“So Tim and Ally, you went to Paris for a week. Awesome! What was one of your favourite times? Maybe the romantic river, how about the photographic interior of Notre Dame?…..”
“Er no. It was when we went to photograph Paris graveyards.”
“REALLY!!!”
Now this conversation could only have been with a non-photographer, as most photographers are aware that graveyards, especially ornate and dilapidated ones, can produce some quite stunning and unusual images. To photograph Paris graveyards was one of the highlights of our trip and we thoroughly recommend it to any photographer who needs more than the usual tourist images of Paris.

This cemetery had so much character and photographic opportunities

Why the cemetery (Cimetière du Père Lachaise)?

Let us tell you about it and we’ll try not to put in too many death puns. Although it doesn’t sound too inviting, a morning or afternoon spent wandering around the mausoleums, some well-kept and some dilapidated, is a very relaxed experience and not in the slightest bit morbid. The photographic opportunities abound with more beautiful textures than you can shake a bony old stick at. While out there look out for graves of Oscar Wilde, Chopin and Jim Morrison to name just a few. However, they are not as photo-worthy as the old and forgotten ones.

How to find it

Cimetière du Père Lachaise lies at the North East side of Paris about 3 km from the centre but is really easily accessible by car or the Metro. Père Lachaise (line no’s 2 and 3), Philippe Auguste and Alexandre Dumas (both on line no 2) and Gambetta (line no 3) all surround the cemetery. There are various entrances around the walled graveyard and depending on which one you use, you can usually find a map of the who’s who of Paris dead and where to find them. (Or you can download and print one before you go).

Getting in the supplies

When Ally first suggested we photograph Paris graveyards to me, I was really excited. How romantic – not! We started off for an early breakfast at an awesome café nearby called Chambelland Boulangerie. They do gluten-free bakery items and the continental breakfast we had was superb. We enjoyed it so much we even bought extra to eat after the cemetery photography. Turns out there is a lovely small wild park on the south side of Cimetière du Père Lachaise and we had our lunch there.

The photographic experience

Don’t feel bad

Arriving at the graveyard we were totally taken aback at how gothic it felt. Don’t worry about offending people by having a camera out. Most people we saw were either making photographs or on a pilgrimage to see their favourite dead artist’s final resting place (and photograph themselves in front of it).

What to look out for

Mini stained glass windows in mausoleums throw amazing light shapes on the stone.

Ravens that frequent the tombs give the images a sense of mystery and Edgar Allen Poe feel

Trees growing through or around old graves can make interesting images.

Try looking for contrasts like saturated colours in a bleak stone surround, or small delicate flowers blooming next to a rusting old façade.

Textures. There are just so many awesome textures we couldn’t get enough.

Post production editing.

Black and white – Try some moody black and white versions of your images. Up the contrast but keep the shadow detail for a little macabre feel or a high key misty image for mystery.

Toned – A duo or split tone can give a eerie feel if for example you mix blue shadows with yellow highlights to get a green; Cyanotype gives a cold feel and selenium or Sepia tone for an old vintage feel.

Blue shadows mixed with yellow highlights

Sepia toned

Selenium toned, using the gradient map

Cyanotype style

Desaturated colour – This equally gives the feeling of life being drained

From well-tended to so old that a large tree has taken over the grave there are image opportunities aplenty when photographing Paris graveyards. Set aside a warm afternoon, take your favourite camera and lens and dig-in. (Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.) You’ll be glad you did.

For more info on this and other places to visit in France, see this great comprehensive article by RV Lifestyle.

The post Photograph Paris graveyards appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Occasionally, in your photographic life, you will find that creativity comes to a grinding halt. A bit like writers’ block! You are bored of looking at super sharp, over-saturated, perfectly grainless travel images and your creative soul longs for something more. As amazing as digital is, it can be too perfect and our humanity likes imperfections. Of course, maybe you just want to try something different. Possibly you yearn for analogue film days but have a digital camera, or sometimes a specific subject just cries out for the vintage look. Whatever the case, we would like to show you how to reinvigorate your photography with 5 professional techniques to make a photo look old.

Here are the techniques we will cover so grab your software and follow along.

1 – Sepia or blue tone (cyanotype) using black and white Adjustment layers
2 – Split toning using raw files or raw filters
3 – More accurate tone types using Gradient Maps
4 – Adding grain
5 – Adding a photo border

What software can you use?

Although for these techniques to make a photo look old are done in Photoshop Creative Cloud, you can do most of them in any other software. We recommend either Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity Photo, but there are so many different image editors available to you at different price points. Most tend to work in a similar way and use the same terminology.

1 – Sepia or Cyanotype tone using Black and White Adjustment layers

What is it?

