This is the eighth in a series of articles discussing some of the photography techniques I’ve learned and employ when I’m out on a shoot.

There’s a single photograph that sparked my love of photography and it’s pictured right.

My father had a book called ‘The Complete Kodak Book Of Photography’ published back in 1998 that I used to look at which captured my imagination. I say ‘had’ because it’s now sitting on my bookshelf and has done for some years (sorry dad!).

It’s a book that masquerades as an information resource for budding amateur photographers but frankly it’s just filled with amazing photos taken by photographers whose lenses I’m not fit to clean. I look at it now really appreciating how good some of them are but also understanding what makes them so good. I’ll admit I was initially drawn to the nude photography section but it was the photo above that really piqued my curiosity (and I’m sticking to that story!). It is in fact a long exposure (probably just a couple of seconds) and that’s why the water has that ethereal look to it.

When I first took my photography to the next level by heading out with my friend Ade and learning from him, I really wanted to recreate a shot like the Kodak one. Luckily I live in Yorkshire which has more than its fair share of rain and therefore waterfalls. And everybody loves waterfalls! Here’s what I’ve learned about photographing waterfalls…

The best conditions to take pictures of waterfalls happens to be dark, cloudy and preferably miserable days. It just so happens that Yorkshire has a surprisingly high proportion of such days. My aim when photographing a waterfall is to create a long enough exposure (in the order of several seconds) such that I capture the flowing, soft look of the water without it burning out - i.e. the water appearing completely white and therefore devoid of detail. This is why sunny days are no good, the water is so brightly lit by the sun that if you expose correctly for the water (which I’ll mention in a moment) the background will be far too dark. Firstly, here’s probably the best shot of a waterfall I’ve taken and it wasn’t difficult to do:

This is Scaleber Force near Settle and it was a truly miserable day. It was cloudy, dark, raining on and off, the ground was muddy and slippery underfoot and nobody else was within miles of us - they were either at home or in the pub. Perfect waterfall weather! Since it was so dull and the light flat I was able to get the smooth flow of the water and have a long enough exposure so that the background was also bright enough to make out.

Right, so the objective is to have as long an exposure as possible (well, longer than a second or two). This means as low an ISO as you can get (for maximum quality) - 100 in my case. You need as narrow an aperture as you can get without losing quality to cut down on the light entering and maximise the depth of field - f16 is probably the best compromise unless you have a really nice lens although I usually just go with f22 - I’m not doing A1 prints! A circular polariser cuts down on the amount of light reaching the lens (they’re great on a bright day for cleaning up light but that’s irrelevant here) and any other filters you can fit on to cut down on the light help too. I had a 3 ND grad on for improved darkness. Then it’s a matter of composing the shot - you may need to remove the filters so you can see through the viewfinder! The composition is up to you, it depends on the waterfall, the surroundings and many other things - it’s best to try as many different angles as you can and see which works when you get home.

Then you need to take a meter reading and set the exposure time. As I mentioned in my piece on exposure the best way to set your exposure is with spot metering (or partial metering if your camera doesn’t have it). So  zoom in to the waterfall itself, point at the brightest part and take a reading, adjusting the exposure time until the meter reckons it’s 1/3 - 2/3 of a stop underexposed. That way you’ll know you won’t burn out the highlights of the waterfall. I prefer shots to be underexposed so I can dodge them later in Photoshop if they need a bit if brightening, I find that over-exposing and trying to darken them later yields lesser results, but that’s just me.

Click the shutter button on your cable release (you don’t want to move the camera and blur the shot by pressing the button on the camera do you?), step back and look around while the shot’s taken. Maybe you could look for other interesting angles to pass the time (it can be quite tedious standing around for 30 seconds while a shot is taken). Have a quick look at the histogram on the camera and the preview to make sure it looks properly exposed and carry on! Don’t delete any if they look terrible though, those preview screens are no good at measure quality, it’s not until you get back and look on the computer that you know if you have any crackers.

Technically waterfalls are pretty straightforward to photograph if you have dull lighting conditions as long as you take your meter reading from the brightest part of the water. The tricky part, as always, is composing a picture that makes people wish they were there and fires their imagination. Just like that photo from my dad’s book did all those years ago for me.

Next: Black and White or Colour?

Well my head's just about stopped spinning following the Future of Web Apps conference. The third day consisted of a series of workshops, the idea being you chose one for the morning and one for the afternoon.

