Golden Rules of Photography #1

Practice What You Preach

Interspersed with my usual ramblings, over the next few posts, I thought it would be interesting to remind you (or tell you - depending on your age) about a few old "adages", sayings or golden rules about photography that have certainly helped me to take better photographs over the years.

The first one is not, in fact Practice What You Preach, but it might as well be, because I frequently teach these "golden rules" to my photography workshop students - and then sometimes find that I inadvertently forget to apply them myself!

This photograph was taken on a photography workshop trip to the beautiful village of Adare, in County Limerick, Ireland with a group of my students. It's a shot of a stained glass window in the Roman Catholic church. I liked it so much, that I promptly sent it off to my agent, with some additional shots, and fully expected to see it on sale via their website in no seconds flat.

Except, it was rejected by my agent, because it failed their stringent QC (quality control) processes. The reason given for the fail was "Camera Shake". I was surprised, to say the least, because to the naked eye there doesn't appear to be any shakiness in it. Although I have a heavy camera, and I was using it with a long zoom lens (with a focal length of 200mm) I consider myself to be pretty good at holding it steady.

I used Adobe Lightroom software to look at the EXIF metadata about the image - which gives details of the exposure settings, and camera and lens used, and the "truth" unfolded in front of my eyes. The shutter speed I used was 1/60th sec (one sixtieth of a second). Not that slow, photographically speaking but perhaps too slow to hand hold a heavy camera with a long, heavy lens attached, pointed upwards at a window. And this is where I should have applied today's Golden Rule...

When hand-holding a camera, use a shutter speed that is faster than the focal length of the lens.

This is only a general "rule of thumb" which I break all the time -and sometimes get away with it. But, it can be a useful guide to help ensure that your images stay as crisp and sharp as possible. For my shot, with a zoom lens with a focal length of 200mm, I should have followed the rule and set at least 1/250th of a second as the shutter speed. This, in theory, would, have helped me keep the heavy camera steadier and avoided "camera shake".

By the way, I checked my image at 100% in photoshop - and I see a tiny bit of blur around the hands and face! Damn those eagle-eyed QC people!

Golden Rules of Photography #2

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