Archives July 2024

I just wanted to drop this real quick, I made a youtube video on using the 3-2-1 backup method. Enjoy.

In February of 2020, just before the world shut down, my husband and I played hooky on a Friday afternoon, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. We really weren’t looking to celebrate the capital-D Day, just to celebrate a day in general. It was cold, but it was clear, and the beach was all but deserted. Gulf Shores, Alabama has a sort of inlet west of the main set of beach entrances that leads to the lagoon, and it was along that inlet where we parked. We spent several hours walking along the sand, looking at the birds, watching waves, and observing the tidal movement along the pilings.

I love the beach any time of the year and any time of day. I love watching the pelicans and seagulls. I love watching the waves and the swells. I love watching people having fun, though there weren’t very many that day. Those that were there were doing interesting things – fishing, shell gathering, picnicking, but not swimming. Remember, it was February. Even along the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama, February is too cold for swimming. Normally, I step into the surf to get the wave shots I want, but that wasn’t going to happen that day. I did spend probably an hour watching the waves from the shore, trying to grab that elusive shot of the wave just at crest. I really wasn’t even aware of how low the sun was moving in the sky toward the horizon. I just kept snapping.

When it’s cold and you’re on the verge of losing any light, you snap away and look at them later. Digital cameras have removed all consequences of taking a lot of bad shots to get one good one, so I do just that – I snap away and look at them later. And so, it was only in the car on the way home after getting dinner that I found this shot. Gorgeous, isn’t it? Pure luck. Sometimes your favorite shot is just pure luck.

WHAT PART DOES LUCK PLAY?

Let me be clear, luck won’t replace good composition or good exposure. That image of the wave was well composed, and the exposure settings were right for the conditions. It would have been a good photo without the fiery touch of sunlight dancing along the crest. The luck comes in with the sun hitting the wave at the perfect point of crest and my shutter opening at exactly the right time to capture it. Sometimes luck is being in the right place at the right time to find something extraordinary, like Steve McCurry’s image of the Afghan girl with the captivating green eyes from the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine. McCurry was visiting a refugee camp and happened to walk past a tent that was being used as a school and noticed the girl. There were countless tents in that camp, but those green eyes are rare among Afghans. The probability of McCurry not only walking past that tent, but spotting one person with those striking eyes was incredibly low. It can be called divine inspiration, fate, or just something random, but all of those descriptions fall under what I call “luck,” that final element that we hope is ours after we’ve done all the work of composition and setting up the camera for the conditions.

LUCK FAVORS THE PREPARED

We can sort of invite luck by making things favorable for luck. It’s not easy. It requires knowing the different things that can happen, and deciding which of those things you’d like to have happen, and knowing which ones you’d like to not have happen. It’s always going to be easier to carry one camera and one lens and shooting on Automatic all the time. You may still get some lucky shots, I’ve done it. (I have a shot of a buck doing his business among the weeds up in Cades Cove. I’ve never printed it or shown it to anyone, but I have it. Don’t know why, I just thought it was a funny thing to shoot.) However, you will find that your luck increases as you understand more about how your camera works. Your luck increases further as you understand light and how your camera captures and uses it. Your luck increases with knowing which lens to use at which time for what sort of shot you want. Your luck will increase in direct proportion to the amount of work you’re willing to put into it.

LUCK OR SKILL?

I love learning something new or learning something better. I can often go through my images and determine when I had learned about a particular technique, because I’ll have several days’ worth of shots making use of that technique. Learning and studying technique is a good thing, but it can cause me to become blind to luck while I concentrate on improving my skill. It’s a personal shortcoming, but fortunately, it only lasts a little while, until I get really comfortable with that new technique and I can use it without having to put a lot of thought and effort into it.

It’s tempting to want to only practice a new technique at home in familiar, boring surroundings, where you aren’t distracted by something beautiful or interesting. The problem with that, though, is that it can leave you unprepared to use that new technique when you are in an environment with something beautiful or interesting. You need to spend time in a lot of different places playing with your new skill, so that it becomes more automatic, you can move to the settings quickly without having to put a lot of thought into the shot. When that event or scent emerges, luck will be on your side.