The morning workshop I chose was Khoi Vinh - who is the design director for NYTimes.com - talking about using a grid technique to design web sites. I hadn't been sure if I'd find this one interesting or not but it turned out to be a fascinating insight into web site design. He's a properly trained graphic designer and unlike me (who used to be a web designer many moons ago) actually knows what he's doing - I'd always had a "keep tweaking until it looks right" approach to design whereas he demonstrated a very impressive technique for designing web content. I left the workshop immediately wanting to redesign this site and any others I can get my hands on so it must have worked!

The afternoon workshop I went to was run by Stefan Magdalinski who is the CTO of Moo. Moo, in case you haven't heard of them, are a company that make business cards. Doesn't sound very exciting, but they make them with a twist. You can choose pictures for the front of them from your Flickr or Bebo photos, they're a different size to your standard, run-of-the-mill business cards and they're made in such a way that they look incredibly cool. As soon as I saw some in the flesh I immediately wanted some! They're so cool you'll want to give them out to people at parties. Go check out the site, order some and then come back here to keep reading… Off you go! 

Stefan's a really interesting guy. He's been in the software game for years and is a bit of a start-up veteran. He's a proper techie and led us through the challenges of creating Moo along with some of his other past work (particularly UpMyStreet). He had some interesting stories about how Moo came to being, the pitfalls of working to someone else's API (such as Flickr's API - something I know all about with John's Background Switcher) and 3rd party libraries, the problems of getting popular FAST and a host of other things you'll likely come across if you start your own web app company. Very interesting stuff and I've already ordered my Moo cards and persuaded some friends to do the same - all it takes is to just show people and they consistently say "wow, I want some!".

I must take this opportunity to thank my good friend John Topley. Attending FOWA07 was his suggestion and he had the misfortune of being stuck with me for the whole 3 days! How he managed to cope with my dry wit and terrible sense of humour I'll never know! Fortunately he's a long-in-the-tooth cynic like me so we were on the same wavelength for most of the time and both cringed every time we heard buzzwords like "mashup".

John also introduced me to the exciting world of the Mac. There were far more Mac users there than PCs and playing around with Mac OS X for a while showed me just how much Vista's GUI is a copy. Really, pretty much every "innovation" is a straight copy from the Mac and when you see some of them in the context of the Mac they make a lot more sense than on Vista. And it's true what they say, out of the box the Mac really is full of creative-enabling software whereas the PC is all business and starchy shirt and tie. Those Mac vs. PC ads are right!

I'll definitely be going to the conference next year and you never know, by then I might have some exciting web app that'll change the world myself! All I need to do is think how I can bring background switching to the online world - or port it to the Mac where it'll be much more fun for starters…

Well, I’ve just spent the last 2 days attending the Future Of Web Apps listening to a lot of interesting people talk about their start-ups, their successful companies that came from start ups, venture capital funding, some of the movers and shakers in the California tech industry talking about moving and shaking and a sprinkling of other fascinating people from the likes of Yahoo!, Google and Amazon.

I must confess that I’m not really one of these people who pays much attention to hype and “the next big thing”. I know there’s a whole scene of bloggers who’re hyping lots of start ups, lots of cool web apps out there that “everybody’s using” and while a few years ago I’d have been right in there trying everything out and getting amazingly enthusiastic about everything for 5 minutes then moving on, I’m a bit long in the tooth nowadays and prefer to spend my time doing constructive things rather than jumping on bandwagons. I’ve heard of sites like Techcrunch and such but haven’t really paid any attention to them. Enter John The Cynic!

Having seen first hand what it’s like being in a company that goes from start-up to acquisition and the problems associated with growing from 6 people to 30 it was like a trip down memory lane listening to the stories of companies like Last.fm (which I’ll definitely be checking out - I was impressed by the calibre of the people, how they’ve done what they’ve done and what they’ve actually done). I was reminded of the hard work, the constantly changing direction, the mistakes made, the highs of getting it right and so on. Happy days!

