Elements of Composition - #5 - Point of View aka Perspective

One goal with your photography is to try and show people the world in a new and interesting way. Probably one of the easiest ways to do this is to change people's perspective on how they usually look at things - literally.

In the US men are, on average 5'9" tall and women are 5'6" - if you are around that height and you stand there taking pictures, you are essentially showing people what they would they would already see themselves.  Finding new perspectives mean get down low, get up high, get close, and anything else that breaks you out of that standard mold.

For kids that often means get down to their level - kneel down and shoot at their eye level.  Below is a series of images I took of my daughter.  In each of these I was kneeling to be closer to her level.

This also works for various other things like shooting weddings, bands, and portraits. 

Band - Prime Eights

DJ Prezident with the band the Prime Eights

She was looking up, so I got above her and shot looking downard to get this shot. 

Well thanks for reading this far.  More articles on the Elements of Composition are coming.See the links below to the previous artiles in this series.  

If you like this blog please subscribe!  

Links to other articles in the series:

To see #1 - Rule of Thirds - Go HERE

To see #2 - Balance - Go HERE

To see #3 - Lines - Go HERE

To see #4 - Framing - Go HERE

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/goddom

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapturedPhotons

Twitter: @capturedphotons

Elements of Composition - #4 - Framing

The easiest way to describe the concept of framing is it's like having a frame inside the image.  This has two purposes, one is it can contain the image and trap the audience's eye, and secondly it can ad depth.

In this case I think it's easier to see what I am talking about than to try and explain it. 

  

The window pane frames the spider in the image above.  This is a pretty clear example of a frame, but you might also have elements that are dark or imply framing.  Below are more examples.

Here the scaffolding frame the crucifix. 

In the image above, the straight lines and darker areas frames around Faris from the band Prime Eights. 

An example of artificially inserting framing during post processing is to add a vignette.  Sometimes this is obvious and one would presume that the photographer was not trying to hide this effort.  Other times it can be applied subtly to bump up otherwise poor composition, lighting or various other reasons. 

Below is such an example.  I was shooting a model testing out a new flash and I was limited in my choice of location so I didn't have ideal situation.  So I made the best out of what I got and I tried to use some vignetting to help focus the audiences attention on the model. 

Below is the original picture out of the camera:

There was just to much stuff going on around the subject that was distracting - plus the flash hit her straight in the face and her head looks photoshopped. In post processing I decided to tone down the beam above her head and get rid of some of the other distractions using the vignette tool.

 

In Lightroom, vignettes are pretty easy to add. You will find it in the Develop Tab toward the bottom. It looks like this.  The screenshot below shows the settings for the image above. 

Well thanks for reading this far.  More articles on the Elements of Composition are coming.See the links below to the previous artiles in this series.  

If you like this blog please subscribe!  

Links to other articles in the series:

To see #1 - Rule of Thirds - Go HERE

To see #2 - Balance - Go HERE

To see #3 - Lines - Go HERE

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/goddom

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapturedPhotons

Twitter: @capturedphotons

Elements of Composition - #3 - Lines

This is probably one of the most impactful elements that can be incorporated into any image since lines can dramatically help direct and focus the attention of the audience on your subject or it can do the opposite - which is bad.

There are two general "families" of lines - Static and Dynamic.

Static Lines are horizontal or vertical parallel lines and they are kind of boring.  They imply steadiness, stillness, and consistency.  So if you incorporate them into the scene you are either trying to reinforce this narrative or you are contrasting it with the subject.  On the other hand, Dynamic Lines are cutting across the image at an angle and unlike Static lines, they emphasis movement and change.

Below is an example of Static Lines which is contrasted by the subject - which it self forms a dynamic line.

Now in the image below, I take the same picture and highlighted the static vertical lines in red and the dynamic line of the subject in blue.  Having this contrast of the subject at an angle to the static vertical lines helps to make the image a little more interesting.



Within the family of Dynamic Lines is a special type called Converging Lines.  As the name implies, converging lines are two or more lines that are coming together and will eventually meet at some point - this point may be out of the frame but that is irrelevant.  The reason they are special is because it's human nature for your eye to follow converging lines to see where they meet.  Which is great because it means you can direct your audience to your subject by placing your subject appropriately. See the example below - first without the lines highlighted and then with them highlighted (you may need to enlarge the picture to get the full effect).

In the images above, it may not be initially clear what or where the photographer wants the subject's eyes to go, but with all these converging lines your eye follows them to the figure silhouetted on the train platform.

