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

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. 

Organizing Your Photos -

Strategies and Tips

Organizing photos has always been a problem even in the age of film though the volume of photos people can generate has magnified significantly with digital.  There are a number of strategies for organizing photos and I will go into some detail what I do and perhaps you can take use this my process or develop your own to help you keep your images sorted.  The key is to figure out your system and then make sure to follow it as you unload photos from your camera onto your computer because once you get behind it can be hard to find the time and/or the motivation to clean up the files.  Then you run the risk of losing photos you treasure either because you accidentally delete them thinking they are stored somewhere else or your computer dies and you don’t get them backed up properly.

Really the only way to organize digital images is to figure out some sort of file structure that you can place your photos into.  It seems that people typically decide to organize by date (ie 2-15-2015), or event name (ie “Christmas at Grandma’s”).  Now there are advantages and disadvantages to both. For instance, you may not remember what date something happened on so you will find yourself spending a decent amount of time searching through folders trying to find the photos you are looking for.  Also, if you don’t use the right date format you will find that your folders won’t be in the order you expect.  For instance, if you use the format 1-7-2015, then all your January dates will be grouped together, then February, etc.  On the other hand, if you list it by event name and you don’t remember what you called the event – for instance you remember is was at Grandma’s house, but you forgot you called it “Christmas at Grandma’s” you will have to read each folder name until you find it.  What I have found that works the best is a combination of the two. 

Here is an example of how I organize my photos.

My top level folder I call “Photography”.  Under that I have a folder for different years 2007, 2008, 2009… etc.  Within each
year I have folders for events “Renaissance Fair”, “4^th of July”, and the like.  Since I started I have gotten into Milky Way time lapse which has become quote a large portfolio.  Each shoot yields hundreds of photos and since I didn't want to have to dig through my general photography images to find these I created a new broad category labelled “Time Lapse.”  In this folder I use a slightly different strategy to organize my files since I seem to shoot in the same locations regularly and the date is irrelevant to me, under the main folder I have a folder for different locations.  Those folders are then sub divided into more folders with descriptive names like “Silos with clouds” – which means something to me but probably not anyone else.  I have also created large broad categories to organize photos of local bands I shoot, Infrared photography and one folder dedicated to my daughter.  

This shows how Lightroom is organized .

As you broaden your photography interests you might make other broad categories  as well – such as Weddings or Real Estate or what have you. This works well not only for general file organization, but also works well in Lightroom.  Now each broad category can become its own Lightroom catalog.  The only issue I have had is if you want to transfer images from one catalog to another it can be a little cumbersome – but perhaps this was solved since v2.7( yeah I am a little behind the times…)

Maybe you are just taking pictures of your family and some landscapes or whatnot you could still separate the images into broad categories such as “Kids” or “Dogs.”  My mother-in-law takes pictures of trees.  She could have one folder labelled “Trees”, a folder for “Family” and then “General.”  Really, you can adapt this to you own personal needs.

One note that I would like to stress, if you do choose to label folders by date, is not to use the standard American date format (ie month-day-year).  The folders, which are usually sorted by name, will have all the months grouped together and your folders will be out of chronological sequence.  So, for example, all your January folders will be together, then all your February and so on and so on.  See example below.  The 1/1/2001 then the 1/1/2002 are next to each other.  

Naming Files with month first will group months together as opposed to grouping years together.

My suggestion is to label them year first, then month and day - always using 4 digits for year, 2 digits for month and 2 digits for day.  See below. This standardizes the titles of the folders and makes it easier to find a particular date. 

Name them with year first and they will be in chronological order. 

Backing Up Files:

On a side note, once you have a pretty well established file system, backing up files becomes that much easier.  I am not going to get into to much detail here since this is a whole other topic in itself but I mention it now since you should develop a backup routine because no hard drive or computer is going to last forever.  There are a couple different things you can do now to help protect your files.  One is to back them up onto an external drive on a regular basis.  They have become much more affordable and you can find a 1TB external hard drive for about $60 online.  Another option is to use a "Cloud" backup.  Meaning you upload your images/files to some online service.  This is a great option since internet servers (where your files will be stored ) have a very regimented and robust backup process and its highly unlikely that the data will be lost.  There are a couple disadvantages to this however, one being there is likely a monthly/yearly cost if you want to store more than 5GB of data, and secondly, uploading a lot of large files may take a long time or be impractical if you don't have access to high speed internet.  

