Road Safety and Etiquette for Photographers

Autumn is always about being out on the road. It starts sometime in September when I head north in an effort to catch the early color. As the leaves change closer to home the trips can be shorter but often more frequent. It is not unusual for me to spend most of many days out wandering the back roads looking for new and familiar color. All this driving has reminded me of the importance of driving safety and etiquette. I used to tell people that I expected that I would die in a fiery crash when, distracted by some colorful tree, I wrap my car around a tree, but over the years, I think I have learned to be more careful when out on a shoot. I am still susceptible to distractions from the breathtaking beauty of New England, but I try to follow a few simple rules in hopes of extending years that I have to enjoy splendor.



 


Keep Your Eyes On the Road
Duh. This seems too obvious to require mentioning, but it can be

Fly by Foliage

the most difficult to control. On a shoot I am always scanning the sides of the road for photographic opportunities. I look for those sudden moments when foreground and background features snap into alignment creating a special balance, but I have to constantly reminding myself that the road ahead must be the primary focus of my attention. While looking forward, I try to anticipate oncoming features and consciously limit sideward glances to fractions of a second. If I can see an approaching opportunity, I will slowly pull off the road, but often these magic alignments fly by before I realize their passing. Here is where my most important rule comes into play.

 
Drive Past and Come Back

Drive Past

My most dangerous driving behavior was my tendency to slam on the breaks when I suddenly became aware of a beautiful scene.
This often occurred without any recognition of the condition of the roadside or who was behind me. It is amazing that I'm still here, but somehow I survived to adopt my most important driving mantra, "Drive By and Come Back". It is really very simple. When I see something that might turn out to be good opportunity, I don't dwell on it. I continue down the road until I can safely turn around and then find a safe place to pull over to study the scene. Often when I return the vista is not what I had hoped, but I've only lost a few minutes of time and I get to live to see the next spectacular view just around the corner.



 

Get Your Car Off the Road

Off the Road

Being essentially lazy my natural tendency is to try to park right next to the spectacular vista. Unfortunately this often means pulling over on a narrow shoulder with my car hanging precariously into the road. This is not only unsafe, but also incredibly rude. To avoid tarnishing the reputation of photographers everywhere I try to find a place that allows me to get out of the way of passing traffic. This may require a hike back to my goal, but what the hell, after hours in the car I can really use the exercise. If my best angle places me in the middle of the road, I try to get completely off the road well in advance of any passing car. Again, this may seem an obvious precaution, but it can take patience to find a moment when I can catch the scene without being a hazard to myself and passing traffic.

 



 Let Them Past 
Even on what would appears to be deserted back roads, it is amazing how often cars will come up behind me. It is certainly, at least in part, because I tend to amble along as I survey my surroundings. It is good manners to let these innocent folks pass and I always feel more comfortable when my frequent scans of the rear view mirror show no impediment to my slow progress and occasional stops.








Limit Distractions

The Look

Do I really have to say, "Don't text while driving!"?  On a shoot I
have many potential distractions. My GPS and iPhone are mounted at the corner of the windshield, away from my view of the road, but still crying for attention. I usually have a map on the passenger seat, coffee and a sandwich and of course Nellie clamoring to be let out to pee. I do what I can. My phone is now set up for hands free operation. I select my music before I hit the road and I usually mute the lovely voice of my GPS as she constantly tries to send me down roads that are actually unnavigable cow paths. I have no easy solution for Nellie. I just try to let her out whenever it is safe. 

Ok, I Don't Hang the Map on the Dash

Most of these "Rules of the Road" should seem self evident, but it is a valuable exercise for me to state them more formally. Hopefully it will increase the chances that I may actually follow them and perhaps survive to enjoy for a little longer the wonders of New England. Drive Safe.

Jeffrey Newcomer
Partridgebrookreflections.com

ISO Control

Bradley Hill Spring, Chesterfield, NH

Getting It Right in the Digital Camera
My father handed down my first 35mm SLR at a time when
everyone was taking snap-shots with Instamatics. I know, I'm older than dirt, but I just got a $10 lifetime National Park Pass, so suck it!

