Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
125
I agree Mike. I also see a lot of these modern ugly tourist ships passing just beneath where I live. All the traffic to and from Stockholm passes the narrow sea-lane just east of the iland I live on (called Rindö). There are a lot of old fortresses here built since the fifteenhundreds.
When I grew up here we used to go down to look at the ships that passed here in the sixties. In these days the ships looked entirely different. We loved our Swedish-America Line´s ships Stockholm and Kungsholm that were all white with very beautiful lines.
Stockholm collided with an Italian ship called Andrea Doria and sunk.
My “gut feeling” was completely wrong. I was still thinking 25,000 ISO was outrageous. Sorry.
So what ISO, if any, do you want me to test? I’m still living too far in the past. So, are we now up to 50,000 ISO? 100,000 ISO? 250,000 ISO? 500,000 ISO??? Never mind me, I’m still living in cave-man times, from when I hated to even go to 800 ISO. I guess I need to accept the new realities. Lesson learned.
Very interesting, but I will try again next weekend.
I really need a helicopter (or a boat) so I can shoot from a longer distance away from the ship.
My definition of “boat” = “a hole in the water into which you constantly pour money”. With all the money I don’t have, I might as well buy an airplane, so I can shoot with a proper perspective.
Thanks for the website; no, never heard of them. I enjoy the photos YOU post of old boats, but I don’t have access to any place around Miami that I can visit. I love your photos of wrecked, skelotonized boats, or what’s left of them, after rotting away for decades. All the boats I get to see are plastic.
In a way, what you wrote explains one of my reasons to use my Leica. Or maybe I’m just lazy, or losing my mind. The enjoyment I used to get from “photography” is getting lost in all the technology, not to mention the costs.
I feel as you do. Regarding the collision, the Andrea Doria sank. The Stockholm was repaired. Both ships were beautiful. It’s a shame that accident even happened. I have a book about it, and there are numerous YouTube videos. I absolutely agree with you about how beautiful those old Ocean Liners were. I took photos of many of them in NYC. I think the only one left is the newest Queen Mary, but I can’t afford to sail on it. I still love the SS United States - they are trying to restore it. I’ve always been fascinated by ships. Cruise ships? Yuck.
I realise what Mike was trying to do and my point was that the main subject got pushed to the background behind some proportionally large and prominent people. The head of the woman on the left was almost as tall as the ship.
Oh, and, strictly, that is not a boat, it’s a ship. In naval parlance, this is a boat …
A boat that goes underwater?? That’s beseeching the gods
But serious. A single boat is quite boring, unless one has something with boats.
Subjects of this size need additional subjects to give an impression of its size.
Indeed. I reckon we should all go back to large format photography where the camera doesn’t even have a battery. I’m all equipped and ready to go.
But, seriously, just because modern cameras have all this whizzy-whiggy new fangled technology, doesn’t mean we are obliged to slavishly restrict ourselves to trying to use all of it. As I have said to Mike many times before, set the menus once and for all and then use exactly the same techniques we always used to use to produce stunning images on film.
Mind you, this does involve learning/remembering how photography works.
We never used to have auto-ISO - we would choose from a list of fixed sensitivities, depending on the light we were expecting to shoot in, buy a roll of suitable film and then use all 4/9/12/15/24/36 frames on the roll at that speed, or possibly pushing or pulling the exposure if necessary.
The ultimate luxury is the LF camera, where you can switch ISO for every shot because the film comes in single sheets.
We never had zoom lenses - zooming was achieved by walking back from or towards the subject. Is using a zoom lens “cheating”?
On some of the older cameras we had to use interchangeable Waterhouse Stops to alter the aperture - none of those fancy infinitely variable multi-blade diaphragms. Are they “cheating”? Come to that, why not revert to pinhole cameras?
You get my point. Advances in photography are not necessarily about cheating, just leveraging modern technology to achieve the same results.
And it is not limited to digital enabling “cheating”. Many is the photographer who would use very sophisticated darkroom techniques to create photomontages from more than one negative.
But even taking a “straight” shot can also be regarded as cheating. We once went to view a house we might have bought, only to find that a perfectly straight photo was framed in such a way that we could not see that it was on a pig farm and the silage pit was within 50 metres of the house.
To come back to today, I used a perspective correction in PhotoLab to emphasise the proportions of the ship. Had Mike had a camera with movements, he could have used the movements to achieve the same effect. And that isn’t limited to reverting to an LF film camera; PhaseOne do a 6cm x 9cm 150Mpx digital back that will fit on a Linhof Technika chassis with movements. Trouble is, something like that is going to set you back by €60k or more by the time you’ve bought lenses.
So, am I cheating by using a DSLR and changing perspective in post? Well, it’s not like it is easier. I have to know about hyperfocal distance, minimum focus and diffraction limiting techniques.
