Reviewing Photo Composition
Posted by latoga | Filed under Gear, Landscapes, Photos, Technique
Tonight on the train ride home from San Francisco, I was working on a some photos from my recent trip to the Redwoods. The first day of that trip found me in Eureka where I was able to get up early to catch sunrise over Humboldt Bay. Tonight, I was focused on four photos that I took from the same spot, just composed differently. It struck me as I worked on these photos how each one has a different feel due to it’s composition. I thought it might be fun to walk through how I look at the composition of each of these images. (click on each image to open up a larger version)
Composition I is the widest view of the scene. This was the first photo that I composed, noticing the rower coming across the bay my instincts kicked in and I knew I would have to act fast to place him in as many of my shots as I could. In general, I think this image is a bit too busy: with the row boat in lower center, and the sailboat on the right, and power plant in the distance the photo feels out of balance to me.
Composition II is more balanced and stronger. With the seaweed floating in the water in the foreground, your eye is lead into the the scene. The row boat on the left in the lower left corner and the horizon with the power plant on the lower third, this image feels more balanced. The empty space at the top helps the image to breath. Following the golden triangles, the rower is near the cradle with the power plant landing in the second largest triangle and the wind blowing the steam toward the empty space of the largest triangle. Or flipping your golden triangles, the seaweed is in the smallest triangle leading your eye toward the rower in the second largest triangle. And the the wind is blowing the steam along the long edge of the largest triangle.
Composition III is also well balanced and stronger than I. With the rower out of frame, your eye is focusing on just the sailboat with the power plant in the background. Using a golden spiral, the spiral ends right on the sailboat with the sweeping arch passing over the power plant. Also, the fact that the wind is blowing the steam from the power plant away from the sail boat helps to reduce and conflict in the image, it flows better from foreground to background.
Composition IV is the weakest of the tighter variations of I. With just the power plant in the image, there is nothing to lead you into the photo. Using golden triangles again, the steam is still following the longest diagonal line and the the large smoke stack falls just outside the cradle. However, the single layer of depth of this image weakens it overall.
If your new to the concepts of the rule of thirds, golden triangles, and the golden spiral and your a Lightroom user there is good news. When you activate the Crop and Straighten tool in Lightroom’s Develop module, you get all of these tools to help with your composition. Under the View menu you have the Overlay Tools option…I always leave this turned on. When you activate the Crop tool, you will see a Crop Grid Overlay displayed on top of the photo, most likely the Rule of Thirds overlay. The trick is you can use the “O” key to cycle through the other overlay grids. If the overlay isn’t lining up correctly with your photo, you can hold down the shift key and press “O” again to adjust the orientation of the overlay. Great way to learn composition rules by doing.
Here are screenshots from Lightroom 2 of each composition with the grid overlay tools visible:
If your looking for more information on these composition rules, check out these other resources online:
- Advanced Composition and the Golden Ratio
- Presentation Zen’s article on the Power of Thirds
- Photo Composition’s list of articles on the Golden Mean
Hopefully this self exploring lesson in composition has opened your eyes up to a new way to look at your own work.
Tags: Composition, Humboldt Bay, Photos, Review, Sunrise
Starlight Redwoods
Posted by latoga | Filed under Landscapes, Photos, Technique
This past weekend my wife and I got out of town and head to Northern California for some camping and hiking in the Humbold Redwood State Park. The goals of the weekend were simple: enjoy some much needed time together, explore this State Park that we have wanted to visit for years, and make some photos along the way.
One of the things I was hoping to try out was doing a time lapse video of still photos taken of the night sky. Since we were going to be far removed from the light pollution of the city, this was a good time to experiment with it. (Of course I decide to do that in one of the places with the tallest trees on the planet!).
Click through on the above photo for a HD video that is a combination of 141 consecutive frames, each one 25 seconds long (17mm f/4 @ 1600 ISO).
When I was planning this before the trip, I thought I would need a Canon Timer Remote to be able to trigger the sutter continuously to capture this series. While in the field it occurred to me that using my existing Canon Remote with my camera in continous shooting mode and then locking the remote would accomplish the what I needed. Continous shooting with out continous attention. The trees are illuminate by a camp ground building across from our site. And the bright burst was the result of a late night camper pulling into their spot.
The trick with this type of exposure is pushing the camera to keep the exposures under 30 seconds. More than 30 seconds and the stars will turn into streaks. So it becomes a trade off between sharpness of stars compared to noise from the high ISO. And using noise reduction software only makes he stars even less sharp.
Once back from the trip, I processed one photo and then synced those changes across all images using Lightroom. I then used FotoMagico Pro to create the slide show and exported it as the HD QuickTime movie.
Note: for a more in depth review of FotoMagico, see Jim Goldstein’s FotoMagico 2.5 Review. From my experiences using the demo version to create this movie, it is very easy to use and a great tool. There are some usability improvements I would like to see (like a way to configure watermarking once instead of for each slide show; and a sort option for the photos). It should also be noted that Boinx Software’s website (makers of FotoMagico) was very slow and errored on me a few times when I tried to download the demo. And then the software crashed on me when saving the slide show not to mention might have caused my Mac to crash when I put it to sleep with FotoMagico running (not directly blamming it for that one, but it was the only new thing running at the time).
Tags: California, Humboldt, redwoods, Time Lapse
HDR And Our Expectations of Photography
Posted by latoga | Filed under Musings, Technique
This topic has been burning a hole in my head or the past two weeks. And I get a gentle reminder every few days in the form of another comment arriving in my inbox.
Back around the 4th of July holiday, Mark Graf had a posting about some playing with HDR he was doing. He posted an HDR variation of a previous photo of his. Mark’s goal was to collect some feedback on what people thought was the better photo (see his posting for my exact thoughts). Mark does some wonderful wildlife and landscape photography and the general consensus of the two images was that the original was better. The idea of “what is the core reason everyone thought that the original was better” has been bouncing arond my head since his posting.
When I was returning from my recent trip to Chicago, I was passing through Denver International Airport and happened to stop in a Seattle’s Best Coffee. They have this huge photo that is part of their advertising behind the counter, it’s a view of the Public Market neon sign from downtown Seattle, but it’s taken near evening and has wonderful mood due to the exposure and low dynamic range (lots of dark areas with highlights just around the neon).
This got me to thinking about HDR and how the typical response to an HDR photo done badly is “it doesn’t look natural” (especially with landscape photography). Yet, I’ve also heard this statement applied to HDR photos that were done really well. But the statement usually comes from someone who is not a photographer, so they are usually uttering their initial impression. This impression has come from years of viewing images and having been conditioned to expect a photo taken near sunset to have lots of dark areas and a low dynamic range. Yet, if they were standing next to the photographer when the image was capture, their own eyes would see much more range than the camera captures.
So, this got me to wondering about how much our expectations of photography are based on our conditioning of the technical limitations if the craft. As the technology changes and advances (something that we have been in the midst of for the past 5-10 years, like never before) are these changes happening faster than the consumers are able to accept them? In 5-10 years from now, will the same person who complained about the “un-nature looking” HDR photo, complain if it’s a LDR photo?
Interesting mind trip to think about how conditioning of the audience affects our work, our decision making process about our photography, and our industry of photography…
Tags: HDR, Photography Industry
