Chez Spud

Quiet please at the back…I declare this meeting of the CCC open for business. Be a love and stick the kettle on and pass the biscuits around would you?

I’ve got a couple of questions lurking from previous meetings but I’m going to tackle just one today, and then throw in some random quick tips for good measure. Usual health warning: I’m not a professional, I’m still very much a learner, quite possibly some things that I say are not technically brilliant…I’m just sharing what works for me. But I would love to be corrected if I post a howler…please do jump in and point and stare and laugh when I get it really wrong. I would hate to be sharing utter twaddle with you and I need to learn too.

So the topic for today is, ‘How to avoid camera shake and the resultant blurry photos”.

Avoiding camera shake

Do you get loads of blurry pictures like the one above? Yeah, me too. Oddly I quite like that photo but that’s not the issue here. Blurry…baaaaaaad….nice and sharp and in focus….goooooooood. But why do we get so many blurry photos? Even just ‘slightly’ blurred is so disappointing and dispiriting. Two reasons (1) because WE cause it by holding the camera badly while shooting and (2) because the CAMERA causes it by not being able to produce a sharp image because of the settings we are using and/or the available light that we are asking it to work in. Damn, I tried so hard to blame at least 50% of the problem on the camera. Seems like it’s all our fault. I hate that.

Let’s start with making sure we’re holding the camera in a way to minimise the wobbles. Ideally, we’d all be using a tripod for every, single shot that we take, engaging the mirror lock up facility and using a shutter release cable or remote instead actually, screams, touching the shutter release button. Professionals do. But then who has the energy, mental head space or bag space for that? But using a tripod is the single best thing you can do to reduce the wobbles. Sorry about that.

So assuming we are all normal human beings who don’t float about with a tripod about our person 24/7, we need to do everything that we can to become HUMAN tripods when we’re snapping away because, in short, we need to move less when we press the shutter. We need to root ourselves wherever we are shooting to give our cameras a solid support, if you have a spare leg you might want to use it but the rest of us will have to make the best of the two that we have.

Here’s the Wife using her knee (not the pig!) for support, and using her other arm to counter-balance:

Practical things we can do to become tripod like:

• If you’re standing up, lean on something…a wall, a doorway, a post, a postbox, a passing hottie…
• Plant your feet firmly on the ground a couple of feet apart, tuck your arms and elbows in close…no flapping wings
• Ideally, don’t stand up…standing is the least stable position for human tripods, lots of moving/bending/swaying opportunities. Try sitting, squatting (ouch hurty legs), kneeling and lying down. All of these reduce the risk of the wobbles as well as, often, giving a more interesting perspective anyway.
• Whenever you can, rest your camera on something…a fence, a car bonnet, a wall. Or rest your arms on something..anything you can do which involves leaning your weight and your limbs on to something solid will help you keep your camera still.

Next tip, hold your breath when you press the shutter. Sounds mad doesn’t it? But when you’re working in challenging ‘oh no I mustn’t wobble’ conditions then every little thing you can do helps. So, you plant yourself, tuck in your elbows, lean in to your passing hottie, take a deep breath and hold it…and only then do you take the photo.

This one is obvious but, in addition to all the above, you need to press the shutter s…l…o…w…l…y.  Also, think about pressing the shutter half way down first (which fixes the focus) and only then push it all the way down. This is good practice anyway, it ensures the camera has fixed focus (assuming you have it on auto focus and haven’t gone off-piste and are manually focusing) and stops us ‘jabbing’ at the shutter thus causing wobbles.

Another obvious point…if there isn’t much light around, make some! Turn some lamps on, use an anglepoise lamp to direct light where you want it, use a torch…just don’t use your camera flash (more on this later).

I could go on and on. But I think I’ve covered the basics. Try reading here for some more advanced techniques and also for admiring that VAST lens! I particularly like the point about lying on the floor, and how to get your lens off the ground (for DSLR users). I took this one with the camera resting on the beach, and used pebbles to build up a ‘stand’ for the lens:

Moving on…the second wobbly problem is that we ask our cameras to produce well exposed, sharp as a pin photos in difficult lighting conditions (by which I mean, low light). It’s relatively easy to get wobble free, sharp images in good light but when the light drops this is a HUGE ask for our cameras, no matter how fancy.

The explanation is going to get technical I’m afraid; when the light is low the camera needs to let as much light as possible in to produce a well exposed image. To do that, it wants to have the aperture wide open and the shutter speed fairly slow. Having a wide aperture (i.e. a big opening in the lens to let lots of light in) dictates how much light is allowed to hit the camera sensor, having a slow shutter speed (ie. how long the shutter is left open for) dictates how long the light is allowed to hit the camera sensor.

