Become Married to Your Tripod - Shafiq Nezammuddin

  

 

Okay, so now you know that as a pro landscape shooter your life is going to be like this: you get up before dawn, and you miss dinner about every evening (remember, there’s no shame in coming to dinner late). If you’re okay with all that, then it’s time to tell you the other harsh reality—since you’ll be shooting in low light all the time, you’ll be shoot-ing on a tripod all the time. Every time. Always. There is no hand-holding in the profes-sional landscape photography world. Now, I must warn you, you will sometimes find landscape photographers out there at dawn some mornings shooting the same thing you are, and they’re hand-holding their cameras. They don’t know it yet, but once they open their photos in Photoshop, they are going to have the blurriest, best-lit, out-of-focus shots you’ve ever seen. Now, what can you do to help these poor hapless souls? Quietly, take your tripod and beat them to death. Hey, it’s what Joe McNally would do.

The Golden Rule of Landscape Photography - Shafiq Nezammuddin

 

 

 

 

 There’s a golden rule of landscape photography, and you can follow every tip in this chapter, but without strictly following this rule, you’ll never get the results the top pros do. As a landscape photographer, you can only shoot two times a day: (1) Dawn. You can shoot about 15 to 30 minutes before sunrise, and then from 30 minutes to an hour (depending on how harsh the light becomes) afterward. The only other time you can shoot is (2) dusk. You can shoot from 15 to 30 minutes before sunset, and up to 30 minutes afterward. Why only these two times? Because that’s the rule. Okay, there’s more to it than that. These are the only times of day when you get the soft, warm light and soft shadows that give professional quality lighting for landscapes. How stringent is this rule? I’ll never forget the time I was doing a Q&A session for professional photogra-phers. The other instructor was legendary National Geographic photographer Joe McNally. A man in the crowd asked Joe, “Can you really only shoot at dawn and dusk?” Joe quietly took his tripod and beat that man to death. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but what Joe said has always stuck with me. He said that today’s photo editors (at the big magazines) feel so strongly about this that they won’t even consider looking at any of his, or any other photographer’s, landscape work if it’s not shot at dawn or dusk. He also said that if he takes them a shot and says, “Look, it wasn’t taken during those magic hours, but the shot is amazing,” they’ll still refuse to even look at it. The point is, professional landscape photographers shoot at those two times of day, and only those two times. If you want pro results, those are the only times you’ll be shooting, too.

Shooting Landscapes Like a Pro - Shafiq Nezammuddin

 If you ever get to shoot in some truly amazing outdoor locations, like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite National Park, it’s really a very humbling photographic experience. The reason why is you’re looking at this amazing vista, at the sheer grandeur of it all, and it looks so awe inspiring you’d figure a chimp could even take a great photo of it. I mean, it’s just so spectacular, how could you mess it up? Then you set up your tripod, look in your viewfinder, and it happens—you begin to silently sob. You’re sobbing because you bought all this expensive camera gear, with multiple camera bodies and lenses that cost more than a Toyota Prius hybrid, you’ve got more filters than a Ritz Camera store, and your camera bag weighs approximately 54 lbs. You saved all year, took your two-week vacation from work, bought round-trip airfare, and rented a huge SUV big enough to haul you, your family, and all your expensive gear out into the sweltering summer heat of the canyon. Now you’re looking through your viewfinder and what you see doesn’t look half as good as the stinkin’ postcards in the park’s gift shop that sell for $1.25 each. Tears begin to stream down your face as you realize that you’re not going to get the shot you came for. And whose fault is all this? Ansel Adams—that’s who. He screwed up the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and a dozen other locations for us all. But even though we’re not Ansel Adams, we can surely get better photos than the ones in the gift shop, right?

Shafiq Nezammuddin - Photography Intro

Fine art photography contrasts against representational photography, such as photojournalism.

It combines photography and conceptual ideas as a process. This is where the artist or photographer tries to express their perceptions and emotions. These are then shared with others.

Commercial photography is not equal to fine art photography. Even though both sets of images are saleable, fine art photography is not commissioned, while commercial photography is.

This is not to say that fine art does not overlap documentary photography. It’s hard to draw a line between genres. It’s also hard to decide what can be considered as a fine art photography project. Most of the times we say that a fine art photography project has a conceptual background. And it’s also acclaimed by viewers, practitioners, and the art world.

The concepts seem to come from different places and the end result is often different. Even if the processes are the same.

Shafiq Nezammuddin - principles of Arabic script

 There are a few basic principles of Arabic script which apply whichever style of writing is used:

 • There ore 28 letters in the alphabet.  

• The sCript is written right to left.  

• There are no capital letters.  

• Words are written in cursive, or 'joined up', writing.  

 

All letters join to the letter before in a word and all but six join to the letter after also. Once you have mastered the various forms of each letter shape in both naskll and ruq'a you will find you can write and read Arabic in most everyday con texts. Fina lly, make sure you have a good ink pen, drawing pen, gel pen or a soft pencil to write Arabic. The Arabic sCript usually looks better when written with a thicker nib or tip. Arabic is a flowing script and it is difficult to achieve a good hand with a cheap biro.

Shafiq Nezammuddin - Arabic Handwriting

 

The history of the Arabic script  

The Arabic alphabet and written language has remained remarkably constant since the sixth or seventh century AD, largely due to the unifying factor of the Qur'an. There is no clear documented progression in the development of the script before this time and only a limited number of original pre-Islamic Arabic texts exist, sometimes as scraps of stone or parchment. Arabic is a Semitic language related to Aramaic and Hebrew. The language has its roots in the nomadic oral tradition of the desert, which largely explains the lack of early examples of the Script. Although spoken Arabic dialects have diverged in the same way that Romance languages such as Italian and French have diverged from Latin, the Modem Standard Arabic of today's media is close to the language of the Qur'an and Classical literature. The spelling and grammar have not changed significantly over the centuries.