This photo essay is posted at KLM Images.

Twist & turn

Zigzag

The eye of the viewer can be guided by actual lines in an image, or by implied ones.

These two riders are stacked up on a slanted hillside watching hunting in the lower field.  Your eye naturally follows them down starting at the rump of the near horse and then reversing at the lower one.  It’s possible the horses are standing still, but the placement of the legs and movement of the tails creates doubt, so you follow the potential movement left and then right, instead of just left along the hillside and out, as you might if the far rider were absent.

Arrested motion

Arrested motion creates implicit lines of force.  In the image of folks handing out a stirrup cup, most of the people face away from the viewer and admire the lovely view, but the woman on the right advancing purposefully off screen and just completing her twist away from her companion (from whom she got the used glasses) pulls our gaze away from the static background and carries it along with her out of the frame.

Hounds in motion

It’s always a pleasure to get a good view of hounds taking a fence.  At this meet we were treated to a long series of nice shots.  When there are several such shots and you like many of them, the trick is not to bore your viewers.  Here are some of the variations.

Horse and hound together

We start with the visiting huntsman taking the coop followed closely by one bold hound.

The next shot shows three different styles of springing from the jump to follow the huntsman.

The launch

Finally, we see the river starting over the cliff as a waterfall and flowing along the ground.

Cataract spilling over the top

Flowing river

Better vs best

Here are three pairs of shots which lend themselves to the question of which is the better in each pair.  Your mileage may vary – my husband disagrees with me about each pair.

All lined up

First we have these hounds running through a gate (and over a coop).  In the first shot, the horizontal and diagonal lines of the fence gate act like a “swoosh” to give a push to their forward momentum.  The second shot is amusing, but doesn’t have that concentrated energy.

A moment later

Concentrated

In the next pair, we have the visiting huntsman with his pack against a lovely backdrop.  The bottom one is a lovely panorama and I’m glad I captured it, but I prefer the concentrated impact of the first one.  The eye rests on the dense center.

Panoramic

In the final pair, we revisit the old problem of the scale of mountains.

On this beautiful day the sky went from background to subject.  The cattle work well enough on the left to give some sense to the size of the mountain, but on the right we suddenly move from the immensity of a mountain to the much greater immensity of the sky.  It doesn’t diminish the mountain, in my view, but it reminds us to lift our gaze higher than the hills.

Cattle and trees for mid-ground scale

Clouds put the mountain in its place

Landscapes

Stacked ridges ending in the Blue Ridge (HDR)

I am far from satisfied with my skill at capturing landscapes and am constantly experimenting for better results.

In this essay, I post-processed some of the images for high-dynamic range (HDR) contrast, so let’s look at the results.

Ordinary cameras are more limited in their ability to respond to contrast than the human eye.  We see very well in both dim light and blazing sunshine, but for a camera we must choose those conditions in our settings or be disappointed.  Depending on the settings, the camera decides to set the exposure to maximize the overall utility of the resulting image, but this reduces the range of absolute darkness and absolute brightness compared to our own vision.  The theory behind HDR is to take multiple versions of the same image with different exposure settings, then blend those together so that the overall exposure is much broader than the camera can capture on its own, and closer to what we actually see.

The point of these shots is not the riders but the overall scale of the landscape they are in.  In these photos the mist between ridges allows you to see the details of the landfolds.  Even the far mountain has visible details instead of just dissolving into a blue wall.

Distant riders, rolling land (HDR)

Visible details on the blue wall (HDR)

What does it look like without this artificial enhancement?  Here are two versions of a similar view, one captured by my husband’s prosumer camera, which does a decent job of capturing colors and landscapes, and one post-processed for HDR from my camera.

They have different virtues.

Ascending ridges (HDR)

Blue walls (not HDR)

Still, let’s not forget that none of this enhancement is necessary for the right shots.

Military placements (not HDR)

Here we have one of those very tricky achievements — showing a panorama of the military nature of a foxhunt.  My husband successfully captured the deployment of the paired whippers-in (for joint meets, which this was, these positions are often filled by one from each hunt) on a distant ridge ahead of the pack to keep them from getting too close to the road while the pack itself is hunting below along the stream.  All of these players are very far away, which is a good thing since you couldn’t otherwise capture them in the same shot.

