Equipment use techniques

Equipment use and Techniques


Highlighted below is some of the Equipment and techniques I used to capture my images


I have produced a certain amount of landscape material to add to my portfolio of images for this course using the equipment shown below

The majority of these images were shot on a 5 day vacation up in the Lake District. The first location I stopped at to take some photographs was a beatiful area of the lake district called Grassmere which has extensive Vista's set on the side of a large lake surrounded by small mountains

I decided to try and get some early morning shots as this is the time of the day when the lighting is at a premium for photography,so I was up and out the hotel at 6am

It was still very dark, so the only way to record images was by using a tripod as I was using really slow shutter speeds. I set up my Velbon Sherpa tripod, a very lightweight tripod but still very sturdy and it caters for all photography needs.




Tripod

I chose this tripod for it’s portability which is not to heavy. I carry this tripod with me everywhere. It is a very versatile tripod and can also be used at very low levels if needed as the legs splay out very wide as shown in this photo enabling usage at virtually ground level

My tripod at 22" fully folded, this a great tripod to pack in a rucksack

Level Indicators

I have 3 spirit levels indicators built into this triopod which is a must to get your shots level for Landscape photography. 


I also have a electronic level indicator built into my 7D camera,another very useful feature of this camera. This feature is very accurate and verifies when the camera is level by turning a red leveling line to green when the horizon becomes level, see diagram.

This very useful feature of my camera is shown as a graphic viewed  on my 3”LCD screen on the rear of my camera

I first set I set up my 7D  first on my tripod with an ISO of 400 as it was still very early morning and the light levels were just beginning to rise. I began taking images with different Iso’s until I started getting the right exposures. As the ambient light became brighter I lowered my ISO’s from 400>200>100 respectively

I prefer to use 100 ISO all the time in my photography as this always gives you the best amount of clarity in a photo with hardly any noise evident. As ISO' levels are increased noise will become more evident

Histogram

I used my Histogram a very useful tool built into my camera which shows a graph of my exposures as I took them. This is a another very useful tool for any photographer


I always check the histogram feature on my camera after every shot to check my exposures were taken correctly. Getting the peaks of the histogram in the in the middle of the graph and the ends of the graph tapering out to the zero line always give me a good guide to confirm I was using nearly the correct exposure

A typical histogram taken from a Canon 7D showing high and low peaks of the histogram graph