I posted the other day about the Elephant Parade in London, a series of 260 small elephant statues dispersed around the capital in herds or alone, indoors and out, to raise awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant. They’re a big hit not only with the general public, who seem to enjoy either climbing on or painting on them depending on mood, but also with photographers – whenever I’ve been out to shoot them, I’ve not been alone.

I mentioned also the difficulty in taking good photos of the buggers – a quick look through the Elephant Parade London 2010 group pool shows a lot of entirely uninspiring shots. An easy excuse is that a lot of them seem to be with point-and-shoots, but then again I’ve seen some exceptional photos coming out of non-DSLR cameras, so it’s a lazy excuse at best.

Lazy is what I think describes most of these shots. There is little attempt to think about composition beyond ‘get it all in shot’. When the comments I hear making about the elephants is often to do with their ‘character’ – as if they were a little more than decorated fibreglass statues –  I wonder why all these lazy shots don’t attempt to bring out that character in their photography.

These elephants all look the same, coming from the same moulds (well, two different moulds – but still, you get my point), but they’ve been decorated to stand out. In some cases, the decoration is intricate and in others entirely subtle.

The trick is to use the statue’s unique features and focus on details, tie it in to the environment it’s in, or shoot other people interacting with it. If all else fails, change your angle.

Anyone and everyone can walk up to an elephant and take a snapshot with a point and shoot. Do something different and you’ll get a decent photograph.

I noticed the other day a post about the ‘rule’ that you shouldn’t decapitate or amputate people in photographs. Needless to say, the post went on to say that actually, doing just that could be perfectly acceptable. Not much of a rule, is it? Don’t get me started on the ‘rule of thirds’ – another one you can choose to break, for aesthetic effect.

Of course, you should never under- or over-expose your shots, unless it looks good.

And always – always! – focus on the eyes in a portrait…

The thing is, there’s no such things as rules when we’re talking about photography (or indeed any other creative pursuit – poetry, painting or piano playing). There’s some guidelines to make casual shots at least half-decent, like the ‘don’t decapitate’ rule, or the rule of thirds. Following these will give you, I’m sure, perfectly acceptable shots. But it doesn’t mean that anything else won’t be just as decent. You might have to practice a little more to get rule-breaking shots that work, but then how are you going to develop your own style unless you do what you think looks good, and not what someone has told you is a rule?

All these ‘rules’ are nothing more than tips, starting points and suggestions. Calling them rules gives them, in my opinion, too much weight, and they’ll be understood by some to be actual rules.

The only caveat I would make, however, is this: whether you choose to follow ‘rules’ or follow your gut feeling when it comes to taking a shot (and editing/developing it, of course), do what you’re doing for a reason. Don’t bounce the flash because someone told you, but because you want that quality of light. Don’t underexpose because you don’t understand how to use your camera properly, but because you want to. That’s all I ask: be deliberate.

The only rule there should be in photography is that HDR is rubbish…

Image: I figured since this post was a reflection on photography itself, we could do with a tree reflected in water. Bit lame, but there you go…!

Last night I went up to Alexandra Palace in north London for one of the city’s best displays. Because the Palace is on top of such a big hill, you get fantastic views across the city, and every now and then there’s a little burst of fireworks in the panorama in front of you, even before the main display starts. We managed to watch most of a display in Greenwich while walking back down, which puts the view into perspective.

It was a bit crowded – something like 50,000 people – and there was a bit of a mad rush after getting food and so on to get to a half decent spot, on a fairly steep slope. Luckily, with my brand spanking new Velbon Sherpa 250 tripod, this wasn’t much of an issue. I took plenty of photos during displays last year, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera this year, except to have a little experiment with zooming in and out during a shot at one point – you can see the half-decent result here.

Taking photos of fireworks is pretty simple, really – so long as you do have a tripod. The basics are:

• Manual settings!
• Low ISO for best colour reproduction and least noise
• Quite narrow aperture for depth of field – I was using f/11 most of the night – so it doesn’t really matter if your focusing is off.
• Long exposures. A lot of my shots were on 2.5″, although at times I went up to 15″. Try out various combinations for different effects, and find your own personal style.

I’m off to the Lord Mayor’s Fireworks on the Thames again next weekend, so expect more soon!

You may have seen my photos of the Trafalgar Square fountains, taken at about 10pm on a summer night, either here or on Flickr (where there are 5 shots). All of these are fairly long exposures (though short, compared to really long exposure shots, if that makes sense!), displaying the water of the fountains as a smooth, flowing stream. In daylight, of course, you can trap the fountains in a single instant so each drop falling is visible, but at night this simply isn’t possible.

Ordinarily, of course, I would use a tripod to ensure that these long-exposure shots come out nice and crisp. At around half a second long each at f/4 (the largest aperture my 17-40mm f/4L USM will shoot at), it’s not easy to come out with a decent shot. Thankfully, statues, buildings and fountains do – so how to get a nice, crisp shot without a tripod?

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After three years living in London, I finally got the chance (and by chance, I mean gentle nudge up the backside) to visit London Zoo. I’m not a big fan of zoos, I must admit – but it seems like one of those things you have to do, like going on the Eye, and other touristy things that Londoners would probably rather not admit to doing themselves. So this Flickr meetup seemed a good idea. Unfortunately, it was a bright, sunny day – conditions I still can’t seem to work properly in, and cages and glass panels tried their best to ruin what would otherwise be the perfect shot of each animal. So, here’s a couple of zoo tips:

• When it comes to cages, try and photograph animals furthest from the edge of the cage to you. This means you can ‘zoom through’ the wire, which will become so blurred as to be invisible. (Of course, this then can cause problems with autofocus, so you may wish to switch your lens to manual if it’s not got a USM focus, for instance.)
• Glass is a pain in the arse. What I found to work better was to get on tip-toes (above the reflections of toddlers and crouching parents) and shoot at quite an oblique angle (45º and above). Still, didn’t really get any decent shots through glass at all, so prepare to fail on this one.
• Take a bottle of water. London Zoo may not be that big, but all the walking around adds up, especially on a hot day – even more so if you head into the humid butterfly tent and rainforest biome.
• A telephoto over any other lens. I was using my rubbish (and to-be-replaced-when-I-have-the-money) Tamron 70-300mm, but it was the only usable thing to get shots of the animals. For the butterflies, I had to take a step or two back, but that’s the only situation where it was a slight inconvenience.

Luck plays a great part in life, and especially when you decide to head out on a particular date in the future with a model. You might already know exactly where: which street, which tree, which fountain or wall. But nothing ever quite works out as planned – thankfully.

I firmly believe the best photographs aren’t planned. Who wants a sterile, thought-out image, when you can have a well-composed but unique photograph? The trick is merely to react well to the changing surroundings. On a recent shoot in Soho, not only did we manage to grab the use of a bit of staging from the Astoria thanks to a very helpful backstage guy, but also managed to get a good shot of a couple of policemen passing in the background.

We could have said nothing to the bloke shoving staging out the back door, and not got some interesting shots with it. We could have waited for the policemen to pass by, out of shot, before continuing, because these things didn’t fit with the plan we’d already discussed. But why? That’s just boring.

The worst thing you can do when shooting on location is to stick to a plan. Plans are great – but only when flexible enough for you to scrap it entirely and react to a new lighting situation you didn’t spot when scouting the location, a different kind of car parked just round the corner.