This is why taking pictures of train tracks are so appealing because you eye naturally wants to follow the rails of the track.  Now, the mistake that most novice photographers make is that the tracks themselves aren't necessarily that interesting - you need a subject to help tell a story.  So when you have converging lines you should have someone or something there to look at.  Heck, you took the trouble to direct the audience's eye there now show them something!

In the examples I have shown so far there are some pretty strong lines - actual physical lines.  Sometimes they are implied and are more subtle.  Here is a picture with a mix of some strong lines and some implied lines from nature.

The dock is similar to the railroad tracks I mentioned and makes a strong set of converging lines, but maybe not as obvious is that the landscape also forms to converging lines. All of which point to the subject.

Here is my next best example of implies lines - this isn't as good of an example as I would like to demonstrate but off the top of my head its the best one I could think of and find. There are some clear lines in this photo, but the one I want to illustrate is the implied line of the stacks that I highlight in the second image below.

The reason I took this photo is because the line of the stacks parallels the contrail line created by the plane.  It was one of those shots where I was stepping out of the car, looked up, saw it and only had a few seconds to move into position, compose and shoot.

Now that you have a few examples under your belt, take a look at the images below and try and see how the lines make the images.  One is very clear and one is probably a little more subtle. I numbered them so I can reference them below.

# 1

# 2

#1 - The lines here are very clear and bold.  It contrasts something that is typically very static - a bridge - and makes it look dynamic with all the crazy converging lines and angles. They all converge to some spot - not necessarily the subject, the bridge is the subject - but to a point on the bridge that is in the rule of thirds. 

#2 - This is a bit more subtle, but the Static Lines should be pretty clear.  Horizontal lines of the benches, and the sleeping subject in the upper left (in the rule of thirds), is balanced and contrasted by the older couple in the lower right - who are looking off frame - heads tilted upward (which implies a dynamic line) at something. 


A word of caution - converging lines are great, but if they converge away from your subject, or out of the frame - then your audience will start to get distracted.  They won't know what to look at, and even though they don't know why, they will find the image hard to look at.  I'll discuss this in greater detail at the end of this series when I explain a technique to help you evaluate composition.  So stay tuned!

Here are links to the previous Posts in this series:

To see #1 - Rule of Thirds - Go HERE

To see #2 - Balance - Go HERE

To see #4 - Framing - Go HERE

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Elements of Composition - #2 - Balance

Taken at the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. The Arabic sign is balancing the portrait of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus.

Now, unlike the Rule of 3rds, from here on out the elements of composition aren't necessary components of an image so you don't need to include them for the photo to be successful but they are available to help you tell the story. I want to stress that you don’t get extra brownie points for including as many elements of composition as you can. You just need to include those elements that are available and necessary to convey to your audience what you are trying to say. 

At the end of this series of posts I will discuss a method of critically evaluating composition - at least of other people - and this will in turn make you better at composing your own photos. 

Balance is kind of a subtle element but when used properly can really help you tell the story in your photo.  Now, as discussed in the previous post, you should be placing the subject off-center into the Rule of 3rds but that can leave a lot of open space in the photo opposite the main subject.  Sometimes that is filled with the background but sometimes you can use that to help give the photo context.  So you have a main subject that is the focal point of the image, but you may have a secondary subject that isn’t competing for the attention of the audience but is positioned opposite the main subject and helps provide context and balance out the elements on within the photo. 

For instance, the image below is moody dark portrait of some random person. As in most portraits, the face is the subject, and you can see it is in the Rule of 3rds. However, you have no context of this image or what’s happening or anything. So maybe you might think this photo is fine as is, but kind of weird. 



Below I have uncropped the image so you can see it in its entirety and the face is still in the Rule of 3rds but now there is the head of a bass guitar that is providing not only context but also balances the image. It fills the space that could otherwise be just a black void with something that adds to the image.  

This isn't something that needs to be incorporated into every photo you take, but its something to keep in mind when shooting. 

Now you should go out and try it!  Your practice photos don't have to be award winning - this is the digital era and the cost of taking a photo is negligible. Back in the days of film it actually cost you money to take a picture but not now!  Share some of your photos in the comments below!  If you have any questions feel free to ask, Ill try and get to them when I can. 

Here are a few more examples that might help you understand what Balance is.

The statue is the main subject, and the plane balances the image.

In this photo I'm interested in the wind turbine, so it could be telling the story of wind turbines near a farm, or it could be conveying the story of a farm near a wind turbine since both could be the main subject.

Here the Milk Way is the main subject and the farm silos help give you scale and tell a story. 

Next week (week of 11/23/15 - Thanksgiving) I'll cover Lines - a hugely important element in composition so stay tuned!

If you are enjoying this series please Follow this blog and share with anyone who you think might benefit.  Any questions or comments please leave them below and I will try and get to them as soon as I can.