Notice that the landscape ridges are nicely articulated by the alternating fields and hedgerows.

Below we have a different sort of landscape, as background to a close-up view of the hunt.  The landscape is medium distance, not far, since the mountains are low and less interesting, and all the interest is in the nearby rolling fields and building, cut by the ribbon of road.  The three redcoats recede nicely in a line like an illustration of perspective.

Rolling farmland (not HDR)

Salvage

Every now and then you get a shot you love that has something wrong which can’t be overlooked.  Sometimes you can salvage those.

There were three lovely shots of whippers-in sailing over a log jump, but it happened suddenly and I was too close for good focus.  The photos were unacceptably blurred, but I didn’t want to give them up.

The various “artistic” treatments in products like Photoshop can sometimes help.  Here you can see the original and the published version after it has been “posterized” lightly in Photoshop.  Treating the image like a graphic instead of a photo simplifies the edges, and that removes most of the problem with the original light blur while keeping all the dramatic impact of the composition.

Since the published version is no longer just a cleaned-up photo, I always indicate that in the caption in the published essay.

Original

Enhanced

Cropping for action

All charm and tilted motion

I typically come down on the engineering side of the analysis vs artistic spectrum, and this manifests in my photography as wanting to see the whole scene: the entire horse and rider, the full pack of hounds, and so forth.  This is an artistic fault, I firmly believe.  I know this because, whenever happenstance intervenes and forces a moving target to be cropped in ways I would never have planned, I am often much pleased with the results.

When I stand too close to the action with a particular lens and try to get something useful anyway, the image is reduced to its essentials.  I don’t need to see the top of the rider’s head or the details of the horse’s legs to enjoy this shot. 

Classic closeup pose

The static shot of this same pair is pleasant, but the moving one is better.  With less clutter, the eye can focus on the parallel curves of the horse’s neck and the back of the rider’s coat, and the right-angle parallel curves of the horse’s body and lifted foreleg.  The tilt of that structural parallelogram keeps the action moving forward.

Well-prepared

It’s easy to get too fixated on big pictures of horses and riders and to miss the closeups that reveal personality.  We see nothing of this rider’s horse, but what does it matter?  Instead we see warm clothing defying the cold wind (earmuffs under the helmet), determination, and some well-packed liquid fortification.

Animal personalities

There are little scenes everywhere at a hunt.

Over here we have a horse seemingly wondering why the famous photographer doesn’t take his picture.

Over there we have a group of “American Gothic” hounds (actually Crossbreds & English), standing straight and upright.

Stiff & straight

Red, white, and blue

Below we can see a whole series of reactions to the threatened disciplinary action, as each small cluster of hounds moves to rejoin the pack waiting in line behind.  You can see that each of the guilty parties, if asked, would have an excuse to offer.

Regrouping in the rear

Variations on the classic shots

There’s nothing wrong with a fresh look at the conventional scenes of hunting.

Much-photographed pair

The huntsman posing for the famous photographer (Jim Meads’ 500th unique hunt) has planted himself firmly on sloping ground, and his horse stands straight and balanced.  All their concentration is on the photographer, but I prefer the profile shot.

Iconic

This foxhound sniffing along the terrace wall could hardly be better posed in front of our host’s farm sign.

It’s always nice to be able to include a “going home” shot.  Here the chilled riders are making their way down the endless lane anticipating a fine hunt breakfast.  The verticals of the bare winter trees are countered by the horizontal shadows on the ground, and the drift of the tails reminds us of the cold wind.

Going home

Carving up the space

Dominated by the curve of the pond

The curved edge of the pond in the first photo eats a nice semicircle out of the left of the scene.  That alone would make for a pleasing composition, but see also how the grasses curve with the pond, and so do the bodies and especially the tails of the hounds.  Everything reinforces that fundamental curve.

Gothic linear divisions

In the next photo, we have linear architectural elements made up unexpectedly of living creatures.

The accidental formal postures of the hound and the rider, aided by an almost straight horizon, create an inner rectangle and draw the eye into the open space in the back left.  Nothing is moving; all is potential.

Painting with light

Every now and then the gods cooperate and provide just the right lighting for a scene.

Running into the light

These hounds are running along the water into the morning sun.  The light paints both the foreground trees and the background field so the well-lit hounds are part of the scene, not separate.  Their movement is just a part of nature.

