Since then I’ve been fascinated with the idea of creating fake miniature shots, and I finally got round to giving it a go.

First, some theory: when taking a picture of a model or other small object the depth of field is often very narrow. That is, the range of distances within which objects are in focus is small. So the object you are focusing on will be sharp, but even objects immediately in front or behind will fall out of focus. For some reason we humans are aware of this, so we interpret narrow depth of field as being “miniature”.

You can fake miniature photography by taking a photo of a real-life scene, but heavily restricting the depth of field. This can be done with tilt-shift lenses, or post-production processing. Since I can’t afford a tilt-shift lens I went for the cheap (read “free”) option of using TiltShiftMaker.com.

Dundee from above

First I found a good vantage point that would let me look down on a scene – which increases the appearance of looking down onto a model. My vantage point was Dundee Law Hill, which has fantastic views across the city. I snapped a picture of the city from above, looking for an area with plenty of detail broadly on a horizontal axis. The image was processed slightly to improve the white balance (the colours were a little washed out in the original), but that’s all that has been done to this image.

So now that we’ve got a decent image to use, we move on to the fakery. I used the tools at www.tiltshiftmaker.com, but if you have the skills you can do this in Photoshop or other image editor of your choice. I don’t, so I went for the easy route!

TiltShiftMaker makes the whole process very easy: just upload the image you want to play with, and you can then adjust various settings such as which part of the image will be in focus, how quickly the focus will drop off, and by how much. There’s an option to view a small preview of your image until you’re happy with it and download the full size copy.

Dundee in miniature
Click image to see larger version

You may have to play with the settings a few times, or possibly experiment with different images, but after a while you’ll get a convincing “miniature” photo. Here’s my picture of a “model” of Dundee. Weird effect, isn’t it?

I’m pretty happy with my first attempt at miniature fakery, but I’d improve on this by seeking out a scene with detail much closer to the horizontal, and perhaps with some people in. This effect gets really weird when you start to introduce tiny people to the scene.

What about you? Have you tried this? Or has this inspired you to try? If you have any examples of fake miniatures you have taken post them in the comments for us all to see. We’d love to see how you’ve tackled this technique.

Your camera’s lens is there to focus light onto the sensor. Light enters the front of the lens and exits the rear… simple. But the lens opening is only a certain size, and this opening is referred to as the aperture. Try making a ring with your finger and thumb and imagine that this is your lens; the hole that you look through is the aperture.

The aperture controls the amount of light passing through the lens, just as the contractions and expansions of your pupil do in your eye. If you have a fixed aperture lens you can’t change the size of the hole, but a lens with a changeable aperture can be handy if you’re taking long-exposure shots and don’t want the image to over-expose (you’d set a small aperture) or if you’re taking photos in low light and don’t want the exposure time to be too long (you’d set a wide aperture in this case).

Aperture size also has another effect, though, in that it determines the depth of field. The depth of field is the range of distances within which objects will be in focus. A narrow depth of field means that you have to be pretty spot on with your focus since objects that are closer or further away will fall out of focus quickly, whilst a wide depth of field means much more will be in focus. A wide aperture gives a narrow depth of field, and a narrow aperture gives a wide depth of field as the light passing through the lens is pretty tightly focused by trying to pass through a narrow hole, a bit like pinhole photography. This is great if you want to play around with which objects are in focus and which aren’t, say if you wanted the background of an image to be way out of focus whilst keeping the main subject sharp.

OK, so that’s what the aperture is and some of what you can use it for, but how do you control it? If your camera’s on an automatic programme it’ll take care of itself, but choose aperture priority mode (Av on my Canon EOS 1000D) and you have control. The thing to remember is that aperture is measured in f-numbers and that the higher the f-number is, the smaller the aperture is. So the smallest aperture on my kit lens is f29, whilst the largest is f4.5. It seems kind of counter-intuitive, but it’s just one of those things you’ll have to get used to!

If you look at the image on this page you can see the aperture in the middle of the lens, a kind of iris made up of overlapping blades. You can also have a look at the aperture on your own lens by setting your camera to aperture priority mode, selecting a small aperture (high f-number), and pressing the aperture preview button. Have a look in the front of your lens and you should see it… if you’re not sure try pressing and releasing the aperture preview a few times and see if you can see it moving. And have fun experimenting with aperture sizes in your photography!

If you have any questions, comments, or I missed something, please feel free to chip in by leaving a comment.

Cars are excellent for photographing light trails; they’re fast and, at night, emit good strong light. The first time I tried this I didn’t have a tripod with me which is a nightmare given how long the exposure is. I was completely unable to hold the camera steady enough to avoid camera shake. However, going back with a gorillapod allowed me to fix the camera to an overpass and snap the vehicles below. I used my camera’s Tv (Time Value) setting to get a good long exposure but found that the action of pressing the shutter release was causing a bit of vibration. The solution was to use the camera’s timer to press the release, step back, and I would then get a good steady shot. The final shot of cars passing underneath was taken with an exposure time of 20 seconds and a bit of experimentation with the ISO number and aperture so that it didn’t overexpose and look very washed out.

