Photo of the Week: Feb. 3, 2008

No story is complete without a few small details to add color to the bigger picture. Photographic details can also speak volumes about a larger story. Learning to see those details and extract them from the surrounding visual noise is one of the keys to honing picture-taking skills. This simple image jumped out at me as I explored my garden following two days of wind, cold rain, hail, and finally snow. The bigger pictures of whitened hillsides and rows of cars buried in newly fallen powder seemed less intriguing then this single nuance of a weather event that dominated our lives for three days. I composed the shot to isolate the glass ornament against a background of tree branches. Later, in Photoshop, I removed the yellow hues in the background to make it appear black and white. I used to practice the lost art of colorizing black and white photos and still admire this effect when done with care and subtlety in a few select images. The absence of color elsewhere in the photo makes the subject appear that much more striking, bold, and, I think, beautiful.

Photo of the Week: Jan. 27, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: I came upon this scene about a month ago after finishing a photo session with a boy donning tefillin for the first time. About 100 young Haredi boys had gathered at the Kotel for morning prayers. I was drawn to them as I watched their Rav lead them in reciting the various prayers out loud in unison. This shot illustrates my approach to photographing sensitive subject matter. There are two issues at play here: First, the boys are in the midst of prayer, and out of respect, I didn't want to disturb them. Secondly, I have always found it more difficult to photograph members of the Haredi community. They simply don't want to be photographed, although this is less true for children than adults. Whenever I encounter a sensitive photographic situation, I always make my intent to photograph known and if I am waved off, I turn away and look for another opportunity. More often than not, however, people are flattered when you take an interest in them, and expressing a desire to take their picture often warms them up to the photographer. These boys looked at me curiously, but were devoted enough to their prayers to ignore me.
I kept a respectful distance from the group and chose a 200mm zoom lens, which has the effect of compressing the depth in the photo, thereby making the boys in the rear appear a little closer to the front row. Out of habit when shooting children, I crouched down on one knee to bring the camera to a lower height. I fired off 2-3 frames and disappeared. I cropped the final image just a bit to bring the boys edge to edge, an effect I've mentioned before that gives the photo a sense of expansiveness beyond what is visible.

Photo of the Week: Jan. 20, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: One of the inherent dangers of being a photographer is that while driving, I often spend more time admiring the landscape than the road. This orchard caught my eye one day while driving up the road from Beit Shemesh to Gush Etzion and I tracked down the exact spot a few days later. The image evolved through several efforts to bring the three main elements - the grassy foreground, the pink blossoms, and the blue mountains and sky - into proper balance and perspective. Typically, my mobility was limited by the contours of the surrounding landscape. I wanted to maintain a slight elevation above the foreground to give the photo better depth, but there wasn't much room to maneuver without losing height. The best angle I could find still left the line of pink trees somewhat thinner and less dominant in the photo than what I could see as I walked around the orchard. In the end, the bold, complementary colors combine with the movement of the photo from lower right to upper left corner to pull the photo together into a successful composition.

Photo of the Week: Jan 13, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: Snowstorms in Israel are just rare enough to make each one a minor celebration. With the roads closed, my shooting was limited to what lay outside my front door. Fortunately, that's never a drawback, as the scenic Judean hills are a willing subject all year long. Once again, timing played a critical role in capturing the clouds in beautiful formation as the tail end of the storm passed over my home. An hour later the clouds were gone and much of the snow melted as soon as the sun rose high enough to warm the valley. Because of the dramatic sky, I chose a vertical composition, which allows for more than half the frame to be filled with rolling clouds that seem to still be in motion. Snow is a tricky subject, as many amateur photographers have discovered. The immense whiteness of a snow scene can fool your camera into underexposing the image because the automatic metering system doesn't know you really want the subject to remain white. The result is muddy, gray, and dull looking images. To overcome this problem, set your exposure compensation option - a feature I've seen on just about every point and shoot digital camera - to +1.5 or even +2. Better yet, bracket your shots, that is shoot a whole bunch of photos at different settings. You'll not only learn how to use this feature, but you're guaranteed to hit one of the shots spot on!

Photo of the Week: Jan 6, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: The proliferation of photographs in our daily lives has made it more difficult to produce new pictures that strike the imagination. This photo has two things going for it which energize the subject. The first is the unusual aerial perspective. Most of the time we view the world from about 5 feet off the ground. Any time you can change that perspective, you add allure to your subject, no matter how mundane, simply by presenting it from an unfamiliar point of view. Secondly, the highly selective cropping maximizes the tension created by the different shapes and colors. By truncating the various groupings of trees in mid-section, the cropping also creates the impression that the orchard is of almost infinite size, because the mind is able to extend the patterns beyond the borders of the photo.

Photo of the Week: Dec. 30, 2007

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: The desert has its own unique beauty as well as a host of photographic challenges to overcome. These include dust, heat, inaccessibility and extremely contrasty light from the first moments of morning until late afternoon. This photo, taken just after sunrise, is further evidence that the golden hours always bear fruit and that rising before dawn has its rewards. A variety of textures give feeling to this image while a gentle, curving line provides depth. Using a strong foreground element, such as these colorful rocks, is essential to drawing the viewer into the photo and giving the landscape both dimension and impact.

Photo of the Week: Dec. 23, 2007

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: When I have to confront the chaos of the dance floor during a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah, I sometimes apply a little technical trickery to capture an interesting shot. Creating the effect seen here requires a camera which allows manual setting of two important options. The first is shutter speed, which must be slowed down to at least 1/30 second or slower to create the kind of blurring of movement and trails seen in this photo. Here, the shutter speed was 1/5 sec. The second and more important feature is an option which allows the flash to fire at either the beginning or the end of the exposure. Most of the time the flash fires as soon as the shutter is fully open, but because the speed at which the flash fires should always be faster than the shutter, you can also set the flash to pop at the last possible moment when the shutter is fully open. This is called rear curtain sync. In this mode, the shutter will remain open for an instant, recording the subject and movement with the available room light. When the flash eventually fires, it freezes the action in a burst of light. The end result is really two pictures, the pre-flash photo which records everything the camera sees up to the moment the flash goes off, and a second, sharper, well-lit image created by the flash.