06 November 2009

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I've updated the site and as I'm using Wordpress now, you need to subscribe to a different feed. Please unsubscribe from this one and subscribe to http://nickminers.com/feed/ instead.

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Nick
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14 October 2009

After the Lakes...


This Saturday I'm heading to the Lake District with my friend Mark Casey for another By Camera week. I haven't decided yet, but I will probably use black and white again, as I did for the Svart/Hvit photos from Iceland in May. What's more, I've been working on a new look for the site these last few weeks, and it should be ready to launch, so I will launch the site with the Lake District photos when they're ready.
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02 October 2009

Thames Barrier


[The Thames Barrier - © Nick Miners Photography


It's been a while since I got my camera out, so I decided to take it in to work with me today. I was initially planning to visit Borough Market again, but I decided instead to head down to the Thames Barrier in East London after work. I got there just before sunset, so all these pictures were taken at ISO 1600 or 3200, as I was travelling light and didn't have my tripod with me.
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17 June 2009

Svart/Hvít (part 2)


Svart/Hvít is Icelandic for 'black and white'. As I mentioned, I spent 23rd to 31st May with my family in Iceland (again!), only this time I shot exclusively in monochrome. I was going to say 'limited' myself but it didn't feel like a limitation - certainly, I had to think in a different way about the photos, but I enjoyed the new style of photography so much that I'm certain I'm going to try it again on future photo trips.

As there are about 60 pictures in this set, rather than present them in the traditional way on this web site, I've created a special gallery at this page.
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03 June 2009

Svart/Hvit


I recently spent another week in Iceland with my family, and this time I forced myself to shoot exclusively in black and white. The landscape and light in Iceland suit this medium perfectly, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I haven't included the gallery on the site yet (61 photos is a bit of a stretch!) but you can view them on flickr at this link.
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09 May 2009

The Zone System


A few months ago I mentioned that I had picked up on the benefits of the Zone System, and had applied it to most of my photography ever since. It may sound intimidating at first but it is really quite simple, and once you experience the benefits I think you'll find it hard to go back. What I'm going to try now is the first in a series of little lessons, where I'll show you some aspect of photography of which the average point-and-shoot snapper may not be aware. Hopefully if you put these lessons into practice you'll be able to achieve the sort of photographs you've always wanted to. Let me know if I sound too patronising; that's not my intention at all.


The zone system was developed by the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, and the principle is simple. A camera can 'see' a more limited range of brightness than the human eye, so it needs to be adjusted to take into account lighting conditions. Most cameras try to render a scene so that the overall lightness is what's known as 18% grey, or exactly half way between pure black and pure white. If we number these brightnesses, 0 for pure black, 10 for pure white and 5 for 18% grey, then by filling in the numbers in between we have the 11 zones of the zone system. Each zone is 1 stop brighter than the previous one.


The 11 zones


Most modern SLR cameras, digital or film, allow you to over- or underexpose by up to 2 stops in auto or semi-automatic mode, which can be limiting, so the first thing to do when using the zone system is to switch to full manual mode. The next thing to do is to set your camera to spot metering mode; refer to your camera's manual if you're not sure how to do this. You are now equipped to try the zone system.


Each zone has a description of what it represents:
0 - Pure black
1 - Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
2 - Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
3 - Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
4 - Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
5 - Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood, grass
6 - Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
7 - Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
8 - Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
9 - Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
10 - Pure white: light sources and specular reflections
What you need to do to apply it is to find a key part of your photograph that you can assign a zone to, then set the exposure accordingly. In the illustration above, I have mapped the camera's exposure meter onto the middle 5 zones, but that does not mean you are limited to just these zones - by using full manual mode you can go beyond these zones but you need to count!


Now let's take an example. Suppose you are in a forest on a sunny day, where the grass on the floor is partly lit by sun and partly in shade. The most effective way of exposing such a scene is to meter on the sunlit grass, and the rest will take care of itself. Point your camera's spot metering zone at the grass so that the grass fills the metering zone, and adjust the exposure so that the camera says '0' - i.e. perfectly exposed (or zone 5). You can then recompose, and because the camera is on manual, the exposure will not be affected. The result will be something like this:


forest floor


A camera set to full auto would have seen the silhouetted trees in the background and overexposed by a stop or two, to look something like this:


forest floor


Note how the vivid green in the foreground in the first picture has been bleached out, and the stump is not as isolated as a feature as it was.