YOUR TURN

When have you had a stroke of photographic luck? Now that you’ve read this, what are you inspired to do so that you can increase your luck? I’m taking an iPhone photography course so that I can take better advantage of lucky situations with the camera I have with me most often. How about you? Drop a comment below.

My photography shops are https://www.oakwoodfineartphotography.com/ and https://oakwoodfineart.etsy.com , my merch shops are https://www.zazzle.com/store/south_fried_shop and https://society6.com/southernfriedyanqui.

As you explore photography, don’t forget to protect your digital assets! ‘Your Data, Your Devices, and You’ offers easy-to-understand tips on safeguarding your information—vital for photographers at any level. Check it out on Amazon!

After you have composed your shot (take a look at the post on Composition), the next consideration is exposure. Exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches the camera’s sensor, and it’s governed, camera-wise, by three settings: Shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. I’ll go into all of them in their time, but I’ve just completed a photography lesson on Aperture, and I wanted to experiment with it a bit to really get a feel for what it can do to and for a photo. The environmental light is also a factor in your final image, but we can, to a certain extent, compensate for that with our Exposure Triangle, as we call it.

An aperture is an opening of any kind, so in photography, aperture, as opposed to “an” aperture”, refers to the size of the opening that lets light in to get to the sensor. Digital SLRs and Mirrorless cameras, and some higher-end Point-and-Shoot cameras (such as the Canon Powershot Sx-60) have the ability to control aperture settings. In the film world, Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras also have the ability to control aperture, but the analog versions of Point and Shoot cameras do not. In the digital Point-and-Shoot cameras, those settings are governed digitally, but there isn’t anything in a film Point-and-Shoot (called Rangefinder cameras) that allows the operator to change that setting.

HOW DOES APERTURE AFFECT YOUR PHOTO?

First, aperture affects the exposure of the image – how dark or light, to put it very basically. Aperture affects the amount of light that is let in during the time the shutter is open. Later in this series, I’ll describe how shutter speed affects the length of time the shutter is open letting light in, and also how the ISO, the sensitivity level, accepts the light that is let in. When the aperture is wide open, lots of light comes in, when it’s very narrow, very little light gets in.

Aperture also affects how much of the stuff you’re pointing the camera at is in sharp focus. Aperture is a strange thing, when you have your aperture set really wide, you end up with a really shallow depth of field, which is the amount of the scene in sharp focus. This is why, when you look at a portrait that was taken with a busy background, the face is in focus, but the background is blurred, very much out-of-focus. A very small aperture will create a scene in which more of the image is focused, from the peaks of the mountains in the distance to the daisies at the very forefront of the scene. Wide = shallow depth of field, narrow = deep depth of field.

LET’S GET REALLY CONFUSED NOW

The increments of the aperture options are measured in f-stops, and that’s worth another blog post in itself, and I’ll address that when I get to it in my course.  What you need to know about f-stops is that smaller f-stop numbers correspond to larger aperture settings and larger f-stop numbers correspond to smaller aperture settings. While it is also true that the larger f-stop numbers, corresponding to a smaller aperture setting, also correspond to a deeper depth of field, and that the smaller f-stop numbers, corresponding to a larger aperture setting, also correspond to a shallower depth of field, you’re usually only going to be concerned either the amount of light hitting the sensor or the depth of field for focus. When you need to consider both, you’ll want to focus on the depth of field and use the other exposure elements for light control.

EXAMPLES FOR EXPOSURE

I took some images of the exact same object from the exact same position, changing only the aperture setting. As you look through them, you’ll see that as I opened up the aperture, more light came in and we were able to see more of the object.

The first image was taken at full automatic, and the camera selected the settings. The camera’s settings were 1/5 of a second, f/7.1, ISO 1600.

I took the camera to complete manual, and I set the ISO to 6400 (if I wanted to really get a shot here, I’d increase the ISO), with a 1/125 of a second shutter speed, then I tightened the aperture way down as far as it would go with this lens and camera, f/36. We can’t see anything, but I would actually be able to manually expose it in Lightroom.