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 3

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 3

Stepper Into Motion

Now that I have tried the relay hooked up to the camera, got a button to fire it, and now its time to test the stepper motor.

First I should briefly explain what a stepper motor is and why I choose to use one.  They are called stepper motors because they move in small incremental steps which is generally measured in degrees.  So a 1.8 degree motor will take 400 little steps per revolution.  Because the motor can move in these small increments, it can (depending on the quality of the motor) make some very precise movements.  That is why I chose such motor for my application since I need the camera to move in consistent, accurate movements between shots.

I am using the Adafruit motor shield.  After I bought it, and started to figure out more about these crazy motor shields they can only handle so much power which means the motors can't draw to much power itself.  The Adafruit ones can handle 1.2A and I found it difficult to find a motor that was less than that. I eventually got one that draws .4A but I am not sure it will be powerful enough to move the camera... we will see!  Regardless it was only $15 so it if doesn't work I can at least use it to test everything out.

The Adafruit website is actually pretty handy and they have a lot of tutorials which is super awesome (see this link here) - though the one for this motor shield was slightly wrong at points, it was right enough that you can figure it out.  First thing first was to download the motor shield library. For instance, the tutorial said once the library is installed it should be accessible through the File/Examples/AFMotor, but that never happened for me.  It does show up under Sketch/Import Library/AFMotor and when you select it you get a "#include " added to the code - I assume always to the top but I haven't done it when there was code present.  Don't let this bother you, keep following the Adafruit tutorial and it has a lot of useful information and some example programming.  I used that example to help with my code below.  

Next step was wiring the sucker up.  For a test, and test only, I used a 9v battery to power the motor.  In real life the battery probably doesn't have enough juice to fully power the stepper motor I am using nor will it have the longevity that I need - 600+ cycles.  I bought a 9v battery hookup and wired it to the board at the Ext. PWR block.  Next to that, there is a jumper. Per the Adafruit tutorial if you want to use an external power supply to run the motor that is separate from the Arduino board, then you remove the jumper.  If you Arduino power supply (ie USB cable) is going to power both then leave the jumper in place.  As a side note, my experience is that even with the jumper removed, when I plugged the Arduino in to the USB to update the program it moved the motor.

Blur block next to the EXT PWR is where you can hook up the power.  The red circle on the right is where the jumper is located.  In this photo, I have already removed the jumper. 

I got a Primopal motor because it was cheap (~$15 shipped), and it was nice that Primopal had data sheets available for all their motors.  Without some sort of tech sheet you will have to figure out how to wire the motor to the board.  Now I am not expert on stepper motors but some are uni-polar and some are bi-polar.  Uni-polar motors have 5 wires and bi-polar have 4.  Either one will work, the shield allowed for both to be hooked up.  There are online resources that will show you how to wire the motor if it doesn't have a data sheet.

To test the motor I used Adafruit's tutorial code with some simple changes.  The motor I have is 1.8 degrees per step, and Adafruit is using a 7.5 degrees per step.  So I changed the steps from 100 to 400 (see red text below).  I also changed the rpm from 10 to 60 just because.

#include


AF_Stepper motor(48, 2);


void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);           // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("Stepper test!");

  motor.setSpeed(10);  // 10 rpm

  motor.step(100, FORWARD, SINGLE);
  motor.release();
  delay(1000);
}

void loop() {
  motor.step(400, FORWARD, SINGLE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, SINGLE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, DOUBLE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, DOUBLE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, INTERLEAVE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, INTERLEAVE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, MICROSTEP);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, MICROSTEP);
}



Now - to tie my camera shutter, and stepper motor together I wrote this code.  A button sets the whole thing in motion.  It will take 20 photos and advance the camera on the track 20 times (see the yellow highlighted section of the code in which this number is set). Keep in mind I have a MEGA board and not the regular Uno board, so I have more pins.  The button and relay are hooked to ports 52 and 53.


