Tamron Blog: Angle of View

People Need A Connection

By Mike Moats

 

When I started in the art show business five years ago it was my first experience at selling nature photography, I thought that the art shows were a place where people came to find contemporary abstract art, so I loaded up my booth with abstracts and soft focus images. It didn’t take long to figure out that the people that attended these shows were not interested in the abstract images. What they were buying was the images that is called realism. Everything in focus images of subjects that people could identify and relate to. Images of reality.

After about five or six shows, I pulled out most all of the abstracts and replaced them with realism. My sales shot up dramatically.

So why do people like realism over abstract? Not everyone likes realism, there are the people that like abstracts, but they are in the minority. I’m in the minority because I tend to prefer the soft focus abstracts, or images with patterns, shapes, soft blurred colors.

One thing that I have learned from talking with the people who buy my images at the shows is that they usually have a connection to the subjects in the image.

Take this Lily of the Valley flower in the image above. One lady buying this image told me that her grandmother had a patch of Lily of the Valley flowers in her yard, and every time she sees this flower she thinks of her grandmother.

Many women who bought it told me that they carried Lily of the Valley flowers down the aisle on their wedding day. So they were buying the image based on that connection of a happy day in their lives.

Another lady told me that her favorite perfume is made from the Lily of the Valley, so she was buying the image based on that connection

I would have never believed that my best selling image every week would be of a frog in duckweed. I had this image for two years before I decided to take it to one of my shows. It outsells every image, every week.

Why does it sell so well, because amazingly I’ve been told several times by buyers that they have huge collections of frogs at home.

I hadn’t taken this frog image to the shows because I thought, who would buy a frog to hang in their home, boy was I wrong!

I stopped taking most of my images of wildflowers because very few were being sold. I started to realize that most people are just not familiar or knowledgeable on wildflowers. If they don’t know what kind of flower it is, then they are not interested in hanging it on their walls. Again, people need a connection to the subject. They like Calla Lilies, Sunflowers, flowers that they can easily identify.

My wife has attended many of my art shows and knows some of the European photographers that show landscapes and scenes from Europe. She had never expressed any interest in any of their images until she went to Europe. After her trip she bought four images from one of these photographers because they were images of places she had been. A connection now caused her to purchase those images.

With abstract, we can’t connect these images with anything in our lives. Unless we have some artistic tendencies we will not be able to connect to these subjects in the photographs or paintings.

The connection to reality is strong. One lady was buying an image of a Trillium that she thought was a Calla Lily, and when I told her it wasn’t a Calla Lily, she no longer had any interest in buying it. It’s still a great image of a beautiful flower, what difference does it make that it’s not a Calla Lily, but it did make a difference to her.

Photography of landscapes are shot with everything in focus and would not be considered abstract, so these are images of realism and reality. That’s why landscape photographers will get good response to their images. But as macro photographers, we tend to be more artistic in what we can do with our subjects, so many of the macro photographers get disappointed when friends and family don’t get the abstracts.

It was mentioned on my facebook page that abstracts tend to appeal more to the younger generation, and I totally agree that younger people tend to be more open minded to this kind of art. The few abstracts I did sell were to the younger generation. The problem is for those of us trying to sell, the art shows are filled with the older baby boomer generation who have the finances to purchase art.

Young people have families and very little money that can be spent on collecting wall art. If they need art for their homes they can buy it much cheaper in the prices they can afford at Ikea, Kirland, Walmart.

Most of the buyers are the older people that have more disposable income because their kids have left the nest, and they have more money to spend on themselves and their homes.

So if you would like to see a more positive response to your macro photography, shoot everything in focus of reality in nature. Hey it’s good stuff, I have lots of great images of reality that do very well in selling, photo contests, and impressing friends and family members.

For daily macro tips, please visit my blog at www.MikeMoatsBlog.com

A Night in DC, Shooting Around the Crowds

By Ken Hubbard

Ok, so André wrote a great article about the night the government did not shut down and how to make the most of the not so great conditions that night. Even though the weather was dreary and the cherry blossoms almost gone, there were still many tourists around. As photographers we all know how frustrating crowds can be when trying to capture the images you want. Normally, to create a photograph I want, I would wait as long as it takes for the crowds to dissipate. Since rain was a factor all night, I didn't have the luxury of waiting so I was forced to look at the monuments differently than I normally would. Below are a few images from that night.

This first image was taken at the FDR memorial, which sheer size can be intimidating to a photographer, let alone dealing with the crowds. What caught my eye immediately was the wall of faces, a very powerful representation of a tragic time in history. I wanted to isolate one figure with a very shallow DOF and shot at an angle that faded away into darkness. This image was shot with the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens.

