The Challenge, Stuck on a Moving Vehicle
Three years ago, my lovely wife and I sojourned to Viet Nam on tour with 25 other people.
Now please note I said with 25 other people! No, this was not a photo tour, just a regular tour for regular folk toting compacts and camera phones and if my memory serves me right just 3 DSLRs.
My wife said before we went, “you'll be that guy, you know, the one who holds up everyone else as he gets all engrossed hanging off trees, crawling on the ground and zoning out while taking his photos". I knew what she meant of course and having never been on an organised tour before I had some doubts as to how I would cope with the unending bouts of “photos interuptus”.
And let me just say, there was no stopping the bus while in transit just so I could get that special shot..... absolutely no possibility of that at all. You see, Vietnamese roads are not blessed with pull off spots for big yellow buses, usually stopping a bus would mean all the traffic stops in both directions, horns then get very horny and wiry angry men start swearing at you…..in Vietnamese!
In any case, the time was simply not there, for those who have never ventured to Viet Nam this might sound odd, but a modest drive of just 150 km can take 8 hours! Non-programmed stopping would decimate any intended schedule for a tour group. To be fair, I was just one of 27, so an alternative approach was needed, if I was going to get any shots in the transit phases of the trip, the world does not revolve around me, unfortunately.
My bus travel photography technique involved throwing out the bus window pretty much all approaches I had ever had towards my work. No careful framing, no use of low ISOs, no changing lenses (or even the focal length most of the time), no control of the subject, no waiting for the right light, no direct control of viewpoint. Hell, it’s enough to turn an anal retentive shooter like me into a spasm racked blithering mess of muscle and blubber (more blubber than muscle).
So here’s what I did instead to avoid a total meltdown.... I got drunk….no, not really but those cheap Vietnamese beers were a nice reward at the end of a hot, humid day.
This is what I actually did…
Preliminary Settings
Said hello to 800 ISO and even 1600 ISO, it’s not so bad after all, but where possible, I shot at 400 ISO which was altogether better quality wise. Bear in mind I was using a Sony Nex 5N at the time, sensor technology has moved forward considerably since then and 1600 ISO these days is probably as good as my 400 ISO was then!
Stuck with *27 mm focal length on my NEX 18-55 kit zoom and gave all my other “real” lenses a nice little rest in the camera bag.
Fixed the aperture to f6.3, which I do more often than not anyway with APS-C, these days f5 on my m4/3 gear has become the new "go to hole".
Fixed the focus to about 4 metres. The acceptable DOF at 27 mm runs from about 2.4 to about 13 metres at f6.3, which is fine when you're shooting stuff that is just outside the bus as you fly past, sometimes I would shift the focus a little further out if we were out of town or in areas where all the action was generally further afield.
Fixed the white balance for the prevailing conditions, which is not too hard as I never use that auto WB setting. I think AWB stands for “Always Wrong Brad”. Of course, as I shoot "RAW only" the WB can be sorted in post but getting the WB reasonably close at shooting time gives me a usable point of reference as far as the colour goes. I will add my Olympus EM5 mk2 seems to be much better on AWB than the NEX 5n ever was.
Fixed the mode to **manual and therefore fixed the shutter speed to not burn out the highlights for the given lighting conditions. Much as I can accept compromises, I can’t accept the highlight burnies and when the lighting conditions are rapidly changing on the fly as you whizz past auto exposure will often completely mess things up. Basically, you could say I expose for the highlights and let the shadows fall where they will, to my mind this allows me to create a more filmic and 3D look in post.
** I will admit that late one day on this tour I was caught out by a combination of a sudden torrential storm and scenes that were inside darkened doorways and messed up, thank goodness the little Sony had a reasonably forgiving sensor for its' time.
These days you could probably use aperture priority and dial back the compensation a bit as insurance knowing the improved dynamic range and noise characteristics of modern sensors will see you through, though I must add the DR for that 5n sensor is really pretty good.
Shooting
So once set up I just shot at anything that looked a bit interesting as we sailed on by. I used the same techniques for shots taken while on boats cruising through river through markets, fish farms and other classic Viet Namese photo ops. The method I used for Pedicabs was similar, I even shot in markets and alleys on the move without looking through the viewfinder using a version of the above. (Pics using the last method are not included in the article, that's worth an additional article, but it's a method I now regularly use.)
