Two young tourists check their itinerary.

It's supposed to be winter. It's supposed to be cold with rain, wind and snow. We're supposed to have frosty mornings and dull, dreary, cloud-clogged days. It's January and it's supposed to be winter.

And yet we're getting temperatures of 11 degrees. Celcius, that is. I don't know what that is in US currency, but it's unseasonably warm here in the UK. It's supposed to be between 0 and 4 degrees or so, depending on whether there's a high or low pressure. And yet it's just a couple of degrees cooler than October.

I'm not complaining, mind you. More opportunities for street photography. With high-contrast pictures full of sunshine and shadow. The ones that are supposed to be tricky, the ones that many photographers say they try to avoid. Not me, though. I love this kind of light.

There was a time when I'd go out to do some street photography and often come back with literally no photos, or at least, just one or two. And there was a good chance that those would end up being deleted. Other times I'd go out and come back with between 50 and 200 photos, a great many of them keepers. And I just couldn't work out what made the difference.

I think I know now, though. It's to do with being able to see what's around me. If I've got something on my mind, I can't see properly. I'm seeing what's in my head more than what's on the street. If I let it go, whatever it is, I start to become more aware. And if I let everything go, including wanting to do great photography, I become even more aware. Of everything. And then there's never any lack of things to photograph, no shortage of pictures just hanging there in the middle of my field of vision waiting to be plucked and savoured.

It's the zone. It's meditation. It's being alive.

Tonight's gonna be a good night... I've photographed this cat before in a big blue and pink woolly scarf. No, not me - the cat was wearing the scarf. It looks like he's got quite an extensive wardrobe. At least two scarves and what looks like a Santa Claus jacket.

I've never heard the guy play the guitar, and I've never heard either of them sing. I suggested to the cat that he might like to have a go at playing the guitar, but he just said, "Me? How?"

I got a private message on a photography forum from someone who said that her new Canon SX230 HS compact camera, the same one that I have, was giving her photos that were a lot less sharp than her Olympus C-740 compact. At first I thought it might be the usual subjects: handheld shots in low light, zooming without image stabilisation, even shaky hands. But she sent me some example pictures from the Canon, and a comparison shot from the Olympus, and it was soon clear what the real problem was. It wasn't "blurriness", it was "fuzziness". And there are at least three reasons why one camera can produce fuzzier shots than another.

Firstly, different cameras can choose different settings under the same circumstances. For a given amount of light in a scene, one camera might choose an aperture of f/4 while another chooses f/5.6. Compact cameras in full Auto (or 'green box') mode usually compare the scene with hundreds of stored scenes to choose the appropriate settings. Now a camera will produce a less sharp picture with a wider aperture. An aperture of f/4 is wider than an aperture of f/5.6, so the pictures will be a little fuzzier. This wasn't the case with my contact's photos: they were all shot at f/4, even the sample shot from the Olympus. Of course, build quality also comes into the picture. The lens in one camera might just not be as sharp as the lens in another at the same aperture.

Secondly, cameras with higher zoom values often won't be so sharp when zoomed right in or right out, especially around the edges of the picture. Her Olympus has a 10x zoom (35mm equivalent of 38-380mm), while the SX230's zoom is 14x (35mm equivalent of 28-392mm). If she is shooting fully zoomed-out with the Canon, she's shooting at 28mm, whereas the Olympus would be at 38mm. Now, the difference of 10mm isn't so much when looked at on a ruler, but in lens terms it's a lot. Cameras with long zooms tend to suffer from lack of sharpness when fully zoomed out or fully zoomed in, especially around the eges. The situation isn't made any better by the presence of chromatic aberration at the edges of the picture (coloured fringing where there is high contrast, such as branches against the sky), which can make the picture look even softer. I looked at my contact's pictures fully zoomed in and saw that this was indeed the case. Not only was there less detail at the edges of the shots from the Canon, there was more chromatic aberration.

There are (at least) three ways to deal with this situation. 1) Instead of zooming right out to get as much into the picture as possible, move back a little and zoom in a little. A longer focal length will go some way to avoiding softness and chromatic aberration. 2) Rather than taking a photo fully zoomed in, move forward if you can and zoom out a little and, if ncessary, crop the edges of the photo off using editing software. 3) Zoom however you like and use post-processing software such as Photoshop Elements, PaintShop Pro, or Lightroom to remove the chromatic aberration; this can be an expensive solution, though.

Lastly, when a camera takes a photo it does some post-processing which usually includes a certain amount of sharpening. Different cameras apply a different amount of sharpening. Some, such as DSLRs, assume that the photographer will apply sharpening using post-processing software, while others, such as compact cameras, assume that the photographer wants the camera to do the sharpening. I certainly apply my own sharpening to my photos rather than rely on the camera, whether it's a DSLR or a compact. One very inexpensive solution would be for her to use Picasa photo manager to sharpen her photos. It's free, it's a great way to manage photos, especially if you're not a professional, and it does a sufficiently good job of sharpening.

