Six Skills of Documentary Photography

Lead:? You must learn to observe in order to make a good documentary? Observation is the combination of senses and vision, that is, how to observe with eyes and grasp vision well? Temperature? Personally, I think there are the following aspects:

(1) Be good at discovering and learn to observe from life.

With the increasing intelligence of digital cameras, observation and composition have become the top priority of photographers. When shooting, you must make full use of your feelings, intelligence and feelings, and concentrate on what you are shooting, so as to inject creativity into your work.

I believe there are things to shoot around.

There is an old saying in China:? Within ten steps, there will be grass? .

There is no lack of beauty in life, but there is a lack of discovery. We should use our own eyes to highlight things that others have never seen, find beauty in ordinary things, and turn ordinary themes into extraordinary works. Only by shooting what you are familiar with can you go deep, even shoot, ponder and think repeatedly, and you can shoot a deep and powerful work.

(3) Choose a suitable angle and position to observe, so as to avoid blindness and randomness in the process of photography. We advocate choosing the right time, choosing the right location and observing attentively. The angle of observation can determine the success or failure of the work. The ancients cloud? Look over the ridge to a mountain peak? . People stand in different positions and choose different angles, and the observation results will be very different. Advocating multi-directional observation will often make you see things that may have been overlooked or not carefully observed in the past, resulting in special significance and perspective.

(4) Look at the essence through the phenomenon.

People's preconceptions are the consistent trend of observation, but this observation has become a major obstacle to photography. The impressionist painter Monet once said that in order to observe, we must forget the names of the things we see. For a flower, a grass, a tree, a walking kitten, a mottled wall and so on. Not only should we look at it according to the existing image in our mind, but we should also dig deep into the internal information and passwords related to things, and combine them reasonably, which will produce unexpected visual effects.

5] Reasonable use of observation methods.

The shooting of everything will produce different theme forms and styles because of different observation methods. After discovering the subject that can be photographed, do you shoot in documentary language or create in picturesque language? Do you use form to dominate the picture or content to dominate the theme, or both? Can you browse, examine and observe? Dig deeper? .

[6] Pay attention to the relationship between the whole and the parts.

Photography is the art of choice. We should learn to find wonderful things from miscellaneous things, so as to seek order in chaos. At the same time, we should learn to combine far and near, up and down, and left and right in our creation. At the same time, we need to find beauty from visual information and details, showing different understanding and interpretation.

Detailed explanation of wide-angle lens application

Equipment used: Due to the long time span of this group of photos, there are many cameras and lenses used, namely Nikon D 100, D300, Panasonic lx2 and lx5, which were shot with Nicol 24mm/2.8 and Sigma 10-20/3.5 lenses respectively.

Generally, the wide-angle lens is used for documentary shooting, because it can make the photographer stimulate the illusion from the relevant information generated between objects, thus making the picture interesting. But if you want to shoot well, you must exercise your ability to control the space.

We can grasp your wide-angle shooting by understanding the dual characteristics of wide-angle:

A. Wide-angle lens has the characteristics of being near big and far small, which is beyond our naked eye observation of things. It will make the nearby objects more prominent, exaggerated and impactful than what the naked eye sees, so it can better emphasize the prospect and be of great help to strengthen the subject's foreground.

B. The perspective of the wide-angle lens makes the depth of field of the lens larger, and distant trees and trees clearly appear on the picture. If the photographer simply concentrates more scenes on one picture, the picture is particularly empty. Therefore, before shooting, we must determine the shooting theme, explore the clear relationship between foreground and vision, and consciously look for objects that can highlight the theme in the foreground to make the picture more meaningful and powerful, otherwise it will usurp the role of the master and even give the picture a messy feeling.

Detailed explanation of shooting actual combat

(1) Conception before shooting

The first photo in this group is the site of my wife's ancestors, located in Yanghe Town, Yingcheng City, Hubei Province. I'm going to take some photos as a souvenir. However, the sight of natural weathering without man-made destruction has set my mind back for decades. Carefully observe every detail that can be drawn. Because the weather was clear and the light was strong that day, I decided to take three photos of different exposure value for the last time and use hdr in ps to make the picture full of incomplete beauty and lack of vitality. Finally, the collision of kittens undoubtedly sublimated the picture.

(2) shooting parameter sharing

Technically, in order to ensure the density of the solar beam, a small aperture slow door is used to shoot.

[shooting parameters] AF mode f16110 second focal length: 1 1mm matrix photometry automatic white balance NEF format is adopted.