Moving on to the Washington monument, I've always liked the way the ring of flags around the monument looked at night, and in the past I've tried to capture the monument and the flags in one image, but once again, crowds were always the issue for me. So on this night I just started shooting the flags, walking around the monument and shooting parts where there was no one standing around. Fortunately, while walking around I was able to capture this image with the Capital building in the background. I lined it up evenly between the flag poles, and ironically one flag is not flowing in the breeze and is a yellowish color while all others are white, make of it what you will. This image was also shot with the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD.

Lastly, the Korean Memorial. I've tried many times to capture this memorial at night, but once again there are always people there and even worse, it is close to a roadway with many cars and buses always parked in the background. With this in mind, I started shooting the individual sculptures to keep the tourists out of the images. What caught my eye with this image was the incredible orange color in the sky and the American flag in the background. I purposely captured the backside of the sculpture with out of focus figures in the bottom right hand corner to give a feeling of marching towards the flag. Again, shot with the 18-270mm VC PZD.

Isolationist Theory and the Histogram

By André Costantini

Everything that you include in the frame gives a viewer information and helps them form some understanding or meaning. The same can be said for what you choose to not include in a frame. By eliminating things you can isolate a subject, removing contexts but creating beauty. Here are some images that I have focused on the subjects. Some of them may look as though they were taken out of their natural environment, but I assure you they have not been. Often this requires either getting really close to a subject or using your zoom lens to focus in on just one part. These three images were all taken with the Tamron 18-270 VC PZD, ISO 250 around f6.3 and somewhere between 1/125 and 1/200 of a second.

The exposure mode of the camera was in Manual for all of these images. This is because the camera's meter would not get the exposure correct. With so much whiteness in the image, the meter wants to compensate and make the image darker. Manual mode gives you more control. As you can see from the histogram (that little graph below) there is a lot of white in the image. You can tell because the histogram gives you a graphical analysis of your image. The right side represents the white tones and the left the black tones. So according to this graph there is virtually nothing in this image which is true black and there is a bunch of white (so white there is no detail) which in this case is not only exactly what we want but exactly what we are seeing in the actual image.

All of these images are backlit by the sky, which is also creating the light on the subject. Backlit or high-key scenes often require these exposure adjustments so that your subjects are not silhouettes. But by isolating your subject you focus all of the attention on that subject which can make compelling imagery without visual distractions.

The Night the Government Stayed Open

By André Costantini

 

A few weeks ago on route to Virginia, fellow photographer Ken Hubbard and I stopped for a few nights in Washington DC. We were seemingly batting 1000 between having just missed the peak of the cherry blossoms, enduring rainy and almost freezing weather and being in our nations capitol on the brink of a shutdown.

Despite the perfect conditions, we set out to make some pictures. I relegated myself to one camera and one lens. The Tamron 18-270 on a Nikon D7000. This was compact enough, I didn't even need to carry a camera bag, I just put it in my jacket pocket. OK, so it was a big pocket, but it did the trick and kept the camera dry until I was ready to shoot some images.

We arrived just as the sun was going down by the basin near the FDR memorial and the Jefferson monument. The rain subsided for a few minutes and there was some semblance of color and texture in between weather patterns. I took the first image of the Washington Monument through the almost expired cherry trees, but out of focus and silhouetted it worked out fine. There was enough context to let you know where I was and what time of year it might be. The camera settings were ISO 1250 f5.6 100mm 1/30 of a second.

About an hour later and a lot more rain, after having walked around the FDR memorial I noticed a puddle at the edge of the basin in which the Washington Monument was reflected. By putting the camera at the edge of the puddle at a very low angle it approximated the position of the basin. With the addition of Ken's off camera flash which he triggered manually during the long exposure, I made this image. The illusion is created because the flash is illuminating the tree and creating the reflection which seems to go as far as practically the base of the Monument. But in reality the puddle is maybe three feet long. The placement of the camera is what creates this perception. It was taken at ISO 250 18mm f8.0 and exposed for 1 second. Because the white balance was set for the available light on the monument, the addition of the flash rendered the cherry blossoms blue which worked nicely against the orange sky creating a surreal but beautiful effect all done in camera.

So don't let some rain get you down. We debated about whether to weather the storm but the image would not have been possible if the puddle didn't exist and the clouds in the sky hadn't reflected the city's light. Sometimes using what nature gives us, can create some unexpected surprises, the likes of which we never would have thought possible.