On stage

At a slightly different angle we see the huntsman in the center of the light while the backdrop behind him has darkened, setting him on stage.

The shadows on his horse help tie him a bit to the background, but he is somewhat apart from nature, set up as an actor upon it, appropriately for his role.

Radiant

In the third photo, we see how a (partially) white horse can suck up all the light.  Not even shadows connect the horse to the background setting.  This rider is not a primary actor upon nature, but a follower of the action.  It seems fitting that her horse is the most theatrical.

So, the hounds are part of nature, the huntsman acts upon nature, and the hunt member cheers them on.  The lighting becomes progressively more artificial, to match.

The eternal foxhunt

Everyone likes a good action shot, and photos of foxes are always welcome, but there’s nothing quite like those timeless scenes that foxhunting throws up.

Thus may it always be

When you look at the slope of autumnal woods with the oaks just beginning to turn and the worn down stone wall you can’t help making a wish that future generations will be in the same spot with the same view.

When you see the immaculately turned out whipper-in moving into position you want to capture the moment as part of a long continuum of similar actions by hunt staff for a couple of hundred years.

This particular shot caught the canter stride at its most calm point, and it’s that stability that makes it resonate backwards and forwards in time as a symbol.

In eternal motion

Nature vs architecture

Fox in the midst of architecture

The front gates of the Blue Ridge Hunt kennels have two lovely metal fox silhouettes mounted on top.  The kennel building is nothing but straight lines, of course: bricks, bars, shingles, and all the other architectural elements, but we get just that bit of nature which gives it personality.  Whenever we look at the kennels there are hounds behind the bars (this is their home), but the foxes run free along the top of the gates.

Architecture surrounded by Nature

In a more natural context, these two does disturbed by the hunting activity retreat past the barn.  The barn is aligned with and echoes the nearby Blue Ridge mountain that ascends behind it, but is dwarfed by it as well.

Though the lighting is attractive on the gable end of the barn, our eyes are drawn to the moving deer.

In both cases, it is the animals that are telling the story.

Photographer as part of the story

This is not stealth nature photography.  I’m standing around with a big old camera lens and drawing the attention of the subjects whether I want to or not.

A sideways glance

This isn’t always a bad thing.  The quiet look from this horse keeps us from just being observers.

Too bad I'm not invisible

In these two pack pictures, the second is much more interesting than the first.  The acknowledged presence of the photographer does nothing useful for the first picture.

In the second picture the huntsman is looking at the lead hound on the far right who is bounding ahead eagerly and about to earn a reprimand to stay closer to the rest of the pack.

Much better

On the other hand, sometimes drawing attention can give you a group portrait as the various subjects interact with the photographer.

Personalities

For example, both of the next shots have interest, but of a different kind.  In the second one, we get a parade of some of the hounds.  It emphasizes their unity as a pack, a tool for hunting.

In the first one, where the hounds look at the photographer, we see them as individuals, each with an opinion.

A pack

Difficult light

Lighting in difficult circumstances

Much of the hunting action had the car followers far from the invisible pursuits along the banks of the Shenandoah River.

When they returned, first staff and hounds and then field, they approached at length over wide fields with the bright sun at their backs, and this made for very trying photography.  We were treated to a view of a fox and some lovely hound action, but getting attractive pictures was next to impossible.

In such circumstances, it helps to just keep trying.  You can see from the picture that this whipper-in is riding into the sun, but happily I was able to get a somewhat lateral view of him, and enough of the slant of the body and horse’s head were illuminated to keep it from being a hazy blown-out silhouette.  As an added bonus, he was well framed between the gap in the trees.

There were many shots of this sequence that were unusable, but random chance can be your friend if you keep snapping away.

The scale of mountains

It's a blue wall, but is it big?

One of the pleasures of living in the Piedmont area of Virginia is the constant presence of the Blue Ridge Mountain.  It’s not a high ridge in this part of Virginia, but it is unavoidable.  Though I see the ridge constantly in hunting situations, I find it a challenge to render well in photos.  Often it is in silhouette because of the time of day or just simply flattened by the lens and made insignificant.

It’s a cliché that a landscape can often benefit by objects in the foreground, either to serve as a point of interest or to provide scale.  In the second shot, I was standing lower than the stable, which was on raised ground.  Without the stable (and the fence) in the picture to provide perspective, it would not be clear that I was looking up at the mountain.

