How To Photograph Into The Sun

An image almost a decade ago using a a polariser and two graduated filters (and held-held) shooting into the sun.

As landscape photographers the inclination to shoot into the sun is overwhelmingly powerful. Funnily enough I haven't heard the term we used to use and which was the topic of many articles when we shot predominantly on film; the term being contre-jour (shooting into the sun). This despite the fact that often the best light is in the opposite direction, or that shooting into the sun almost always leads to a nightmare exposure with an exposure value range from pure black through to burned out highlights. Still, we feel compelled to turn our lenses directly towards our galaxy’s star and photograph it as it moves from dawn to dusk through the sky. How do we get to the point where our images are actually artful as opposed to a mess of inky blacks surrounded by flare and ghosting artifacts?

Thoughts on the Nikon Z50

Last week while I was battling my way up a pass in the Drakensberg Nikon dropped the Z50 onto the world. As usual the commentary is fairly hyperbolic and boiling in indignant negativity towards the announcement. Which is weird as the camera looks fairly compelling to me.

Confusing Circles and Airy Disks: A relatively simple explanation of depth of field and hyperfocal focusing

After much searching of the internet and reading of photographic textbooks (the dense kind that have little if any pictures) I discovered I’m absolutely clueless as to how to actually calculate hyperfocal distance and little better at understanding it. My goal then became to reverse this if at all possible. This tutorial then is my attempt to wade through what I saw as rather complex math and distil it into something that makes sense to other mathematical luddites like me. I’ll start the article with the simple stuff, and move on to the more complicated matters after. 

An Obsession With Decay

Photographers have a strange affinity with ruins. Some of the earliest daguerreotypes are of some of what we consider famous ruins now - the likes of the Parthenon - or of decrepit farm houses. Early photographs were used as a historical status quo image, creating a record of historical architecture, as was the case with the 1851 ‘Heliographic Mission’. This was an official mission to record historical buildings, many of which were in a state of ruin and which were earmarked for restoration or were in the actual process of restoration. Prominent photographers of the day, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave le Gray, Edourad Baldus and Mestral were involved in this technical exercise. At this point the definition of “photography as art” was still in its nascent stages. This would form more thoroughly as the Calotype became more prominent in use.