(Just to be clear, because some people got the idea the first time I published this article that these were the only types of pics I took on the trip and then told me I'd missed the real stuff. No, these pics are not the only type/style I made, I captured lots of close-ups of people, objects, events, set up shots and all manner of interesting stuff. These images demonstrate one style only for the times you are stuck in motion on a bus, boat or car and still want to get some storytelling images, I hope that's clear. When I feel the inclination, I might post some stories regarding other images I captured. I published this set because I thought the methods used might be helpful to some bus bound photographers out there.)
Yes sir I was running a freewheeling digital lottery approach, not even sure of what I had until I got to load all the shots on the Mac Meister once back home in OZ. I did play with about 15% or so of the "moving window set" on the trip so I could share with my tour companions on our last day together.
So in the editing phase… you ask?
Did I need to crop? Of course, but that’s hardly a challenge these days and even the old NEX 5n's now paltry 16 mp offered plenty of flexibility.
Did I need to brighten some things up? Of course, but I should note that I never had an unintended clipped highlight zone.
Did I need to adjust the colour? A bit but mainly because the bus windows tinted things up somewhat and made judging perfect white balance tricky. (One serious trade-off with shooting through tinted bus windows is that your exposures will exhibit poor red channel response as most tints knock out the red wavelengths disproportionally, this makes editing a little trickier and makes the image noisier.)
Did I get noise, sure, but then it was either that or nothing and at reasonable sizes, the noise is fine, in any case, it's much better than what you would expect from your smartphone - even today?
Did I get some good shots? Well that’s open to opinion, but I believe I got some nice results and here’s why....
Results
Shooting from a fast-moving window of opportunity forces you to examine composition very quickly, it concentrates your timing, with mere seconds being broken down into tiny slithers of time, all of which offer distinctly different compositional possibilities, it forces you to choose NOW, Right NOW! ……..And it provides the joy of unpredictability.
Of course, there will be many duds, false fires and marginal results, there’s no promise of ***perfect sharpness or exposure, but when you play the numbers with considered intent, controlling what you can, accepting what you can’t, there’s always the possibility of a compelling photograph or two.
I also shot a lot of "street style" photography whilst in Viet Nam and enjoyed it immensely, but what I found interesting was that the images taken from the moving windows of boats, buses and pedicabs brought something else to the table that regular street shooting didn’t, “The total obliviousness of the subject being photographed”.
The subjects took no pose, nor adjusted their stance and expression, they didn't turn away or dart around me as they might with regular street shooting, they had no time to respond even if they did see me. Mostly they were simply, completely, utterly, unaware. On the occasions they did become aware of being photographed, they had too little time to change their demeanour and on a couple of occasions the sudden "half conscious direct contact with the camera lens" created an additional point of interest.
Another factor also added to the mix, the changed viewpoint of sitting high up in a bus, it gives a different visual insight compared to the pics from pedicabs and boats. The elevated perspective means you can see into the more three-dimensional spaces around the core subjects, areas that would normally be blocked from view by bodies and other objects, this allows you to better see relationships in both form and story. A couple of the pics in this set were taken from Pedicabs, and I am sure it will be obvious that they have a different dynamic.
To me the rendered images are little slices of life as lived on the streets, I feel they captured the essence of Viet Namese street trade and relationships, for example, Men playing board games and drinking coffee, while the women worked in the background.
A fascinating aspect of the Viet Namese streets is that you see so many contrasting elements close to one another, someone, fixing motorbikes 3 metres away from a food stall with others chilling out on motorbikes just another 3 metres down the road.
What really struck me was that in each frame I could see many stories or possibilities, crop the frame or move it around a little differently and your viewing channel changes, this flexibility initially led me down a rabbit hole of random cropping and frustrations. Decisions... decisions!
The images serve a very personal purpose, they bring to mind all the things that my wife and I saw and experienced honestly, they were taken for us, it was only much later that I thought about sharing them with my students and readers.
Viewed retrospectively it's the little things I notice most: Men seem to sit around more, women generally appear more involved in activities. There are those the ubiquitous small red chairs everywhere in cities. Motorbikes, the supreme possession and freedom machine, being used for everything from workhorse to a convenient roadside seat. Then there's the prevalence of smoking and the observational looks from locals where time being passed while doing nothing is not wasted time at all, the random social activities. Most of all it is the hard work that is done with so little in the way of tools and of course the ingenuity and happiness of the people.