The stable is quite a large building, but that isn’t immediately obvious until you see the size of the rider for comparison.  So the shot without the stable would make the ridge look closer and lower, and the shot without the rider makes the stable look closer and smaller (cover the stable or the rider with your hand and observe the effect).  It takes both objects to help the background ridge seem as large and solid as it does.

A large ridge

In the crowd

Ears & tongue

Hunting hounds come in packs, but each is an individual.  There are things I would wish different about this picture (the busy background, for example) but there are two things I particularly like.  One is the movement of the ears, esp. on the front hound.  This is a hound on the move, and it illustrates the flow of the entire river of hounds.  You know this is a chaotic stream because of those ears.

The second item is the tongue.  These strongly colored hounds were bleached out by the light and create an almost monochrome scene in which that pink tongue is an unexpected sight.  It’s a quiet effect, but once I saw it I can’t ignore it.  (Click on the photo to see the full-size version.)

I had several shots of the hounds along the wooded edge deciding whether or not to dive in.  This one benefited by concentrating on only three of them, each with a different reaction to what they can hear from hounds already in the covert.  One is diving in, one is thinking about it, and one is moving deliberately.

Individuals or not, they are all members of the pack with the same goal, and their unity is caught visually by the line of the vine swinging down from the right across the back of the middle hound and up the tail of the left hound.

A pack made of individuals

Many lines

The master of the straight lines

This rider (one of the MFHs) is leaning back and drawing her horse after her.  The crop around her neck hangs down in two straight parallel tracks echoed by her two legs, but all the leather straps and reins on the horse are curved — except for the rein held short.  Unlike all the other loose or passive straps the left rein has been made active.

The rein and the hand that holds it are the focus of the image.  We know the horse will follow her weight and turn, and I see in that a symbol of the mastery of man.  In that context, the vertical parallel lines of the windows and doorway, also man-made, reinforce the crop lines on her body.

Complicated events

Waiting for another hunt to finish

This is a just-published essay from an event of a few months ago.  There is a 4-day pack trial of basset hounds where several hunts come and compete in various pack formations (3-couple, 5-couple, 7-couple) actively hunting rabbits and being judged for hunting effectiveness.  This particular essay is the second day, with the 3-couple (6 hounds) competition.  Day 1 is published here; days 3 & 4 will be available here & here.

At any time during the course of the day, there may be one pack just finishing hunting and exiting the hunting area, one pack beginning to hunt, another pack waiting its turn, and yet another pack out taking some exercise.  The participants largely know each other and have done this for many seasons, so they are not confused by the activities, but a photo essay sampling all the activities in order can’t help but be bewildering to less knowledgeable viewers compared to, say, a foxhunt.

One pack returns from its hunt trial

Without referring to the event schedule, the folks who were there want to know which hunt they’re looking at.  I provide 2 levels of guidance: metadata identifying each hunt, which helps with searches, and a reference to the hunt in the title of the first photo for their mini-section of the essay, so that viewers can tell when the scene changes.

Portraits

Quite a feather in his cap

Though there is hunting activity to film and even the occasional rabbit chase, I find that these pack trials are largely extended portrait sessions.

There are many sorts of portrait opportunities.  At the most obvious level, there are portraits of hound packs, with their huntsmen and staff.

Unlike following a hunt to which I belong, where I would have many opportunities all season to get formal pack shots, these events are one-offs.  They may be the only occasion that I see some of these distant hunts, so if I miss the shot, there’s no recourse.

These events are reunions for the regulars, and they enjoy seeing striking pictures of each other as souvenirs until next time.

Shaking ears in excitement

Nothing like scratching your back

And then there are the animals, without which none of this would be possible.

The hounds are the stars, naturally, and their personalities are much on display.  Getting a group of different individuals to act as a pack with a single purpose under the guidance of a huntsman is one of the constant miracles of this sport.

Hounds dodging the huntsman before the trial

Example of screen resolution at 72 ppi (see below for larger)

What I’m going to cover

I’ll take you through a bit of what happens inside your camera, how pixels are stored in an image file, how image files are stored on a computer, and how to choose the right resolution for different usages.  I’ll be generalizing with a heavy hand to keep the explanations as simple as possible.