I took several more shots, stepping down a bit each time, and we don’t really see any change until we reach f/14, and we can really only barely see something.

From here on out, each step down provides a little more clarity on the image:

f/11.0

F/8.0

F/7.1

We finally got to a point where, at the same settings for ISO and shutter speed, it was as good as it was going to get.

EXAMPLES FOR DEPTH OF FIELD

Depth of field can be explained as how deep the field of focus is, that’s how you can remember what it means. Remember that while the f-stop number corresponds inversely with the amount of light hitting the sensor, it corresponds directly with how deep the field of focus is. When we want the sharp focus only on our primary subject, we’re going to use a very shallow depth of field (lower f-stop number), but when we want everything in focus, like a magnificent landscape, we’re going to use a wide depth of field (higher f-stop number).

The image below shows a very shallow depth of field. The hummingbird and the feeder are in sharp focus, but all of the background is decidedly out of focus. This photo was shot at 1/400 of a second, at a pretty low ISO because it was broad daylight, and the f-stop was set to 4.3, pretty narrow.

The next image has a wide depth of field, because it’s a landscape and I don’t want anything to be missed. I want the foreground (the area closest to me), the midground (the middle of the image), and the background (the top of the trees in the distance) all to be in focus, so I chose a higher f-stop of 20.0. Once again it was daylight, so the ISO is 640, and the shutter was open for 1/200 of a second.

As we move through our experiments, I’ll show you how you can use the other members of the Exposure Triangle to compensate for Aperture adjustments, so you can get the focus on the part of the picture where you want it and still get the level of exposure you’re looking for.

HAS THIS BEEN HELPFUL?

Let me know if there’s something I can clarify for you, or if you’d like an explanation on a different aspect of learning photography.

My shops are https://www.oakwoodfineartphotography.com/ and https://oakwoodfineart.etsy.com , my merch shops are https://www.zazzle.com/store/south_fried_shop and https://society6.com/southernfriedyanqui.

As you explore photography, don’t forget to protect your digital assets! ‘Your Data, Your Devices, and You’ offers easy-to-understand tips on safeguarding your information—vital for photographers at any level. Check it out on Amazon!

Maybe all you want to do with your photographs is capture the moment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I still do a lot of that with my photography. But there’s also nothing wrong with learning how to make your capture of those moments more pleasing to look at. I have plenty of images that are just the capture of the situation, a documentation of what was happening in very dry terms.  In my posts here, I talk about gear and how it can help improve your products, but there’s one unpleasant truth we all have to live with: the best gear in the world won’t improve a poorly-composed picture. To enjoy the output of your effort, you have to learn the basics, just like you do in everything else. With today’s digital processing tools, you can accommodate a lot of other misfortunes, but you still have to start with something that is composed well. What does that mean?

There are certain things that make an image pleasing to look at, and composition is only one of those things. Composition is how you have the elements of the picture arranged within the shot. There are several methods for placing the elements and I’m going to explain them, with examples from my own collection. That means I’m going to show you examples of good composition and bad composition, both from my own collection. Yeah, it’s been a learning process. Also, these aren’t particularly my best photos, just good examples of the methods. Very often the best photos use several methods, so they don’t always make the best teaching tools.

COMPOSITION METHODS

The most basic and easiest method to learn is the Rule of Thirds. As you look at the display screen or through your viewfinder, imagine the display divided into thirds both horizontally and vertically, and imagine the dividing lines on the display. Most cameras and even smartphone cameras can actually show those lines in certain modes, and there are too many combinations of cameras and modes to explain how to get the displayed. They’re there, though, even for phone cameras. It’s tempting for beginning photographers (yes, it’s acceptable to call yourself a photographer even if you’ve never published an image) to want to put the main subject into the very center of the frame. That may work for some compositions, and if it works, do it. But try placing the main subject on one of the intersecting gridlines and see what happens. Try putting the horizon on one of the horizontal lines. Try putting your subject on one of the vertical gridlines, with any sort of “face” looking into the center of the frame. By taking things off-center, you can add more interest and start to lead your viewer’s eye around the picture. You’ll be combining the Rule of Thirds with other methods as you progress, but it’s usually a good place to start.