#include

AF_Stepper motor(200, 2);  //number of steps per revolution and indicates which port the motor is wired to.

const int buttonpin = 53;  //number of the pin the button is connected too
const int camerapin = 52; //number of the pin the relay to trigger the camera is connected too

int buttonstate = 0;

void setup() {

 pinMode(camerapin, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(buttonpin, INPUT);

 // Setting up the stepper motor
 Serial.begin(9600);           // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("Stepper test!");  //probably not a necessary line....

  motor.setSpeed(60);  // 60 rpm
 }

void loop(){
  buttonstate = digitalRead(buttonpin);

  if (buttonstate == HIGH){
 
    for (int i=0; i<20 span="">; i++) //this will be the stepper motor camera trigger loop, i dictates the number of times the camera shoots
  {
    digitalWrite(camerapin, HIGH);
    delay(3000);
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);
    delay(500);
    motor.step(400, FORWARD, SINGLE);
    delay(1000);
  } //ends the FOR statement
 }  //end IF statement
} //ends LOOP



Next Steps - make a track and dolly for the camera!

Isle Royale Cont.

On day 4 it was time to hike back to Three Mile camp. I could have decided to just stay at Daisey Farm, but it seemed better to hike 7 miles on this day and only 3.4 Friday to catch the ferry instead of vice versa. However, the day was gorgeous; a warm bright sun fended off the chilly Lake Superior breeze. This was the first day during the whole trip that I wore a t-shirt. All my previous days I had been wearing several layers of light jackets, a sweater, long sleeve shirt and a short sleeve shirt. It may sound uncomfortable, but it was actually quite ideal. At any given time I could either shed or add layers to keep at a comfortable temperature.

Here are some pictures that took to try and campture the magic of the scenery. What I was not able to do was get a picture that accurately portrays the ancient, wizen, and heartiness of the trees, lichen, moss, and rocks. The island looks like something you would find in a magical kindgom of elves and gnomes. Many of the trees are covered in moss, the moss covers the ground and the rocks are painted with lichen.


Here is a picture of Three Mile camp... or the dock anyways since the camp is well hidden in the trees.


Sunset on my last night on the island:
Here is a night shot I took that same night:

I am hoping to make time next year to take this trip again. If I go a little later in the season, the berries will be in season and while hiking you can also graze.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. You can get my contact information here.

Please feel free to visit my web page.

Thanks,
Matthew Eddy
Photographer

Isle Royale Trip 5/25-5/29/2009 CONT...

Day 2:
Staying the night in the shelter was pretty chilly. The wind blew right into the shelter and made the night a little uncomfortable. At about midnight I wrapped the rain fly of the tent around me to help cut the wind. My sleeping bag is rated to 20 degrees F, I have a full sized inflatable sleeping pad, and I was wearing long johns and a light wool sweater.

I got up at around 8, cooked a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, packed up and was on the trail by 10 am or so. Off hand, I can't recall how long it took me to get to Moskey Basin, but I think I was there by about 1:30 or so. The hike from Three Mile to Daisy Farm was pretty easy. Daisey Farm to Moskey Basin was a bit tiring since the trail moves away from the coast and goes up into the hills a bit. It seemed that a lot of people had the same idea as myself to make Moskey Basin a final destination. Threre were only a few shelters and tent sites available. However, the design of the camp ground was such that I found a relatively secluded tent site. Given the night I had, I wanted a tent site, and it was a great decision. It sprinkled a little that night and but I was warm any cozy in my little tent.

I didn't do much after arriving in Moskey Basin since the weather was a little ugly, with some showers and high winds.


Day 3:
The weather didn't start getting good until Wednesday night just before sunset. I was hoping that it was clear a little earlier, and I decided to hike out to Lake LaSage. As I was hiking out, I ran into one small group who said that people reported fresh wolf tracks and scat. Out around Lake LaSage, I did see tracks and some fresh scat. Originally I was hoping to stay out there for a while and get some nice shots of the sunset over the lake, but I am happy that I decided to head back to Moskey Basin since I got to watch one of the best sunsets I have seen in a long time. Below are pictures of the sunset. It was amazing how the clouds changed, and

This was one of the LONGEST sunsets I have ever experienced. I think the sun technically set at around 9pm, but it wasn't until after 10 or closed to 11 that the sky started to get dark. The next night I was trying to take pictures of the stars and I had to wait until midnight before the light from the sun had dimmed enough to start to even SEE the stars. Also, as you can see by the pictures, the light, sky and colors changed dramatically over the course of the sunset.

Ill post more later.

Thanks,

Matthew Eddy

Photographer

http://www.oil-rigs.net/