I will use one of my cameras (Canon 50D) as the example.  It’s a standard dSLR camera, the sort with removable lenses.  If you’re using a camera phone or a point-and-shoot, all the same considerations apply, but some of it is hidden from you or not accessible.

Pixels

A digital image file is essentially a grid composed of discrete dots, called pixels (short for “picture elements”).  When you look through your viewfinder (or at the viewscreen) on your camera, think of the scene as having a fine mesh screen superimposed on what you see.  Your camera’s sensor array has one “slot” for each hole in that grid.  My camera’s sensor array is a grid that is 4752 x 3168, which is 15,054,336 pixels, or 15.1 MP (mega-pixels, mega = 1,000,000).  That’s why Canon refers to it as a 15 MP camera.  If your camera phone is 5 MP, then its grid is more coarse, covering the same amount of image with bigger holes.

Digital images typically define a pixel’s color by referring to its red, green, and blue components.  (We’ll talk about how colors are defined and combined in a later article).  If I know exactly how much blue and its brightness, how much green and its brightness, and how much red and its brightness are represented in one pixel, then I know exactly what color of, say, periwinkle blue and its brightness was captured.  So for each pixel, I have to know some information about each of 3 color channels.  In fact, I have to know 8 bits of information about each.

Bits and bytes

A bit is a small piece of information.  It can be either a one or a zero.  (At the bottom level, computers are all about how to move bits around.)  If I have one bit of information about a pixel, I might be able to tell if it is black or white.  If I have 2 bits, I can tell more about it.  It turns out (grossly simplifying…) that 8 bits is just the right amount of information for most uses to tell which of a great many possible blues and how much brightness one color channel has.

For other files on a computer, such as text files, 8 bits is also a very useful amount of information.  If I have 8 bits of information, I can designate a particular letter of an alphabet, identifying “capital A”, “lower-case q”, “question mark”, etc.  There is a special term for a chunk of 8-bits: it’s called a byte.  If your text file has 2500 characters, it will take at least 2500 bytes to store it in a file (plus extra).

Going back to my camera, I need to know 8 bits of information for each of 3 color channels (that’s 24 bits, or 3 bytes) for each pixel.  15 MP x 3 bytes/pixel = 45 MB (mega-bytes) for a single picture, uncompressed.

File size

Files on computers are measured in bytes.  Your hard drive holds, say, 200 GB (giga-bytes, giga = 1,000,000,000) which is the same as 200,000 MB.  (This is a bit simplified, since the “mega” in mega-bytes is conventionally 1024, not 1000 (having to do with powers of 2) but, really, you don’t care.  Just treat it as 1000.)

Since it’s hard to get a handle on what’s a big file, here are some comparisons.

• A 10-page 4200 word text document in Microsoft Word is 0.07 MB
• If you are on dial-up, an email JPG attachment of 1 or 2 MB is a noticeable delay, and 4 MB or more may prove to be a real nuisance.
• If you are on dial-up, a web page that has 1 MB of data takes a noticeable time to open in a browser.
• A typical 3 minute MP3 audio file is 2-6 MB.
• If you access the internet via satellite, you may be limited to upload/download traffic of 500 MB/day.
• A typical DVD runs about 30-70 MB/minute of video.  (Online videos are smaller and lower resolution).
• A typical CD holds about 700 MB

Camera output & compression

Continuing my camera example, each picture needs 45 MB to describe all the information for all the pixels.  So far, that’s just inside the camera (which has its own small computer).  What goes onto my camera card?  That depends on whether I am writing JPG files or raw files.

JPG is a type of file that is optimized for size.  It is much smaller than the original, very widely used, and quite suitable for a large variety of applications including web display and most photo printing.  It achieves this smaller file size by reducing the amount of information it carries, permanently.  Once a picture has been converted to the JPG format, either inside your camera or in software afterward, you can’t get back to the original information.

Using our example, my original picture (4752 x 3168 pixels) has been cropped to produce an image that is 3113 x 2364 pixels, or 7.4 MP.  This would take up 7.4 MP x 3 bytes/pixel = 21.6 MB as a file, without compression.  A JPG output file is only 5.5 MB.  (The web page example at the bottom of this article is 0.3 MB).