Thinking In Sets
All up I ended up with about 150 keepers in the "From Moving Windows Set" for this article I have pulled together a subset of 24 images that fitted the cinematic framing format, actually 17:9 (just a bit wider than the standard 16:9 format) but I have other groupings of square pics and close up images and pics based on different themes.
Ultimately I was trying to tell a story through a series of pictures, they are all part of a whole rather than simply individual frames, and I have designed a large-scale artwork for my home audio room that uses all of these frames and a few others as well in combination. That artwork will be completed in the coming January, it's not dissimilar to this large-scale artwork I created three years ago, you might like to take the diversion to check that one out.
http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2013/05/05/one-giant-polaroid-by-brad-nichol/
The Rig
Technically my trusty old NEX 5n rig proved fine for the task, with focus locked down, exposure pre-set and using my DIY’d direct vision viewfinder or modded LCD hood I could see from my left eye roughly what the camera would see with its' own eye a split second later. At first, this viewing the scene with both eyes was more than a little disconcerting, but you do get used to it. It’s probably a little easier for me to shoot like this as I am very short-sighted. With the adjustment on the cameras' viewing system set so I could see without glasses via my right eye, any view with my left eye (which was looking directly at the scene) was only semi-resolved but resolved well enough that I could see what was about to come into the frame of my viewfinder eye.
One nice aspect of the NEX 5N is that when its set up as above with " the first curtain" shutter enabled and in manual focus, the shutter response is absolutely instantaneous. All cameras have some slight delay, it rarely matters much, but for this type of shooting it certainly did. With practice, I got to a point where the only limiting factor was my response time, and ultimately I had to slow down as I found the lack of slop in the camera's response meant I was often firing 0.2 - 0.3 seconds too early.
After several days experience, I was able to look through the viewfinder confident that as I watched the compositional elements play across the moving scene and finally snap into balance, I could reliably snap off the frame at the decisive structural moment.
The images taken on the bus were mostly captured at a speed of around 40 to 60 km per hr, but I did get quite a few at 80 km per hr, which is really about as fast as things get in Viet Nam, and also the legal limit. The slower speeds of the boats and pedicabs made capture much easier, meaning the shutter speeds were either slower or the ISO less extreme.
Shooting a little wide helped a lot, I absolutely needed to maintain that extra visual space so the subject elements could move within the frame without being inadvertently cropped out by unexpected developments. Generally, I tried to get the compositions centred, but being able to crop a little more off the right side of the frame when needed was often an image saver which enabled me to still create a wide framed cinematic look in post.
Regardless of what sort of camera you have, it should be possible to come up with a collection of settings that will give the desired result, even on your smartphone if you use an App that gives full manual control and preferably the option to shoot raw. But...if you want to try this approach, please remember that you need to be realistic, for every keeper, you will no doubt have many duds and since you are going to most likely be cropping quite a bit a modern camera with a higher pixel count will probably prove a great advantage.
On subsequent trips I have used the same methods and techniques, though on the last trip I used my Olympus EM5 Mk 2 kit, the keeper rate is far better with the more modern kit.
Technically it's much easier with the Olympus EM5 Mk 2, I now get sharper shots, better colour and surprisingly less noise added to that the EM5 mk2 can reliably autofocus much faster should I desire to use it, though this is somewhat lens dependent. Anyone who says the equipment doesn't matter is a little misguided, true enough it doesn't greatly matter for many types of pics, but when working on the edges of capture it can be a deal breaker....anyhow moving on.
Dirty Windows!
There is one fly in the ointment that you may not get much control over, dirty windows! The problems will include muddy shadow rendition, some loss of clarity and of course it will exacerbate the effects of light sources which shine directly onto the windows. In the end "it is what it is", I've made adjustments for the defects in post editing where possible, that "Dehaze" filter, for example, can come in very handy, but in some ways, the defects just add to the authenticity of the pics.
I must say that the driver of the bus on this trip was fastidious about the cleanliness of his windows, though by the end of the day things always got a bit messy, often he was seen doing a little sparkling at lunch breaks and we always started the morning off in a pristine state! Other bus trips and train trips I have been on since have failed to come up to his high optical standard, but sometimes you might be able to get your window cleaned or do it yourself.
For train trips where you have a booked seat you might be able to give the window a wipe before the train departs from the platform, yes I know people will probably think you're a bit…mad or extreme…but heck it's your photos!
Why 27mm?