What would I do differently next time? Well, I’d like to take a shot from the roadside so that the lights are much closer to the camera, and I hear that busses are excellent for this because they give off a load of light. Perhaps a trip to the local bus station is in order!

The second thing I wanted to try was “light graffiti”. This is the art of drawing in the air using a torch and a long-exposure shot. So, in the darkness of my house, I set the camera up with a small aperture and a long (30 second) exposure time. The camera’s timer was used to give me a few seconds to get round to the front for the drawing and a small hand torch was used to provide the light. The trick here was to remember to keep the torch pointing at the camera as much as possible (it wasn’t very powerful), and to remember to switch it off wherever there’s meant to be a gap in the line! Oh, and you need to write backwards if you want it to come out the right way out in the photo, although you could always reverse the image in photoshop if you do it the wrong way round.

If I were doing this again I would like to use a different kind of torch, as my LED torch gives a very white light. Incandescent bulbs give a warmer light, but maybe I could just change the colour by sticking some coloured film on the LED torch.

There’s loads you can do with this, light and long exposures give you so many opportunities to be creative. If you’re outdoors you can outline street furniture (like post boxes or benches) in light, or you can try different light sources (like glow-sticks) to achieve different results.

Have you tried photographing light trails or graffiti? Why not post some examples of your work in the comments, and give us some hints and tips? I think this is a fantastic technique, and would love to know how others have got on, and how this can be done even better. And if you have any questions, post them in the comments section too!

So I want to ask for your help. Can you comment and tell me if there’s anything you particularly want to know about photography? What questions do you have? What techniques do you want to try out?

I can’t promise to cover everything, but I’ll certainly do my best. Go on, tell me what you want to know!

It boasts an 18 Megapixel APS-C Canon CMOS sensor, and continuous shooting at 8 frames per second for up to 94 shots! Its viewfinder also covers 100% of what the lens is picking up, meaning what you see is exactly what you’ll get when you release the shutter. It takes both EF and EF-S lenses, so if you’ve already invested in some you won’t have wasted your money (some of the Canons only take EF lenses).

If you want to know more about this camera you can read a comprehensive review on Photography Blog. I really like the look of this, and if money were no object I’d be sorely tempted. If you do have the money (around £1600 or $2000, body only), the Canon EOS 7D is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (body only), or again from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com as a kit including 25-135mm lens.

Before we look at a couple of ways to do this, what effect will it have? Well, the photo above is of a stream running through a butterfly farm. You’ll hopefully notice that the water looks a bit milky, which is the effect of a long exposure and bubbles/splashes in the water. This looks particularly good with waterfalls, and extra long exposures can turn a choppy sea into a beautifully smooth surface. You can also use long exposures to  photograph a busy scene, but any people moving in the scene blur or even disappear entirely.

How is it done, though? I usually just set my camera to aperture priority mode and select as small an aperture as possible. The camera automatically compensates for the lower levels of light passing through the aperture by increasing the exposure time. Another option is to use shutter priority mode to tell the camera exactly how long you want the shutter to stay open for. Whichever you go for, though, I’d strongly recommend using a tripod as any movement of your hand is going to show up as a blur… and not the one you wanted in the first place.

All in all this is a pretty simple technique, but there is a problem: having the shutter open for longer than normal means that a lot of light passes through the lens… so much so that on a sunny day your photos stand a good chance of being overexposed and unusable. If you’re taking photos indoors or in poor light you’ve got a bit of leeway, but if you do find your images are overexposing try lowering the ISO speed, or using a Neutral Density filter to cut down the light. With a bit of experimenting you’ll be taking long-exposure shots in no time!

Got a good shot using a long exposure and want to show it off? Feel free to share in the comments – I’d recommend Flickr as a great place to put your photos online.

In those pre-digital days these things seemed magical, and the discontinuation of polaroid film is, I think, quite a loss.

Well, it’s not going to bring back polaroid, but if you want the polaroid look Rollip.com allows you to convert your digital photos online!

The process is kept very simple – just pick what style of photo you want, choosing from imitation polaroids (complete with that classic “frame”) or full-sized with the same colour and focus effects applied. As with Poladroid, I think the recreation of the dodgy colours you used to get with polaroids is pretty spot on.

If you go for the imitation polaroid you’ll get to choose which style of frame to go for, with a variety of text styles for captioning your photo and other nice effects (like the coffee-stain I used on the photo above!) Then upload your original image and you get the processed version back out. Simple!

That’s it really; you can download your processed image, send a link to your friends, or share it on social sites… and when someone asks you why your picture looks a bit funny you can tell them about the good old days of polaroid cameras

Drop in to Rollip.com and see what you come up with!

