Let the photos be full of life.

How to make a photographer keep improving? Find the meaning of life in the memory card behind the camera! I hope you can write with me after reading the following article.

Morocco-laundry

Character: the woman who goes to the laundry.

Venue: Chev Shawan, Morocco

Canon EOS- 1Ds MarkII, 24-70mm lens, ISO 200,1100 second, f/8.

Before shooting

Chefchaouen in northern Morocco is obviously built with the main function of stimulating the vision of photographers who are tired of the gray streets in northern Europe. The narrow streets, stone walls, doorways, arches and houses in the town are all built in a unique Moorish style, and the exterior walls are painted with the most beautiful sky blue. We came to Morocco to look for colors, and this is what we are looking for.

I wandered in the blue alley on a winter morning, intoxicated by the light. A serious problem for me is that people here don't like being photographed. This has become my biggest challenge, and I must find a way to solve it. In the process of looking for shooting opportunities, I never treat cultural sensitivity rudely, but at the same time, as a photographer, I also want to take pictures. I used two methods in shooting to avoid the limitation of local historical habits. The first method is to show people's daily work and living environment in a "documentary" style. This photo is full of bold shapes and colors. In order to avoid too much confrontation, I didn't shoot the faces of the characters, they just appeared in the active town space. The second method is "encouragement and inquiry", looking for people who may be photographed, establishing contact with them, keeping a proper distance, striving for permission, and taking carefully arranged portraits in advance. I usually try to shoot in the second way. Sometimes a simple refusal will frustrate my work all day, but after 20 years of hard work, I have developed a thick skin.

Photographed

I must admit, my sense of shooting lurks in the alley. I fixed the 24-70mm lens at the focal length of 50mm-this is my most commonly used lens, and set the sensitivity to ISO 200 to ensure the success rate of hand-held shooting. After a long wait, a woman dressed in orange from head to toe walked to the laundry room, and the color of her clothes was in pleasant contrast with the blue wall and doorway. I didn't press the shutter until she reached the perfect position in advance. I looked for it for a long time when shooting. The beautiful doorway is an excellent shooting location. I still want to see if there is a better position, but I also know that exposure is the most important thing.

After shooting

I cut out some messy details at the top and processed the photo into an aspect ratio format of 16 _ 9. Usually, I don't crop photos because I think it is a good composition exercise, but the dull colors and messy details at the top and bottom of the picture are not good for this photo. In addition, this is a photo without using filters or strange post-processing methods. We should try our best to simplify our uncertain pictures.

South Africa-Interdependence

Main body of the picture: A red-billed starling landed on the nose of a buffalo.

Venue: Kruger National Park, South Africa

Canon EOS- 1Ds MarkIII, 500mm lens, ISO 800, 1/200s, f/4.

Before shooting

When we walked out of Johannesburg airport and arrived at the exit, we saw a man holding a sign with our names on it and a big box next to it. There is a disguised Canon 500mf/4ISL lens in the box. You may have seen these huge lenses on sports photographers' cameras. The front of the lens is as big as a dinner plate. They have incredible optical properties-I have coveted them for a long time-but they are too big, too expensive and too heavy. I need the right lens for this trip, and 500mf/4 is just the right tool for this job. Its price is similar to that of a reasonable car. I only need to use it 1 month and rent it 1. In order to avoid trouble in handling, I arranged for the lessor to meet me here.

Photographed

I like this shot very much. I have a lens of 100-400mm, but at all focal lengths above 100 mm, the maximum aperture is gradually narrowing. So far, every photo I have taken here has been taken with the maximum aperture f/4, and the minimum depth of field can create a beautiful Jiao Wai foreground and background, and remove those distracting details.

Travel again. On our right, a buffalo is grazing, and a red-billed starling is pecking at parasites on its skin. I pressed the autofocus button and locked the focus. After rapid re-composition, I took a photo and looked at the LCD screen. There was no warning of highlight overflow, indicating that the highlight part was exposed normally (see page 33). I don't have time to check the histogram, but experience tells me that exposure in aperture priority mode generally works well.

