PHOTO SKILLS

Tips, tricks and techniques to improve your photography

IN THIS ISSUE

10 skills for you to learn this month

01 Long exposures under a pier page 40

02 Abstracts at the seaside with Louise Collier page 43

03 Portraits, but with a twist page 44

04 Create an Easter- or spring-themed still-life page 46

05 Greg Patton captures Dalmatian pelicans page 49

06 Wild swimming with Marc Le Cornu page 50

07 Discover Hollin Jones’s street life page 52

08 Rate my photo: Christopher Scragg page 54

09 Why this shot works: Cam Parfitt page 56

10 Photo Challenge: Architecture page 58

Tag us with your photography Whether out and about taking photos, or if you’re inspired by any projects in this issue, tag your work to: @digitalcameramag

Follow us on Facebook or email us And if you would like to get your work published in our reader gallery, send your images to: digitalcamera@futurenet.com

01 LANDSCAPES

Under the boardwalk

Come and shoot some long exposures under the pier in broad daylight, with Wendy Evans

Long exposures, during the day, when the sun is shining? What madness is this, I hear you cry. Well, calm yourselves, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. For this project, I thought it would be interesting to capture the swirl of the incoming tide, set against a blue sky (remember those?) and the architecture of the underside of a pier, with its wooden planks and rusty metal. The first thing you’ll need is a tripod, because we’re going for a long exposure. Exactly how long it is will be dependent on a number of factors that we’re going to consider here.

Now, before you pack your tripod and head to the seaside for your nearest pier, it’s worth checking the tides. When will you be arriving? Where will the tide be? Does it come all the way in? Do you need to be there at low tide, high tide or somewhere in the middle? For your research, try www.tidetimes.org.uk or the Met Office website.

Having checked all of that and arrived at the pier, head underneath while everyone above plays on the arcade machines and buys candyfloss for excitable children. It’s best to go for a central composition, so that there’s symmetry, with the underside of the pier providing leading lines into the background. Don’t have any stanchions too near the camera as the wide-angle lens will distort them, as well as produce converging verticals.

Camera: Nikon Z 8 and Nikkor 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5 G lens at 24mm

Filters: Circular polariser, Cokin ND grad, Cokin 2-stop ND4 filter

Settings: 1/2 sec at f/8, ISO 64

ND filters

The point of using a neutral density filter is to reduce the amount of light coming into the camera, so you can use slower shutter speeds on bright days. They are usually rated ND2 (1 stop), ND4 (2 stops) and ND8 (4 stops).

ND grads

The idea of a graduated neutral density filter is to balance the light from the sky with that of the ground, particularly in cases where there is too much contrast between the two.

Step by step The key is to reduce the light How to shoot an under-the-pier shot with a long exposure

01 Load up your filters

Because it’s sunny, you’d normally get a fast exposure, but that’s not what we want. So get out your filters, starting with an ND (neutral density) filter that can reduce the light coming into the camera. This one here is for two stops of light (an ND4 filter), but as the sky was also fairly bright at the sides of the pier, I used a graduated ND filter to cover those areas as well.

02 Set the ISO

The other way of reducing the light for a longer exposure is to reduce the ISO. Hold the button down and reduce it as low as it will go. On some cameras, it might be ISO 100 or even ISO 64. Others may have a special low-rated mode that’s the equivalent of ISO 32, in terms of the effect on speed rather than the image quality being any cleaner.

03 Aperture and shutter speed

Set the camera in Aperture Priority mode and dial in f/22 to start with. What shutter speed does this give you? You might get around four to six seconds, and if that’s the effect on the water you want, shoot away. However, f/22 won’t give you a sharp image, especially in the pier details. Here, I went for f/8, which is sharper, with a shutter speed of 0.5 sec, which showed movement and blur in the water.

04 Focus and depth of field

If you go with f/22 at 24mm, you will get plenty of depth of field because the hyperfocal point is under a metre away and the first 40cm or so that is not sharp won’t be in the shot at all. At the f/8 aperture used here, the hyperfocal point was 2.42m, and although I focused on the pier structure about 3m away, again, most of the first 1.34m that was not quite as sharp was either out of view or was on the sand.