If you look at the image below, with the gridlines superimposed over it you can see that it’s just a little bit “off.” With some creative cropping, we could come up with a little better positioning of the subjects.

The image below shows good composition, closely following the rule of thirds. It feels “balanced” both horizontally and vertically

2009_0509, IMG_0795.jpg, good composition

Leading Lines is another composition method you can put to use easily. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you use lines to lead the viewer’s eye where you want it to go. This is one good example, but the second one is probably one of my favorite pictures ever. It shows not only leading lines, but also pattern repetition, you can see the boy almost exactly mimicking the man’s stride.

Framing is another method that is just what it sounds like. You can use elements in nature or architecture to frame a subject. This image shows what might have been a frame, but it turned out pretty badly.

This image was one that I took of my son, positioning his head and shoulders inside one of the diamonds formed by the chain-link fence. Just doing that was still a bad composition, but I knew that zooming into that frame was not going to produce a good image – unless I took it abstract. I applied a black-and-white filter and an artistic filter and cropped it around that one frame. Now it looks like I meant for it to be that way.

COMMON COMPOSITION MISTAKES AND PROBLEMS

You will make these mistakes, and others, and some that you won’t be able to identify but you’ll know they’re mistakes. It’s okay. You’ll take a lot of photos and most of them are going to be okay, or just bad. But you have to take those in order to get that one fabulous print-worthy shot. Just keep trying. Learn how to look at your photos with a critical eye. When you like one, look at it deeply to figure out why you like it.

This is a picture of an osprey’s next in the middle of Lake Eufaula in Alabama. I love ospreys. I think they’re beautiful in flight, and they build really cool nests in really interesting places. So I was thrilled to get this close (with the help of a zoom lens) to this nest – but doggone it, there’s to much stuff in the picture.

We moved the boat around (to find a better fishing spot, but it worked out for me too), and we were able to get a much clearer shot without all that other stuff.

Here’s a shot I was so thrilled, because Mama was feeding the Babies and I got them all! The shot would have been better without the sticks that we see coming up from the left side of the nest, but the nest belongs to the bird, not me.

Sometimes the main subject of the photo just ends up in an unfortunate location within the shot. Maybe the face is too close to the edge, facing the edge; maybe your leading lines are great but you’re two feet to one side so the picture is lopsided (done that). This shot was taken from a boat, bouncing on a lake, on an overcast day. Getting waterfowl pictures from a boat is hard, because you’re above the bird. Now, not all above-the-bird shots are going to turn out bad, but this one did partly due to the lighting. I’ll be talking about light further down the road, because photography is all about light, and getting that right will reduce the amount of editing you’ll have to do. Also, there are some issues with light that you can’t fix with processing and editing, and this image is a good illustration of that. It’s just dull. The duck was pretty. The lake was pretty. The day was not. As a result, the shot was not.

You also have to pay attention to lines in the image that don’t have anything to do with the main subject. Below, we see that the cracks between the pavers don’t contribute to the main subject, the butterfly. The butterfly is gorgeous, and if the image was worth processing, I’d flip it around so the butterfly was upright, but the lines of the sidewalk are just too distracting.

ADVANCED COMPOSITION TECHNIQUES

Once you figure out the basics, you can start playing with some of the more advanced techniques. One of these is negative space, which is just empty space around a subject.  This is a good illustration of negative space. Negative space can provide a perspective of what the subject might be doing or planning to do, or it can provide a space for words in an advertisement (called “copy”).

You can use symmetry and patterns to provide an interesting composition, but don’t ignore their placement within the photo. This photo shows coordinating angles and repeating patterns.

This one shows pseudo-symmetry, or “not-quite symmetry.” It’s symmetrical enough that it provides interest to the subject, even though it’s not perfectly symmetrical.

Here I combined a pattern with negative space.

TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR COMPOSITION

The best way to improve the composition of your photos is to intentionally take photos that align with a particular type composition principle. Spend a particular time frame studying only that principle. You’ll eventually get to a point where you look at a scene and instinctively know how you want to compose it. You may want to take two steps to one side or the other. You may need to hold the camera over your head to get the angle you want. You may need to get closer or farther away. These aren’t the only principles of composition for photographers, but master these first, and then, if you need to, move forward into something more complex.

It can be helpful to search out a photography challenge with weekly submissions. You’ll spend a whole week seeking for opportunities to produce a picture that fits the week’s requirement. Most challenges have social media groups where you can get feedback from other photographers to help you improve your eye.

I’d love to see your compositions – post on some social media channel, and drop a link to it in the comments! Tell us what you were going for in the image, and whether or not you think you achieved it.

My shops are https://www.oakwoodfineartphotography.com/ and https://oakwoodfineart.etsy.com , my merch shops are https://www.zazzle.com/store/south_fried_shop and https://society6.com/southernfriedyanqui.

My photography results have evolved from grainy film images to some really lovely print-worthy graphics. I’ve gone from just shuffling through the pictures, to printing photo books, to printing images to hang on the walls of my own home, on to selling my images for stock images, large printed canvas images, and images printed on household objects. These last efforts have helped me understand the differences between what each of my cameras has been able to accomplish. Some of my well-composed and well-lit images were rejected by the stock photo agencies because they were too small. Those same images created limitations in what I was able to print them on for the household objects. The photos taken with my iPhone cameras have evolved as well, because of the improvements in the cameras in the phones. I’m still not great at iPhone photography, though. That’s another side quest.

The image up there at the top is a decent enough image. I really like it, and it was the first picture I ever took that made me feel like I could actually learn to be a good photographer. But you know what? Except for small prints (maybe as large as 8×10, but that’s about it), it’s essentially unusable. When I start going through the process of making it big enough to print larger, the image loses a lot of its fidelity, it gets grainy, and those distinct pine needles and water drops turn to mush.

Does Gear Play a Part?

I want to be very clear: a great camera will not make you a great photographer. You will still need to learn how to compose a picture, how to determine what the light will do to the subject(s), and the settings you will need to accomplish your vision. However, higher-end hardware is capable of producing larger images at a tighter resolution, and with fewer visual aberrations. It’s almost never going to be enough to just scale an image that starts small up to a larger size, because it will end up being horribly pixelated. When I was looking for my camera upgrade, I knew that being able to produce larger images was something that was going to be important to me. It’s not for everyone, and if you’re not interested in producing large prints, you don’t need to pay extra for a camera that will make it easier to do that.

I had 17 images processed and listed in my shop on Etsy before I fully understood what was going to happen when these images were printed and shipped to my customers. Fortunately, before I had made my first sale on Etsy, I started to populate my new independent shop online. The software for that site will reject images that don’t meet size minimums, because of the quality issues that will occur in printing a poster-sized photo image. I had eight images rejected, nearly half of the ones I had uploaded, the very same images that I had in my Etsy shop. These same images were among the ones I have at my Society6 shop.

I have a shop at a site called Society6, where I sell things like prints and canvases, but also mugs, phone cases, tablet skins, blankets, and other “merch.” In the Society6 shop, for one of my images I could only enable six products. Not wanting to put too much time into it, and not really knowing at the time that I had options, I just moved on with what was available. Recently, however, by making some changes to the image sizing, my options vastly increased – I quit counting at 25. Table runners, tablecloths, comforters, shower curtains, and certain types of prints are now available.

So How Do We Address This?

With software, and it’s gotten a lot more accurate with AI additions. Here are a handful of programs that can resize images:

Adobe Express is a free online tool. It has a reasonably user-friendly interface, and it will allow you to resize based on a percentage, or by pixel number, or to fit certain social media platforms. If you don’t mind the upload/download process, it’s probably fine for most purposes, especially social media. However, a file that starts out at 9 MB already is not something I want to pass back and forth over the internet tubes. I also like the option to work offline.

