Shoot Photos Like a Pro in ‘Umurangi Generation: Macro’

The DLC pack for Umurangi Generation, Umurangi Generation: Macro, comes out on Nov. 7. It adds four new zones with all-new characters and photo challenges, an entire brand-new soundtrack from DJ TARIQ, and new ways to interact with the world of the shitty future Aotearoa we raved about earlier this spring (right before the real world went and turned into that shitty future). Thanks to Tali Faulkner and Origame Digital, we got an advance copy of the DLC and can briefly report: it is fantastic. But more on that later. This isn’t about the game; it’s about how you’re empowered in the game once you’ve collected all nine brand new shiny pieces of tech.

Let’s start with a brief overview of everything you receive in the game. First, some scrape pads. Scrape pads allow you to get down low on rough terrain. Basically, this unlocks the ability to go prone. Then we have the combo of roller skates (go fast) and spray paint (draw on stuff): since so many people said Umurangi Generation reminded them of Jet Set Radio Future, now you can go ahead and just pretend you’re playing Jet Set Radio Future. Goes well with 2Mello’s Memories of Tokyo-To, which you can find on Apple Music and Spotify. The roller skates, aside from allowing you to live out your fantasy of playing JSRF again, really do make a big difference on how the game flows. Now there’s much less of a noticeable tension between how fast I can get around and how quickly that 10-minute timer seems to be going down. You can boogie around old and new maps in no time at all.

Additionally, you get three new lenses: the Selfie Lens, the Box Lens and the Cartridge Lens. The Selfie Lens is a wide angle zoom lens like the one you get early on, but now you can, like, take a selfie. That makes the group shots each level requires as a bonus objective a little bit more interesting, but other than that, nothing super special is going on with this lens. The Box Lens is a Polaroid or Instamatic camera fused with your DSLR. You can take readymade Instagram shots with it. That is what I will be doing with it incessantly. Finally, the Cartridge Lens is… weird. It’s even admitted in-game that there aren’t many practical uses for the Cartridge Lens, but if you wanted a lens that recreated the effects of the Game Boy Camera, here you go.

All of these features are great, and as rewards for completing each of the four new stages (by our estimates an added two hours or so of content to the base game), these would certainly be enough. But! Of the nine upgrades you can receive, we have three we haven’t talked about that don’t just simply bring added value to the gameplay, they actually bring it to a point where you could probably actually use Umurangi Generation to teach basic photography. These upgrades are: the manual ISO hack, the manual aperture hack, and the manual shutter speed hack.

With these new features, plus the wide array of camera mods, post-processing tools and lenses already in the game, we now have a bona fide photography simulator on our hands and it’s cool and accessible as hell.

But what are they? And why am I making such a big deal out of it? Let’s find out.

Part 01: The “Exposure Triangle”

The mechanics of photography are weird, so I am not going to try to explain every little aspect of how an image gets made on a granular level. Instead, I’d like you to think of any camera you own or have owned as consisting of three main sectors, each responsible for letting light through in a certain way: the lens, the body, and the film or the sensor. Let’s start with the lens.

There are two main things a lens controls in the process of making an image: the sharpness, or focus, of the image, and the amount of light being let in to expose the image. When it comes to focusing, either you’re letting the computer in the camera do it with auto-focus or you’re focusing the lens yourself, by turning a focus ring. Turning the focus ring moves a bunch of different glass elements inside the lens housing around until the image you see through the viewfinder is nice and sharp. Really, that’s all there is to it – or there would be, if it wasn’t for depth of field. That’s where the lens’s second job, aperture control, comes in. Again, most modern cameras are set up to automatically control the aperture, but you can exercise a great deal of, well, control over your image by switching this feature off.

Inside each lens, too, is an iris. When the lens is connected to the camera and the shutter release button is pushed, either an analog mechanism is triggered or the camera’s computer sends a signal to close the iris in the lens. Only, the iris doesn’t close all of the way. Much like our eyes, a camera lens’s iris can expand and contract to either let more or less light in, allowing us to see an image that is properly bright no matter what conditions we’re in. In this process, however, another interesting thing happens: it actively changes the possible depth of field the lens can perceive. Having a shallow depth of field means that only a tiny cross-section of the viewable scene in front of you can be in focus at any given moment. Turning the focus ring to the left or the right moves the point of sharp focus – this cross-section – closer to or further away from you. A shallow depth of field corresponds most cleanly with a low F-stop, like f/1.4 or f/2.8. A wide depth of field – where most of your image is going to be sharp, no matter which lens you’re using – corresponds with a higher, stopped-down F-stop, like f/5.6, f/8 and so on.

Different lenses will have much different depths of field from each other, too. A wide-angle lens (focal length: around 15-30mm) will typically have a pretty wide depth of field even with a low minimum F-stop, unless you’re incredibly close to the object you’re photographing. Likewise, a telephoto lens (focal length: anywhere from 100mm to like 900mm) can create dramatic images with an incredibly shallow depth of field even with F-stops hovering around f/5.6 to f/8 because they are primarily meant to take images of objects many hundreds – or thousands – of feet away. I’ve got this 180mm telephoto lens on my desk with a minimum focal range of 6 feet. That means I simply can’t focus on an object within a 6-foot sphere. It’s pretty cool.