Unfortunately, rain and expensive electronic devices don’t mix too well. I got chatting to one of the racing teams’ photographers who showed me that there was a lot of condensation in the LCD screen on top of his camera. He could still take photos, it hadn’t completely ruined his camera, but he was concerned that he’d “got too much water in it” the previous day and wasn’t quite sure if it would dry out properly again. For my mind, any water is too much water… I don’t want to find my camera has died because of a short-circuit or some other water damage.

There are a number of professional camera jackets available that will protect your kit, but if you’re not in the mod for splashing out big money you can make something pretty effective yourself with a sheet of polythene (or a plastic bag), some electrical tape and a lens hood.

I used the packing bag from (believe it or not) a toilet seat to make my cover, but if you can get a polythene dust sheet you can also tape that into shape to make a bag. The bag I used was large enough to fit over my camera and lens with plenty of extra room. I wouldn’t recommend putting your head in the bag but that extra room meant there was less likely to be any snagging as I zoomed or focused the lens. I cut a hole in one side that was the same size as my lens hood, and then taped the lens hood into the hole with electrical tape – this let me have the camera inside the bag and provided a little extra protection against rain. On the other side I cut a small slit, removed the viewfinder cover from the camera, stretched the slit over the viewfinder and then put the cover back on. This meant that I didn’t need to lift the side of the bag up to look through the viewfinder and with a little care I could ensure no water got there.

So that was my very simple, and very cheap, camera raincover. It actually worked pretty well, although sometimes the bag would blow in front of the lens and obscure what I was trying to take a photo of… but at least my camera stayed dry!

There were still some problems, though, that you might encounter yourself while photographing in the rain. Wind, as I’ve already mentioned, would occasionally blow my raincover in front of the lens, but it would also blow rain onto the lens. This gives rise to blurry areas in your photographs and can confuse the autofocus system. Solution? Well, you could use a lens cloth to wipe it try every now and again… I used my t-shirt. Rain on my hands also caused condensation inside the bag which, while not a big problem, isn’t really desirable. If  you’re doing this, try and keep your hands as dry as possible.

So that’s how I managed to take photos in the rain, but do you have any other tips? I’d guess it’s hard to take photos facing upwards? Or have I missed something altogether? Feel free to contribute in the comments!

There are a few causes of lag in compact cameras (updating the viewing screen, focusing, writing the image to memory, to name a few), but DSLRs tend to do pretty well when it comes to keeping the delay between pressing and capturing as low as possible.

The use of an optical viewfinder helps here, since it works at, well, the speed of light. There’s no delay between real-world events and what you see in the viewfinder UNLESS you’re using live mode to view the preview on your camera’s LCD screen. The process of encoding the image and sending it to the screen means it will always lag very slightly behind what’s actually happening in front of you.

The physical movement of the reflex mirror that allows light to hit the camera’s sensor obviously takes time, which is another source of shutter lag in all SLRs. However, that movement is so quick you’re pretty unlikely to miss your subject because of it. In the Canon EOS 1000D, for instance, the lag is listed on “Imaging Resource” as 0.087 seconds, whilst the comparable Nikon D60 is listed as 0.093 seconds. Those times are for when the lens has already focused, though, so all that needs to happen is for the camera to capture the shot. If you’re waiting for your lens to focus then the time will be increased – and the times will be different depending on the subject, the lens, and the conditions.

So if you’re looking to keep your lag time as low as possible, and increase the likelihood of capturing the very shot you wanted, use your optical viewfinder and prefocus if possible. That way you leave the camera with as little work to do as possible, and allow it to be as quick as it can be.

The physics of polarisation is a bit deeper than I want to go here, but if you’re really interested you can check out the Wikipedia article on polarisation for some background on what the filter is doing. Let’s just look at what effect a polariser will have on your photography here!

If your camera has an autofocus system (and it’s pretty likely to), then you will want to go for a circular polariser as linear polarisers can prevent the AF from working. The polarising filter consists of two rings – one that screws into the front of your lens and one that freely rotates and contains the actual filter. By turning the front ring you filter the light entering your lens based on how it’s polarised, which is very interesting but you’d have to ask what the point is.

Well, when light is reflected on a non-metallic surface it tends to become polarised. So by filtering that light you can filter out reflections from many different surfaces. This can let you see through windows where you would otherwise just see the reflection; it can let you see through the surface of a pond, or it can help you remove unwanted reflections in a car’s paintwork. Some of the light from the sun is also polarised, and using a polariser in landscape photography can darken the sky and increase the saturation of the colours in your photograph.

Just as a quick demo of what the filter can do, here’s a shot I took of a car I’ve been lucky enough to be testing recently. The first is with the polariser rotated to allow reflections through, and the second with it rotated to block them.

Reflections On...

Reflections Off...

I hope you can see the usefulness of this filter, and maybe it’s sparking off some ideas as to where you could use one. I’d recommend going to a park and playing around with the reflections on a lake or pond. If you’re after a filter you can get hold of them from about £14 or $18, and if you’ve got some great shots using this kind of filter feel free to share them in the comments section!

Find polarising filters on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (affiliate links).