 |
Mitsubishi 4WD Owners Club of Qld (Inc) |
|
|
Improve Your Photography |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |||||||
Hints To Improve Your Photography – Part 1 (by Greg Conlon)(No .. we didn't forget the photos - they're in the compression chamber ... coming soon!!) IntroductionAs the name suggests, this article is aimed at providing some basic hints on how to improve your photography. It is not intended to be a textbook. There are plenty of those available in the library or bookshop and even some web sites. I’m no professional, it’s just a hobby for me. But here’s some of what I’ve learnt over the years and many rolls of film. Everybody seems to be able to tell a good photo from a bad one, but usually can’t tell why one is more appealing to their eye than another. Everybody is capable of taking great photos with even the most basic of cameras and they usually do from time to time, but often it’s by accident. Hopefully this guide will help you understand some of the basics, to improve your percentage of good photos. I’ve included some examples that I’ve taken from my album and Kerry’s. They’re not all perfect. I’ve selected them to demonstrate different points. Some of the detail may be lost in black and white printing, but hopefully you’ll get the general idea. I have split the Hints into four parts over the next few issues of the magazine, because there was too much to put in one issue. This issue will deal mainly with the basics of composing a photo. The next issue I’ll go through some more advanced rules of composition. In Part 3 I’ll look at taking the photo and in part 4 will be hints to make you look better for when you’re the subject of the photo, instead of the photographer. Being Ready Read the instruction manual for your camera, so you know how to use the features, like a zoom or flash. Keep your camera ready. Don’t pack it in the bottom of your bag, or leave it in the car. Some of the best pictures will be the ones you never thought of. Unplanned moments can often make priceless pictures. Make sure you have film in the camera and take spare batteries and film with you. Otherwise, you could miss a once in a lifetime photo. Basic Rules of Composition Take off the lens cap. Make sure there is nothing in front of the main lens of the camera, like your fingers, a lens cap, or the camera strap. Keep the horizon horizontal. In photos that include inherently vertical things, like trees, or buildings (the Leaning Tower of Pizza excepted), keep them vertical. You want to give a true representation of the angles. This may be difficult with a wide-angle lens, because of distortion at the edges of the frame. If you do have some distortion of angles from a wide-angle lens you either need to balance the distortion from side to side (as shown in this photo), or accentuate the distortion by keeping only one side vertical. You could also reduce the distortion by moving further away and zooming in, or using a lens with a longer focal length.
Keep it simple. If a picture is too cluttered, the viewer's attention will be divided. Choose uncomplicated backgrounds, otherwise your main subject can be lost in the confusion. Avoid other items competing for attention by giving the main subject most attention.
Move in close to the subject or zoom in if you have a zoom lens on your camera. Not too close. Include only enough to tell the story. Is the next photo a photo of the baby, or the sofa? If there is nothing to enhance the photo, leave the rest of it out. Framing the photo as shown on the right would have been better. The inclusion of a doll, or rattle would help to add some interest and colour.
Avoid Distractions like power lines, or cars, or people that are not part of the scene that you want to capture. In the example below, there is somebody’s arm on the right hand side that causes a distraction. You may also note that the horizon is not horizontal. As I will discuss in Part 3, you could fix both of these problems with a pair of scissors, before you put the photo in you album.
If you’re taking photos of people, check the background to make sure it doesn’t look like that have something growing out of their head, like a tree branch, or a light pole. I’m sure you’ve all seen many amusing examples of this. Look ‘em in the eye. When taking photos of people or animals, take the photo from the same eye level as the subject. This might mean squatting down, lying down, or standing on a box. Taking the photo from slightly above is better than from below the eye level of your subject, under most situations. The next two photos give an example of this
Show some scale. Sometimes it is difficult to get an idea of the size of the subject, like a tree or a cliff, so it helps to include in the photo an object of which viewers recognise the size, like a person, or a car. If it’s a small object like a spider or lizard, then a person’s hand, or some other smaller object may be more appropriate. In photos below, on the left we can’t really get an idea of the height of the sand hill, it could be 3 meters or 300 meters. On the right we can see people at the top and bottom, which gives us a better idea of the scale.
Hints To Improve Your Photography – Part 2 (by Greg Conlon) Hi again. This month I’m going to lead you through some more advanced hints on composing your photos to be more pleasing to the eye. Balance. It is important to balance a picture. Good balance is the arrangement of shapes, colours, light and dark in a complementary way. Balance does not mean symmetry. Using symmetry can divide a viewers attention. Framing. The purpose of framing is to give a picture depth. Framing is using trees, animals and any other object to surround the picture to make it more interesting. In this photo, the framing is provided by the trees on either side of the photo and the shrubs in the foreground. They give the viewer more information about where you took the photo from, rather than just what you took the photo of. In this photo, the tree on the right provides the framing, and there is also some interesting foreground (the flowers), to provide balance and help give a better sense of the complete scene, rather than just being a stark photo of a mountain. Moving Subjects. When the subject of your photo is capable of movement, such as an animal, person, or car it is best to leave space in front of the subject so it appears to be moving into, rather than out of, the photograph. We are generally more interested in where we are going rather than where we have been. Also, unless you’re after a special effect, people, cars, and animals all generally look better taken from the front or side, rather than from the rear. It might not look like it at first glance, but in the photo below the car is not in the middle of the picture, it is entirely in the top half. It is moving into the photo. In the photo on the right, there is more room above and in front of the Kookaburra than below and behind it, giving it somewhere to go.