A Black and White Adjustment layer allows you to non-destructively colourise your image to a tone approximating a Sepia or Cyanotype photograph.

How to do it

• Open your image in Photoshop. It doesn’t matter if it is a colour, black and white or even a scan. You will need to then apply an Adjustment layer so go to the Layers panel and click the new Adjustment layer at the bottom. From the list chose Black and White.
• Click the tint button and choose a suitable colour.
• If you are adding this adjustment layer to a colour image then adjust the sliders to lighten or darken various colours in the image to taste.

Choose Black & White from the Adjustment drop-down menu

Click the small tint button above the sliders to choose a toning colour

Why are we using an Adjustment layer rather than doing this from the image and adjustments menu? If you use Adjustment layers and save as a PSD file you can always come back and adjust your settings later, as nothing is set in stone. You can also delete or hide the Adjustment layer to get back to your original image.

This black and white tint process enables you to do a very rough approximation of a Cyanotype or a Sepia image. Later in this post we will do a more accurate version of toned images. See our previous post on how to make a digital cyanotype including making the background! 

2 – Split toning using raw files or raw filters

What is it?

Split toning is a technique that allows you to tone the highlights of the image with one colour and the shadows with another.

How to do it

• If you have a Raw file then open the image in the Raw file converter and switch on the Black and White convert button.

Convert colour to black and white in Raw by choosing button in basic tab

• Open the tone tab and lighten the colours to taste.

Adjust sliders to lighten and darken original colours for authentic old vintage photo feel

• Open the split tone tab and choose a colour for the highlights and for the shadows. You can then dial in the saturation and even change the balance so you get more shadow colour or more highlight colour.

Yellow highlights

Blue shadows

Mix of yellow highlights and blue shadows for a greenish look

Mix of yellow and cyan for old photo look of vintage traction engine

A mix of yellow highlights and a reddish  shadow can give a very beautiful warm sepia feel.

To do the same to a non-Raw image, open it in Photoshop and then go to the filter menu and down to Camera Raw. Follow the instructions as above. If you are using this technique to make a photo look old you might wish to convert the image to a smart object first. This means that you can double click the filter on the smart object layer and go into the filter to change any settings.

3 – More accurate tone types using Gradient Maps

What is it?

A Gradient Map allows you to map colours to various tones (light to dark) in an image by applying a gradient with the new colours in. If this last sentence sounded like Geek Speak then just look at the examples to see what we mean.

How to do it

• Open the image in Photoshop and find your layers panel.
• Click the Adjustment layer button at the bottom and choose Gradient Map.
• In the Gradient Maps panel go to the gradient map and choose the drop-down menu and add in the Photographic toning maps.
• Choose a tone to apply to your images.

Choose Photographic Toning from the Gradient Map option menu

Cyanotype gradient colours mapped to image

Gradient map with a heavy sepia so the highlights go orange/brown

Of course you can just go wild

Our favourite tone is the Selenium no 2 tone. See more on Gradient Maps in our how to photograph like Michael Kenna tutorial.

4 – Adding Grain

Why do it

Adding grain can cover a multitude of bad-retouching ‘sins’. It can also augment an image. What it cannot do is to make a bad image better.
We like to add a bit of grain to some digital images to give them a more analogue feel.

How to do it

Grain can be added either in Raw (from the effects tab), from the Raw filter (in Photoshop) or from the add noise option (in the noise filter in Photoshop).

5 – Adding a photo border

A scanned border can make all the difference to the authenticity of your old photo technique. Scan in and old image, put it above your image in the layers panel.

The first thing to do once you have both images open in Photoshop is to drag your toned image into the border image as a layer. (We flattened the toned image before dragging it onto the border image to keep things simple.) We used ‘overlay’ from the Modes drop-down menu in the layers panel to mix the toned image with the border image below.

Here are 2 before and after examples

Original tractor before ageing process

Tractor with old photo look – Zante Greece

Original books before old vintage photo treatment

Original books after old vintage photo treatment

Your own look

These are just a few of the many techniques you can use to age a photo and give it that old treasured image look. We use the Gradient map with Selenium tone on most of our Black and White images to give them a warm feel.
Experiment with these techniques and come up with your own unique look.

The post 5 Professional techniques to make a photo look old appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Learn from the Masters

Some days we look at well-known photographers images and something in us just cries out “I wish I could create images like that”! At first I thought it was just me but I have discovered that the majority of photographers feel like this about certain other photographers some time. If you have ever seen the beautiful black and white zen-like work of Michael Kenna then you will probably know this feeling really well. If you don’t know Michael Kenna’s work, have a look at his web site. Once you have finished weeping with inadequacy come back and let us look at how to photograph like Michael Kenna so you too can create similar style images.

Have a look at our other  ‘How to photograph like…’ series that includes Edward Weston and Ansel Adams to see how to create images like they have.