Now, having gone through all of the theory, there is one more way to get sharper photos from the SX230 HS and other Canon cameras. It's buried in the My Colors menu. Unfortunately, the My Colors menu isn't available in Auto mode. However, Program mode (P) is the same as Auto mode except that it allows you to change more settings, including My Colors. And if you don't change any other settings, it shouldn't be any different from using Auto mode. For some people, it's also a first step-up towards using the so-called 'creative' modes.

I'll explain the steps for anyone who has a Canon compact as it will be similar to the SX230 HS. If you have soft photos and you don't have a Canon, your manual should tell you if and how you can change the settings for more sharpness. With the SX230 in Program mode and ready to take a picture, press the Func Set button, press the top or bottom of the dial to move to My Colors (2nd from the top of the list), press the right side of the dial to highlight it, then press the Disp button. You can now change the Contrast, Sharpness, overall colour Saturation, amount of saturation of Red, Green, and Blue in the picture, and Skin Tone colour in the picture. Press the top or bottom of the dial to access each of these settings and press the left or right side of the dial to decrease or increase each value. Press Func Set again when you're done. It's a lot simpler to do than to explain.

This should give my contact sharper pictures. Whether they'll be sharper than the pictures she gets with her Olympus remains to be seen, and depends to some extent on the other problems I've mentioned in this article. I just hope that they're satisfactory.

 

The Landscape POTY exhibition is making its annual visit to the National Theatre on London's South Bank but if you go you might be forgiven for thinking you'd wandered into the wrong room. Landscape photos there are a-plenty, but - what's this? A picture of an armchair in a room in a dilapidated house? A man on a bench in front of a stone wall? A close-up shot of the leaves of a Japanese Acer tree, and another fairly close-up shot of some seagulls? Sorry, I thought you said 'landscape'...

Last year I was entranced by the quality of the entries. There is still a lot of magic in this year's crop but there is also an increasing number of shots being accepted as 'landscapes' that are quite obviously nothing of the kind. Some are perhaps borderline: a picture of two people on a beach with a beach mat; two photos where the camera is aimed up at treetops, and several where it is aimed up at more or less well-known buildings; even the kayaker standing inside a cave might be considered very loosely as a landscape shot.

But the tops of electricity pylons in a photo that shows absolutely no land, taken by a photographer who claims that the picture is "almost more than a landscape"...??? Well, you can leave out the words "more than". And as for the two different close-ups of frozen bubbles in pond water, one of which was taken underwater in a special camera housing, well, I'm really struggling here. Is the problem that there is only one landscape photographer on the judging panel? Almost certainly not as other judges include the editor of Amateur Photographer magazine, a picture editor for the Sunday Times, and representatives of AA Publishing and Epson UK. So more than half of the judges should be able to recognise a landscape photo. Is the problem that there weren't enough entries that were true landscapes? At a time when everyone and his dog has a camera of some sort, I doubt it.

Maybe it's just me. Anyway...

Once again the exhibition is slightly marred by bad lighting. Where photos are arranged in two rows, the ones in the top row are impossible to see without the harsh, blown-out reflection of the light that's pointing directly at them. And you find yourself chasing your own shadow off of the bottom row. This has been a problem with exhibitions at the NT and also at the.gallery@oxo ever since I started visiting both about five years ago. Maybe they should get a photographer to arrange the lighting. Just a thought.

But don't let any of this put you off. The majority of the pictures at the NT are of landscapes and the winning photo, Robert Fulton's Winter Field, Sterlingshire, Scotland, most definitely is a landscape, and a deserved winner. The quality of all of the entries is excellent, you can work around the light, and I think you'll find it worth a visit. 

One other positive note is that the tech-savvy will enjoy reading the details of the camera and lens used, the exposure information, and even the post-processing used on the photos.

Now, I must dig out that picture of my little finger to enter into next year's competition. It should be OK, I was standing in a landscape when I took it...

 

Charlie Waite at the NT
Whether you're a photographer or not, if you're interested in landscapes, you might want to go to the NT bookshop for a talk by Charlie Waite about his approach to landscape photograhpy. Dates are Tue 13th December, Wed 14th December, Mon 23rd January, Tue 24th January, all start at 7.45pm and tickets cost £5.