I glanced at the information in the viewfinder and checked the exposure parameters to see if the aperture is at the maximum, whether the shutter speed is fast enough, whether exposure compensation is needed when shooting again, and whether there is any problem with the sensitivity setting. After several weeks of work, my camera feels like it is full of oil, which is very easy to use. Starling landed on the indifferent buffalo nose, and I pressed the shutter.

After shooting

If it works properly, autofocus is very useful, but like any automatic device, it is not simple. No matter how many focus points there are, no matter how complicated the control system is, all I can decide is where to focus. With this lens, I found that whether the autofocus mode adopts single autofocus or servo autofocus depends on whether my subject moves or not. In the single autofocus mode, I can use the central focus sensor to start autofocus at the focus I choose. In this photo, the focus is on the buffalo's eyes. I can lock the focus by pressing the shutter button half-way, so that I can take multiple photos again, so that the focus remains locked until the shutter is fully pressed. If the subject is moving, servo autofocus is your best choice, because the focusing system will try to focus with the movement of the subject. This operation is very flexible, and you can also lock the focus by pressing the button below the lens barrel. The advanced autofocus system is quite clever, but I still find that in some cases, I prefer to switch to manual focusing.

South Africa-tugra R.

Theme: Tugra River and crescent cliff at dawn.

Venue: KwaZulu-natal province Drakens Royal Natal National Park.

Canon EOS- 1DS MARKIIII, 16-35mm lens, 0.9 medium gray mirror, 0.9 medium gray gradient mirror, ISO 50, 6.2 seconds, f/ 14.

Before shooting

At dawn, I stood by the Tugra River, waiting for the light suitable for shooting. The river surged over my knees, and the water flowing down the cliff brought a comfortable and cool feeling. For weeks, we have been hiding in the Land Rover to shoot wild animals, and now we can shoot the scenery on foot. That's great. I don't believe anything nearby will eat us, but you never know if it will. When I rummaged through Le Shebao's camera bag and tried my best not to let so many devices fall into the rushing river, the light gradually fell from the sky. The swift current makes me doubt whether the tripod can be stabilized. The pins of Gitzo tripod have stood firmly on the rock, but I'm worried that the energy of current will cause the tripod to shake. This lightweight carbon fiber tripod still makes me uneasy even after working hard abroad for several months. There is only one way to solve this problem: take a sample and enlarge it on the LCD screen. Everything is clear, and I can work.

This is a summoning setting, which is believed to be more dramatic and impressive than the pictures I saw before. It rises slowly from the prairie of KwaZulu-natal province, forming a long jagged Drakens mountain range with towering cliffs, deep valleys and waterfalls. This is a unique landscape in Africa. The nature of plants, geography and light is completely different from the pastoral scenery of my hometown Somerset.

Photographed

When the sun set smoothly on the crescent-shaped cliff, I was waiting for the right light to record the scenery. I use a 16-35mm lens to record as wide a scene as possible. Oh, that's the fun of shooting with a full-body camera. I used a 0.9 medium gray filter to slow down the shutter speed and a 0.9 medium gray gradient filter to reduce the exposure of the sky. The clouds on the top of the mountain show the faint pink and lavender peculiar to dawn, and the golden light begins to appear on the highest cliff. This is the light I'm waiting for. I reduced my sensitivity to ISO 50, so that I could record the flowing of the gura river below. The exposure time of 1/6 seconds and the aperture of f/ 14 make the running water very blurred, but there is no common diffraction problem when shooting with a small aperture. Shoot, check the exposure, shoot again. Clouds on the eastern horizon began to move and dissipate. I waited, watching the scene change and scanning the sky, hoping for a breakthrough. Half an hour later, the dark clouds cleared and it was all over. The twilight period, which lasted only a few minutes, was the decisive moment. How long do we have to wait to catch up with the next time?

After shooting

The morning sun scorched the earth and the temperature rose rapidly. We walked and sweated up the mountain to find the beautiful scenery nearby. This is a road that landscape photographers often take-shooting, looking for scenery and shooting again. Nature will interrupt our shooting schedule from time to time, but finding an ideal shooting location will continue this endless work.