Record Photographer Clifford Oto's Blog

Occasionally I’ll be asked what’s the best camera. Is it a DSLR, superior to a point-and-shoot camera or smartphone? The answer is: it’s whatever you happen to have with you at the time.

It may sound a bit flippant, but if all you have is one type of camera and not the other, you don;’t want to miss the shot just because you’re pining away for something else.

Case in point. Last month my family and I traveled to Washington D.C. to see my daughter receive her Masters degree. The ceremony was held at the base of the Washington Monument and I wanted to capture it with my DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera. With it, I could use a telephoto lens so that I could pick out my daughter out of the thousands of other graduates.

We planned to arrive a few days early and stay a few days after to do some sightseeing. I had thought I had charged up the camera’s battery, but it showed less that 25% power (I think I may have left it on in the camera bag which may have allowed the power to drain). Wanting to use it during my daughter’s ceremonies (of which, there were 2), I left it in the hotel room during our other outings. What did use instead? My smartphone.

First we visited the Artechouse gallery in D.C. It’s an art installation that’s dedicated to art that technologically-based. In its main exhibit several projectors beam scenes of floating flowers against blank walls in a large room. People can move the flowers through hand/arm gestures picked by by sensors near the base of each wall. They be sent soaring across one way to another, spin in place or just hover in place. The exhibit’s polished floors reflected the images on the walls, doubling the visual experience. I kicked myself for not bringing my DLSR, but I was able to capture the experience with the only thing I had, my Apple iPhone. There were a few things that I couldn’t do with the phone that I could with a DSLR, namely to fine tune the exposure, but I concentrated on what it could do.

The phone was good at recording the overall scene’s colors and silhouettes of the visitors. My phone’s aperture is set and unchanging. The camera determines the exposure by changing the shutter speed and/or ISO (light sensitivity). In low light situations such, as the gallery, I knew that the camera would probably use a slow shutter, so I concentrated on holding it as still as possible to avoid camera shake. I tried to take pictures when the people stopped moving to lessen the possibility of blur in them.

Later on we visited the National Cathedral. In photographing the exterior I concentrated on using sound techniques that would with a DSLR. I used things in the foreground, such as trees and windows to help frame the gothic cathedral.

I tried to emphasize to capture the strong angles and solidity of the building. And got in as close as I could to photograph the details of the architecture. Inside, I tried to capture the moody subtly of the filtered light as well as the solemn grandeur of its grand vaulted ceilings.

All in all, I liked the photos that I shot with the phone. Could I have done better with my DSLR? Perhaps, but I surely would have run down the battery and would not have been able to use a telephoto lens to photograph by daughter’s graduation ceremonies.

Today’s smartphone cameras are so advanced that they can rival bigger imaging devices such as the DSLR and one could make some great pictures with them. So why should one learn how to use a “higher” level camera? Every camera has its advantages and limits. And learning about a DSLR can also help you to learn basic principals of photography itself and use your smartphone to it’s best advantage. It’s like learning how to drive. One could just drive an automatic transmission. But if you also learn how to use a manual transmission you can drive both without missing a beat.

Animals are the subjects for June’s Readers Photo Challenge. Most people have an affinity to on sort of creature or another and this challenge will encompass them all: mammals, birds, reptiles fish and insects. Whatever strikes your fancy and you can photograph it is fair game.

Pets are a natural source of subjects for most people. Some can ham it up for the camera others shy away from it. Pets are a part of our families. You know your pet the best. Try to capture it’s personality as well as its likeness. Also you can control when and where you take your pet’s picture. Look for good light, like in the early morning or late afternoon and watch your backgrounds. Try to avoid cluttered and visually confusing backdrops. Also look for people with their pets. Human/animal interactions can make for some great moments to capture with your camera.

While you can use a wide angle lens to photograph your pets, they are used to you and usually will allow you to get close to them with a camera, other kinds of animals are another story. Domesticated animals such as cows or sheep are usually seen in a field or pasture. If you can’t get permission from the farmer then you’ll have to photograph them from the side of the road, requiring a long telephoto lens if you want to get a close, tight shot. Animals and birds found in the wild are usually very skittish and can sense you coming a mile away. Long lenses are a must for taking pictures of them. A word of warning about wild animals. Many people don’t realize that they are really wild and are unpredictable and dangerous. Too many people try to take a selfie with a sea lion or bear only to get bitten, mauled or even killed. Keep your distance and stay safe.