“Proper” digital photography is neither easier nor harder than film photography. It is just different. But we do need to remember that, whatever the camera we are using, it is just a black box with a hole at the front and a means of recording the light on the back.
@mikemyers, the majority of your confusion comes because you are trying to make use of all those fancy things your digital camera can do instead of setting it up once and then using it like a good old fashioned film camera. It’s the thinking photographer’s choice.
I’m no longer sure what the main subject was, silly as this may sound. Maybe I should have focused on the people?
I did learn one lesson - my other photo is better in almost every way, and feedback I have received by mail said the same thing. The small boat on the left is just icing on the cake. This is just a small crop from my 20mm lens. The heads covering up the ship didn’t bother me, and perhaps even improved the photo. In retrospect, I should have moved a little towards my right.
With my “photojournalist hat” on my head, this is the best way to put it.
The “story” (to me) was the important thing, not “the ship”. Both are tangled together to form the photograph. Check the raw image to see the full image:
Completely against what I thought before, I think I will get my best photo on an overcast day. Shooting into the sun is no fun. It almost “hurts” my eyes to look at that last photo. Amazing that the sun didn’t ruin the rest of the photo - standing there, I never even noticed the shadows.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
134
A lot of interesting perspectives and thoughts but when I look at these subjects, I think it is a lot like looking at a Kashmiri Silk Carpet that changes character after the angle you are watching it from.
The thing with digital photo techniques is that it can be overwhelmingly complex and complicated especially for a user new to it and using a modern interchangeable lens camera. There are so many different functions and it is (especially with Sony-cameras that are extremely configurable and really demands configuration to be usable and on top of that especially Canon-converters starting to use Sony immediately got lost in a menu swamp they really were not used to).
… but when configured they can be as easy as a Kodak Click to handle really (and I´m not talking about the stupid green Auto but something far smarter and more flexible than that) or for that matter a mobile phone camera. A funny thing is that I have never heard a mobile phone camera user think about using that camera as cheating.
Another strange thing is that I have had about 10 different interchangeable lens cameras since 2005 (19 years) but I had only two SLR-cameras (Pentax ME and Olympus OM2) between 1963 and 2005 (42 years). Especially the Pentax was very simple since the only thing I could set was the aperture and the DIN/ASA(ISO) and the focus.
Despite the simplicity of the Pentax ME I consider using it with positive color slide film with ASA/ISO between 50, 64 or 100 far more demanding than using my A7 IV because that really forced you to expose correctly (otherwise the colors were lost directly) and being very conscious about shutter speeds and camera shake.
… and then I haven´t even mention postprocessing yet.
I also think many of us also seem to neglect the extreme complexity the complete digital environment exposes us to. Today we are just so used to this that we tend to overlooking it completely but it is computers, operating systems and many different softwares that have to be compatible and interact just so we can be able to make a picture!!! All that tech is also are a part of this photo platform we use and then I haven´t even mentioned video.
Speaking about large format cameras I still remember when I was young working at a factory producing silkscreen printing presses. We had just finished the assembly of a big machine that was going to be used to print advertisements on sheet metal for bus stop shelters in South Africa (yes glass was not to think of there :-).
Then there came this photographer with his big Linhoff-camera made of wood!! He set up his camera and got it ready and guess what? Our jaws dropped when he started to expose. Shutter?? No! He just took away the lens cover and started to walk around the machine for at least a minute “painting” the machine from different angles with a strong light. He was using a very slow film in order to make it possible to “lift the shadows” with his light painting. THAT I thought really was to cheat in the beginning of the seventies
It was the same process in our factory when we needed photographs of our benches in the begining of the 80’.
And the result was perfect with one single take.
Edit: the camera was made of metal…
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
137
@sloweddie
You know between 1820-1914 more than 80 miljon left Europe for USA.
Between 1850 and 1920 1,5 miljon left Sweden for USA - many left from Gothenburg on the Swedish America Lines white beautiful ships that you could see in the link above…
The last one in my family to leave for America in the first emigration wave was my fathers sister and her little son. They left 1917 under the WW I. My grandfather was supposed to leave with the same ship but was forced off the boat by police since he was in the age to swerve in the army. It was in the middle of WW1. My sister left around 1980 and lived there until she died 2005. In fact, our family in the U.S is more numerous than what is left in Sweden.
If you are interested in why they left I have written a photo story about that below. On the top of it you will find a Google Translate link that converts the Swedish to English.
Sweden was poor then and the living conditions were extremely hard especially in the areas where my family comes from because they were subsistence farmer and working for generations in the huge forests of the north with logging - cutting timber in the winters. You get an idea of how it must have been by looking at my pictures of the huts they were forced to live in down to - 40 degrees Centi grades in the winter.
