Transferring Skills

You don't need to have started out as a film photographer to succeed in digital photography, but it certainly doesn't hurt. As a photographer, if you've shot with film for any length of time you've accumulated a lot of useful knowledge and skills that help you take better pictures than the average snapshooter. For example, you know not to shoot into the sun (unless you're looking for a silhouette), and that the tiny built-in flash on a point-and-shoot camera isn't powerful enough to capture the lead singer at a concert when you're seated in the balcony.

You've instinctively learned to hold the camera steady when shooting in dim light, or to take multiple shots when photographing groups, because somebody in each photo is going to be making a face or have his eyes closed. You might not even be aware of all the photographic techniques you use automatically, but being photo savvy does offer an important edge when it comes to making outstanding pictures. The good news is that, despite the differences in technology, most of what you've learned can be transferred directly to digital photography. An experienced film photographer making the transition to digital photography always has an edge over a beginner.

The photographic skills you possess become even more useful when you begin editing your digital photos in Photoshop or another image editor. Terms like lens flare, motion blur, and grain are probably familiar to you. If you are a more advanced photographer, you might understand techniques like solarization, or perhaps even graphic reproduction concepts like halftones, mezzotints, or unsharp masking. Those whose perspective is more pixel- than photography-oriented must learn these terms the hard way. Photography can sometimes appear to be a highly technical enterprise to those who just want to take a picture.

Fortunately, serious photographers have always been a little gadget-freaky. Early photographers built their own cameras, and through the years photographers have continued to craft their own custom-built devices and accessories. Today, you'll still find that some of the coolest gadgets for photography are home-brewed contraptions. The first photographers also had to be something of a scientist, as they experimented with various processes for coating and sensitizing plates and film, exposing images by the illumination from electrical sparks.

Until electronic photography began making inroads, the avid photographer with a home darkroom still dabbled in photographic chemistry as a way to increase the sensitivity and improve the image quality of his film through refined darkroom technology. Now that many chemical tricks can be reproduced digitally, photo alchemy has become the exception rather than the rule. I still have a darkroom in my basement, but it's been gathering dust for the last decade. The joys of working with images in the darkroom have been supplanted by computerized image processing.

So, while many of the skills a digital photographer needs to acquire are the same, others are very different. You no longer need to know how to build a camera or mix chemicals. Instead, a basic familiarity with computer technology has become something of a prerequisite for using microprocessor-driven digital and conventional film cameras. But, while photography has become "easier," don't underestimate the wealth of knowledge and skills you've picked up. The things you already know will stand you in good stead when you advance to digital photography and computer-enhanced photo manipulation. The skills you can continue to refine and use fall into 10 broad categories. I'll run through them quickly in the next sections.

Basic CompositiCompositional skills, so necessary for lining up exactly the right shot in the camera, are equally important in conventional and digital photography. Your finished product should be well-composed regardless of how it was captured. The chief difference in the digital realm is that image editing can let you repair compositional errors after the fact. If you want your subjects in a group shot to squeeze together for a tighter composition, Photoshop lets you rearrange your subjects. If you discover you've overlooked a tree that appears to be growing out of the head of one of your subjects, you can remove it. However, it's still important to be able to spot these photographic faux pas when they crop up. The ability to recognize good composition and put it into practice is an invaluable skill that not all photographic beginners have. Figure 1.4 shows the kind of compositional corrections a serious photographer makes almost instinctively.

Figure 1.4. Ooops! What's growing out of the statue's head? Simply taking a step to one side improves the composition.

Lens Selection

Beginners don't think about the choice of a lens or lens setting at all. The only thing they care about is that their camera can "zoom in" on something far away and make it appear closer or "zoom out" to let them include more of a scene in the photo. Photographers, on the other hand, understand that the choice of a particular lens or zoom setting can be an important part of the creative process. For example, telephoto settings compress the apparent distance between objects, making them appear to be closer together. Cinematographers use this telephoto trick when the hero of a flick runs in and out of traffic, apparently just missing vehicles that are actually dozens of feet apart. Wide-angle settings expand in the apparent distance, giving you vast areas of foreground while making distant objects appear to be farther away. Faces can seem to be broader or narrower depending on lens selection, too.

The perspective of different lenses and zoom settings operates in similar ways within both the conventional and digital photographic worlds. The chief difference you'll notice in digital photography is that your choice of settings is liable to be more limited. The typical digital wide-angle view isn't very wide at all, frequently no broader than you'd get with a 35mm to 24mm lens on a film camera. The longest telephoto effect you might achieve can be no longer than the equivalent of 200mm with a film camera (although some newer fixed-lens cameras exceed the equivalent of 400mm). Digital "zooming" can electronically enlarge a portion of your image to simulate a longer telephoto lens, but the quality often suffers. Even so, if you know how to use your lens arsenal with a film camera, you can apply the same concepts to digital imaging.

