As you may know, I love to take photos of reflections. There was an unexpected opportunity to do that a few weeks ago, as Chris and I were floating down the Neckar River in a rowboat with our visitors from California.

Well, at least Chris and I were floating, our visitors were all taking turns working to actually row the boat. But I was also taking photos, of course, and at one point I got a couple of interesting shots of the scene reflected in our friend JP’s sunglasses.

These photos are actually good as examples of the idea that in order to get a sharply focused photo of a reflection, you always need to think of the reflection as a landscape, and not as a portrait. I used these photos in my workshops this past weekend. I taught the group of teenagers again (on Saturday, teaching in English), and before that, on Friday, I  taught a group at the local senior center (teaching in German – a first for me!)

Now, the teens on Saturday were non-native speakers of English; on Friday the group were native German speakers. But it wasn’t language problems that made all the groups look at me like I was crazy when I explained this idea that one should think about reflections as landscapes, and not as portraits. That’s true for all reflections:  in a mirror, in a puddle, in water on a river, or even in a pair of sunglasses on a person sitting near you. No matter where the reflection is, or how close the physical object that has the reflection is to you, the reflection will always be more than 10 feet/3 meters away from you. Which is true landscape scene from the perspective of a camera, where a landscape photo has as its subject anything more than 10 feet/3 meters away from you.

Therefore we need to tell the camera to use landscape settings when taking photos of reflections.

Now, the first photo of JP below was intended as just a standard portrait photo of her. So I have the focus set for less than 10 meters, since JP was sitting less than 10 meters from me in the boat. To get her in focus, therefore, we use portrait, not landscape settings.  Note that the reflection in the sunglasses isn’t in sharp focus.

Portrait JP (reflection not in sharp focus)

However, the next photo has a clear reflection in her glasses.  Here, the focus needed to be set to infinity, infinity being defined in camera terms as a subject that is more than 10 feet/3 meters away from you.  On a simple point-and-shoot camera, the focus will be set to infinity automatically by using the landscape mode, so choose landscape mode and focus in on the reflection, not the rest of her face.

On the Rowboat (Reflection in focus)

The setting for the landscape mode on most digital cameras has a little mountain symbol. So, if you think of reflections as mountains, and set the camera the same way as if you were taking photos of mountains, your photos of the reflections will always be in focus. “Mountains and Mirrors”, or “Berge und Spiegel“.

Anyway, thanks very much to JP for letting me use these photos in the workshops and also here on the blog. 🙂

BTW, I really enjoy teaching the photography workshops, and it was fun on Friday to try my hand at teaching them in German. Special thanks go to our friend CS, who made the arrangements at the senior center, and who also served as my assistant and security net in case I needed help with the German during the class.

I was initially not sure how well I’d do talking for 3 hours in German about photography. But when I got to the section on reflections, and saw the look  on people’s faces at my explanation about “Berge und Spiegel” ,  I knew that I must be doing OK with my German. It wasn’t a look of “I can’t figure out her German” on their faces; rather, it was the exact same look of disbelief that “mirrors” are like “mountains” that I see on the face of everyone when I teach it in English.

So I figured the native-German speaking seniors in the class must have at least  understood what I had just said in German. Not believed it, of course. No one ever does.

But at least they understood it. 😉

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