Cameras make trade-offs between speed and camera card capacity.  They want the optimal reduced file size (so you can hold more on your camera card and write them more quickly) that preserves all the original information (for image manipulation in post-processing software) that doesn’t take too long to create (lots of calculations needed) so that you can click the shutter button again right away.

Each camera manufacturer (bless them) has a proprietary method of making raw files smaller without losing any information (lossless).  For example, if my image has a dark shadow, one pixel can store 24 bits of information about it, but the next pixel, which is identical, can simply store a little information that says “I’m just like Charlie over there”.  In real world situations, the file size needed is about 1 third the size of the original.  My uncropped output files for a 15 MP camera range from 17-19 MB, instead of the 45 MB they would require without this lossless compression.

Matching intelligent proprietary software is needed to read these output files to turn them back into a grid of pixels so that you can manipulate the image in post-processing applications.  For common camera brands, this is more or less automatic.

There’s one more small complication.  When you look at your viewfinder to see the picture you just took, or when you look at a directory of pictures on your computer, what you see when you skim through those files are small thumbnails called previews which are also made by the camera (and other software), to make it easier to manage your image files. Those are written to a special area of the output file, along with metadata, information about the picture (date, camera model, settings, etc.).

Resolution – what’s right for different media

Now we can finally talk about resolution.

I’ve taken my picture, saved it in a raw format or JPG, and opened it up in my post-processing application (Photoshop, Lightroom, any of a great many tools).  I’ve cropped it and don’t want to do anything else.  It’s 3113 x 2364 pixels.  Now what?

Remember old newspaper and comic book images?  If you looked really closely, you could see that they were made up of individually colored dots but, if you held the image away from your eyes at the right distance, you no longer saw a bunch of dots but a smooth image.  Printers today still create images that way, and “dots per inch” (DPI) is how they refer to the resolution of the picture.  If there aren’t enough dots/inch for the right viewing distance, you will see the dots rather than a smooth image.

The right viewing distance matters.  A billboard high up in Times Square has great big dots when you stand next to it, but looks just right from 100 feet away, which is how it is intended to be viewed.  A framed photo on a wall might look much better from 2 feet than from 2 inches.  What the human eye can see and resolve at the intended distance is the governing consideration.

Pixels aren’t dots, but the difference isn’t very important.  Pixels are square, not round, and they are measured in “pixels per inch” (PPI), but the terms DPI and PPI are often used interchangeably.  I will continue to use PPI here, but someone requesting a photo from you for publication is likely to use DPI.

Typical PPI or DPI resolutions:

• Image for a web page: 72 PPI (web pages need to be as small as possible)
• Conventional photo print: 240-300 PPI
• Conventional magazine or newspaper: 300-350 PPI
• High-resolution art print or art publication: 400-600 PPI

Notice that PPI and DPI are ratios: item/inch.  By themselves, they don’t mean very much.  I can take my file which is 3113 x 2364 pixels and make it any resolution I want without changing it a bit; all I’ve done is say how close together or far apart the pixels should be and it’s up to the output device to figure out how to display that.  My example image at 300 PPI would be 10.4 inches (3113/300) x 7.9 inches (2364/300), more than enough for a magazine and perhaps enough for a calendar.

Resampling

But what the magazine might actually want is a picture that is 3 inches wide at 300 PPI.  That means I can’t just change the space between the pixels — I have to change the pixels themselves.  The output file would need to be 900 pixels wide (3 inches at 300 PPI), but my original image is 3113 pixels wide.  So what I need to do is resample the image.

Resampling takes the original information and summarizes it using fewer pixels.  It creates a version of my image which has thrown some information away in order to represent as much as possible the same image using fewer pixels.  It is also possible to resample an image to make it larger, but the software has to make up information to do it (based on nearby pixels) and there are very real limits on how much of that can be done without the effect becoming very obvious.

For magazines, I typically send my largest JPG file and let them change the resolution, resampling if necessary, as they choose to fit the space alotted.  I check that the number of pixels is large enough to support the maximum space they are likely to need at their usual resolution, or else I warn them that the image they chose might be too small to use for that purpose.  (If the image is 600 x 300 pixels, it won’t be magazine-usable at bigger than 2 x 1 inches, at 300 PPI.)  I would prefer to send them a JPG files of exactly the right size based on the raw original, but that is rarely an option.