Generally you will be able to find a part of your picture that fits within zones 3-7 so you can see your camera showing you how far over- or underexposed you have made it. However if you want to venture further into the more extreme zones, here's where you need to count. To expose for zone 2, set the exposure to underexpose by 2 stops, then decrease the aperture or the shutter speed by 3 more clicks of the wheel (if your camera meters in 1/3 stop increments, as in the illustration above) or 2 more clicks (if 1/2 stop). For zone 1, use 6 or 4 clicks, and 9 or 6 for zone 0. To achieve a silhouette, for example, you should ensure the object you want to appear in silhouette is at zone 2 or below, but bear in mind that you may lose detail in the background if it is not bright enough, so take another reading from the background to ensure that you keep it in zone 5 or higher. If the contrast between the background and the object isn't great enough, you probably won't be able to achieve a perfect silhouette.


I hope this has all made sense; by all means look on the internet for more about the zone system and how a camera meters, but if you do get any good results using this system I'd love to hear from you.


The next lesson will be about using Neutral Density graduated filters to allow you to control the balance of the bright and dark areas of landscape photographs.

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05 May 2009

Northern Ireland by Camera


Crash - © Nick Miners Photography


I have just returned from a tour of Northern Ireland as part of the occasional, ongoing By Camera series of galleries, where I tour a location with some friends with the sole purpose of taking photographs. Until the others have picked their photos for the minisite, I have put up a selection of mine. Click here to view, or here to see a larger selection on flickr.
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18 April 2009

Rediscovered


The road to Hvannadalshnukur - © Nick Miners Photography


I recently had another look through my Iceland photos from our trip to Iceland in 2007, and found 10 more photos that I'd missed the first time round. It just goes to show that you should never throw photos away too readily...

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06 April 2009

More on the 4am project


Having re-read my previous post, and subsequently read posts from other people who took part in the 4am project, I have to confess to feeling that my contribution was shamefully brief and didn't give the project the attention it deserved. So here is the 4am Project, the Director's Cut.

The 4am Project was the brainchild of Birmingham-based photographer Karen Strunks, who came up with the idea for people around the world to take a photograph of their local area at 4am, a particularly unusual time of day for photography when lack of people in otherwise busy places and the (in most cases) darkness would give a new perspective to otherwise familiar scenes. I decided to take part after seeing a gallery of photographs featured in the Guardian, and I admit to a certain fondness to early rising that makes me seem somewhat unorthodox to my friends.

So I set my alarm for 3:30 on Saturday (the key being that it was the 4th day of the 4th month) and after a strong cup of coffee and some breakfast to line my stomach, headed out to see what I could come up with. The sound of the car's engine sounded so much louder to me than usual, as I was painfully aware that most sane people were still trying to get over Friday night's excesses and wouldn't welcome being disturbed at this ungodly hour.

My first stop was a viewpoint on Old Redding, near the Grim's Dyke hotel made famous by the residency of WS Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. The viewpoint has a large car park and there was a nagging concern that I'd stumble across a secret dogging location. Fortunately there were just three other cars, two of which appeared to be unoccupied, but the third had its engine running, and all the lights were out. I just kept my head down and got on with my photography. I couldn't see much with the naked eye - the view was all blackness punctuated by street lights, but the photos I captured (here and here) show a lot more detail, in the first of which you can clearly see the Kodak factory at the north end of Harrow, and the dark outline of Harrow-on-the-Hill against the sky.

This being 4am, the usually busy thoroughfare of Old Redding was empty, so I took the opportunity to grab a couple of shots from the middle of the road, having to make way at one point for a slow and silent milk float, by far the most frequent sight on the roads at that time of day. In this picture you can just make out the red glow of the tail lights in the vanishing point.

I headed back into Watford, passing two more milk floats on the way, to the railway arches outside Bushey station. These have recently been cleaned up and some fancy lighting has been installed. Concerned that it may have been switched off to save energy, I was relieved to find it still going strong at 4:30, so I took a sequence of shots showing how the colour fades from red, to pink, to blue over time. For good measure I took one last shot with the 16mm lens on which I think nicely juxtaposes the white light from the traffic bollard against the orange glow of the street lamp and the pink arch in the middle. This is one of Watford's busiest junctions, and it was very strange to see it so deserted.

I arrived back home just after 5am, and after uploading and tweeting my efforts, headed back to bed to wake again at a more 'normal' time of 10am!

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04 April 2009

4am on 4/4


04:13:43 - © Nick Miners Photography


The 4 am project is a worldwide project to collect photographs taken between 4:00 and 4:59 (local time) on 4th April all round the world. I thought I'd give it a go, so I set my alarm early and headed off to a viewpoint near us with views over Harrow. I then stopped on the way back home to shoot the railway arches nearby which have recently been fitted with a lighting installation. It was quite unusual to be out at that time of the morning, but not an unpleasant experience, and I might have to give it a try later in the year when the dawn starts to light up the sky that early.

Click here to see my selection.

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