Selective Focus

One thing that differentiates the knowledgeable photographer from the snapshooter is the ability to use focus to isolate or emphasize portions of a subject. When one thing is in focus and the rest of the image is blurry, our eye is automatically drawn to the sharp portion of the image. Whether you're using a conventional or digital camera, you need to make these decisions at the time you take the photo. Unfortunately, the process is complicated with most digital cameras, because virtually everything in a digital image might be sharp, regardless of what lens settings you use. I'll get into the reasons behind this in Chapter 3, "Mastering Camera Controls." On the plus side, those working with digital images have tools that are not available to the traditional photographer. An image editor can apply selective focus effects quickly, and in a much more precise, repeatable, and easily modified way.

Indeed, one of the key advantages of applying effects in an image editor is that you don't have to risk ruining an original piece of film every time you experiment.

Choosing the Right Film

Just as a painter chooses a palette of colors or a sculptor selects the right piece of marble or clay, traditional photographers have long been able to select a film with the characteristics they need for their images. Each variety and brand of film has a personality of its own, which, quite literally, colors your image with subtle nuances of contrast, texture, and hue. For example, some films are more sensitive than others, offering the ability to capture images in less light or with shorter shutter speeds to freeze action. Of course, these fast films tend to have higher contrast, more grain, and muted colors.

Other films manipulate the contrast/texture/hue triad in different ways. Some are known for their bright, vibrant colors or their ability to reproduce flesh tones realistically. Professional photographers often rely on an array of films formulated for these characteristics, selecting the film with bright colors and snappy contrast for product photography to make inanimate objects more attractive. An entirely different film might be the choice for portrait or wedding photography, when accurate skin tones and a softer, more flattering look are desired. These films tend to be lower in speed and have more compact grain, so the texture of the film becomes invisible.

Still other films are selected solely because of their sharpness or finer grain, which makes it possible to make bigger enlargements. Some films are chosen specifically because they will be used for some sort of darkroom manipulation, such as "crossprocessing," when a color transparency film is processed in chemicals designed for color negative films (and vice versa). As you can see, film photographers have a rich set of film tools from which to choose.

Digital photographers have fewer options when taking a photo, because most of the characteristics of the digital sensor are hardwired into the solid-state device. However, digital picture takers have many more options when making the picture within an image editor, as contrast, texture, and color can all be modified to an extent much greater than is possible through selection of a conventional film alone.

However, you can make some adjustments that control how your digital "film" behaves. Most digital cameras let you change the sensitivity of the sensor by adjusting the ISO rating (which is roughly equivalent to the ISO film speed). If you opt for a higher rating to shoot in lower light or at faster shutter speeds, quality will suffer the same as with higher speed films. Instead of grain, you'll get electronic artifacts, a kind of fuzziness that does resemble film grain in many ways. Other digital camera controls might let you change the color sensitivity ("white balance"), image contrast, color saturation ("richness"), and other characteristics. In these cases, though, you're not really modifying your digital film (the sensor) as much as you're telling the camera's built-in computer chip's software what image processing changes to make to the raw data as an image is stored in memory.

The latest digital cameras let you adjust characteristics such as contrast and saturation before you take the picture, in effect, letting you choose the kind of digital film you're using. The two photos of some artificial flowers shown in Figure 1.5 were taken seconds apart with a digital camera mounted on a tripod. Thanks to intelligent design by the camera manufacturer, switching from one saturation level to another required only pressing a single button and turning a control wheel. Other cameras may require you to make a quick trip to a menu to effect a similar change. The top photo shows the cloth flowers as they actually appeared in the shade on an overcast day. The bottom version brings the fake blooms to life with a boost in saturation. I could have performed the transformation in Photoshop, but the ability to do the same thing in the camera is more in the spirit of digital photography's "shoot, review, re-shoot (if necessary)" capabilities.

Figure 1.5. Press a button and turn a control wheel or access a menu option to instantly change the color saturation of these flowers from blah (top) to vivid (bottom).

Most of the time you'll still want to rely on your image editor to adjust colors, change contrast, blur, or sharpen images. Although digital photographers don't change their "film" much, in the final analysis, they have much the same capabilities as their film-shooting counterparts, plus many more that can't be equaled outside a computer.

Darkroom Techniques

Knowledge of darkroom techniques is becoming something of a lost art these days, but if you're the kind of photographer used to huddling under the dim illumination of a safelight while the acrid fumes of stop bath fill the air, your knowledge will prove to be invaluable in the digital realm. And, even if you don't have darkroom experience, you're likely to be more than a little familiar with what can be done in the darkroom. Even photographers who don't mess with processing and printing themselves tend to understand the techniques, if only so they can make intelligent decisions when ordering images from their own photolab.

Your darkroom savvy will prove useful when it comes time to edit your images within an application like Photoshop. After all, there's a good reason why Photoshop's predecessors had names like Digital Darkroom. The number of darkroom techniques that have been directly transferred to Photoshop is enormous. From the Dodging and Toning tools to the tremendous range of masking techniques, dozens of Photoshop capabilities have direct counterparts in the darkroom.