 

Landscape Photographer of the Year
National Theatre (Lyttleton Exhibition Space
Until 28th January 2012, Free
Monday - Saturday from 9.30am - 11pm and Sunday 11 Dec and 1 Jan from 12pm - 5.30pm.
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/67845/exhibitions/take-a-view-landscape-pho...
http://www.take-a-view.co.uk

Charlie Waite talk
National Theatre Bookshop @ 7.45pm
Tue 13 & Wed 14 December, Mon 23 & Tue 24 January, cost £5

 

This is a very simple photo of a blue motor boat towing three roped-together dinghies down the river Thames. Or it might have been up the river - I don't remember four years later which side of the river I was on when I took it. The water looks a little choppy but not so rough that the people sailing the dinghies would need rescuing. And when the water is choppy it means that the wind is up, so the boats weren't being towed through lack of wind in their sails. The sails are lowered but visible so they have definitely been used. So why are the three dinghies being towed?

This is the kind of situation where I find that I've raised the camera to my eye and taken the shot before I've even finished the train of thought. Sports people talk about being "in the zone" and there's a zone for photographers, too. It's a kind of space where you're deliberately, unthinkingly, totally aware of what's around you, not so much "in the moment" as outside-of-time, until that breathing space when you find that your camera's shutter has clicked itself and you've captured something of interest. Or it might not be of interest. No matter. Just going out and doing it is all that counts. If the shot was interesting, you feel spurred on to get even more interesting pictures; and if it wasn't you're spurred on to go out and improve. But either way, if you're a photographer, that's all that matters. Well, almost all...

When I found the original of this photo on my backup drive, it was lacklustre and badly framed. It doesn't take much to improve a photo if you know what you're doing but back then I knew a lot less about photography - which is why this one ended up on my backup drive, waiting for me to get up to speed. All it took was to crop some extraneous stuff from the top and run it through Topaz Adjust to change the overall tonality, bring up the saturation, and bring out the detail. The Thames doesn't usually look blue but the blue was in the original photograph; Adjust simply brought it out and made it more vibrant. It also gave the picture a more 'painterly' quality, which is great because it probably wasn't completely in focus to start with. I'm getting to like Topaz Adjust more and more the more I use it.

By the way, I came to the conclusion that the guys in the blue boat had been teaching a basic dinghy sailing class and it was quicker to tow the boats back than let them make their own way under canvas.

If the starlings gather on the weather vane, it isn't windy... At least, I think it's fairly safe to assume that it isn't very windy or the vane itself will be spinning. So there you go, that's today's weather tip. ;-)

When we start to learn photography, we're told that the subject should be evenly lit from the front for the best results. And that's good advice right at the very beginning when we're novices. But we soon learn that if we're careful we can get great side-lit or back-lit shots. Side-lit shots are good because they show surface texture, and back-lit shots are good because they can make wonderful silhouettes, especially if they reveal some detail rather than being completely black.

Silhouettes with rich, yellow sunlight behind them can look great because we associate the yellow with warmth, with Spring and Summer, with long sun-filled days. But this photo was taken four years ago in November. I don't remember the day but we must have had good weather, at least long enough for me to take this photo. But at the time, I didn't do anything with it; I just moved it to my backup drive.

Going through oldies, looking for photos with the potential for revival using modern post-processing software, I re-found it and gently massaged it through Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, and Topaz Adjust. Saturating the sky emphasized the unusual sunny warmth of the November day. Gently changing the tonal balance to bring out the detail in the mid-tones while preserving the blacks gave me the kind of results I always yearn for but rarely get straight out of the camera, given the way that digital cameras flatten and desaturate the light they capture. With my current Nikon D5100 I can preserve much more colour and tonal range than I ever could with the Canon Powershot S3is bridge camera which I used to take this photo.

I love the way digital photography technology is improving daily.

Love Is The Answer
Hey, you two! Tell the guy with the backpack...

Sometimes when I'm out doing street photography certain elements come together in a split second and I have to be ready to raise my camera and capture that split second even if I don't know what the story is yet. Sometimes I see the story first and all I have to do is record it. Other times I don't even see the story at the time but I know it's there and later on in post-processing it will develop as the photograph 'develops'.

Some times the story belongs to the subject. At other times it arises from the setting. And yet other times the story is mine in the seeing of it. And whether the story that I see is 'true' or not is fairly irrelevant.

Walking down New Bond Street (or was it Old Bond Street or even Brook Street?) I notice a piece of graffiti that's new since the last time I was there. Einstein and his dog, and the great man is holding a sign: "Love is the answer". A couple are walking arm in arm towards me and, as I raise the camera, a young man with a backpack passes going the other way.

The couple 'know' that love is the answer, but does the guy with the backpack? Is he single and adventurous? Or does he just carry a lot of stuff around? Does he know love? In this split second, does it matter?

The Press Photographer's Year exhibition comes once again to the Lyttleton Theatre foyer this year. Admission is free and it runs until Sunday 4th September from 9:30am to 11pm on Monday to Saturday, and also on selected Sundays. See the National Theatre page for full details.