So why is having a manual F-stop hack so good? Because you not only have better focus control now, but you can also exercise more control over brightness and depth of field before you shoot your millionth penguin friend photo. But wait. There are two other sectors to get to. Before you get excited to go out and take some really cool shots with all the bokeh you want, let’s talk first about the camera body – and shutter speed.

When you press the shutter release button, at the same time that a mechanism is triggered to close the iris in the lens, a similar mechanism is triggered to lift up the viewfinder mirror (images seen through a lens are flipped and turned upside down) and make the shutter open and close. The speed at which this all happens is called the shutter speed, and it can range from “open the shutter for as long as you want; this is basically just for night time photography when you want to get a photo of star and satellite trails” to some wild tiny fraction like 1/8000ths of a second. The slower a shutter speed is, the more light and information is collected by the sensor or piece of film. Objects in motion will register that motion in the form of blurs and streaks across the frame. The faster a shutter speed is, the more the target object will look frozen in time – while sacrificing light intake. Typically, you would pair a high shutter speed with a low aperture, keeping depth of field in mind, to offset that light loss.

High shutter speeds are good for action/sports photography, where a talented shooter can capture dramatic moments in time that would be lost to the blink of an eye by a casual observer. Low shutter speeds are good for taking images that convey drama through an overall sense of motion rather than the capture of a single split piece of a second. It is incredibly easy to turn out trash work in both instances, so don’t ever kid yourself that one style is better than the other.

Finally, we come to the third sector of our camera field trip along the exposure triangle: the sensor. Specifically, the sensitivity of the sensor in a given moment, or the ISO rating. When you press the shutter release button and the iris closes and the viewfinder mirror lifts up and the shutter opens and closes, light sensitivity is the final barrier to producing a good image.

If your sensor/film’s light sensitivity is too high (where either the camera is trying to solve for lower-light conditions, or your film’s silver halide grains are too big, and it’s a bright and sunny day), your photos will trend toward being overexposed; they’ll have the added issue of looking possibly too grainy for your purposes, depending on what you’re trying to do. If it’s too low, your image may end up coming out underexposed more often than not.

On balance it’s much easier to overexpose than underexpose, and much less fixable in post later. A pretty decent “exposure triangle” preset I’ve learned to remember over the years is: ISO-200, f/5.6, at ~1/1000ths of a second. This will get you pretty good action photos on a perfectly sunny day. Usually with ISO, you either set-it-and-forget-it or it’s set for you, for up to 36 exposures (depending on the film you buy).

Part 02: Taking Control

Now here’s the thing: your camera is preprogrammed – hell, MOST cameras are – to be able to find and meet the conditions for a perfectly exposed photograph without any input from you. It can focus without you, set the right aperture and shutter speed and ISO sensitivity without you, can determine the right white balance without you, and even account for differences in light and shadow and make corrections (through High Dynamic Range, or HDR) without you. This is, I believe, the promise of most beginner camera kits people buy. Right out of the box, you’ll be able to take great photos! This is a misuse of beginner camera kits, in my opinion (they should honestly be there to let new photographers learn how to compose a photo before they get into all the technical stuff, but instead they’re basically used for neither purpose), but it’s how things are. And with the phone in your pocket, you not only have an incredible still camera system, you also probably have a killer video system as well. At least, you do if your light conditions aren’t shifting rapidly.

So… why is it good that in a game where you’re learning how to be a photographer through each stage’s missions and challenges, where there are so many bells and whistles to keep track of, that the developer would give you new things to try and keep track of yourself?

Because at some point, you are going to want to take that control. Because sometimes the presets aren’t good enough. Because you don’t want an exposure that’s just “good enough,” you want things to be… perfect. Or you want to experiment. And you might not be in a financial position to buy one of those dinky beginner kits from Canon or Nikon (which still run for about $500). And Umurangi Generation Macro is only $9.99 for preorder on Steam.

When you played through Umurangi Generation’s base game, you primarily learned how to compose a photo. You had to find a place to stand or crouch to get all seven birds in the frame, or back up to the edge of a chainlink fence to get your penguin bud in the same frame as your other three human friends. Some bounties would tell you to get right up on an object; others would tell you to shoot the object from a distance, with a telephoto lens if possible. For the most part, exposure was handled for you, or fixable in a post-processing suite that frankly is better than Photoshop at making a good image out of a crummy one. You don’t have to worry so much about levels or curves or histograms in Umurangi Generation’s editor, after all.

When you play Umurangi Generation Macro on Nov. 7, you will not lose that experience in composition; the challenges in each new stage are difficult and varied enough that you will have to think of creative ways to complete everything. You will absolutely find yourself crawling around to get the perfect angle. And now, knowing what you know, that perfect angle can be complemented by a perfect – or perfectly imperfect – exposure. Happy shooting!

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