You may be wondering why I chose 27mm as the focal length, thorough testing showed me that 27mm is the magic setting for the Sony 8-55mm OSS lens, it’s the sharpest focal length, has almost zero chromatic aberration, no vignetting and no distortion, what’s not to like about that. As an added bonus 27mm just happens to be an ideal focal length for the task, wide enough to get a bit of crop-ability in the frame, yet still give an excellent natural widescreen look when cropped top and bottom. Remember that on a full frame sensor this is equivalent to 41mm.
The Editing
On the editing front, I decided to go with a more muted colour rendering that was sympathetic with Vietnamese street scenes, typically a mix of decaying colour faded by time and neglect intermingled with the gaudy hues of western commercial influences. I could summarise the look as aged Kodachrome colour rendering combined with Tmax highlight and shadow tonality. Most of the files are fine for printing at 11 by 14 inches provided you accept that there will be some visible luminance noise in the images, which I'm fine with, it gives a certain grittiness I feel looks quite organic.
Concluding
Ultimately I was pleased with the results I obtained, it honed my skill-set, got me thinking literally outside the frame and gave me a great additional record of the trip. Probably, more importantly, the skills I gained have served me well over the subsequent 3 years and several trips, so all round a pretty sound investment of time and effort.
One final tip, if you have one, it's an excellent idea to use a soft rubber lens hood, it will kill some of the vibration coming off the glass, but most importantly it will help you eliminate reflections bouncing off the glass windows of the bus or train.
** Manual is nowhere near as troublesome as many photographers assume, think of it this way, if you are using Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Program you still need to pay close attention to the exposure compensation settings as the cameras exposure is easily fooled by the brightness values of the objects in the scene. In my experience optimal exposures regardless of the camera require me to adjust the compensation for about 65-70% of exposures (analysis of the EXIF data of thousands of my photos confirms this)… Here's the thing, basically you are making adjustments to over-ride the limitations of the cameras exposure system anyway, setting it manually in the first place just shortcuts the process and if you really know what you are doing may actually be quicker and more reliable..no second guessing.
*** Perfect sharpness is I think an over-rated requirement, yep it's a nice thing to have, but the message and content trump it every time, and when you look at many of the most famous photos taken it's amazing how many are, shall we say, more than a tad soft.
Thinking In Sets
All up I ended up with about 150 keepers in the "From Moving Windows Set" for this article I have pulled together a subset of 24 images that fitted the cinematic framing format, actually 17:9 (just a bit wider than the standard 16:9 format) but I have other groupings of square pics and close up images and pics based on different themes.
Ultimately I was trying to tell a story through a series of pictures, they are all part of a whole rather than simply individual frames, and I have designed a large-scale artwork for my home audio room that uses all of these frames and a few others as well in combination. That artwork will be completed in the coming January, it's not dissimilar to this large-scale artwork I created three years ago, you might like to take the diversion to check that one out.
http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2013/05/05/one-giant-polaroid-by-brad-nichol/
The Rig
Technically my trusty old NEX 5n rig proved fine for the task, with focus locked down, exposure pre-set and using my DIY’d direct vision viewfinder or modded LCD hood I could see from my left eye roughly what the camera would see with its' own eye a split second later. At first, this viewing the scene with both eyes was more than a little disconcerting, but you do get used to it. It’s probably a little easier for me to shoot like this as I am very short-sighted. With the adjustment on the cameras' viewing system set so I could see without glasses via my right eye, any view with my left eye (which was looking directly at the scene) was only semi-resolved but resolved well enough that I could see what was about to come into the frame of my viewfinder eye.
One nice aspect of the NEX 5N is that when its set up as above with " the first curtain" shutter enabled and in manual focus, the shutter response is absolutely instantaneous. All cameras have some slight delay, it rarely matters much, but for this type of shooting it certainly did. With practice, I got to a point where the only limiting factor was my response time, and ultimately I had to slow down as I found the lack of slop in the camera's response meant I was often firing 0.2 - 0.3 seconds too early.
After several days experience, I was able to look through the viewfinder confident that as I watched the compositional elements play across the moving scene and finally snap into balance, I could reliably snap off the frame at the decisive structural moment.
The images taken on the bus were mostly captured at a speed of around 40 to 60 km per hr, but I did get quite a few at 80 km per hr, which is really about as fast as things get in Viet Nam, and also the legal limit. The slower speeds of the boats and pedicabs made capture much easier, meaning the shutter speeds were either slower or the ISO less extreme.