Rule of Thirds. When looking through the view-finder, draw imaginary lines as shown below. When used correctly, the rule of thirds provides greater interest in an otherwise boring subject.
This is a principle taught in graphic design and photography and is based on aesthetic principles which I won’t go into here. By visually dividing the image roughly into thirds (either vertically or horizontally) you achieve the informal or asymmetric balance mentioned in Part 1.
Although there are many ways a photograph
can be composed effectively by basing it on the use of "thirds," the most common
example is the placement of the horizon line in landscape photography, on either
the upper line, if there
In the bottom photo we see the horizon on roughly the top 1/3 line, the foreshore on roughly the bottom 1/3 line and the boat occupying the left 1/3 of the picture balanced with the island and clouds in the right 1/3.
The same rule of thirds works for taking photos of people. If you’re taking a group, put their heads on the top 1/ 3 line. If you’re taking a close up of a single person, then put their eyes on the top 1/3 line. Using curves and angles. Diagonal lines and curves in your photos add more interest than all horizontals and verticals. The hand rail in the adjacent photo draws your attention to the main subjects, John and Mt Warning. The angle of the cloud also provides a sweeping perspective. You’ll probably notice the rule of thirds and some balance in this one as well. Second Nature. The rules of composition sound simple enough, but they need to become second nature to you when you pick up your camera. Practice makes perfect. Take three or four photos of the same subject or scene from different angles, or including different framing, foregrounds, or backgrounds. Put the subject in different positions in the frame. Then, when you get your photos back, analyse what worked and what didn’t. You’ll soon start to get the hang of seeing the final photo in your camera viewfinder, before you take the photo. One step forward, back or to the side can make all the difference. Hints To Improve Your Photography – Part 3 (by Greg Conlon) So far we’ve looked at some basics and some of the common rules of composition. This month we’ll look at taking the photo. It’s not necessarily as easy as just pushing the button. Taking the Photo. Now that you’ve worked out how to compose your photo beautifully, there are a couple more things you need to consider before you press the shutter button. It’s all about light. You need the correct lighting on your subject and you need to let the correct amount of light through to your film (or CCD if you’ve got a digital camera) and it needs to be focussed in the right places. Lighting is very important to adjust the brightness and contrast in a photo. The most common light source is the sun, which provides both direct and reflected light. The simple hint is to keep the sun behind you, and make sure that the sunlight is on your subject and not on the front of your camera lens. That said, sometimes backlighting can be a nice effect, but is a more advanced technique to master. You can use something to reflect natural light on to your subject, like a white sheet, or you can use a flash even during the daytime to fill-in shadows on peoples’ faces. Another simple trick is to wait for clouds to move, either to let the sunshine through or to block the sunlight, depending on the effect you want. You can also wait until the sun is in a better position. If something is in shade in the morning, you might get a better photo in the afternoon. Use the time of the day to change the colour tones in your photos. When the sun is low in the sky early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the light is softer and usually has a warmer tone to it and can cast some interesting shadows. If you don’t want shadows and want a more even and sharper light, then midday might be a better time for your photo. Flash units either built into the camera or separate, are probably the next most used light source. But, don’t just use them at night. I use a flash quite a lot during the day as well. It is particularly useful to add extra light to people’s faces if you’re outdoors and the sun is in front of you or to the side. If you have a camera with an automatic flash, check your manual to see if you can turn it on manually as well. Correct Exposure is vital in taking good photos. There are two elements of your camera that adjust how much light gets through to the film, the aperture and the shutter speed. Most simple cameras will work most of this out for you automatically and don’t let you adjust anything manually, or they simply only have one setting. But it helps to know what they are doing. Now, I’m going to go a bit technical here for a bit, but hang in there, I’ll get back to more simple stuff again shortly. The aperture is adjusted by an iris that opens and closes to let more or less light into the camera. The iris, usually contained within the lens system, is calibrated to ‘f-stops’ that represent the proportion of available light that is allowed to pass through the lens for each iris position. The shutter speed, as the name suggests, just adjusts the length of time that the shutter is open, allowing light through to the film. The amount of light you need also depends on film speed or ASA rating of the film. – Kodak Max is 400ASA, Fuji Reala 100 is 100ASA. The lower the ASA rating, the more light is needed to expose the film. This is why high ASA rating film will allow you to take good photos in lower light. But higher ASA films are grainier and can give you less sharp images and less contrast, particularly on enlarged prints. What’s in Focus? It is important to focus on your primary subject. However, the aperture also affects what is in focus. A high f-stop number represents a small aperture of the iris. The higher the f-stop, the less light is let through the lens, but the deeper, the depth of field. Depth of field is the range of distances from the camera that are in focus. This also varies with the central focusing distance. Here’s an example for an old Pentax 50mm lens. If you focus on something that is 3.5 meters away and you use an f-stop of say 4, everything from 3m to 4.5m will be in focus. If you use an f-stop of 22, everything from 1.8m to