A bloodhound indicates he has found his subject (72 ppi)

Screen displays

Images can look very good on a web page while still being remarkably low resolution.  The example photo above is 72 PPI and takes up only 0.3 MB.  An image that size printed at 72 PPI would be very unsatisfactory.  What’s going on?  Partly it’s because the image is illuminated which masks many small subtleties, and partly because my display device (the computer screen) is not really a high resolution device.

I have set the screen resolution for my laptop at 1680 x 1050 pixels, which is considered fairly high resolution for a computer screen.  For general use I have set my laptop display so that the icons and text size are pleasing for me.  In my case, that’s a density of 96 PPI (density being a synonym for resolution).

This is why images copied from the internet are very unsatisfactory when printed: insufficient information, which is the same as saying the wrong resolution for other purposes.

Can you spot the camouflaged hound leaning on the horse?

Lovely hounds

This was the first day of cubbing for the Old Dominion Hounds.

As sometimes happens, all the hunting activity took place off-stage, from the perspective of the car-followers.  We got to watch them leave and return, and in-between there was much appreciation of the lovely scenery and occasional faint echoes of hounds and horn.

Huntsman lecturing his hounds

At least there was much to admire in the presentation of the pack, polished in the sunlight and somewhat dazzled by all the people.  The early morning sun turned the pack into Apollo’s hounds: golden light and golden/red hounds.

The colors of the Old Dominion Hounds include brick-colored breeches.  Combined with the red ring-neck hounds and the huntsman’s vividly colored horse, it creates an amazingly harmonious color scene.  I understand breeding hounds for a consistent color, but just how did they get that horse to match?

Sitting at attention

Landscapes

Using the subjects to give scale to the landscape

When far from the action, or absent any action at all, one natural response is to turn to landscapes, especially since hunting often takes place in lovely surroundings.  The Old Dominion Hounds territory is in the Virginia Piedmont country, around the Rappahannock River.  The Blue Ridge Mountain dominates the western skyline, and closer outlier hills on either side of the river provide contrast.

It can be a challenge to make the vista that seems so impressive in person interesting as a photograph, absent special equipment and elaborate post-processing.

Folds and hills leading into the Rappahannock River valley

One approach is to make lemonade out of your lemons: if the subjects are too far away to be interesting in their own right, use them to give some scale to the overall landscape.  Then the folds of land and the haze in the atmosphere are pluses rather than minuses.  Don’t forget to boost the contrast enough to get some visible detail for the distant mountain.  In-between the near hills and the Blue Ridge Mountain in this photo lies the Rappahannock River.

Another technique is to highlight the landscape more indirectly, as background to your subject.  This conveys a sense of place without losing interest as just a static shot.

Blinded by the light

Blinding light

Photographically, the big technical challenge was the blazing early morning sunlight.

Uncontrollable shadows

There are some obvious responses to that situation.

First, go stand with your back to the light — not so easy when all the action faces the other way.  Don’t forget to keep your shadow, very long when the sun is low, from being visible in the middle of the shot.

Second, watch out for harsh black shadows right next to brightly lit items.  Some of this can be mitigated in post-processing by using a fill-light option, or on the scene with a flash, though it always seems so odd to use a flash in brilliant sunlight (folks look at you strangely).

On the other hand, the light can also be your friend, when everything lines up well.  It can make colors blaze, or create theatrical lighting effects.

Vivid colors

Theatrical spotlights

Illuminated distant subject

Trade-offs

Bright light creates some other problems with your camera settings.  If you’re not familiar with camera settings, there will be more articles later going into greater depth.

Four things control how much light creates the shot.

• The speed of the shutter.  The faster it is, the less light hits the receptor, and the more motion can be stopped.
• The size of the aperture.  The more open it is, the more light hits the receptor, and the shallower is the depth of field (area in focus).
• The sensitivity of the receptor (originally, of the film).  The more sensitive it is, the more spurious noise will be created, making the image dirtier.
• Filters added to the lens.  (Not discussed below).

At this stage in my photography, I am a fan of clarity.  For me, that means a fast speed, so that I can stop hounds and horses in action, and as much depth of field as I can muster so that both near and far subjects are in reasonable focus.  In addition, I don’t want a lot of “noise” in the solid areas, in other words, I want a low ISO setting (ISO refers to the degree of light sensitivity).  (Depth of field is also impacted by nearness and distance of subjects, telephoto lenses for zooming, and so forth – not covered here.)