Song in a Dark Czech Bar  : ISO 6400

Anyway, when I got the camera, I had to decide which speed of Kodachrome to use. I made the radical decision to forsake the time-honored ASA 25 and go with the new, lightening fast, ASA 64. My father worried that I was a communist, but that extra stop felt liberating. As film improved faster speeds became available, always with the trade-off of coarser grain. The increased sensitivity was great, but If you wanted to change film speed in the middle of a roll, you had to wind the old film back into the canister while trying to stop before the lead got sucked in all the way. I know what it feels like to open the camera and find that the lead is gone, and with it, the remaining exposures on the roll. The whole process was complicated, time consuming and wasteful. The result was that changing film to adjust speed for varying conditions was not a routine consideration. Exposure was almost always adjusted through the manipulation of just two variables; aperture and shutter speed and these two factors were unbreakably linked. For any specific aperture there is only one shutter speed that will result in the desired exposure, but the ease of adjustment of ISO in digital cameras has broken the chains of that strict inverse relationship.

With digital photography the adjustment of sensor sensitivity is achieved through the turn of a dial or tap of a button, making ISO the important third variable in controlling exposure. Through the adjustment of ISO, there is now a range of shutter speeds that can be used with a fixed aperture while keeping the exposure constant.

Nazca Boobie, Galapagos Ecuador;: ISO 1600

Conversely, when a fast shutter speed is needed to capture action, adequate depth of field can be preserved by stopping down on the aperture and compensating by increasing the ISO. The combination of easily adjustable ISO and the ridiculously high sensitivity of modern digital sensors has remarkably expanded our flexibility in controlling exposure. But this flexibiliy comes at a cost and that cost is noise.

Sensor Noise
As is true with film, higher ISO's lead to increased image noise. Newer sensors have greatly improved low light response making it possible to get quite serviceable images with surprisingly high ISO settings, but different cameras have varying abilities to handle noise. Even as it is essential to know how shutter and aperture affect exposure and image quality, it is also important to know how adjustments of ISO affect image noise and sharpness on your camera. The physics of shutter and aperture are essentially the same for all cameras, but digital sensors vary greatly and the only way to understand how your camera handles high ISO is to test it. I have to admit that, until recently, I have used the" shoot and pray" approach to high ISO, but after testing my Canon 5D Mark 2, I feel much more comfortable pushing the ISO when needed. The result has been better low light images and sharper action shots.

The Test

ISO Test Imag

1) First start with a scene that has a wide range of brightness. Dark areas are especially important since noise is most noticeable in these regions. If you wonder why this is true, check out my recent "Exposing to the Right" article.

2) Shoot a series of images using your full range of ISOs. Aperture preferred mode works best since it keeps the depth of field constant. The scene should be well illuminated to avoid long exposure noise from contaminating the images taken at low ISO. If possible, shoot in RAW for maximum flexibility.

3) In my test I first I brought each image through Adobe Camera Raw with identical settings for optimal exposure, but without any sharpening or noise reduction. Zooming in on a small segment of the image, it is easy to see how noise increased with higher ISO. To my eye, results were quite good up to about ISO 800, but then progressively deteriorated up to the max of 6400. 

Image Detail, No Noise reduction

4) I then went back to the images and used Camera Raw's excellent noise reduction function to clean up the images. The noise reduction function in the new Lightroom 4 has also been improved. There are many other good software solutions for noise reduction, but in all of them the best final result is a compromise between noise reduction and the inevitable softening of detail. In my test, noise reduction expanded the acceptable ISO range by a step or two. 

Noise Reduction in Camera

A test like this can be a helpful guide, but the impact of high ISO on any specific image will vary depending on its brightness, the importance of shaddow detail and the final destination of the image. A large fine art print will have a narrower range of acceptable ISOs than a picture destined to be a small, low resolution jpg on Flickr.

As is always true, photography is defined by the compromises you make. The control and expansion of ISO made possible by digital photography, provides a great new creative variable to the complicated equation that makes up each image. The art is in how you balance the competing factors to achieve your own solution to the equation. It is just one part of getting it right in the digital camera.