Blue And Yellow Macaw (Ara Ararauna) Close Up

Description:
The blue and yellow macaw is one of the largest parrots and is frequently chosen as a pet because of its companionable nature, ability to speak and exotic appearance.

Macaws are expensive birds costing over $1000. 00 dollars.

They need a variety of food apart from seeds and can live to up to 60 years.

Native mainly to South America this Macaw is not a threatened species

If you want to use this photo of a Blue And Yellow Macaw, go to Alamy.
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Photo Comments:

I found this Macaw with a number of others in an aviary in Kent.

The lighting level was good but not very bright.

Here were my thoughts:

I wanted a close up which meant using a long lens with good close focussing.

I wanted to show every feather which meant maximum sharpness.

I wanted to avoid any sign of wires or cage

This meant:

No camera shake.
No subject movement:
Keeping to a low ISO for a low noise result.

One bonus was that at least for the moment the parrots seemed completely still.

This combination of factors made a telephoto zoom ideal – the main reason being that with a zoom lens you can choose your exact distance and position and then compose accordingly.

I was able to to press the front of my 75-300 IS Canon zoom against the wire.

This meant that with carefully positioning the wire would “disappear” from my picture.

(taking care to avoid flare from the wire.)

Also this meant that with the extra support I could use a slower shutter speed than would be possible handheld.

I was able to try a few exposures using both auto and manual focus to make sure that I focused on the eye.

I took both horizontal and vertical shots but this was my most successful.

New Features:

I’ve introduced a few new features this week:

I’ve posted a page of travel pictures from twelve countries available from Alamy - I’m planning to finish my Guide to Travel Photography in the foreseeable future.

I’ve added the Photobox printing services to the places where you can buy prints of my photos.

If you’ve got a birthday, anniversary or other celebration why not choose one of my pictures as a gift?

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Caption:

Monastery Cell In Fiesole

Description:

Monastery Cell In Fiesole near Florence in Italy

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Photo Comments:

Fiesole is near Florence in Italy.

When I came upon this monastery cell i felt sure it would make an atmospheric picture.

One of the great things about stock photography is that there’s room for contemporary photography of ephemeral scenes as well as timeless images which can have both contemporary and archival interest.

I felt that this image would stand the test of time.

I took the picture on a Yashicamat film camera as I felt that the medium film format would provide extra quality and allow for any necessary cropping.

I took a light reading with a meter and also bracketed my exposure.

The window and the light streaming through it meant that careful exposure was needed.

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Purple flash drive

Description:

Purple flash drive with cap on green background.

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Photo Comments:

This is perhaps a boring photo from the purely pictorial point of view.

Still as a stock photograph it presents some challenges.

It needs to be bitingly sharp.

To ensure this I used:

a macro lens – my 100mm Canon Macro.

A low ISO for a low noise picture.

A camera with a large sensor – 21 megapixels on the Canon 5D Mark 11.

Studio Flash using a softbox and a reflector to stop camera shake and ensure even lighting.

Live view for extremely accurate manual focussing.

Mirror lock up, self timer and a remote release to prevent camera shake.

All of this was rigged up on a copy stand.

This close specks of dust will show up and need to be dealt with before the shoot – with compressed air in my case, or after the shoot cloning.

And then there’s keywording – What are these things called?

Is it a

Flash Drive

Flash Stick

Thumb Drive

USB Drive

USB Key (from the French)

And so on.

Then anyone searching for flash drive for example will get loads of false positive results unless the words are linked together by either the picture searcher, the photographer or the search engine.

It’s a minefield.

Still I didn’t entirely neglect the pictorial aspect.

I tried to get an interesting composition and chose colours that would complement each other.

At least the thingamajig isn’t black.

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Caption:

Detail of statue of Emperor Trajan

Description:

Detail of a statue thought to be of the Emperor Trajan on the Roman London Wall , London , England.

If you want to use this photo of the Emperor Trajan, go to PhotographersDirect.

