Underexposing

[Ron Kruger]

Try underexposing your shots for dramatic effect and maximum color saturation. I have attached some examples to show what I mean.

[Garooch]

Interesting. What was the background?

[Ron Kruger]

It was taken in the soft glow of evening light right in the trout stream where this brown was caught. By getting close and underexposing so that the camera was stopped down (open all the way, which decreases depth of field), the guy holding the fish and the water behind it went black.

[Ron Kruger]

You guys can do much the same thing with your flower shots. Chose a time when the light is soft, but still bright during early morning or late evening. Chose a subject that is in full sunlight, but where the background is not. You'll have to use manual overrides to stop your apature down all the way to cut down on depth of field. Focus is critical. Do that manually too. Take a shot at the normal reading, then a few subsequent shots, setting the camera to underexpose 1/4 stop, then 1/2, then 3/4, then 1 full stop.

[Dasiavue]

Interesting idea. You use a 35 mm SLR camera?

[Ron Kruger]

Yes, a Nikon, and I still shoot film. The trout pictures here were taken with Kodachrome 25, which you can't even buy any more. I know I need to go digital, but the type of equipment I need for my work is between $2,000 and $10,000, depending upon lenses. I just can't afford it, so I shoot film in my Nikon (which cost me about $3,000 back in the late 1980s) and bought a professional scanner to turn the slides and negatives digital for emailing with my articles. Most all of my shooting is for specific illustrative purposes, not art, and I pretty much have to go with what I expose, because all the newspapers and magazines strongly instruct their photographers NOT to alter images with PhotoShop or similar software programs before submitting them.

[Dasiavue]

You do magazine shoots? What kind of things do you shoot for newspapers and magazines? I pretended to be a photojournalist once in London...I took photos at a demonstration. I had fun doing it.

When you mentioned Kodachrome the first thing that came to mind was Simon and Garfunkel...kind of ages me, doesn't it? lol

[Ron Kruger]

I'm a free-lance writer with a syndicated column of limited distributed in Western Kentucky, St. Louis and Detroit. I also write magazine articles for various publication around the nation, from slicks to tabloids. It’s all how-to, where-to stuff that requires illustrations. Photography is a necessary part of the package. I've also served as the editor (including photo editor) of a high-quality magazine that featured full-page and double-page spreads and won a national award for design.
Now, this all sounds much more impressive than it is. Free-lance writing is no way to make a living. The way I like to put it is: everyone seems to admire the written word, except those who pay for it. Making a living at free-lance photography is even tougher, but if you can combine the two you can scrape by on an income similar to flipping burgers somewhere.
But I love what I do and have no intention of ever retiring. As I said somewhere else, I once had a job where I hated to wake up because I knew I had to go to work. Now I wish I didn’t have to waste time sleeping.

[Ron Kruger]

The main key to taking pictures outdoors is to concentrate upon the nuances of available light.
I learned to take photographs before anything was "auto." During the 1980s, a friend of mine who did a lot of work for National Geographic convinced me to take the automatic plunge, and I bought a state-of-the-art, fully automatic Nikon. The thing that really sold me on it, was that with a flash unit that cost almost as much as a good camera, I was able to take the kind of complicated "flash-fill" shots that made National Geographic famous, without having to figure it out.
I've come to realize, however, that point-and-shoot is deceptively simple, and while it does free the mind to concentrate more on composition, it often prevented me from thinking about better ways to unitize outdoor light, so over time I have found myself overriding most of the automatic functions.
Auto-focus is fine for tack sharp pictures, if the depth-of-field is high, but most of the time it is not, so most of the time I focus manually by going past both ways, then back to the sharpest possible focus, the way I learned to do 30 years ago.
Auto-exposure is even more complicated, really, and even spot metering is designed to "average" the available light in a given area, so I've slowly reverted back to "bracketing" every shot (taking one shot at normal reading, then one on each side of normal). Underexposing a bracket or two is what most often puts drama and pop into exposures and concentrates the eye on the main subject.
These old tricks, plus the old advice to take a bunch of different exposures of every scene worth a shot (not just in exposure and focus, but in angle as well), are still applicable today if you want your photographs to be more than just snapshots at best, or pictures that could have been taken with a cell phone at worst.

[Ron Kruger]

It's rather simple, really. If you want your pictures to stand out in the point-and-shoot crowd, you've got to do something that goes beyond what they used to call the "idiot camera" mentality. You've got to do something different, and the best way to do that is to concentrate on the nuances of available light and learn what happens inside your camera on various settings.