Now before we get started there are a few things to know.

• Michael Kenna creates images on a medium format Hasselblad.
• He uses film
• He has a very zen-like nature about him
• He is a photographic genius
• He is a darkroom super-craftsman

So now the bar has been set so spectacularly high, let’s see what we can do with our DSLR or Mirrorless digital cameras – no pressure then!

I photographed these cranes at the Bristol harbour, UK in a Kenna style with simple shape and no shadow detail

Analysing the Master

When trying to imitate anybody’s style we start by analysing their techniques, so when looking at Michael Kenna’s photography, this is what I saw.

Composition:

Michael Kenna looks for simplicity in his composition, moving closer or framing the subjects to get rid of extraneous objects. He uses a lot of symmetry and rule of thirds but is not afraid to break rules if the composition calls for it. As he photographs on a Hasselblad which has a square format, a vast number of his images are square.

• Pro tip – Michael will often put the horizon on almost the centre of the image. He uses a technique called the optical centre. This is about 10% above the centre of an image and is where the eye naturally rests.

The images have a timeless quality about them, which suggests a photographer who is in no rush, and analyses every scene and possible angle before creating the image.

Black and White film:

In an interview with Procameraman.jp Michael talked about his favourite film as Kodak Tri-X 400 ISO. This is a very forgiving / flexible film and well suited to the long exposures he does. Some are as long as 10 hours. It also has a very distinctive and pronounced grain structure.  See our post on what black and white film to choose to find out more.

ND to blur clouds or water and other filters to darken skies:

In order to create the long exposures, to get the milky water during daytime we need to assume that Michael uses an Neutral Density filter and the camera on a tripod. See our how to photograph with ND filters tutorial.

We can also assume he uses a red and or polarizing filter to darken and lighten parts of the image. We have written extensively about using filters in black and white photography in other posts.

Quite a lot of contrast and high key:

Michael Kenna’s images appear to have large tracts of almost black and almost white in them. The middle tones are there but are in the minority. A lot of his images are also high-key, meaning most of the image is really light although almost every image has something nearly black in it. As a master craftsman Kenna is probably using a combination of film development chemistry and darkroom techniques to augment the original stark image. For more ideas about black and white, see our post on what makes a good black and white image.

I photographed this high key image in Wivenhoe near our home on a misty autumn morning. Not quite Kenna style as it doesn’t have any very dark areas.

How to Photograph like Michael Kenna Step-by-Step guide

Find your Perfect Composition

This is the hardest part of the process but with a little patience you will achieve extraordinary results. Don’t rush things. Leave your camera in your bag until you have found the perfect spot to create an image from. Try to pre-visualise the final image before you touch the camera.

Look around for simple details, structures or shapes. To photograph like Michael Kenna, try to ignore the colour aspect that can be overwhelming.

To help us compose we set the Sony A7R camera to black and white mode so the images appear in the viewfinder as black and white (most mirrorless cameras have a similar feature).

If we’re using Ally’s Nikon D600 DSLR or a film camera that doesn’t have this feature then we view the scene through a strong coloured filter. This gives you one colour, and even though it’s not black and white, it helps to show the shape and form of the scene.

Exposing the Scene

To photograph like Michael Kenna, use long exposures with the camera on a tripod to get movement in clouds and water. Make sure you’re using a solid tripod, as even the slightest movement on the camera during a 30-second exposure can ruin an image. Use a Neutral Density filter to help you get the very long shutter times you need. Our 10-stop filter usually allows us to achieve 30-second shutter times in normal daylight.

We use Manfrotto and Gitzo heavy duty tripods with robust heads. They are a pain to carry but so worth it when you images are stunning. We recently tried out a travel tripod from Manfrotto but it was much to wobbly in even the slightest breeze so it’s going on eBay soon. Don’t forget your red or orange or polarising filter to darken the sky. These will also help to give you longer shutter times.

Not all of Michael Kenna’s photographs are long exposures though but they are all about simplicity. Taking the essence on the scene into a beautiful composition. Michael once referred to his images as a Haiku rather than a literary work.

The Digital Darkroom

Michael is known as a darkroom master artist and artisan and so it comes as no surprise that he does a lot of dodging and burning on his images. He also mentioned in an interview with Camerawork magazine that he uses Ilford Multigrade paper so he can dodge or burn areas at a variety of contrasts.

All of this we can do in our RAW files using adjustment brushes.

Finally, a how to photograph like Michael Kenna post would not be complete without talking about toning. Michael uses sepia tone on his images to give the highlights a bit of colour. We can easily do this to our RAW files in the RAW converter or, (and we prefer this method), use a Gradient Map adjustment layer in Photoshop.