infinity will be in focus. So your depth of field varies between 1.5m and infinity. If you were focused at 0.5m, your depth of field at f-stop 4 is only a few millimetres and at f-stop 22 it is 100mm. So why not just use f-stop 22 all of the time? Because it doesn’t let much light through the lens, which is okay on bright sunny days, but is no good on overcast days or at night. If you want to know more about this, find a good photography text at your library. How Fast? The correct shutter speed depends on the available light, so the aperture and shutter speed go hand-in-hand to produce the correct exposure. If the correct shutter speed for a scene is 1/250 of a second at f8, then these other combinations will also work –1/125 at f11, 1/60 at f16, 1/500 at F5.6, etc. Just as we change aperture to adjust depth of field, we adjust shutter speed to change the amount of blurriness in the image from moving objects. Great waterfall photos are best taken with a slow shutter speed - ½ second or slower – even a few seconds. This allows the water to be all blurry and appear to be flowing. Most sports are best photographed at a faster shutter speed to capture the action at an instant in time. Typically 1/250 second or faster, depending on how fast your subject is moving. For normal daytime scenery photos 1/60 to 1/125 of a second are pretty standard. Backlighting is a problem that fools some cameras. It happens when your subject is in the shade, but there is a bright scene behind your subject. What you’ll often get is a beautifully exposed background and just a silhouette of your subject. You can either use fill-in flash, as discussed above, or adjust the exposure manually, if your camera allows it. This comes back to point 1 in part 1 – “Read the #$*!&#! Manual” and know you camera well. Keep still, especially if you are using a slower shutter speed, otherwise all of your photo will be blurred. Many blurred photos are a result of camera shake. A couple of hints to keep the camera still are:
Improve your chances of taking good photos by taking more than one photo of the same subject with different composition and camera settings and throw away the duds. Only show people your good photos and they’ll think you’re a master. I typically throw out between 30% and 60% of the photos that I take. Analyse and Practice. Study your own photos to see what looks good and what looks bad. Study other peoples’ photos to see what you like about their photos. Try to understanding why certain images look good or interesting to you. Try to put it into words. Don’t resign yourself to thinking that great photos come from great cameras or gifted photographers. The equipment has comparatively little to do with it and the photographers are just people like you and me who have worked very hard at their trade and thrown away a lot of dud photos that nobody got to see. Based on what I have discussed over the past couple of months explain to yourself the mechanisms that make the top photo better than the bottom one. They’re both reasonably boring and taken by two different people at the same time in the same place. So, why is one a bit better that the other? That’s it for this month. Join me again next month for the final in the series and a less technical discussion on Breaking the Rules, Photo Albums, and making yourself look better in other peoples photos. Hints To Improve Your Photography – Part 4 (by Greg Conlon) This month I wrap things up and talk about Photo albums and finally how you can look better when somebody else is taking your photo. Recapping Here’s a quick reminder of what we’ve discussed over the past three issues:
Shoot First, Ask Questions Later It’s all very well to take your time to compose your photo as we’ve discussed. But if your subject is going to move, or the scene is going to change, you’re better to take a quick snap, then take another after you have had a chance to compose the shot. I’ve missed quite a few photos over the years, because I was trying to get it just right and something changed before I got a chance to take the photo. Once you get used to composing your photos, it will start to become second nature and won’t take you long for each photo. Breaking the Rules Sometimes breaking some of the rules can make interesting or unusual photos. This usually means really breaking them – not just bending them. For example, using backlight to create silhouettes, or putting horizon a long way off horizontal, like this photo, or taking pictures from well above or well below a persons eye- level. It’s best to play by the rules and experiment when you get the chance. Don’t bet valuable memories on chancy shots. Be Bold and try different angles and exposures, you don’t know what’s possible until you try. This photo was taken at 2am in the morning by moon and star light. The exposure was 20 minutes. The stripes across the sky are stars. Stick it in your Album A lot of people keep all of their photos in a shoebox. You can enhance your photos even further by judicious use of a photo album. Using an album allows you to chop photos up to get rid of unwanted parts or stick them together to form a panorama. You can only do this in a free-form album though. All of the photos don’t have to be the same size. I don’t like ‘flip’ photo albums (one page per photo). It’s more like taking slides – they all have to be perfect shots – you don’t get the chance to change them after the fact. While we’re on the subject of slides, most of my favourite photos are slides. Slides offer a better contrast and depth of colour than prints, but the problem is that you need to carry a slide projector or viewer if you want to show people you photos. With digital photography and scanners, soon you’ll be carrying around your photo album on a lap-top or palm-top computer. This will allow us to fix up photos digitally after the fact as well as screens offering better contrast and colour depth, than prints. Give in to the other side. When you are on the other side of the camera, here are some posing tips:
A Final Word The hints we’ve discussed are all simple things that will get you started on the way to creating improved photographs. If you want to learn more, there are plenty of sites on the Internet that can provide more hints and good books available from bookstores or libraries. Greg Conlon |
|
|