To be specific, in an ideal world with perfect lighting I would want a shutter speed = 1/1250, a small aperture < f8 (smaller yields greater depth of field), and a low ISO (less noise).  There are, alas, no ideal worlds.  Typically I set the shutter speed to 1/1250 second, which reliably stops the movement of almost all hound and horse tails.  (In darker conditions, I’ll step that down all the way to 1/640 if necessary to let more light in, but paws and tails will begin to blur).  Then I set the ISO to Automatic and let the aperture default.  In a studio, or for a controlled shot, I could have more specific manual settings, but following a hunt, I have all I can do to not knock the shutter speed settings awry.  Adjusting a setting while whirling to shoot a fox is just about impossible.

For bright light conditions which should be perfect, I found the camera made decisions for the two varying settings that were not what I wanted.  There were unpublished photos in this essay that were brilliantly lit, but the camera chose to use a wide open aperture instead of decreasing the ISO number for greater light sensitivity.  The open aperture created a shallow depth of field, so for a typical picture with two horses together, one behind the other, there was an unpleasant focus problem with the more distant horse.  A manual setting could fix that, or an ISO setting of 100 (the most light sensitive) instead of Automatic would encourage a narrower aperture.  It’s time for me to move to purely manual settings.

This will be an exercise for me in the future, to control the settings more directly when the action gives me sufficient time to prepare.  That should result in fewer unsatisfactory shots, as long as I can remember to change the settings back afterward when necessary!

Photo essays – the subjects

Although I have done some straight commission work, more interesting to me is the work done with no particular customer in mind.  For example, when I cover a hunting meet, I don’t know in advance what sorts of shots I will get, nor who might be interested in them.

At the opening meet of the season

Junior handler with her basset hound

Not surprisingly, some of the customers are the subjects in the photos.  They enjoy seeing pictures of themselves having fun or all dressed up for a special event.  They are fond of their horses, their hounds, and their friends.

And then there are the kids, who may or may not see the photos online but who have parents and grandparents.

A special case of subjects are the staff of the hunts.  They’ve seen all too many photos of themselves already, and yet they occupy a large number of shots, being the core of the hunting activity.

Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles at a demonstration

Still, whether or not the subjects are actual customers, they care about how they are portrayed.  You might not sell a print to a huntsman, but you can probably irritate him quite effectively by portraying him in an unflattering situation, and lose an invitation to come back.

What interests me

I am interested in both the romance of the hunting scene and the participants that enact it, especially those in the animal world.  No hound is ever going to buy a print, nor any fox, rabbit, heron, deer, etc.  And yet there is little more thrilling than getting a shot of the elusive prey, or a glimpse of the other dwellers in the natural world.

Deciding which way to go

Easily evading beagles

The partnership of man and beast in pursuit of prey, the fair balance between hunter and hunted, the practical rituals that have arisen for the sport, and its emphasis on traditional values and character growth are what keep me interested in this subject.

This photography is just hunting by another means.

You yourself are the only audience that matters

As a photographer, I am most pleased when I can capture a hunting-related picture with particular merit, in composition, liveliness, or something else.  Sometimes I am gratified to find those shots have an audience besides me, but I’m the one I care about pleasing.

Ideally I would only release “best” shots in a photo essay about a hunting event, but there are other considerations.

Basset leaping down from a wall

First, I find it a good practice to impose a structure for a photo essay, to tell some sort of story.  For that reason, it helps to be able to show scenes of interest, even if they are not quite of “best” quality.  Perhaps they have messy backgrounds, or are otherwise more snapshot-like.  It’s good to keep the standard up, but I will compromise a bit for the story.

Second, I have to keep in mind the human subjects of the essays, especially the field members.  If I have a chance to take a series of shots of field members jumping and include them in an essay, even if it overbalances the story, well why not?  It gives them pleasure, and that pleases me.  And it’s surely part of the overall hunting scene.

Thus my photo essays have a mix of shots I really like that came out well, shots that are passable that show something important, and shots that will primarily please others.  The ones I like best typically have the smallest paying audience.  It may not be a very commercial approach, but that’s a different issue.  At least it keeps me smiling.