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.  

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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

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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

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 2

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 2

Buttons make it go!


For those who have not had much experience with the Arduino, basically what happens is once the board if plugged into a power source the program starts to run - so in this case the relay will start clicking away until you unplug it or upload another program.  So its kind of nice to update the program so that the relay, and therefore the camera will only fire once a button is pressed.

Now I add a button that will trigger the relay and therefore the camera.  The basic button wiring can be found on the Arduino site but I have one here as well:

So I ran a wire from the Arduino +5v pin to the bread board.  Hooked one side to the switch, on the other side of the switch is connected to a digital pin on the Arduino (Pin X), plus a 10K Ohm resistor connected in parallel to ground.

Here is my set up:

Button is the little back square on the white bread board.  The purple wires connect to the relay.  The red, yellow and black wires on the left side go to the camera.  

One thing to consider is that buttons aren't perfect and may "bounce" - meaning they don't make smooth contact and may chatter a bit.  I added a simple debounce code - very simple, maybe even laughably so - but I am a simple guy and I didn't understand the debounce code available online.

Here is my code:

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);  //sets pin 52 to output mode
 pinMode(buttonpin, INPUT);  //sets pin 52 to input mode
}

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

  if (buttonstate == HIGH){
    digitalWrite(camerapin, HIGH);  // since I am not sure how much time the relay needs to be on for the camera to register it will keep the relay "on" for .1 seconds. 
    delay(100);
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);
    delay(500); //to help prevent the button from triggering the relay multiple times by accident, this delay prevents the button from being pushed again for .5s
  }
  else{
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);  //in hindsight, I probably don't need an "ELSE" statement
  }
}


Next: Stepper it up!

My new lens: Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8

WOW

What else is there to say? All the reviews say the same. For me, this lens on my D300 is perfect. I bought a Sigma 18-50mm, and I am happy with it, but since the D300 is a DX camera, there is a 1.5 magnification to the equivalent focal length of the lens - and I just couldn't get wide enough with 18mm. An 18mm lens on my D300, is like a 27mm lens on a film camera. However, a 14mm lens is like a 21mm lens on a film camera, and there is a huge difference between 21mm and 27mm! I really don't know waht else to say about this lens except that I want to take more pictures with it. Because of the overcast light, I didn't have problems with flare, but I happy with the contrast the lens managed on such a muddy day. I also noticed that I didn't have much perspective correction to make when at 20-24mm.

For now, I think my lens collection is pretty complete between the 14-24mm Nikkor, and the 18-50 f/2.8 Sigma, and a 70-210mm f4-5.6 lens since I don't do much work past 50mm mark anyway. The 24-70mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens looks pretty tempting since I would like to get a FX body at some point and the Sigma only works on the APS-C sensor bodies. Well, for now, I am pretty well set on lenses.

If you aren't sure what I am talking about when I refer to DX camera, and 1.5x magnification, feel free to email me and I would be more than happy to explain it to you.

Well here are a couple of shots I took early Saturday morning.




Just a little self promotion, but I am a local Ann Arbor MI photographer and my website can ber viewed here.

If you are interested in photography, and can't find any local classes, then check out this page of my website here. Since I teach a class through Ann Arbor's Rec and Ed department, I have put together a few powerpoint presentions on the fundamentals of photography and you can download the pdf versions.

Thanks,
Matt