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Photo Comments:

I was attracted to this fine statue on the London Wall and decided to photograph it full length and in detail.

I was particularly pleased that the lighting was diffused rather than bright sunshine which is much too harsh for portraits – even of statues.

(Statues have the advantage that the eyes stay open even in bright sunshine.)

I was looking to separate the head from the background by controlling the depth of field.

I also wanted to keep a reasonable distance to keep the features of the face, eyes nose and ears, in proportion while avoiding shooting upwards from near the statue.

For these reasons I decided a telephoto lens was best and used my 75-300 Canon IS zoom.

A study like this needs to be sharp with very careful focus on the nearest eye and I used both auto and manual focus to get this right and used the image stabilization to avoid any camera shake.

As I’ve pointed out before even the best photos are no good if they can’t be found.

Thomas Gray’s comment

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air

is true for photos too.

This is why keywording is so important.

Here are the the keywords I found:

Emperor  Monument  Roman  Age  Sculpture  Statue  Trajan  Art  Bronze  Caesar  Cultural  Tourism  Depth  of  Field  DoF  Emperors  England  Face  General  Head  and  Shoulders  Head  Shot  Head  Shots  Headshots  Historical  Imperator  Landmark  London  Majestic  Monuments  Portrait  Roman  Roman  Empire  Roman  Era  Roman  wall  Selective  Focus  Tourist  Attraction  Travel  Destination  Ancient  Rome  Army  Officer  Army  Officers  Civilisation  Civilisations  Civilization  Civilizations  Destination  Destinations  Educational  Tourism  Europe  Faces  Famous  GB  Generals  Government  and  Politics  Great  Britain  Head  Head  Only  Heads  Headshot  Historic  Historical  Site  Historical  Sites  History  Landmarks  Londinium  Metal  Metallic  Metals  Military  People  Picture  Pictures  Place  of  Interest  Places  of  Interest  Popular  Portraits  Portraiture  Religious  Tourism  Sculptures  Senior  Officer  Senior  Officers  Statues  Tourism  Tourist  Attractions  Tourist  Destination  Tourist  Destinations  Travel  Travel  Destinations  UK  United  Kingdom

There is an amount of repetition here but it shows the difficulty of keywording for different agencies.

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Public telephone in Cairo

Description:

A public telephone  with Arabic numbers in Cairo in Egypt

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Photo Comments:
It’s all too easy to think of foreign locations (not foreign to the people who live there of course) as somehow strange or exotic.

Egypt is often stereotyped as particularly so.

Still large cities like Cairo function in similar ways in most parts of the world and daily life is pretty mundane revolving around the basics of jobs food friends and family.

So I believe it’s important to reflect the everyday experience and public telephones are quite often typical of their locations.

This telephone attracted my attention because of the lighting which made it easy to contrast the equipment with the background and because a hint of the location came from the Arabic script.

I used my standard 28-75mm Tamron SP zoom handheld to capture this image.

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An Angel on a Medieval Ceiling

Description:

An angel painted on the medieval ceiling of Saint Peter’s Church in Thanet, Kent, England.

Saint Peters is a village which is part of the town of Broadstairs

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Photo Comments:

I rarely use on camera flash and I’m particularly dubious about the flash equipment built into so many DSLRs these days.

I do understand that they have their uses.

However, the nave of this church was dark and I wanted to highlight the craftsmanship and the colour of the ceiling paintings.

For this I decided to use a 75-300mm IS Canon zoom on my Canon D5 Mark 11.

One of the features (or lack of) with this camera is that it doesn’t have a built in flash.

I used my Canon Speedlight 430x in the hotshoe.

I used manual setting for exposure and set the flashlight to its manual setting also.

The reasons for this were to:

• use a shutterspeed that was as fast as possible with the flash synchronisation.
• produce the maximum output from the flashlight so that I could choose an aperture around the “sweetspot” of the lens.

One other thing I took care over was to shoot at a slight angle so as to avoid a hotspot reflection from the flash.