Still with me? In simple terms; if it’s quite dark, the camera still wants to produce a nice photo for you but is screaming for light to be able to do that and wants it by allowing a lot of light in for a a long time. So far so good BUT there is a downside…wide aperture + slow shutter speed = high risk of blurry photos. Curses!

Solutions? If you have a P&S stick on the ‘night shooting’ mode and you’re done. Ta da. Got a big fancy camera? Then you’re going to have to have a big fancy solution.

1. Adjust your ISO. The general rule is to keep your ISO as low as possible (generally 100 or 200) as this keeps your images nice and ‘clean’. But low light means you need to make your camera sensor more sensitive to light, so you increase the ISO. It’s trial and error in terms of what number to raise it too. Personally I start at 400 and work up from there. It’s tempting just to stick it on the highest ISO your camera offers but the goal is get a well exposed, not blurry photo at the lowest possible ISO you can get away with. The reasoning being that high ISOs produce ‘noisy’ (grainy) images, and the higher the ISO the worse the ‘noise’ will be.

This is taken at ISO 400

At ISO 1000 (early on Christmas morning, opening stockings by lamp light), it’s a bit noisy:

And this at ISO 1600, lit by firelight only, very noisy!

2. Use the ‘fastest’ lens you’ve got (i.e a lens with a big maximum aperture, one that enables you to let as much light in as possible). I’m straying in to our next guest blog, but big apertures have small numbers (like 1.4, 1.8, 2.8) and small apertures have big numbers (like 16, 22 etc). Confusing huh? This was taken at f1.4:

3. Start by putting your camera on aperture priority and open the lens up wide, as wide as it will go if necessary. Ideally you’d want it a couple of stops lower than its maximum aperture as this the lenses ‘sharpest’ place to be. Having bumped up the ISO will mean your camera will select a faster shutter speed than you might expect, but that’s ok. We WANT a faster shutter speed to stop the wobbles!

This was taken in aperture priority at f1.8:

4. Check your LCD display. Still looking a bit wobbly? Deploy the exposure compensation button, stop it down a little (0.3, or 0.7) and this will increase the shutter speed again. Downside could be that you end up with an underexposed (too dark) image.

This was taken at f2.8, ISO 800…it’s still a bit blurred though:

5. If you’re SUPER fancy, shoot in RAW so that you can fiddle easily with the exposure/noise issues later on.

6. Finally, it’s worth shooting in ‘burst mode’. That means that when you press the shutter down the camera will take multiple shots until you take your finger off the button. This just means you have more chances of getting one that’s in focus! NB…if you are shooting in RAW your camera will stop after a couple of shots to ‘process’ what it’s taken before shooting some more.

But wait! There’s something missing…what about flash? All of the above are tactics to use to get sharp, well exposed images without using flash. Flash is not our friend really. It will nearly always result in sharp images, but ugly and ‘flat’ looking ones with horrible shadows (unless you are SUPER SUPER fancy and have off-camera flash, strobes etc etc). The flash on your camera, no matter how fancy, makes ugly photos. Fact.

However, there are times when capturing the moment is more important than fiddling around trying to get the camera settings right, and missing the moment altogether. I chuck this in as a general piece of advice…we’re not professionals, we’re not making our living from photography, we’re just learning and trying to improve our snaps. But it’s more important, in my view, to capture those milestones and moments of life any way you can. So if it’s speed you need….stick your camera on auto and just snap away. When you’re old and looking through your photos you’ll be glad that you did.

QuickTips!

If you’re shooting a landscape scene, don’t put the horizon in the middle of the shot. It just cuts the image in half, literally. Decide which bit of what you’re looking at is more interesting, the foreground or the sky…then let the more interesting bit dominate the composition.

On a related point, don’t always put your subject in the middle of your image. If you feel like it, read up on the rule of thirds. Or just experiment and see what you like.

A note on camera . Buy a spare one, it’s really worth it so that you are never stuck with a dead battery and the shot of a lifetime staring you in the face. They’re not expensive, get them on Ebay. Then get in to a routine of immediately charging the dead one as you take it out of the camera. This is more important in the Winter…cold weather drains batteries faster!

Phew that’s all folks. More soon. Keep snapping xx

If you liked that, you might like this ...

• Camera Club: Backing Up
• Camera Club: Special Edition…what I learnt this week
• Camera Club…roll up for a Photo-A-Day project in 2010
• Camera Club…RAW v JPEG
• Camera Club: Uncle Bob Blues or How to be the Perfect Wedding Guest