Thank you!

Links to other articles in this series:

To see #1 - Rule of Thirds - Go HERE

To see #3 - Lines - Go HERE

To see #4 - Framing - Go HERE

Elements of Composition - #1 - Rule of Thirds

In photography to make amazing photos, you need three things (not necessarily in this order)

1. Interesting Subject
2. Good Exposure
3. Great Composition

In this series I want to break down composition to its individual elements and walk through them one by one.  The nice thing about composition is its pretty universal through all forms of 2D art.  If you have a background in paining, drawing, etc that will make you a better photographer because, whether you realize it or not, you have at least some sense of composition.

Now I suppose I should define Composition - its the arrangement of elements within an image that help tell the story or invoke a reaction.

I should also define one other term right now since I will be using it frequently in this post as well as others to come and it is the term subject: the main focus of an image.  For instance, if you are doing portraiture it would be the person.  If you are taking a picture of a bridge, its the bridge.

Here is the list I will be covering over the next few weeks.

1. Rule of 3rds
2. Balance
3. Lines
4. Framing
5. Point of View
6. Direction of Movement
7. Pattern
8. Texture

Now a good photo may have one or all of these but more isn't always better! Don't try and force more elements into the image.  It still, to some degree, needs to feel organic and not completely artificial.

Right now I want to cover Rule of 3rds.

This is the most important one of the bunch for various reasons - you should either be using it in every photo you take or not using it for a specific reason.  There is no gray area.

By definition the rule of 3rds say that if you were to cut the frame into thirds both vertically and horizontally, the subject will be positioned at the intersection of those cuts.  To demonstrate I have one of my images and red line representing 1/3 increments from the top and the sides.  Where they intersect has been circled.

Now in this case the main subject is a bridge and you can see it sits right in the cross-hairs of the upper left intersection.  Now I want to stress that is not important for your subject to be EXACTLY in the intersection of the Rule of 3rds - they should simply be off center. If you don't believe me, look at Mr. daVinci's painting below - you may recognize it even if I drew all sorts of lines all over it. For portraiture the eyes are the main focal point so you should be concerned where they are arranged within the image. In the painting below you can see Mona Lisa's eyes are not in the horizontal center and only slightly off from the vertical center-line (not shown).  The green lines represent the technical Rule of 3rds lines and the red cross is the center of the image (approximately).  

Basically, the rule is that the subject should NEVER be in the center of the image.  Except that rules are meant to be broken and there are times when you should put the subject directly in the center of the image.  Those instances are not generally common but if you want to convey a sense of loneliness or isolation then frame the subject in the dead center. I don't have to many examples so the image below is probably my best, but I wouldn't say its great in that I have seen better. This is part of a longer time lapse series which I think is more interesting than just the individual still.

Taken with a Nikon D80 converted to Infrared with a Pro-Optic 8mm lens.

Please stay tuned for the next in the series which I hope to have posted late next week since I will be out of town this weekend (hopefully getting some more Milky Way photos and shooting more videos).

If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments below and if you want to see more please subscribe or look for my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/CapturedPhotons

Videos on Infrared Photography can be seen here: https://youtu.be/CMSd2mUAsys

Links to more articles in this series:

To see #2 - Balance - Go HERE

To see #3 - Lines - Go HERE

To see #4 - Framing - Go HERE

Moon Photography!

Moon, mid-eclipse. 200mm lens, ISO 400, f4, 1s shutter speed

Sorry, this is a little late to capture the lunar eclipse, but taking pictures of the full moon can still be fun even when its not being eclipsed.

Before I get started talking about exposure and lenses and such I wanted to explain someone that may not be obvious and understanding this will help you better understand how to take pictures of the moon.  The moon, which you may know is being illuminated by direct light from the sun.  And, the moon is essentially the same color as concrete.  Basically, this means the moon is as bright as a sidewalk on sunny day.  So don't be surprised that you may find that a proper exposure is going to be somewhere in the ballpark of ISO 400, f/16, at 1/250th.

Fun fact - the human eye/brain completely exaggerates the size of the moon and it is always disappointingly small in photos so you will want to use as long a lens as you can.  200-300mm for instance would be much more preferred.

You can shoot a time-lapse of the moon but it moved quite a bit in 30 seconds.  Below you can see two images taken 30 seconds apart and see how much the moon has moved in that interval.

So you can shoot a time-lapse but the moon will move across the frame unless you use some sort of star tracking tripod - which I don't have... yet.  It seems like I do more and more astrophotorgaphy so I may pony up a few hundred dollars to be able to do this.

