On Saturday Photography Made Simple had a lovely day with Lucy and her parents in Evesham, helping them with their canine-centred photography, which focused on (although not in this picture), their lovely Golden Retriever Bramley. We also got out and about in Evesham, which even on a dark November afternoon managed a certain amount of oriental garden glamour.

We are very happy to come to you to help with your photography – drop us an e-mail and we’ll give you a quote, but we’re less expensive than you probably think!

Bramley the golden retriever

We had an interesting morning yesterday with Tom and his Leica M8. We often use motoring metaphors to describe the difference between cameras (for example, it’s a lot easier to drive a fiesta than a ferrari to the shops). If there was a motoring metaphot for this camera, it would be one of these stripped-down-not-even-a-radio-but-still-eyewateringly-expensive little road cars. A Caterham, say. None of your namby-pamby anti-lock traction control. Simple, pure, dangerous.

The Leica M8 is a rangefinder camera rather than an SLR. Most people think that SLRs are cameras where you can swap lenses over and generally this is true. Strictly speaking, a Single Lens Reflex camera has one lens, so that looking through the viewfinder looks through the real lens. If you leave the lens cap on, you can’t see anything through the viewfinder! Many compact cameras have a separate viewfinder and you actually look through a separate lens. If you leave the lens cap on, you can still see through the viewfinder because you’re not looking through the main lens.

The M8, although you can change lenses, has this separate viewfinder system. As a result, it has no mirror inside, and is therefore flatter and smaller than an SLR. The shutter is also quieter, because a big mirror doesn’t have to be moved out of the way. Afficionados say the benefit of this separate viewfinder gives you not just the frame you’re taking, but also some area around it, which helps with composition. It is also brighter than most SLR viewfinders.

You have very few gizmos to help you. No autofocus, just a smooth focus ring on the lens, which you turn to align green squares in the viewfinder. Aperture is set the same way – a smooth ring marked in f stops. There is an auto mode, which is basically aperture priority picking a shutter speed for you based on the aperture you set on the lens, but that’s about it. There’s no pop-up flash (like top SLRs, which makes sense since they cost about the same).

Having not handled a Leica for some years, we did a bit of research before I met Tom, and there are some good resources – by far the best is Michael Kamber’s harrowing review from the front line in Iraq.  A very experienced photographer, Kamber has lots of concerns about the camera – you can’t get the SD card out quickly when being chased by Iraqi police, the switches change settings when they bang against your flak jacket.  Not the sort of thing that is a problem in non-war-torn England, but he points out that the M8 is really noisy at higher ISOs than 320 (this is a problem in England in November, it’s as black as your hat around here) – this is a bit rubbish when you can get almost noiseless cameras for not much money.  (We’re thinking here about the Nikon D90, D700 or D3, depending on the size of wallet).  Also, Kamber points out that  the auto white balance seems to be weirdly sensitive, so that pictures at the same shoot in the same room swing wildly in colour depending on whether you’re pointing slightly towards the window, or slightly towards the indoor lights.  We found this to be a problem too,  and it’s pretty annoying even if you’re shooting RAW and can change it all afterwards.  This is never a problem even on really cheap cameras.  However, other reviews are available – see the luminous landscape review, which is so positive it might as well have been written by Leica.

There are a couple of real advantages to the Leica:

Firstly, the lenses are great!  Tom’s one and only lens, a 35mm (acting as a 46mm with the camera’s 1.33 crop factor) is an f1.4,  which is great for low light.  However, for all it’s claim as a good unobtrusive camera, you need to be really close to get a nice portrait at this focal length.  Like, really close.  Like, totally in someone’s personal space.   So it’s great for beautifully and accurately capturing slightly annoyed looking people.  There are virtually no telephotos, and the rangefinder viewfinder is not all that accurate at showing what you are actually photographing (which is the point of viewfinders last time I looked).

Secondly, the focus distance is written on the lens.  This allows you to focus (at say six feet), then walk up (to say Britney Spears) to six feet from the subject, and take the pic without re-focusing before you get thrown out by the bouncers.  This is old-school journo shooting, but not that useful because normally in these situations the light is poor and the M8’s noise means you can’t get a decent shot.  Also, at low f numbers the depth of field is so shallow you have to be very close.  So it’s not that great in practice unless you’re in good light and really know your stuff.  (That’ll be Michael Kamber again).

Thirdly, and we’re not underestimating this, the camera looks and feels GREAT!  You can pretend to be Cartier-Bresson or Capa while taking your holiday snaps.  Not many of your friends will have one, even if your friends are all fabulously wealthy.  You really feel like a photographer, and the camera is so unforgiving that you have to learn quickly.  In the same way that some fabulously wealthy people like to risk their necks by driving cars with spoked wheels, frames made of wood and water in their genuinely hydraulic brakes.  But, rest assured, they’ll have a proper car for days when they actually need to arrive somewhere.

Overall, we came away from using the camera unimpressed. We’re not into auto stuff on cameras, but this is ridiculous.  We’d like one, sure, in the way that we’d like an Austin Healey.  We used to have a Hassleblad that we never used, but used to click the shutter to hear the skill and engineering in the build.  But we sold it eventually because we never used it and it had become an expensive piece of ornamental art.