Final and original image from our Michael Kenna style photographic trip. Drag slider to see more.

Putting it all into practice with a trip to the North Norfolk coast in the United Kingdom

The Photographic Process

Ally and I live in a county called Essex, which is about an hour’s drive from central London (or 2 if the traffic’s bad). About 2 hours drive north of us, is the beautiful undeveloped coastline of Norfolk that offers plenty of scope for interesting images. After a long hot summer we set off for 2 days photography knowing that we wanted to create something simple and stark.

The first day was stunning, bright blue sky with small puffy clouds, long sandy beaches with sand dunes, photography heaven. The second day was rainy and overcast and just awful. So how did we do? Well, the first days’ images were ‘pants’. (This is an English expression meaning rubbish!)

Tim looking for the perfect composition on the rocky pier

It was the overcast sky that gave us the beautiful stark and simple images (without harsh shadows) that we were looking for. I find this very annoying as I (Tim) am a sun worshiper and hate overcast days but there we go.

Ally trying a different angle

Once I had viewed all the potential photographic vantage points for the pier I wanted to photograph, I set up the Manfrotto tripod on the rocks and made sure it was secure. I wanted to do some longer (30 sec) exposures to give the water movement so I attached our ND filter. The exposures ranged from 10 to 30 seconds and even though I had a sturdy tripod the wind still gave me a bit of camera shake on some of them.

This is what the bit of wind did to my long exposure when it buffeted the camera

When composing I used a combination of symmetry and the rule of thirds for my horizon.

Rule of Thirds

In the Digital Darkroom

I am using Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud (2018) however this technique will be very similar in any software that enables RAW file editing including Affinity Photo, a favourite of ours on the iPad.

Cromer contact sheet in Bridge including some edits

In Raw, the un-retouched original

In Raw with very basic edit 

The first thing I did when opening the image in Raw was to convert it to Black and White. I also set the options to sRGB (not greyscale) and the channel bit depth to 16.

This gives me an image with smooth gradients that I can add colour to in Photoshop. If you open it from Raw into Photoshop in greyscale mode you will have to convert it to RGB colour to add the toning adjustment layer. Having it as 16 bit rather than the default 8 means that there are thousands of shades of lightness per channel rather than just 256. This gives you smoother gradients without as much ‘banding’.

I then took down the highlights as some of the clouds were overexposed.

Raw gradient to get the dark sky Michael Kenna style

Along the top of the camera Raw window you will see a little gradient icon. I clicked the icon to get to the gradient area and added 2 gradients to darken down the clouds a bit.

Raw dodge and burn edit like Michael does in the darkroom

Clicking the little paintbrush along the top again, takes you to the adjustment brush area. I added a brush, painted the area I wished to adjust and then adjusted the settings on the right. Not only can you lighten and darken but also change contrast, sharpening, clarity and a host of other properties. As you can see by the dots on the picture I did 13 different brushes. Some to lighten the water, some to increase contrast and detail on the rocks. The little mask button at the bottom allows you to see the areas you are painting. I switch it on and off to see what I’m doing.

Overall on the image I lightened the highlights and darkened the shadows to get that distinct Michael Kenna look.

Lastly I added a selenium tone adjustment layer

I opened the image in Photoshop as a Raw smart object. You do this by holding down the Shift key while clicking the open image (object) button in Photoshop Raw.

If you wish to learn Photoshop on the iPad or Affinity Photo on the iPad have a look at our Udemy courses below.

Click here for amazing money off deals to Learn Photoshop or Affinity Photo v2 on the ipad with Tim’s Udemy course

Having my image in Photoshop as a Raw smart object allows me to double click the smart object any time and go back into Camera Raw to make adjustments. If you’ve never converted to black and white before, check out our post with technical and geeky explanations!

I added a Gradient map and chose the Selenium tone Gradient Map. Even though Michael Kenna uses sepia tone over selenium I thought it looked better on this particular image. The difference is that a sepia tone works on the highlights first and selenium toning works on the shadows first.

Final Image

Go Forth and Create Like a Master

As you can probably tell by the tone of this post, Michael Kenna is one of my favourite photographers and although I don’t go out to copy his work, it has always had a great impact on my personal style. Anybody can copy anybody else’s technique; however you need your own personal vision to really create you own image of he world. Learn all you can from all the master photographers but then turn all that knowledge into your own unique vision. See our post on photographing like Edward Weston  and Ansel Adams.

To sum up a post of how to photograph like Michael Kenna we need 2 things. Beautiful simple composition and lots of shadows and highlights in a toned Black and White image.

Try it out. You might find that your own style, added to this technique creates some amazing images you’d never thought of doing before. Mostly, have fun doing it.

The post How to photograph like Michael Kenna – Tutorial appeared first on ImageExplorers.