How To Easily Start a Nature Photography Business From Home
by Roy Barker
Nature photography is the photography of animals, birds, fish and other wildlife.
We will be discussing marine photography in a future article, because it involves
specialist, expensive equipment and assorted diving skills. Here are some important
things that you'll need to know.
Nature photography offers special challenges to the photographer. Not least of
which is the developing process of film itself. When single reflex print film is
developed it goes through two processes, development and printing. The
development produces a true color; however automatic printers do printing
processes these days. In most cases these are set automatically to reproduce
flesh tones, the color of skin.
As a tonal color this is not very much represented in nature so that when your
film is printed, the colours shown, are not necessarily the colors that were shot.
This can be frustrating when you are trying to improve your technique. One way to
see an instant improvement is to use slide film, this only goes through the first
process of development, and the distortions that occur in printing are eliminated.
The medium to top of the range, digital cameras also improves tonal quality as
well as having improved highlight and shadow features. The disadvantage to the
use of SLR digital in nature photography is that the consumption of battery
power is higher, and you may not be in a position to re charge them in remote
places. Also the delicate sensors in digital cameras can be damaged when dust
gets in the mirror chambers.
Another challenge for the nature photographer is to understand how a light meter
works. Light meters reflect light off a surface, but they cannot measure tone,
which is a shade of color. As it cannot register a shade of color. It makes a
basic assumption that the surface measured will reflect 18% of the incident
light, that means the amount of light falling on a subject. In practise that
means that regardless of the color of the object it will provide a reading that
assumes you want to produce a shade at 18% mid gray. If you then set your
aperture opening at the suggested setting it will produce 18% of grey in the
finished image. Unfortunately there is not that much grey in nature, but there
is plenty of pure white, for example snow, and clouds.
Once you have obtained your light reading you have to manually adjust the
aperture setting so that the final tonal colour will be white and not gray. To
reproduce a pure white image you may have to open your f/stop settings by 2 full
points. Conversely if you want to reproduce pure black then you have to close
down the aperture, by 2 ½ to 3 f/stops. An f/stop is only a numerical number
that represents how far the aperture is open.
In changing light conditions for both sand and snow, bracketing is a useful
technique. It means that you take or three extra exposures at different
settings, so that you can almost guarantee the "perfect" exposure. If you have
determined the best exposure is to be taken at 1second at f/16, then to bracket
using slide film, you would also shoot additional exposures at 1/2 f-stop
settings above and below the "best" exposure setting. This means 1 second at an
f-stop between f/16 and f/22; and 1 second at an f-stop between f/11 and f/16.
This is 1/2 stop above and 1/2 stop below your meter reading.
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