David Bennett

Taking a photograph is always a compromise between the available equipment and the quality of the light.

In the middle of the day with the sun overhead, there is plenty of light but things do not usually look at their best. Waiting for the right light isn’t an option if the subject will not hang around, so the compromise is between getting the shot in the midday sun, or getting no shot at all.

Sometimes you can shade the subject from the overhead sun, but it depends upon how big the shade is, or how small the subject is. In this case my body was enough to shade this subject and take out some of the harsh noonday shadows – about which more below.

Diffusers and Reflectors
In sunny conditions photographers will sometimes use sheets of translucent material that are big enough to cast shade over a model and even out the shadows and highlights. The material is stretched over a frame so it can be manhandled and moved into position to block out the specular light from the sun. And photographers will use equally big reflectors to bounce light back into the shadows. Google for the ‘California Sunbounce’ to see some very big diffusers and reflectors and shots of how they are used.

Specular Light
Specular light is light that comes from a small point source. The sun is big, but being so far away it gives a specular light with harsh transitions between light and shade. And it drains the colors from everything it hits. Flattering light is the kind you would get on a bright, clear day with the sun hidden behind a convenient hill, with its light bouncing off a bank of cloud and scattering its rays into a diffused glow.

Shoot Indoors
Shoot indoors by a window that is not in direct sunlight, and your subject will be bathed in directional light. This helps sculpt the subject to give a more three-dimensional look. The nearer the subject is to the window, the faster the fall-off of light and the harsher the transitions from highlights to shadows. Move the subject deeper into the room, and the highlights will taper off more gently into the shadow areas.

Portable Flash
Many professionals use portable flash to take out the harshness of noonday shadows, but that creates its own look, and perhaps you want a more natural look. And flash equipment that can bathe the subject in a gentle light is neither lightweight nor small. The light from a flashgun mounted on a camera is still going to be specular – though to be fair, you can sometimes give the subject a little ‘pip’ of flash to lift the shadows. You can do this by setting the controls on the flashgun to give just a touch of additional light to the subject, rather than having the flash overpower the ambient light.

But getting reliable and consistently repeatable results from flash in any conditions means having a soft, even light. That requires something big to bounce the light from the flash through. This might be a softbox – a sheet of translucent material stretched over a frame, or a translucent umbrella to shoot through. That in turn means a bigger flash – a strobe rather than a little flashgun.

Deciding how much equipment to take and what to leave behind on account of its size and weight is another compromise the photographers must make.

The Light At The End Of The Day
If the mid-day sun in unflattering and your subject will hang around to the end of the day, you can wait. Then you can take advantage of the gentle shadows that strike obliquely and make subjects look more sculpted and three-dimensional. But at the end of the day the light levels will be lower and that brings its own problems.

A Detour Into Film Speed And Grain
If you are shooting film, you have to decide which film to use. Every film (both black and white, and color) has its own ‘look’ but every film is also rated for speed, or to put it another way, for sensitivity. Film manufacturers understand what photographers want and they formulate and produce films in a range from less sensitive to more sensitive to suit different light levels.

And of course there is a trade-off: Slower speed films deliver the smoothest results. Faster, more sensitive film show more grain.

Grain is undesirable because it makes the subject look blotchy, but in the heyday of film, newspaper photographers took that problem in their stride and developed a style built around the grain of certain films. Kodak Tri-X is a black and white film that was and is a favorite with news photographers.

The Advantages of Speed
Faster films aren’t just for shooting in darker conditions. Kodak Tri-X is rated at 400 ISO, which means it is four times more sensitive than a standard film that most consumers would buy for shooting outdoors. That means in turn that a photographer can use a shutter speed that is four times faster than he would have to use with a slow film, which enables him to capture a moment rather than a blur.

Sabastiao Salgado
Sabastiao Salgado is a world-famous photographer who uses Tri-X to document the dignity of man in the most terrible circumstances. He has learned how to make dramatic and remarkable photographs using this fast and grainy film. Google for his name if you are not familiar with his work. It is well worth it.

Changing Rolls
Photographers who shoot film will carry rolls of different film in their camera bags. They will have fast film for action and indoor shooting, and slow film for bright daylight. If you shoot a whole roll of film outdoors then a slow film will be suited to this. But what if you shoot half a roll and then move indoors?

Professional photographers were forever swapping part-exposed rolls to put a more suitable one in their camera. Then they would feed the part-exposed roll back into the camera later. And they would have to remember how many exposures they had taken before they took the roll out. It was a constant source of tension and worry.

Digital Cameras
Now with digital photography we can increase the sensitivity of the sensor just by turning a dial on the camera.

However, as we increase the speed of the sensor, the camera amplifies the signal from the sensor beyond its optimum value. And the trade-off for this extra sensitivity is that along with the increased signal comes increased noise. Noise is the name given to the digital equivalent of grain in film.

Digital Noise
However, digital noise is less attractive than the grain from which fast films suffer. It shows in the photograph as black and colored speckles as well as ‘artefacts’. Artefacts are tiny odd shapes that aren’t there at all in the subject that is being photographed. They are what the camera sensor itself makes when it does its best to fill in the gaps in the signal.

Cameras are getting better though, and in the past ten years the progress has been dramatic, with cameras that can shoot in low light with very little noise. Now photographers can shoot in range of conditions that were once unthinkable.

But despite that, the quality of light is still something that photographers have to take as it is – for better or worse. If it is midday they still have to contend with the harsh overhead light from the sun.

Coffee On The Terrace
A week or two ago, Tamara and I were sitting having coffee on a terrace. It was late afternoon and the sky was dark. But through a break in the clouds the sun shone through at a raking angle and that is when I took this shot.