Shooting a little wide helped a lot, I absolutely needed to maintain that extra visual space so the subject elements could move within the frame without being inadvertently cropped out by unexpected developments. Generally, I tried to get the compositions centred, but being able to crop a little more off the right side of the frame when needed was often an image saver which enabled me to still create a wide framed cinematic look in post.
Regardless of what sort of camera you have, it should be possible to come up with a collection of settings that will give the desired result, even on your smartphone if you use an App that gives full manual control and preferably the option to shoot raw. But...if you want to try this approach, please remember that you need to be realistic, for every keeper, you will no doubt have many duds and since you are going to most likely be cropping quite a bit a modern camera with a higher pixel count will probably prove a great advantage.
On subsequent trips I have used the same methods and techniques, though on the last trip I used my Olympus EM5 Mk 2 kit, the keeper rate is far better with the more modern kit.
Technically it's much easier with the Olympus EM5 Mk 2, I now get sharper shots, better colour and surprisingly less noise added to that the EM5 mk2 can reliably autofocus much faster should I desire to use it, though this is somewhat lens dependent. Anyone who says the equipment doesn't matter is a little misguided, true enough it doesn't greatly matter for many types of pics, but when working on the edges of capture it can be a deal breaker....anyhow moving on.
Dirty Windows!
There is one fly in the ointment that you may not get much control over, dirty windows! The problems will include muddy shadow rendition, some loss of clarity and of course it will exacerbate the effects of light sources which shine directly onto the windows. In the end "it is what it is", I've made adjustments for the defects in post editing where possible, that "Dehaze" filter, for example, can come in very handy, but in some ways, the defects just add to the authenticity of the pics.
I must say that the driver of the bus on this trip was fastidious about the cleanliness of his windows, though by the end of the day things always got a bit messy, often he was seen doing a little sparkling at lunch breaks and we always started the morning off in a pristine state! Other bus trips and train trips I have been on since have failed to come up to his high optical standard, but sometimes you might be able to get your window cleaned or do it yourself.
For train trips where you have a booked seat you might be able to give the window a wipe before the train departs from the platform, yes I know people will probably think you're a bit…mad or extreme…but heck it's your photos!
Why 27mm?
You may be wondering why I chose 27mm as the focal length, thorough testing showed me that 27mm is the magic setting for the Sony 8-55mm OSS lens, it’s the sharpest focal length, has almost zero chromatic aberration, no vignetting and no distortion, what’s not to like about that. As an added bonus 27mm just happens to be an ideal focal length for the task, wide enough to get a bit of crop-ability in the frame, yet still give an excellent natural widescreen look when cropped top and bottom. Remember that on a full frame sensor this is equivalent to 41mm.
The Editing
On the editing front, I decided to go with a more muted colour rendering that was sympathetic with Vietnamese street scenes, typically a mix of decaying colour faded by time and neglect intermingled with the gaudy hues of western commercial influences. I could summarise the look as aged Kodachrome colour rendering combined with Tmax highlight and shadow tonality. Most of the files are fine for printing at 11 by 14 inches provided you accept that there will be some visible luminance noise in the images, which I'm fine with, it gives a certain grittiness I feel looks quite organic.
Concluding
Ultimately I was pleased with the results I obtained, it honed my skill-set, got me thinking literally outside the frame and gave me a great additional record of the trip. Probably, more importantly, the skills I gained have served me well over the subsequent 3 years and several trips, so all round a pretty sound investment of time and effort.
One final tip, if you have one, it's an excellent idea to use a soft rubber lens hood, it will kill some of the vibration coming off the glass, but most importantly it will help you eliminate reflections bouncing off the glass windows of the bus or train.
** Manual is nowhere near as troublesome as many photographers assume, think of it this way, if you are using Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Program you still need to pay close attention to the exposure compensation settings as the cameras exposure is easily fooled by the brightness values of the objects in the scene. In my experience optimal exposures regardless of the camera require me to adjust the compensation for about 65-70% of exposures (analysis of the EXIF data of thousands of my photos confirms this)… Here's the thing, basically you are making adjustments to over-ride the limitations of the cameras exposure system anyway, setting it manually in the first place just shortcuts the process and if you really know what you are doing may actually be quicker and more reliable..no second guessing.
*** Perfect sharpness is I think an over-rated requirement, yep it's a nice thing to have, but the message and content trump it every time, and when you look at many of the most famous photos taken it's amazing how many are, shall we say, more than a tad soft.
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