A safe way to photograph wild or exotic animals is to simply go to a zoo. With lions, tigers, bears and more, you can see animals that you’d have to travel across the globe to see. Some zoo enclosures can present problems in shooting. Chainlink fences can pose a obstacles to shoot through. There’s a trick to minimizing or even eliminating them. Using a telephoto lens, try to get as close to the fencing as you can while simultaneously having the animal be as far away from the fence as possible. This will throw the fence extremely out of focus, rendering it virtually invisible to the camera.

The key to taking any animal picture is patience. In photographing a wild animal you may have stalk it much like a hunter would. Even after you find one you may have to wait for it to get into the right light or the perfect place in your composition. Some pets may become over excited. It may run around frantically because of it, making it difficult to get a shot of it. You may have to wait for it to calm down enough for you to get a picture. Others are shy and you may have to wait for it to open up enough to get a shot.

Whether wild or domestic, animals are fascinating subjects and with a little patience you can get a great photo of them.

How to enter:

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “AnimalPics” in the subject line

2. Photos have to be shot between June 4 and June 18.

3. The number of photos is limited to no more than 12 per person
4. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of device you used and where it was taken (eg.: “John Doe of Stockton. Micke Grove Park, Lodi. iPhone6s”)

5. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown) and what they are doing in the photos (eg.: Jane Doe, 15, walks her dog Skippy through Victory Park in Stockton).

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is June 18. The top examples will be published on Tuesday, June 25 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

People at work or play was the subject of the latest Readers Photo Challenge assignment. The idea of the assignment was not just to photograph the activities, which can be very different from each other, but rather to get pictures of people engaged in doing something and not just sitting for a portrait.

Ten readers sent in 38 photos. Here are the top picks.

Read More »

Some of you may think that outside during the day is the best time to take a portrait because there’s plenty of light. That’s true but it’s not always the best light. The best outdoor light is early or late in the day when the sun is near the horizon. Midday sun is the worst. The light is coming straight down and creates harsh and unflattering shadows on your subject’s face. Moving them into a shaded area where the light is more even is one solution, but there is another: use your flash. It may seem a bit counterintuitive because if there’s lots of light, then why do you need to use a flash?

The technique is called fill-flash (some people know by it’s reversed name flash-fill). As the name suggests, by using your flash you can fill and lessen or eliminated those shadows under the eye sockets and nose to create a more pleasing look.

Polaroid knew this many years ago and had their instant cameras fire their flashes with every shot whether you were inside or out or whether it was night or day.

In the old days of non-automatic flashes one had to calculate the power of the flash and the ambient exposure manually, which was a pain. It’s probably why so few photographers eschewed fill-flash back in those days. Today, all you have to do is attach your flash and turn it on. If you have a camera with a built-in flash, that’s one less step you need to take.

If you find that the fill is too much or too little, most flashes have controls to incrementally compensate up or down. Read your owners manual to find out how to do it.

On-camera fill-flash can look a little flat (though infinitely better than the awkward shadows that an overhead sun can create), that’s why I like to use my flash off camera. There’s a couple of ways you can do it. You can get a wireless transmitter to trigger your flash. Some use invisible infrared light pulses to fire the flash while some others use radio waves. You can set the flash on a light stand anywhere you want. The downside is the added cost of the transmitter. I like to use an off-camera sync cord. It’s a cord that attaches to the accessory hotshoe at the top of the camera and the flash. It allows me to hold the flash at arms length and get some directionality from the light.

There are a couple of restrictions where fill-flash doesn’t work so well. First is distance. The technique will only work within about 10 feet or so. Any farther away than that your flash won’t be strong enough to make a difference. Secondly, the technique really won’t work for smartphone cameras. Most have some sort of a “flash” function but it’s really just using the phone’s flashlight which is too weak to overcome a daylight exposure no matter how close you are to your subject.

With fill-flash you don’t have to wait for the best time of day for light, or be a slave to the lighting conditions. You can use your flash to take control of the situation yourself.