What’s definitely different from when I went through all this is that web software (as opposed to the vision software in the electronics industry I worked in) has to have a community around it using the current (I hate to utter the words) “Web 2.0″ strategy of building interest and ultimately making money. What also struck me is that the some of the challenges are one hell of a lot less of a problem than what I worked on. If you want to try out a new feature on the people using your software, the time between idea and going live with it can be a matter of days, or even hours and the associated costs are much lower. Whereas in nasty old monolithic client software you can’t really get away with that and it ends up taking months before you can try something out (what with long release cycles you can’t just drop in things left right and centre). Plus the tools and technologies available today make realising your idea as a web app a technically far easier proposition than making your dreams a reality a few years ago in so far as your plumbing : creating ratio is much more weighted towards creating. These are good times to be a software developer!

Highlights for me included seeing Kevin Rose (the man behind Digg) talk about the development of Digg and some of the problems facing it. It’s hugely popular and having found myself on the front page of Digg last year I can only guess at how many people use the site. It’s an interesting problem growing a site to the point that it has 900,000 active users in the same place and they don’t all get along. Trying to manage the social aspect of a site like that is a tricky one and must be fun to work on!

Another highlight for me was Jonathan Rochelle from Google. He’s one of the men behind Google Docs and Spreadsheets and was one of the founders of the company acquired by Google that did the spreadsheets part. I’ve used Google Spreadsheets right from when it came out and even did a fair bit of wedding planning on it! Being able to have my good lady looking at it at work while I’m at my office doing the same, both making changes at the same time and chatting over the built in IM was very useful indeed.

But the best thing for me was seeing the man who invented PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf up on stage. Nobody who’s worked on web software over the last 10 years could fail to have come across PHP - it made developing web apps orders of magnitude easier than it was before and forms the cornerstone of LAMP - as used by a great many web start-up companies and BigCo’s besides. Yet for such an important person he was - as is often the case with very smart people - extremely humble and pragmatic. He was definitely from the old school and made a very interesting speaker.

What I found most peculiar - aside from people’s over-enthusiasm over announcements about things like OpenID (which for me like is swapping a bag of cats for a can of worms (that’s the long-in-the-tooth cynic in me kicking in again, sorry)) - was some of the people in the audience. Those who sat and blogged everything that was said in real-time did a very impressive job and I doubt my brain would have let me do that. However, there were loads of people sitting there playing games, emailing, looking at CVs and just generally doing anything but listen to the speakers. Makes me wonder why they (or their companies) have spent good money to send them to a conference where they’re not paying attention.

I always find it strange that people think they can listen, email, IM, play Risk and think all at the same time and be “super-productive” - “connected” as it were. It’s simply not possible - you end up doing a half-arsed job of all of the above. It’s a proven fact that merely talking on a mobile phone while driving massively reduces your ability to concentrate, and neither of those activities requires much brain power.

However, I’ve come away from the conference feeling positive and with a few ideas floating around my head that weren’t there before. Don’t expect any world-beating web applications to appear from me any time soon, but it’s certainly expanded my point of view and exposed me to a world I’d paid little attention to. The future of web apps for me has just started.

Well, this is an interesting turn of events. I'm sat on a train down to London on my way to the Future Of Web Apps conference. My friend John said a while ago that he was going to go and suggested I give it a look. Just perusing the list of people going and the subjects they were covering for 30 seconds was all I needed to start pestering my boss to let me go! That was a few months ago and suddenly it starts tomorrow.

I'm sure I'll meet lots of interesting people, listen to lots of interesting things, learn a hell of a lot, have a few ideas pop into my head and come back with my creative juices flowing at Maximum Homerdrive. I'm not going to do the Scoble thing of sitting in a conference blogging about what's going on as it happens. As anybody who's seen me cook knows, I struggle to poach eggs at the same time as making toast - so I'll stick to doing one thing at a time if you don't mind!

I've never been to anything like this before so I'm not entirely sure what to expect but I'll keep my mind and eyes open. Should be fun! I'll keep you posted…

I needed to scan something in to my computer and I realised as I switched my scanner on that my newly installed copy of Vista hadn't seen it yet. "No problem" I thought, it'll either find the drivers itself or I'll put the CD I got with it in.

It failed to find the drivers both on the web and on the CD. "Strange" I thought. I assumed it would be using some standard means of communicating with the computer (TWAIN) that Vista could easily handle. So I went to Epson's web site to get the latest driver and realised there weren't any for Vista (yet there were for some of their other scanners). It's not an ancient scanner, probably a couple of years old so I was surprised I couldn't get it to work.