Below is my off the cuff time lapse that I shot.  Since the moon moves so much I had to adjust the camera every 30 minutes or so.  Also, I had to adjust the exposure not only because of the eclipse but also because of cloud cover.  That is why at times the moon seems to disappear is because I stepped away from the camera and clouds rolled in and obscured the moon.  Also speed at which the moon moves is due to a change in interval timing.  At first I was taking pics every 30 seconds, but toward the end I switched to 15 second intervals.

Enjoy!

Do You Need 50+ Megapixels?

How Many Megapixels Do You Need? 

Just a cell phone photo I use in an example later to calculate megapixels.

 

For those who may be unaware, digital camera manufacturers have been engaged in an all-out megapixel war.  The opening salvos of this battle had probably began back in the 90’s with the first consumer digital cameras, and at one point they marketed the number of megapixels down to two digits. An example would be my ancient Nikon Coolpix 900 with 3.34MP – wow those last .04 MP were really important! Nikon’s last generation of cameras upped the ante with 36MP D800 which eclipsed Canon’s 5D Mark III with a measly 22.3MP.  Canon answered in their latest line up with the 5Ds and 5Ds-R monsters which feature a 50.3MP sensor (not sure why we need these decimal points any more).  The “-R” signifies that the low pass filter was removed to improve fine detail sharpness. So of course now everyone is speculating when Nikon will release their next assault.  Sony, who makes most if not all of Nikon’s sensors, has a 44MP camera locked and loaded in the chamber ready to be unleashed on the world, which means the next Nikon body will likely have at least that.

Megapixel is a marketing companies dream because it’s this number that seems to equal the “goodness” level of a camera. If a 8MP camera is good a 10 is better. At first this was kind of true but are we now getting to the point of diminishing returns?  A long time ago, I read some photography magazine (it’s like a blog but it was printed and you had to buy them at stores) article, and they wanted to find out how many megapixels you needed to equal 100 ISO film.  I am giving only a brief overview because various films had different properties and so did different speeds – but basically they concluded that 35mm 100 ISO film was about the same as 10MP.  So what are megapixels and how many do you need?

If we want to know what a megapixel is we need to define what a pixel is – its the smallest spec of color in a digital image. Mega, that means million, so a megapixel means a million pixels.  Hence, a 14 megapixel camera captures images that have 14 million pixels.  Its actually pretty easy to figure out how many pixels or mega pixels an image is.  I got the new Samsung S6 phone and I don’t know how many megapixels the camera is.  Now I could be boring and look it up with google or something but I can just as easily figure it out on my own.  I have a photo  that I transferred to my computer.  In Windows you can select the file and it will tell you its size (see screenshot below). Its 5312 pixels x 2988 pixels. Multiply the two number together, divide by 1,000,000 and you get 15.872256 megapixels – but you can round to 15.9 I suppose.  

Circled you can see the dimensions of the image that are used to calculate megapixels.

Now that we have that sorted out does more mean better?  Not really. More means more.  For example, I guess megapixels is kind of like horsepower.  You don’t gage the “goodness” of a car solely on how many ponies are harnessed under the hood and usually higher hp translates to lower fuel economy.  So a 700 hp car would be fun but its not for everyone – many people are quite content with 11-150hp and the better gas mileage.  That’s kind of the same with megapixels – there is a threshold at which point you really don’t need more.  That threshold is different for different people depending on what they do with their photos and there is a down side to getting these giant photos which I will talk about shortly.

If you make prints, especially large prints you are going to need more megapixels than someone who just saves photos on their computer or shares them online.  But you might be surprised how many you actually need. To make a good 8x10, 3MP.  Without cropping, I have printed an 11x14 from a 3.3MP image and it turned out great but I would want to shoot at 6MP just in case I need to crop a little.  The next standard size is 16x20 and since the surface area of that print is about twice that of an 11x14, its nice to have twice as many MP – so I would say 12.  Not many people are making prints this large and I have printed as large as 24x36 with a 12MP image with great results so I think most people really only need 6MP but its nice to have up to 12.  Unless you are always cropping your down pretty significantly or printing banners, anything more than 12MP is unnecessary. 

If you often find yourself shooting at 3200 or more ISO then the extra MP helps hide all the digital noise so I don’t want to forge to mention that.

Now there are a number of reasons why high MP cameras are actually kind of sucky.  The file sizes are huge which means your memory cards don’t go as far as they used to, hard drives fill up faster and general computing power needs to be bumped up to maintain the same post processing time. If you backup your files to the cloud then your upload times will also increase. 

Though I am sure there are a lot of people who will love 50+MP cameras, for most people its more than they will ever use or need.  For the most part I would be content with 12-16, but I don’t see a truce coming anytime soon in this war.