Gnu Image Manipulation Project (GIMP) is a free and open-source image manipulation tool very similar to Photoshop. It does have the capacity to change image sizes, but it’s not particularly easy to learn how to use. I have GIMP, and I use it, but not for this.

Adobe Photoshop supposedly also will resize images, but I haven’t been satisfied with the results. It’s also not free, never was, and now it’s available only as a subscription model at $20.99/month. Again, I use it, but not for this.

Corel Paintshop Pro offers a lot of the same features that Photoshop does, but at a single-purchase price point of $79.99, and I don’t have any experience with it.

The one I use is Topaz Gigapixel. I paid $70 for it and I’m making extensive use of it, and it’s working well for me. I am able to take a photo up to exactly the size I need without it looking distorted or pixelated. The AI engine is able to accurately make the adjustment from a size of 3456 x 2592 pixels to a size of 12000 x 9000 pixels, which is the size that my photography site’s backend admins recommend for larger sized prints. For smaller items, the size isn’t a factor. This program is soooooo easy to use, all of the control required to resize an image are right on the opening screen.

The main drawbacks to resizing an image are the increase in file size and the visibility of “noise” and “softness” of edges that you may not have noticed with the smaller size. In fact, unless I blow the image up to 100% in Lightroom, I can’t see it either. However, a large print will show it all. I have to other Topaz products that help with that: Denoise AI and Sharpen AI.  Noise is the proliferation of little dots of “stuff” that you see in some images. Pictures taken in low light are notorious for noise, but that’s certainly not the only place we see noise. I had a picture of a lily pad that was really noisy after I increased the size. The Denoise program did a good job of smoothing out that fabric. Sharpen AI works well for those edges that look “edgy” when you’re looking at a picture the way we normally look at pictures but that look so much softer when you view it at 100%. It’s amazing that when I look at an image that takes up my whole laptop screen (and I use a pretty big laptop) and it looks great, when I zoom in to see how it’s going to look at, say, 30” x 40”, all of a sudden, I’m seeing a lot of noise in certain spots. (Isn’t that a funny phrase, “seeing a lot of noise?”) That noise is simply unacceptable for those large prints. It has to go. It’s better to not introduce it in the original image, which is probably something I’ll explore later, but sometimes it just happens.

Here’s an example of what I mean. This image is beautiful, decently composed, great color contrast, and, at this size, it looks like you can see every detail.

It’s too small in its original format, so I used Gigapixel to increase the size. Now here’s what happens when you zoom into it at the tree branches:

I lost the sharpness of those twigs!

It also introduced that “noise” I mentioned. It’s not nearly as clear here as it is on my monitor in Lightroom, but I guarantee that if I created a 30″ x 40″ print of it, you’d see a proliferation of white “stuff” in that foreground. Not good.

This was after I ran it through Sharpen and Denoise. I got rid of all that white stuff in the black areas and brought back the sharpness to the twigs but introduced a sort of surreal quality to it. When I publish the image, I’ll play up that surreality, but for most of what I would want to do with this image, it’s going to work.

These tools are great, but they do have limits, and the main limit is that they cannot fix a bad composition. Fixing minor flaws only works with an image with strong composition. I’ll do a post later that helps you understand a good composition, but I’ll give a brief explanation now. A good composition leads your eye around the picture. There are no distraction created by stray items. The picture feels “balanced,” that is, not all the visual attraction is in one sector of the picture. If the “feel” of the picture is off in any way, the best tools in the world won’t make it better.

Size doesn’t always matter, and if you’re producing pictures to be used in a photo book or in a collage of 4 x 6 prints, you don’t need to worry about it. But this is a business I want to take on, so I needed to learn how to get it right for my customers.

What are the biggest challenges you have in creating images? Or, what are your tools for resizing images and cleaning them up for production? Follow along for more discoveries I make on my journey.

My shops are https://www.oakwoodfineartphotography.com/ and https://oakwoodfineart.etsy.com , my merch shops are https://www.zazzle.com/store/south_fried_shop and https://society6.com/southernfriedyanqui.