I remember when I started on my journey to become a photographer, I came across the phrase “lens compression” – but it wasn’t explained.
With an engineer’s background, I readily grasped such concepts as the field of view is wider for lenses that are shorter– because if you take a paper tube, and look through it, the longer the tube, the less field of view you can see at the end. Gotcha.
But I still couldn’t find a good example of this strange phenomenon that people kept talking about – lens compression.
Lens compression is what happens when you take a picture with a longer lens – it apparently compresses the foreground and the background, and makes stuff appear closer together than in real life. With wide-angle lenses, the opposite effect occurs.
For example, let’s take a look at two pictures: (more…)
Curves and Lines, Swanton Road. Reading direction, in additition to other factors, influences most Western viewers to "read" the curvy tree first, the straight trees second.
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
Last week, we talked about direction in composition and how it relates to movement. There are several other themes that occasionally play into direction in composition, today we’ll briefly talk about a couple of them in no particular order. None of them are relevant to most images, but each of them seems to occasionally come into play when I think about how I’d like to compose an image. Perhaps a few of these ideas will be helpful to you as well.
While I’ve had trouble finding a good reference to the history of the idea, it has been understood for some time that reading direction has a cultural influence on how we look at images. In much of Western culture, we’re more likely to parse images from left to right. If there is an implied horizontal sequence in an image, we’ll probably read the leftmost object as coming first–or at least read it as the more primary object. This is far from an absolute. And in nature photography we’ll rarely have the opportunity to invert the world (at least outside of the digital darkroom), but occasionally I’ve given that idea consideration in composing an image. It’s interesting to take an image and look at how different it feels when flipped horizontally, I recommend trying it on a few of your own images.
A related idea comes from the world of graphic design, when you’re putting together something that mixes images and text, the piece will feel more harmonious if any motion in the image moves in the same direction as the text. (more…)
When you first decide that you want to be a professional photographer, there are so many things that you have to learn. You’ve got to learn the equipment, the software, and the business side of being a professional photographer. Then there’s the unbelievable amount of knowledge that you have to absorb in order to develop an eye and a talent for the entire operation. So much information, in fact, that any good photographer will tell you that they are still learning all the time. The one thing that can often fall by the wayside while you are trying to dig yourself out of of the mountain of education that has landed on your head is that you also have to develop your own style.
This can be very hard to do. When you take into consideration the fact that Photoshop provides a virtually unlimited palette from which you can paint (not to mention the hundreds of ways in which you can shoot) it’s easy to wind up all over the map. Occasionally I’ll come across that photographer who seems to have a clear idea of what they like and how they want to present themselves, right from the very beginning. I hate those guys. Nobody likes someone who seems to have it all together while the rest of us are flailing about with our water wings in the shallow end of the pool. Don’t even think about sitting at my table during lunch. Seriously.
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
We’ve talked a fair bit about symmetry and asymmetry, it’s time now to talk about direction-various meanings and feelings that come along with where in absolute terms we place subjects in an image. There are several concepts “in play” when we talk about direction, so I’ll be devoting two, perhaps three columns of the Tuesday Composition to the topic.
The connection between direction and movement is a significant part of deciding where to best place objects in an image. When we have a moving subject in a scene, we often find it more natural when there’s more room “in front of” the moving object than behind it. That additional space we give the object to “move into” seems to suggest more movement from the object and can be part of telling a story about where the object is going to.
In Casual Climbing, providing the rock climber more space to ‘climb into” contributed to a sense of movement and also provided, along with other cues, a sense of danger and excitement. We’re left with no doubt that the climber is heading up. (more…)
Mt. Oberlin Alpenglow, Glacier National Park. I used 2 ND grads, a 2-stop soft, and a 3-stop soft, to capture the enormous dynamic range of this image in-camera.
One of the great things about the advent of digital photography is that it has greatly reduced the number of filters I need to carry. Many of the functions we used to carry out with filters (warming/cooling, color filtering for B&W, soft-focus effects) are now much more easily and more accurately controlled in post-processing. But a few filters are still impossible for me to replace, particularly my polarizers and my set of neutral density gradient filters (ND grads).
ND grads were designed to address one of the fundamental challenges of photography, the challenge that light has too much dynamic range. We see the world with image sensors of seeing detail in a range of 13-14 stops in the same scene, our cameras tend to top out (even if we nail our exposures perfectly, which we don’t always do) at a few usable stops fewer than that. This means that we often see scenes in the world where we can make out detail and color in the shadows and in the highlights, scenes that our cameras cannot capture entirely. Because we often have the situation where the highlights are on on side of an image (e.g., the sky) and the shadows are on the other (e.g., the land), ND grads are an attempt to address this by darkening the lighter part of the image to bring it closer in exposure to the darker part. They’re grey (neutral) on one side, clear on the other, and there’s usually some sort of transition zone between the transparent grey area and the clear area to possibly make the effect less overt. (more…)
I think what I love most about digital photography is the experimentation and freedom it allows. One quick little nugget that I’d like to share is playing with the white balance. Yes, that lovely feature that makes sure your whites are white and blues are blue is also a useful little tool when you want to add a bit of warmth to your images or change the “expression” of a photo by cooling it down. (more…)
One thing I really like about this business is the fact that it’s subjective. There is no one right way to do things. Of course that can be a double-edged sword. An image you’ve poured your heart and soul into can elicit a reaction of, “meh” from a client. That’s ok because it can go the other way too. An image you considered a throw away can get a “wow!”
Sunrise, Goblin Valley. When sunrise is a must, sleep comes at a premium price.
Normal people (by which I mean non-photographers) often suffer from a strange delusion-the idea that it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars (and both weeks of annual vacation) travelling across the world to see a beautiful place, but no sense at all to either get up for sunrise or stay outside for sunset, and thus having to eat dinner earlier or later than their usual hour. A little thinking ahead might give many of these folks a better vacation experience.
Of course, we photographers need to think ahead too.
For many of us, sunset and sunrise are our prime working hours, it’s important to be out and about for both. In many locations, this can be a challenge. My first trip to Glacier National Park in Montana was in mid-summer some years back. I realized then that if I needed to be up at 4:15 to make a 5 a.m. sunrise, and that I wouldn’t be back from a 9 p.m. sunset until almost 10, that it was absolutely impossible to get more than about six hours sleep between the two and still make both calls, in practice, I was getting closer to four and a half. (more…)
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
As I’ve said before (and will keep saying), these photographic “rules” we talk about are more like dozens of tools in a large toolbox, and the vast majority of your images will only use a small subset of those tools. In fact, often there are very good reasons to do precisely the opposite of whatever one of these guidelines might seem to suggest, sometimes the rules themselves are contradictory. Today’s column is a case in point. Last week I explored a number of reasons you’d usually be better off not centering things vertically or horizontally in your images. This week, I’m going to mention some exceptions, but those exceptions are no more hard-and-fast as the original “rule” was. As such, I hope that you’ll not only get some ideas about why images might work well centered, but also that you’ll get a little better idea of what I mean by the “toolbox” metaphor. (more…)
Being a photographer is a great way to make a living. Sure it’s challenging, but anything worth doing is. Sure it takes talent and hard work, but anything worth doing does. But c’mon, I’m not saving the world here. (more…)