I remember many years ago after covering UOP volleyball for several years,

I had a night off so I took my wife to see the Tigers play. It was my first time watching a match without having to cover it. We were having a fine time following the action up until somewhere near the end of the second game. I began feeling a bit antsy. I could tell my pulse rate was up a bit and maybe even my blood pressure too. By the end of game 2, I had the urge to get up and leave. I wasn’t sure what was going on until it hit me: I had never stayed beyond 2 games before. I always had to leave to make deadline for the next day’s paper. It had become so ingrained in me that I developed sort of an internal clock that let me know when it was time to leave.

Working photographers know that deadlines are very important, especially so in newspapers. If I’m late with my photos, that pushes back editors’ decisions on what runs in the paper, which makes it late for the people doing the layout, which pushes back the people delivering the paper on your doorstep.

Most people will see me take a picture that think that’s the extent of my job but there’s more. I have to download the images to my computer and pick out my best ones which go to an editor to cull down further. I have to crop, then tone the photos for contrast, color, lightness and darkness. Lastly, I have to provide caption information for each one. If it’s a sporting event, I have to match the number on the player’s jersey with their name.

Photographers doing other kind of work also have deadlines. A photographer shooting senior portraits has to provide proofs to their client for them to pick the shots they want then make prints in time for them to send out in graduation announcements.

Wedding photographers shoot hundreds if not thousands of photos in a single night. All those have to be edited down so that their best work is presented to the client who then picks from those, all in a timely manner.

If you’re looking to make photography your profession then you’ll have to learn to work within the time that your clients have form you to shoot and deliver their photos within a deadline.

You might think that deadlines can put the kibosh on creativity, not so. Knowing that you only have, say, and hour to shoot and event can get you concentrate on what’s important and ignore the superfluous minutiae (though you also have to keep you mind open to those details that might actually be important). Once you get used to working within time constraints you’ll get used to it and meeting deadlines will become second nature to you.

“Curse me for a novice” was, as any comic book geek like me would know, something that Dr. Strange would say in the comics. He would utter it when he made an easy mistake or forgot something simple in casting his magic spells, which was surprisingly quite often for someone billed as the Sorcerer Supreme. But it proves a point that even the best of us, no matter how skilled, can mess up at times. Even after 35 years as a working photographer, I had my own curse-me-for-a-novice moment recently.

On Sunday, March 31, my 21-year-old son Christopher and I took a trip up to Daffodil Hill near the Mother Lode town of Volcano for the attraction’s opening weekend. It was a beautiful day with blue skies and pleasant temperatures. Thousands upon thousands of the white or yellow blossoms dotted the 36-acre ranch. I took my camera out of my bag and realized that I had broken the 9th unofficial rule of photography: always have batteries. 

Technically, my camera had a battery, it was just dead. for I had forgotten to make sure that it was charged up before leaving the house. I had a second battery but it was sitting on a charger at home, about an hour and half away. 

There’s a trick that you can do if your battery goes dead while shooting and you don’t have a spare. Turn the camera off, take the battery out, then re-insert it. Sometimes there’s enough of a reserve charge to fire of a frame or two. I tried it, but the battery was so depleted that it didn’t work. So my camera became an expensive, 3-lb paperweight having on my shoulder.

Fortunately my son had is camera, a Canon EOS Rebel T6, and graciously let me use it. I worked as quickly as I could because I knew that he wanted to take pictures too, The Rebel is an excellent beginners camera but I’m used to a pro level machine, so I had to adjust to it. 

The Rebel is small, again, great for novices, but since I was the one who made the novice mistake, I had to get used to how it handled. It felt too small for my hands. My pinky finger hung off of it’s grip with nothing to hold onto. It’s smallness also translates to it’s weight. It weighs about 1-lb, lighter than the lenses I was using, which made it front-heavy. 

Canon must believe that most users of the Rebel will be using an automatic setting because changing exposure settings manually on it took more steps than on my camera. I had going the camera’s menu then press a button then turn a dial to change the aperture and then again for the shutter speeds, taking the camera from my eye each time. With my professional camera I had to do is to turn a dial for each never having look away from the viewfinder if I didn’t want to.

I got my photos and returned the camera to my son who was off taking pictures with his phone while I was shooting. That gave me the idea of taking some with my own phone. 

The curse of being a novice can also be a blessing, because if you want to improve your photos you should slow your process down and think more. Shooting with my son’s camera and then with my phone, made me slow down and consider my pictures carefully. I didn’t take as many photos as I normally would have but the ones I did take were all the better for it.