Tips and Techniques | Photocrati

The Tuesday Composition: Areas of High Contrast

Morning by the Merced, Yosemite — Morning by the Merced. Notice how your eye is more attracted to the tree leaves than the canyon walls.

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.

In a previous column we’ve talked about how the eye is attracted to and tends to follow along edges in a scene, and that similarly, the eye tends not to spend much time wandering in the center of silhouetted areas, tending to explore the edges of those areas instead. Both of these ideas are related to the fact that as one looks at an image over time, the eye will spend more time looking at areas of high contrast than areas of lower contrast. If your image is half-solid without texture, and half a simple textured pattern, the viewers’ eyes will tend (depending, of course, on the dozens of other factors that go into human perception) to spend more time wandering around the patterns.

This autumn image from Yosemite Valley demonstrates the principle. As we look at the image over time, our eye spends a lot of time wandering around the tree branches and leaves compared to the shadowed valley walls or the thin strip of foreground grasses. If we were just trying to understand why our eye spends more time on the tree than the valley wall we might think it was just a matter of the tree leaves being highlights that our eyes are attracted to. But here, while our eyes might very well be first attracted to the brightest part of the image (the grasses at the base of the image), the the eye will eventually spend more time wandering the more interesting and complex patterns of the branches. And the large contrast in the tree leaves (both color contrast and tonal contrast) is a primary reason why. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Blacks, Shadows and Silhouettes

Sunset Flames, Second Beach — Sunset Flames. Second Beach

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.

Two weeks back we looked at how our eyes tend to behave around photographic highlights. This week we’ll spend a little time looking at the flip side of that coin, dark areas in an image.

Silhouettes provide the clearest examples. Much as our eyes seem to want to dwell in highlights, our eyes avoid dwelling in the blacks of featureless silhouettes. I believe that this is one of the reasons that in general, (and I once again must remind you that all of these compositional “rules” are really statements about what tends to happen, not what always happen, not what must happen) we don’t find featureless black areas problematic in color photographs nearly so often as we find blown, featureless highlights.

The featureless black of silhouettes seems to push the eye to the edges of the object being silhouetted, where our eyes will will tend to trace along the edges of the silhouette, emphasizing the shape of that object. Thus the studio lighting maxim, “front-lighting for color, side-lighting for texture, back-lighting for form.” (more…)

Wedding Photography Lighting – Find the level that’s right for you

I was talking with a friend of my wife’s yesterday and she asked, “Can you help me pick out a new camera? I want to take better pictures of my kids.”

I get this sort of question all the time and it’s a tough one to answer. Most people don’t understand that good photography comes in levels (like Donkey Kong). Sure, it starts with a decent DSLR but then it moves up through many different levels of skill. The real question you have to ask yourself when you want to take better pictures is: How much time am I willing to dedicate towards learning to take good photographs? Then I can help you choose your equipment.

The same question applies to wedding photography. Search the web and you will find prices from $500 – $5000 for a wedding photographer. How can that be? Well, it’s all about the levels and like Donkey Kong there are several different ladders you can choose to climb if you want to reach the big gorilla. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about the “Flash” ladder. (I’m a wedding photographer in Tampa, FL) (more…)

When the Light isn’t Right

Rhododendrons and Redwood Trunks, Damnation Creek Trail — Rhododendrons and Redwood Trunks. Damnation Creek Trail

Sunday the light just wasn’t working for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t ugly out. It was a beautiful blue-sky day in far Northern California, where I was just finishing up a much-too-short run to spend a couple days in the redwoods, in part as part of the Save Our State Parks effort. The trip was amazing. But yesterday, full sun and 30 miles-per-hour winds left me uninspired.

Now, I’m far from the first photographer to observe that “the light isn’t right” is often as much a statement about the photographer as the light itself. Yes, it’s likely that a sufficiently creative photographer will find a way to make great images in any light she or he ends up with. On the other hand, it’s also true that some types of light really fit my photographic vision better than others. And no matter what the cause, the question remains, what to do with a day like that? (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Edges

Snowy Pinnacles at Dusk, Ã˜ Fjord, East Greenland (Image Copyright Joe Decker) — Snowy Pinnacles at Dusk. Ã˜ Fjord, East Greenland (Image Copyright Joe Decker)

Much like our eyes are attracted to highlights in an image, our eyes and brains are not only attracted to edges in an image but they also help us in seeing them, allowing us to perceive those edges even when they’re weak or incomplete. This makes edges (lines, contours) an important element of composition.

