Alastair Humphreys » Photography

Things I Love about Travelling in India

Al Humphreys — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:44:10 +0000

Is India the most colourful, mad, exciting country in the world? Probably.
Here’s a photo essay on in which I documented ten things I love about India.

And here is a short two-minute video from my walk across India. Hope you enjoy it!

Rule Number 1: Do What You Love

Al Humphreys — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:01:35 +0000

Do what you love
Do it very, very well
Do it with energy, passion, imagination…

…and if you do all that you might end up getting paid to do what you love. Don’t focus on the pay when you start. Focus on doing what you love, doing it very, very well, and being the best in your little niche.

Here’s a great video that demonstrates this perfectly.
Man, I’d love to call myself an ‘Adventure Photographer‘!

I wrote about this subject earlier in the month. Have a look here.

Where I’d rather be this Monday morning

Al Humphreys — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:06:55 +0000

What would you rather be doing?

This post originally appeared on Big Dan’s blog.

My Ten Most Interesting Photos

Al Humphreys — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:22:49 +0000

I really enjoy photography and am starting to build up a nice range of different images. So I decided to steal this idea from Tom Allen’s site and show today my 10 Most Interesting photos, as determined by the clever robots inside Flickr.

A nice fellow named Prince Albert I met in Camden. He used to work in Barclays bank.

My brother’s dog. The “Interestingness” robots in Flickr do seem to have a fondness for puppies and kittens.

Jumping into the sea at sunset. Using the self timer. The concept is easy: set your timer. Jump off the harbour wall into the sea at the exact moment the shutter fires.
Easier said than done. Great fun trying though.

After an unsuccessful evening of street photography in London with my friend Jim (who designed my Ten Lessons book) I took this final picture as we waited for the Tube back home.

Snow in London! Very exciting…

Happy Birthday, Mum! Taken in western China.

A mini world map in my diary, a notebook, and a couple of cups of coffee. Where shall I go this year..? I love planning trips. Far more fun than the reality.

From a brief dabble in wedding photography. I don’t really like this picture though. (I prefer this one). A henna party to paint the hands of the bride-to-be, eat vast amounts of delicious food and have a great party.

Training for the Bob Graham Round in the Lake District.

Map reading in the desert.

Rain in Trafalgar Square.

Muslim woman and scuba diver at the giant aquarium inside the Dubai mall.

OK, I stretched it to 12. Sorry.

How to Take Good Photographs

Al Humphreys — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:03:46 +0000

I’ve been receiving a few emails recently asking about travel and expedition photography. Although I am not a professional photographer and still consider myself very much a learner, I thought that I may be in a good position to help. I’m currently somewhere between a beginner and an expert so I can offer a few tips that might help a beginner, but are a bit simplistic for a proper, artistic photographer.

With a bit of patience, effort and imagination anyone can take excellent photos on their travels, a major advantage if you’d like to give talks about your experiences, write articles and blogs, or even sell your photos.

These tips will work for any camera, but you will need to boldly go beyond the Auto mode. If you have a point and shoot camera you can experiment with scenes such as Sports, Portrait, Night Portrait as well as forcing the flash to be either on or off, as the occasion demands.

If you are using an SLR camera you’ll need to play with the aperture (Av mode on Canons) and the shutter speed (Tv on Canons). I won’t venture into the scary world of Manual mode in this blog post! This article is designed as a try-it-and-see post rather than trying to teach you why or how things work.

For each example photograph you can click on the link beneath it in order to see all the geeky details of the photograph (shutter speed, aperture, focal length, ISO, and lots of stuff that I don’t understand).

Depth of Field

Often when you take a photo you want the viewer to concentrate on just one part of it. A good way of doing this is making the camera blur out the bits you’re not interested in. To do this you need to make sure that there is a big distance between what you want to be in focus and what you want to be blurred. On a little camera use Portrait Mode. On an SLR use the Aperture priority mode and twist the dial to get the smallest ‘f-number’ possible. You will also get a better effect if you use you lens as zoomed in as it can manage. Aim at the bit you want to be in focus and fire! This technique is often used for portraits.

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Shutter speed (Fast, Slow, Panning)

Use of the cameras shutter speed is more intuitive than use of the aperture (above). You can use it in three main ways.

1. To capture action use a fast shutter speed. On a compact camera use Sports Mode. On an SLR use the Shutter priority mode and twist the dial to get the smallest number (the display is showing fractions of a second) you can get before the display flashes unhappily (meaning that beyond that point it won’t be able to take in enough light to get a decent picture.) Aim at the fast-moving thing you want to capture and fire!

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2. A nice way of showing how fast something is moving is to use an effect called panning. Instead of holding your camera steady you use it to follow the moving object, pressing the shutter on the move. By experimenting with a slower shutter speed than in the example above you can get the thing you’re focusing on to be clear and sharp whilst all the background is blurry. This usually requires quite a lot of trial and error until you find a shutter speed that works for the particular scenario.

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3. If you slow the shutter speed right down then light is let into the camera over a longer period of time. The time can vary from fractions of a second right up to hours for photos of star trails through the night. You either need a tripod or to balance the camera somewhere and take the shot using the Self Timer mode so that you don’t make the camera wobble. Here are a few examples.

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Fill-in Flash

Our eyes are better than any camera. They can make sense of a scene in which parts of it are very light and others are dark. For example you can be indoors and simultaneously see objects in the room as well as the sunny garden outside. A camera is not so clever: it can either expose properly the light parts or the dark parts. It cannot do both at the same time.
A technique to get round this is called Fill-in Flash. It involves forcing the flash on your camera to fire to illuminate dark parts of your image. Even compact cameras can do this, either through forcing your flash to fire or by using the Night Portrait mode (which combines what you have just learned here about fill-in flash with what you learned above about using a long shutter speed to suck in more light. The flash lights the person in the foreground, the long shutter speed makes sure you can still see the Blackpool Tower in the background).
To keep this very, very simple do this: force the camera to fire, aim at the lovely sunset, press the shutter half way down so that the camera can get itself properly exposed for the bright sun, and then fire. The flash will ensure that your beloved in the foreground is nicely lit up, even though she is far ‘darker’ than the sunset behind her.
Counter-intuitively this is also a technique worth trying on very sunny days to reduce shadows or to stop a bright sky “blowing out” (looking white).

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Overexpose

Overexposing a photo means allowing in too much light. You can do this deliberately as in the examples below. Aim at the darkest bit of your picture, press the shutter half way down so that the camera will get itself properly exposed for the dark part, reposition your camera as you wish, and then fire. This is a great technique for making bright, dreamy shots.

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Underexpose

Underexposing a photo means allowing in insufficient light. You can do this deliberately as in the examples below. Aim at the brightest bit of your picture, press the shutter half way down so that the camera will get itself properly exposed for the bright part, reposition your camera as you wish, and then fire. This is a great technique for making silhouettes.

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And finally here are two techniques that veer away from camera technique towards composition and creative decisions. (Extra post: photography composition tips.)

Tight Shot

Don’t always take the ‘normal’ shot. Get in close, zoom right in, try to tell your story as much through what you leave out as what you include.

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Wide Shot

Don’t always take the ‘normal’ shot. Stand back, get up high, get down low, be imaginative.

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Was this article helpful? Would you like to know anything else? Post a link to a photo in the comments and I’ll do my best to explain how it was taken. Or do you know a lot more than me? If so please do leave your own tips in the comments as well.