunning, buildering, and much more.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned along the way, I hope you find them useful:

1. Equipment

This is your mantra ‘know my equipment’! Whether you own a digital point & shoot, digital SLR, film compact, or any other camera, the single most important way to improve your photography is to know every aspect of how your camera works – read the manual for your camera, try out ALL the options, when done, read it again. Understanding how your camera works will help you nail the photo that you want in less time and will stop you from missing those ‘must have’ photos.

You should definitely try and master the manual modes that your camera offers, shooting manual takes the decisions away from your camera and gives you the power to decide exactly how you want your photos to look. Why would you want your camera to take those decisions away from you and place them in the hands of its Japanese designers? The automatic modes are there to offer a ‘best guess’ based on average camera use – group snapshots, landscapes, gurgling babies, & pet cats – they don’t have parkour or tricking modes – your brain does, use it!

You can take great photos with ANY camera, but only if you understand its limitations completely. Better gear will allow you to get the photo you want with less retakes and hassle, you don’t HAVE to buy the latest DSLR to take great photos, but it may save you some time if you can afford it.

I shoot parkour using the following: a Canon EOS 5D, a Canon EOS 1DMKII, a Rollei 6008i, and a Leica M6. Each of these cameras allows me to shoot a particular aspect of the discipline more easily than the others (or with higher quality results), but I could just as easily shoot parkour with a typical digital point and shoot – it would take me more time to get the shot I wanted, but I’d get it just the same.

© Ben Anderson

2. Technique

Your knowledge of photography is your ally: Learn as much as you can about photography and you will be 95% of the way to getting good results. Read about the principals of photography, how the relationships between ISO, Aperture, & Shutter speed affect exposure, when to use a wide angle lens, how to ensure everything from just in front of you to far away is in focus, how to draw attention to a detail with very shallow focus, and much much more.

The single best book I’ve found for learning every technical aspect of photography is ‘Photography, 8th Edition’ by Barbara London (9th edition now available – my wishlist), it’s not cheap but it is superb, get it if you can afford it, if not, borrow it from your local library.

Some simple ideas:

Try and keep your shutter speed above 1/250s, the faster it is the more likely you will be to ‘freeze’ the action and reduce blurring due to subject motion. At the same time try and keep your aperture to f/8 or smaller (the higher the f number the smaller the aperture), this means that more of the scene will be in focus, so you’ll be more likely to get a good shot. You should be trying to use your camera’s manual and semi automated modes just as I said in the equipment section, they will transfer the power of decision making to you. After a short period of acclimatisation you’ll begin to realise that the manual modes offer you far greater creative flexibility, and that they will not hinder you as much as the decisions made by the camera in the automated modes.

If at all possible pre-focus your camera, and turn AF off – AF can significantly increase the time taken for your camera to decide what to focus on, and it may not choose what you would! This is actually much easier than it sounds, once AF is disabled use the focus ring (or buttons) to focus on an area of pavement or wall that is the same distance from you as your subject will be when it is in motion, by using this technique with the f/8 aperture tip above you can virtually guarantee that your photo will have a crisp, in focus subject.

Don’t forget to set the ISO! The ISO setting adjusts how sensitive your camera’s sensor is to light (If you’re shooting a film camera things are a little tougher because you’ll have to switch films), you should always try and use the LEAST SENSITIVE setting that will still allow your camera to have a relatively fast shutter speed (see the shutter speed tip above). So, in the case of my Canon 5D, I always try and shoot at ISO 100 if I can: the reason for this is that the higher the ISO number, then the more digital noise, or film grain, will be in your picture. Every time the ISO number doubles then so does your cameras sensitivity to light – and usually the amount of noise doubles too.

To recap:

* For moving subjects keep the shutter speed as fast as possible, above 1/250th of a second

* Try and use a small aperture like F/8 (the bigger the number, the smaller the aperture).

* Disable AF and pre-focus.

* Keep ISO as low as you can to avoid noise – adjust to keep aperture small and shutter speed high.

* MOST IMPORTANTLY – don’t be afraid to experiment, don’t treat these settings as gospel

This may all sound very complicated, but before long it will be second nature – honestly!

© Ben Anderson

3. Anticipation

How do you anticipate what your subject will be doing next? By knowing your subject matter thoroughly! Immerse yourself in every aspect of it, speak to the people who practice it, read what others have written about it: blogs, online news articles, books, forum posts, newspapers, interviews, and TV programs are just some of the sources you can use. In the case of parkour, check out the parkour wiki, visit parkour.net, and perhaps most importantly look to see what your competition is doing – this can also lead you to being original. Of course the best way to understand something is also to participate in it, you can then use your own insights to show your passion for the subject.

© Jéan-Pierre Whitfield

4. Rapport

If I’ve learned one thing about getting into the heart of a subject, it’s to build links with the practitioners, learn their abilities, never ask them to do something that they are not comfortable with, respect them and treat them as you would wish to be treated. Be yourself and you will earn their trust.

To the best of your abilities you should always keep your promises, at the very least be courteous enough to offer truthful explanations as to why you have had to change your plans or break a promise. It’s far better to never make a promise that you can’t keep, always set expectations within reality.

Small favours can build a strong relationship, I’ve given the members of WYPK permissions to use web versions of my photos as they see fit, this is great viral marketing since the kids are often more than willing to repay the favour with a link to my website – you may be reading this as a direct result of one of those links! Who better to promote your work than those most passionate about its subject?

The gift of a photographic print is a small token that any photogrpaher should be prepared to make in return for the ability to take that photograph in the first place, particularly if the photograph turns out to be popular.

© Lloyd Spencer

5. Location

Location, location, location! Think about your surroundings, try and place yourself so that the environment will help show your subject in its best light – avoid clutter, simple backgrounds make it easier for the viewer to pick out what you want them to see. Think about how light is distributed around the scene, will your subject be adequately lit? Are there any bright areas that will distract the viewers eye? Will the point of view be interesting? Does it convey how you want the viewer to see the scene?

Use geometry to your advantage, lines that converge on your subject will guide the viewers eye toward it, similarly they can also guide the viewers eye around your photograph or indicate a direction of motion. Use geometry to your advantage when composing the shot, by far the simplest approach is to place your subject on ‘the golden mean’: if you divide your image into thirds both horizontally and vertically then placing your subject at the intersection of a horizontal and vertical line instantly adds impact – our brains are programmed to respond to these intersections, so take advantage of them.

© Ben Anderson

End of Part 1.

Click here for part 2.

Parkour photo set on Benneh.Net