We’re just not sure that most people will be able get good pictures from the M8.  And that, surely is the whole point of a camera.  If you really really want one and you want to try it out, buy yourself a35mm  film Olympus Trip on ebay.  It’s just as retro as the M8 and people won’t know what it is either.  You can pick them up for five quid on ebay rather than a thousand for body-only.  Not only that, for most people in most circumstances it will take better pictures.

A couple of weeks ago weil spent the day at Paul’s house teaching him a few tricks with his camera. Now some of Paul’s wildlife pics are on the BBC website:

Well done Paul – great stuff!

We’re very happy to come to you to help with your photography. Drop us an email and we’ll work out a price.

The Worcester Group had a go at portraits with wide-angle lenses, with predictable results. We were expecting ghastly fisheye effects, but were pleasantly surprised. This is Rachel, Roger and Lesley messing about on a very rainy Wednesday night, mostly at close range with 18-55 kit lenses at 18mm.

The trick here is to use the widest possible zoom, and get in really close. The distortion is interesting, rather than weird, and the fact that the lens is so wide means that it gathers a lot of light, which keeps the flash power down.

As you may know, DSLRs have a S or Tv mode where you set the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture, or a A or Av button where you set the aperture and the camera sets the shutter.

The new Pentax K20D and Samsung GX20 have a TAV mode,  where you set the aperture and shutter and the camera sets the ISO to take the shot.  Interesting.

Have a look - http://www.digitalcamerasforbeginners.com/digital-camera-reviews/pentax-k20d-versus-samsung-gx20-what-digital-camera-review/comment-page-1/#comment-169

Since the latest frontier of camera technology is shooting at high ISO possibly this is the wave of the future.  High ISO can eliminate lens sweet spots, reduce the need for flash, and speed up your shutter.  It’s all useful stuff, but I’d still stick with Nikon, Canon or Sony for the time being unless you are absolutely sure you can get all the lenses you’ll ever need for the pentax/samsung.

If you’re a golf widow, why not come on a photography course at the lovely Culzean Castle while your other half improves their handicap at Turnberry or Troon.  They’re just up the road, you know!

Shooting at angle seems to be very fashionable right now – so here’s how to do it nicely.

Two things you should do:

1. Make sure that the angle is enough so that it looks as if the shot was taken on purpose. If it looks like you have one leg slightly longer than the other, it’s not really sufficiently wonky.

2. Try to run features into the corners – this helps with composition makes the picture look considered and not random.

Wonky shooting sometimes means that you can actually fit in a scene that can’t be done in portrait or landscape orientation. (It got rid of tourists, buses, pickpockets etc in the Big Ben pic, for example).

But beware – this is a high-fashion look, and it will date as fast as, say, Lady Gaga! Make sure you have some conventional pics to go with your wonky stuff.

All these pics were taken on our lovely little Canon G9 when I was scouting for London locations with Peter Hall, who teaches car photography and motorsports photography for us. The G9 is great as a camera to keep in your pocket when you can’t be lugging around a dirty great big SLR. Working professionals do this all the time – see Leon Neal’s blog – but he uses a £700 Lumix where we’d recommend a £200 G9. Leon has a bigger budget than we do! After all, it’s the quality of the picture that matters – no-one cares what camera you used, what chair you had to stand on or what post-production you did, as long as the picture does the job!

We’ve had several clients lately who’ve managed to change settings by accident while mostly using the vari-program modes. What this means is that if they become brave enough to go over to the semi-auto modes (that’s P A S M or P Av Tv M) suddenly their pictures all turn blue, or go really dark or light. So they give up and go back to the “idiot” modes again, because this works ok.

This is caused by changing the white balance or exposure compensation while using the semi-auto modes. If you accidentally set your camera to underexpose by a couple of stops (this is easily done) all your pics will be dark, but since this is ignored in the “idiot” modes the problem seems to go away. Accidentally ending up with tungsten white balance will make the pics blue, but trying to compensate for yellow light that isn’t there. Worse yet, this condition will not change until you set it back, even if you turn the camera off.

The way to check this is to try the camera in P (which is Program, basically a posh auto mode) and compare it to an “idiot” mode – the darkness and colour should be about the same. If not, you’ve accidentally hit the exposure compensation or white balance and you’ll need to set it back to zero compensation and auto white balance (AWB).

This is a common problem – at one course at Ashton Court Phil had two students – one with a camera accidentally set to 2 stops too bright, and the other to 2.7 stops too dark.

If this all seems a bit complex, drop us an email and we’ll help you out. That’s what we’re here for!

Back in Portmeirion we did a two day residential course eating our way through North Wales. After fantastic lunches on Saturday, we stayed in the village and had such an enormous breakfast on the Sunday we could barely stagger around the village. All good fun, and as always, better weather than you expect in Snowdonia. As we often do, we did DSLR on the first day, and creative on the next, which works well. Portmeirion will do a discount for accommodation for people on the course, so why not bring the other half to see the village and maybe meet up for lunch? Bed and breakfast in the village is suprisingly affordable, and quality second to none. A truly memorable weekend, and you’ll learn something too! You won’t lose weight, however! The next photography course is December 5th and 6th – why not come along? Of course, if you want to keep the calories down by just coming for one day, that’s fine too!

Yep that flower is still there – and took the eye of one of the students this time! Here is Vince in action while Phil helps out Annie.

Here is Annie’s slightly ominous bag. Suprising what narrative you can tell with a bit of depth of field.