Remember, the words for the first imaging device camera obscura comes from the Latin for "dark room."

Retouching

When I started in photography, retouchers were true artists who worked directly on film negatives, transparencies, or prints with brush and pigment. They applied their skills in a variety of ways. Some worked on assembly lines, improving the complexions in millions of high school senior portraits with a few deft dabs. Others were involved in more painstaking efforts, laboriously restoring treasured family photos or perfecting a high-ticket portrait. The most skilled artisans were employed in advertising, using both retouching and compositing skills (described next) to turn a product or fashion photo into a marketing masterpiece. Today, Photoshop enables those with artistic sentiments who lack an artist's physical skills the ability to retouch images. Even the most ham-fisted among us can remove or disguise blemishes, touch up dust spots, repair scratches, and perform many tasks that were once totally within the purview of the retouching artist.

Compositing

Compositing is no longer the exclusive domain of million-dollar advertising campaigns and supermarket tabloids. Those who want to combine several products into an exotic collage, or show Tony Blair shaking hands with a space alien, can now do it on their own. If you want to mock up a photo that seems to imply that you drove the family car to Samoa, the task is within your reach. Or, perhaps your goals are less lofty: All you want to do is excise that clod of an ex-brother-in-law from the family reunion snapshot. Compositing is the key. You can perform this magic in minutes using an image editor. Photographic masters of the past had to spend hours double-exposing images in the camera, or toil for days to meld negatives, transparencies, or prints. Today, the chore takes only a few minutes, as you can see in Figure 1.6, taken from my book Digital Retouching and Compositing: Photographers' Guide. It shows a castle on a cliff overlooking the sea. The castle, cliff, and clouds are from three different photos, yet on first glance, the composite is fairly convincing.

Figure 1.6. This image combines three photos into one composite.

Color Correction

As a digital photographer, you have more flexibility in getting accurate color in your images, but the techniques you used with film cameras provide valuable background for implementing digital techniques. In the film realm, color correction is often achieved using filters over the camera lens to compensate for slight color casts. Other filters correct for the unique requirements of fluorescent lighting. Color correction can also be done when making a print. If you understand all these methods, you'll know how to use your digital camera's white balancing tools to provide the best color in your raw image. You'll certainly have a head start if more drastic corrections are required in an image editor. One advantage digital color correction has over conventional methods is that your corrections can be updated and refined as you work. If you snap a photo and the LCD view screen shows that the image is badly balanced, you can adjust your camera and reshoot the picture. Corrections made with your image editor are also fast, repeatable, and reversible. If you like, you can even make several changes to your image's color and decide which you like best.

Monochrome

Most of the digital black-and-white photos I've seen resulted when a tyro photographer pressed the wrong button and set his or her camera for monochrome capture. However, black-and-white photography is alive and well, and widely practiced by professional photographers and some of the most avid amateurs. These days, black-and-white pictures are generally produced solely for creative reasons; color is routinely used for everything else. My local newspaper publishes two or three of my publicity photos each month, and I always provide them with a color 5 x 7 print from my inkjet, even though 90 percent of the time the photo is published in monochrome.

From a creative standpoint, though, black-and-white photography is a great tool, letting you strip an image down to its bare essentials, untinted by the mental images conjured up by full color photography. Tones can be more stark and moodinvoking in black and white. Images can also display a full range of subtle shades that are often ignored when color predominates. Serious photographers understand this, and can use the capabilities of digital photography to explore the artistic possibilities of the world of black and white.

Many of the latest digital cameras are sensitive to infrared illumination, so, equipped with the right filter, you can even explore the amazing world of black-and-white infrared photography. I'm going to include a section on infrared techniques later in this book.

Filters

You can never be too rich, too thin, or own too many filters. Slap a filter on the front of your lens and you can transform a boring image into a kaleidoscopic marvel. Filters let you apply split-field colorization (that is, blue on top and reddish on the bottom of an image, or vice versa) in the camera, or create a romantic blur in a glamour portrait. Conventional photography has long been rich with clever filter techniques that add star-points to highlights, apply serious color changes to images, and polarize sunlight to reduce reflections off shiny objects. If you've ever packed a stack of decamired (color correction) filters in your camera bag, or wondered which Cokin filter to buy next, you're already hooked on the optical effects you can get with glass or gelatin.

Filters are such an important part of serious p

hotography that I'd never consider a new digital camera with a fixed lens that didn't have a screw mount on the front of the lens for the filters. I'd even give extra weight to a model that accepted (or could use an adapter for) my extensive collection of 37mm and 52mm diameter filters. Your knowledge of using filters can be transferred easily to digital photography, and will come in handy with image editors, which themselves are designed to use software "filters" to modulate images. The first thing a photographer notices when introduced to Photoshop is how many of the image editor's filters mimic traditional photographic filters and darkroom effects.