After a reboot I was greeted with this friendly message:

Not very reassuring and in all the years I've been using Microsoft Windows, this is the first time a piece of hardware has failed to survive an update. May it rest in peace…

Of course, I also have a server running Windows 2003 lying around so I plugged it into that and the scanner worked as sweet as a nut. But it's interesting to see that underneath quite a lot clearly has changed in Vista and the days of Microsoft's legendary obsession with backwards compatibility may be starting to fade. Either that or Epson haven't updated their drivers yet and I'm just getting burned for being an early adopter!

I was idly flicking through the recent transactions on my bank account the other night when I saw a few items I didn't recognise. It seemed that I'd been to Tesco four times over the previous 2 days and had spent around £60 on each occasion. Since I haven't actually stepped foot inside any Tesco store for about a year, this was clearly wrong.

I then realised that in fact someone had managed to clone my card and was spending my money! The fact that it was my debit card and therefore taking money directly out of my current account meant that, unlike a credit card where there's a few weeks delay where you can sort these things out, the money had already gone from my account!

Naturally I called my bank and told them what happened. In fact, they were really good, told me they'd pass the details to their fraud department, stop my card and send me a new one. The next day I looked at my statement again and spotted another 2 transactions (at the same Tesco and each for around £60) that must have gone through before they stopped the card. Another phone call to the bank and they were added to the fraud list. So effectively I was out of pocket by £360 by someone who'd managed to copy my debit card details.

Thing is, I'm ultra-cautious with my debit card. If I'm not sure about it I'll use my credit card (for the time delay effect I mentioned above) so it's a mystery to me how they managed to skim it (which I'm assuming is what they did). Plus, I thought Chip & Pin was supposed to stop all this sort of thing. So much for that.

Luckily, my bank refunded me the money with no questions a couple of days later, so kudos to them! But for all those nay-sayers who say worrying about card skimming is just a lie spread by the banks to make you scared and that it can never happen to you, it most certainly can. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

I wonder if they bought anything nice from Tesco. Maybe some of those tasty flapjacks. Flapjacks are nice! 

This is the seventh in a series of articles discussing some of the photography techniques I've learned and employ when I'm out on a shoot.

I've been dreading writing this article because you can write an entire book about exposure. And in fact many people have, some I would recommend are:

• The Perfect Exposure by Jim Zuckerman
• Understanding Exposure… by Bryan Peterson
• Night and Low Light Photography: The Complete Guide by Lee Frost

If you really want to master the art of exposure, you should pick up a book and read it as it can be complex and subtle subject. I'll give a brief overview of aperture and shutter speed, then I'll talk about why I always use manual mode on my camera and how I use it to get the exposure right. Following articles will build on what I discuss below.

First of all, the two main components of exposure are aperture and shutter speed (I'll not get into the others at this point like ISO as it's just going to be confusing). Generally, a wide aperture is going to let more light in (think of a big window in a room - a lot of light will be allowed in on a sunny day, whereas if you have a port hole instead of a window, not a lot of light will get in at all). However, to complicate things, the wider the aperture, the shorter the depth of field. If you want to take a photo of someone where they are in sharp focus and the background is very blurred, use as wide an aperture as possible. If, however, you want the background and the person in the foreground in sharp focus, use a narrower aperture.

The same composition taken with a narrower aperture will need the shutter to be open longer to let the same total amount of light in as before. So you can take two photos of the same scene with the same amount of light being captured by the camera, but in one the aperture is wide and the shutter speed fast, whereas in the other the aperture is narrow and the shutter speed much slower. In the former the depth of field is short and in the latter the depth of field is much greater. You still with me?

One more confusion is that a wide aperture is denoted by a low f-number on a camera (such as f1.8) and a narrow aperture has a high f-number (like f22). If you want the full run-down on f-numbers, check out this Wikipedia article. 

As I mentioned when I talked about ND Grad Filters, the human eye can capture huge differences in brightness from the reflection of the sun on a rain-soaked road to the darkness of the ground under the shadow of a tree - and all at the same time. A camera is nowhere near as good, only being able to resolve a few stops of light (remember that a one-stop increase in exposure equates to double the amount of light, so 2 stops is 4 times the light, 3 stops is 8 times and so on). This means that the brightest and darkest things in your picture don't want to be more than a few stops apart. But how can you tell?

