Recently a friend of mine looking to take up large format photography asked my advice on what they should do, I wrote a lengthy e-mail to him which distilled all the knowledge I’d accumulated. Much of this knowledge was either very hard to find or required speaking directly to those in the know, so it may be useful for others…
Before we can begin to describe what equipment you’ll need it’s probably a good idea to delve into a little theory and background, I hope this doesn’t put you to sleep.
The three most amenable formats are 5×4, 5×7, & 10×8 - for some curious reason the Americans describe the two outer formats with the figures reversed, so 4×5 & 8×10.
5×4 has a focal length equivalence roughly 3x that of 35mm (full frame) cameras, so a 90mm lens on a 5×4 camera has a field of view roughly equivalent to 30mm on a 35mm camera - although 5×4’s aspect ratio is different to that of 35mm so the resultant image is taller. 5×7 is approximately 4.5 times that of 35mm, and 10×8 is around 6 times that of 35mm.
Those are the 3 ’standard’ formats, I say standard because people do shoot larger and also cut down versions of these for speciality photography, for example 20*24 Ultra Large Format, or 4*10 panoramic. Of the three, 5×4 is BY FAR the most readily available in terms of film and equipment, it is also the easiest to shoot due to its smaller size.
Just about any large format lens can be used on any large format camera, the important thing to remember is that not every lens will be suitable for the format you are shooting. This is typically because the lens only produces an image circle large enough to cover a particular format - the bigger the image circle the more expensive the lens tends to be. The wider that a lens is, the smaller its image circle usually is.
Another benefit of large format photography which relies on the size of the image circle is the ability to employ movements. Of which there are, Rise/Fall, Shift, Tilt, & Swing:
Of course this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of what the movements can be used to achieve but it does give us some ideas. Naturally, the movements can all be used at the same time to achieve complex results.
Shooting large format equipment is costly, time consuming, space wasting, and challenging, but in my opinion the benefits in terms of depth of field and movements far outweigh all of these negatives. Hopefully this less than comprehensive introduction may have helped to clarify some of the more mystical aspects of the pursuit for you.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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