If you don´t have the time for all the text, at least look at the pictures.
Not necessarily. Side lighting can be very rewarding, provided the ship sails at a suitable time.
But it did ruin it because the sky is massively over-exposed and the highlights are totally blown.
We have discussed this before. If you have such bright highlights, you must spot meter. Looking at the settings for the previous photos, I see you were using centre-weighted metering, which is totally useless in this kind of situation. And, with the sun actually in the frame, you are going to blind yourself trying to spot meter the sun.
Unless it is partially obscured by veiled cloud at least, never, never, never shoot like this.
Assuming the sun is not directly visible, and you are in manual mode, the procedure is this…
Select spot metering and measure the brightest part of the image area. The meter should read +2EV on the scale in the viewfinder
Do not, under any circumstances be influenced by the histogram or the screen on the back of the camera. The image will be horrendously dark and the histogram very much filled towards the left. This is perfectly normal.
When you get into PhotoLab, you will need to use Smart Lighting (Spot Measure Mode) to bring the highlights into range as much as possible, then use the Tone Curve and Fine Contrast tools to adjust the contrasts.
Oh, and before you do any of this, you’ll need to throw out your previous images and start again.
On the last photo I posted, look at the tree at the left, then look where the shadow was going - as in blocking the direct view of the sun in my camera. That was deliberate, but for the wrong reason - I wanted to block the sun from my eye, and doing so got rid of all the glare I was aware of. Nice trick, that I need to remember for the future.
Oops, I didn’t read your response until after I posted mine. But why would I want to throw them out? Nothing is “perfect” and I am far from perfect, but I like what I did capture in that last image more than what I did not capture because the highlights are blown out.
If I get another chance, I will take your ideas into account.
Spot metering is necessary to do what you suggest.
Center weighted metering seemed best for me, as the middle of the image was what I was most concerned about.
I’m not talented enough to do what you can do, especially with so little time.
…and as to the parts of the image that just turn white, that corner of the sky, and the narrow reflection in the water, that was “real”. But for the tree that is blocking the sun, I’d never have taken this image.
My thoughts - “do the best you can with what you’ve got”. …and “strive to learn more for the future”.
My goal - to capture the ship, and the crowd admiring the ship.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
141
Today @Joanna, it was a pretty thick fog here when I went with our commuter boat into Stockholm from the Vaxholm Archipelago. The sun was there but hardly made it through the clouds so I had no problems shooting against it.
Talking about ships. Here is one of the red and white Viking Line boats that normally goes between Sweden and Finland. During the tourist season Stockholm like Miami gets visited by all these Cruisers.
A picture of Storskär, a steamship still trafficking the islands is our Arhipelago. We have still quite a few of these old steamers in traffic. Storskär was built in 1908 and is still going strong after 116 years in traffic and is still in an absolutely wonderful condition. She is patiently waiting for the spring and all the tourists that use to love to eat a “steam ship beef” on their way out in the islands.
All pictures right out of my mobile without the slightest modifications like a real hardcore “Photo Purist” but I guess there were quite a lot of “cheating” going on there behind the curtain of my Samsung, despite I didn´t notise anything :-).
I enjoy your second photo the most, as it shows the mist getting thicker and thicker looking off into the distance.
I like the cruise ship photo too, but the mist is so thick I can’t see what I’m trying to see.
The first photo is nice too, but I have no frame of reference - no view of anything beyond th ship. I wish there was just enough to see, to get my bearings.
I also enjoy the reflections in the water. Wish I was there!!!
I think one of me greatest lessons was learning to use an LF camera. Everything manual and I needed to imprint into my brain the procedure from beginning to end. I learnt that I had to consider how I was going to print the image before pressing the shutter (pre-visualisation). Measuring the exposure based on Zone 3 for the darkest visible shadow detail and using graduated filters if necessary to control the highlights. After all, Fuji Acros 100 film only has 8 - 10 stops dynamic range.
Now, with digital, we have 14 stops of dynamic range, we measure the exposure based on the highlights and place the exposure at +2 EV, recovering the shadows in post.
With high dynamic range subjects, don’t use average metering, revert back to soft metering, just as you would with film.
Now, after more than 20 years, this is all instinctive.
I guess the problem for some is that they still don’t grasp the technology and, when they have to use it, they struggle to know what to use and what to ignore. hence, confusion reigns.
quote=“Stenis, post:134, topic:37104”]
Our jaws dropped when he started to expose. Shutter?? No! He just took away the lens cover and started to walk around the machine for at least a minute “painting” the machine from different angles with a strong light
[/quote]
Ah yes. Light Painting. A friend pointed me towards a certain Helmut Hess on Flickr
I keep telling myself to have a go at this. The results, as you can see, can be stunning.
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