As the surface of the painting was flat and not too shiny I was reasonably satisfied with the result.

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Caption:

Seagull Flying Over The Aegean Sea

Description:

seagulls are birds in the family laridae and this one is pictured flying near the coast of Kavala in northern Greece following the ferry to Thassos.

Thassos is known as the emerald isle because of an abundance of grass and trees.

It is the most northerly island of the Aegean group and is just opposite the mainland Greek town of Kavala

If you want to use this photo of a seagull, go to Alamy.

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Photo Comments:

I love photographing birds and wildlife in general.

In my experience there are a couple of approaches to good close up photos of birds.

One is to use long lenses and stay right away from the birds.

The other is to get close up yourself.

In this case I was on the ferry between Kavala on the Greek Mainland and Thassos.

Enormous numbers of seabirds followed the ship and some would eat from the passengers’ hands.

They had no fear of humans and often came even to near.

For this picture I was able to use a 28-80mm standard zoom.

The biggest problem with this kind of photo I find, is getting the exposure correct.

Bright sunlight and white feathers can easily result in blown highlights.

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Caption:

Palm Trees in Egypt

Description:

A group of Palm Trees in Egypt.

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Photo Comments:

I’m back in Egypt again – sort of.

In a previous post I touched on the difference between Royalty Free and Rights managed Pictures.

Pictures of people will usually be rights managed unless you’re very careful with releases.

However a picture like this one although it’s in Egypt is fairly generic – by which I mean it could be taken in quite a few places in the region.

Palm trees are not all the same and experts can doubtless distinguish many different varieties.

Still, palm trees convey tropical climes and exotic locations in general.

For this shot I chose to isolate a group of palm trees against a sky background.

As this was a handheld shot at a distance I used the image stabilization setting on my Canon 70-300 IS zoom.

In case there’s any doubt it’s not always a good idea to use the IS facility though it’s pretty useful.

My experience is that using it seems to shortens battery life somewhat so if you can use fast shutter speeds this might be a reason not to used it sometimes.

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Egyptian Policeman

Description:

A portrait of a smiling policeman in Egypt.

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Photo Comments:

When you go travelling you’ll certainly come across great scenery and buildings.

But don’t forget the people.

I have no one approach to taking pictures of people except that it’s vital to treat people with respect.

Just because some people are poor or down and out or seem eccentric or bizarre they all deserve their dignity.

Sometimes you can chat to people and see what they think.

I often find with this approach that people can be stiff and unnatural. They can take on poses.

Sometimes I’ll use a telephoto lens and pick people out from a distance.

This means not intruding into peoples comfort zone.

I take the view that in popular tourist areas people are used to photographers and expect to be photographed so that it’s all right to go ahead.

Also while I always try to be reasonably unobtrusive I always make it clear that I’m a photographer so people can keep out the way.

Anyway, the point is that photographing people is possibly an ethical minefield.

I felt that this photo captures the good natured attitude of the policeman.

From the technical point of view I took this photo with my 75-300 Canon telephoto zoom.

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Statue of Richard Hooker in front of the Cathedral, Exeter, Devon, England

Description:

Richard Hooker (1554 – 1600) was an Anglican priest and an influential theologian.

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Photo Comments:

Photographing statues like this one presents a number of challenges.

Often there’s limited room for movement and using a zoom lens makes framing easier.

I’m very keen to avoid messy backgrounds which means either throwing the background out of focus or finding an even toned background.

Usually I want to get the whole of the statue sharp so using very wide apertures is not an option.

For this picture I decided to go for the sky as background.

This means shooting from a low angle.

If you do this near the statue you’re going to tilt the camera and get a strong foreshortening effect.

This may have artistic possibilities but it wasn’t what I wanted.

This statue has reasonable space around it and I was able to shoot at a reasonable distance using my 75-300 Canon IS zoom.

With skies like this there are a number of points to watch for:

Look out for cloud formations which might have an effect on the composition.

Also, skies like this will show up any sensor dust so may need some cloning or spotting later.

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