Well your camera has a light meter built into it (I'm assuming you're using a DSLR of course). When you point your camera at something and half-click the shutter, it'll activate the light meter and it'll show you something like this (which is the display from a Canon EOS 400D):

If you use spot metering (so the needle is telling you what the exposure is just around the centre of the viewable area) and point the camera at something and the needle is in the centre, then that portion of the picture is correctly exposed. However, that's only a small part of the story. Say you point it at the brightest part of the shot (maybe the sky) and change the shutter speed or aperture until it's just under the +2 marker. Then point it at the darkest part, say the ground. If it's above -2 then your whole picture ranges across just under 5 stops of exposure (rather confusingly). It probably means it's quite a dull day or you're using ND grads like a good photographer! Take the picture and the shot probably looks pretty good. Now change the settings again so that the brightest part is at zero - so you've exposed for the sky. Now if you point at the dark ground you'll notice it goes off the bottom of the scale. Take the picture and you'll see that the sky will look pretty good, better than your first shot, but the ground will be completely black. The shot is underexposed. The histogram function of your camera can explain what's happening.

A histogram shows the total number of pixels and ranks them by lightness - the dark pixels towards the left and the light towards the right. If you take a picture of a black cat in snow, there's very little black and a lot of white - so you'd see a small spike on the left and a big spike on the right. If you take a well exposed picture of a landscape with lots of colours, you'll see a nice curve going from low on the left, rising up in the middle and going back down towards the right again.

From the histograms above you can see that the left-hand one is perhaps a little underexposed, most of the pixels are towards the left. The right-hand one is over-exposed so most of the pixels are towards the right axis. The centre one looks about right and has a nice spread of dark-to-light. However I tend to prefer the left-hand one as although it's a bit darker, the colours are richer (you might notice a lot of my photos tend to be darker for this exact reason).

There are hard and fast rules about how to expose correctly, such as finding the middle-grey in the picture and exposing against that. If you put a camera on auto mode it'll take a sample of pixels across the image, average them out to middle grey (which is a particularly drab shade of grey) and set the exposure accordingly. This means it almost always gives you a wishy-washy exposure because it's guessing and doesn't know what you're actually trying to take a picture of. If you go to the extremes like a black cat in a coal cellar, it'll always over-expose the cat and for the counter-example of a polar bear in the snow it'll always under-expose. For this you need to either use exposure-compensation or manual mode because only you know what you're taking the picture of.

My friend Ade sets up exposure by assuming that -2 is black, -1 is soil, 0 is grass, +1 is sand and +2 is white. This means no matter what the lighting of the subject he's taking a photo of, if he wants the grass to be perfectly exposed, he meters off the grass and adjusts his settings until it reads 0 (by metering I mean pointing the centre of the viewfinder at the grass, half-pressing the shutter button so the meter comes to life and adjusting the aperture or shutter speed until the meter reads 0). If there's sand and he wants that perfectly exposed, he changes the exposure until it reads +1 on the meter. And so on.

I try to keep that in mind, but sometimes I just experiment and see what I get. The best way to tell how well exposed the shot is isn't to look at the picture on the camera display, it's to look at the histogram and see what the distribution looks like. More to the left leans towards under-exposure, more to the right is over-exposure. However, you don't always want a perfectly exposed shot. Maybe you want to under-expose to draw your eye to something brighter than the rest of the picture. Maybe you want to over expose a background to give a dreamy look to the shot. It all depends what you're trying to do and I could write a book on the subject and still not explain it fully! For example, the following two shots demonstrate that sometimes you want to underexpose and sometimes you want to overexpose:

	By overblowing this shot (the meter was telling me it was overexposed), the details in the room are lost but the eyes really stand out. On automatic mode you'd have a more detailed and dark photo, but without much impact.
	Here I wanted to produce something dark and mysterious so your imagination fills in the black. If I'd gone on auto-mode it would have taken a longer exposure and brightened things up somewhat - which wouldn't have had as much impact.

I've really just given a brief overview of the subject, but I urge anybody who wants to improve their photography to stop using the automatic settings. To use manual effectively you need to understand exposure, and exposure is one of the main keys to taking great photographs. It's tricky to figure out at first but once you do there's no stopping you.

Personally I never use any of the auto-settings on my camera. The one time that I tried was on a night shoot when I was curious to see what exposure it would set for the picture of a skyscraper I was taking. I half-clicked the shutter to see what it would do and the flash popped up which made me laugh given that the building was half a mile away! So no use at all then!

Next: Everybody Loves Waterfalls.