(That we respond to edges, even minimal ones, is not simply a cultural artifact: The detection and exaggeration of edges in scenes is a function of the brain, in particular, it is one of many functions of the primary visual cortex. This part of the brain operates much in the same way that software sharpening does, if you look near a defined edge between a light and dark area in an image, the lighter area appears even lighter right next to the boundary, the dark edge appears even darker on the other side of the boundary.)

“Snowy Pinnacles” provides a simple example of these principles. As we discussed last week, many viewers of this image will first have their attention drawn to the moon because of our “attraction to highlights”, but from there, it’s likely that many viewers will then begin to look down and to the right, along the edge of the taller pinnacle until they reach the lower pinnacle at the lower right. (more…)

Book Review: Tell the World You Don’t Suck

Tell the World You Don’t Suck: Modern Marketing for Commercial Photographers by Leslie Burns Dell’Acqua

I’m a big fan of marketing and advertising my business. I really try hard to put my work, my business and my name out there as much as possible. With that said, sometimes I get stuck. Getting stuck in your marketing is no different from getting stuck creatively. It happens to all of us and learning how to break out of that rut and into more productive areas is important for any business owner. It’s at times like these that books like this one come in very handy indeed. Sometimes we need a creative kick in the pants, sometimes the foot is more business oriented. (more…)

Favorite iPhone Apps for Photographers

I travel a fair bit. And like many photographers, I’ve grown to love some of the benefits that come from having a connected PDA in my travels: being able to handle business calls and emails and modest web browsing is a great benefit to me as a travelling sole proprietor. I’ve been using an iPhone 3G for the past year, and I’ve found a handful of useful applications that I’ve come to rely on in my work. Finding these applications can be a bit of a trick, most “iPhone photography” applications are aimed at folks making photographs with the iPhone itself. It can be hard to sort through applications for the rest of us.

For each application, I’ll also note whether the app functions without a connection to the internet. While network coverage continues to increase, in many of the areas where I often shoot, it’s still spotty or non-existent. So, for me, offline usage is a great benefit. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Highlights

Crashing Waves, Bandon Beach — Crashing Waves. Bandon Beach

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.

This is the first installment of my delayed promise toward writing a weekly post about photographic composition. Unlike many basic elements of photography, such as depth-of-field or ISO, composition is something that is not easily taught in in a top-down, linear fashion. Even the most frequently cited “rules of composition” are ideas that are more often ignored in an excellent image. And very few people can even begin to construct an effective image through an abstract understanding of even dozens of such rules. Instead, photographers learn composition and how and when to apply these rules, through trial and error, through practice, through looking at other photographers’ work, and through guidance and feedback from skilled eyes. So think of this series as a starting point, not an ending point, to learning composition. Now, let’s get started by talking about highlights. (more…)

Wedding Photography and the Zoom Lens

If you get a bunch of wedding photographers together in a room (like AA), talk will eventually come around to lenses. A bunch of photographers talking about lenses makes watching paint dry seem glamorous. Everyone has a favorite lens and everyone has a particular style and it can be tough to decide on what your style and lens choices will be. It’s really just trial and error. Eventually, you will find yourself reaching for the same lens again and again and suddenly, before you know it, you have a style!

So, let’s talk about the almighty zoom lens.

(more…)

Reflections on Weak Sunsets

Sunrise Reflections, Old Marina, Mono Lake — Sunrise Reflections. Old Marina, Mono Lake

The power and beauty of an exceptional sunrise or sunset is incredible. As nature photographers, it is understandable that we gravitate towards the most direct expressions of these incredible moments. Those sunrises and sunsets often offer not only incredible color in the skies, but also on the landscape itself–color that shows texture and contrast by raking across our subjects. Trying to pull in the whole picture, capturing all of this, is a wonderful goal.

Sadly, all too often, the skies don’t light up the way we expect. Or other factors get in the way of these hopes. In remaining attached to our vision of the grand scene, it is all too easy to give up and to forget what powerful alternatives can remain. Often, I find those alternatives include reflections. (more…)