I like taking photos of waiters – there’s something about the uniform that makes the scene gel. When I saw the exposure in the LCD in the back of the camera, I could see how the low, raking light had sculpted the elements in the scene.

Hunted to Near Extinction
Red kites are one of the United Kingdom success stories of the past twenty years, but they were hunted almost to extinction in the nineteenth century, with just a few birds left in the wild in Wales.

They were reintroduced into the UK 1989 at the initiative of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) which is the statutory advisor to the Government on UK and international nature conservation.

The JNCC worked together with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and English Nature (now replaced with a body called Natural England).

The reason I mention it is that the decision to reintroduce red kites was not just a matter of a conservation body rearing and releasing a few birds, but was considered at government level against the backdrop of what was in the best interests of nature conservation in the UK and to honor Britain’s international treaty obligations concerning wildlife.

The reintroduction of red kites has been very successful but they are still on the ‘amber’ watch list for endangered birds.

The risk is not from environmental factors, but from people. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes it an offence to take, injure or kill a red kite or to take, damage or destroy its nest, eggs or young. But just in May of this year the BBC reported that the illegal poisoning of a red kite in the Yorkshire Dales was being investigated by police. It had eaten bait laced with the pesticide alphachloralose, which is often used illegally as a pest control.

Red Kite Facts
The wingspan of a red kite can be as much as five or six feet (nearly two metres), but amazingly their bodies weigh just two or three pounds (less than one and half kilos). That enables them to circle around effortlessly on thermals for hours eyeing the air and the ground looking for prey.

They are not fast flyers and they are not built for overtaking birds in the air. But they can change direction quickly and catch an inexperienced juvenile crow in mid-air.

They also hunt rabbits, rats, mice, other small animals. And they eat invertebrates such as earthworms, which paints a strange picture when one imagines those claws and that beak being used to hunt a worm.

They eat carrion as well, and in the Middle Ages they were common in towns, cleaning up the streets. And for that reason they were protected. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they began to be seen as pests – hence their near extinction.

Kites have very good eyesight and when they see something that interests them, or they want to lose height, they fold their wings and swoop down, like in this series of photographs I took a few weeks ago at Harewood, a small village that surrounds a country estate near Leeds in Yorkshire.

Red kites were introduced here in 1999 and there are now quite a number of them in the area. I have seen as many as a dozen at one time, dotted about the wide expanse of sky, some just dots high in the air as they ride the thermals.

About The Photographs
These shots are crops from the central area of the series of photographs I took. I shot them with a long lens (70-200mm) but the birds were still small in the viewfinder.

I have seen red kites perch in the high branches of trees at Harewood, and one day I hope to see a red kite in a tree and have a camera with me. It always seems to be one or the other.

The ‘Why’ of Beehive Design

The behavior of honeybees is fascinating and complex, and honeybees are vital to the pollination of very many crops. This makes the fact that they are under threat of extinction worldwide from colony collapse disorder (CCD) all the more serious. [ See this article Honey Bees: Nature’s Linchpin In Great Peril ]

I wanted to take some photographs of bees, so we went to see a demonstration of beekeeping. I saw the beekeeper lifting the frames from inside the hive and examining them, but I didn’t understand the ‘why’ of what I was looking at.

Then a couple of weeks later I saw a display at the apiary of the Leeds Beeskeepers Association and the reason for the design of modern beehives became clear.

Skeps

This is a traditional straw beehive, known as a skep. It is the kind of beehive that was used for centuries in England and which continued in use until well into the 1800s. You probably recognize the shape, which is found on the labels of jars of honey and used as the design for little pottery honey pots.
It is made of a rope of straw tied into a shape to mimic the shape of a natural hive that bees might look for in a hollow in a tree or between rocks.

The design varies a little, with some skeps having the entrance at the top while others have them at the bottom, but they all share one characteristic, which is that the beekeeper has to destroy the hive to get the honey out.

The Bee Space

Then in the 1850s the Reverend L. L. Langstroth noticed that bees will not bring the surfaces of two combs closer together than a ‘bee space’ – about the width of a finger – and that piece of knowledge is what determines the interior arrangement of modern hives.

Modern Hives

Modern hives use sheets of beeswax stretched on wooden frames. The frames are hung inside the outer case of the hive with a bee space between them. A bee space is also left around the edges of the frames so that the bees can move freely inside the hive.

To encourage the bees to start building combs as quickly as possible, the sheets are impressed with a honeycomb shape. The bees could bridge the space between the frames if they wanted to, but they generally don’t want to because they want access to the cells, so the design suits the bees and the beekeeper.

In The Frame

Beekeepers use a hive tool – a flat bar of metal with a hook at one end – to lever out the frames from the hive so they can inspect them. Even with the bee space design, the bees may still extend the combs beyond the end of the frame, and the beekeeper then has to scrape that off otherwise he or she won’t be able to fit the frame back in the hive.

The honeybee in the photograph at the top of this article is sitting on a piece of comb that the beekeeper had scraped off a frame.

Bee Chains

One other fact of honeybee behavior is that honeybees like the dark and when a beekeeper lifts out a frame to examine it, the bees tend to migrate to the darkest part on the frame – at the bottom. And they may hang on and form a bee chain like in this photograph.

I actually missed the point when the chain was at its longest, which was about twice the length in this photograph.
 

Photographing Bees

I wanted to photograph honeybees for these articles and also for our ecards, but it is proving more difficult than I imagined.

The reason is that bees move constantly. They have four wings (with each pair on either side hooked together when the bee is at rest) and when they are out foraging for nectar and pollen, their wings are buzzing more or less constantly, and very fast.

And in the hive they are constantly fanning the honey to drive off moisture before they cap the cells with wax.