OhShoot’s blog

My tripod is cheeeeeap. Anyone who wants to buy me a really really expensive one with all the bells and whistles, please feel free. lol.

One thing to remember when framing a photo in your camera viewfinder is that your camera takes a photo which is a rectangle. One thing that is worth thinking about is whether your shot is better as a long rectangle or a tall one.

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Take this shot, for example: it's a thin tall subject, so it's probably better as a tall rectangle. Taking it as a tall rectangle also allowed me to remove some other very colorful objects which were in the background if I took it as a long rectangle, and which I felt took attention away from the green ball.

There's an issue, though. My cheapie tripod head won't tilt quite all the way over. This means that the horizon line of the fence is at an angle. Usually I try to remember to adjust the legs of the tripod to compensate, but I forgot this time.

Remembering horizon lines is especially important when you are taking shots of water, such as the ocean. While it is possible that this fence is actually at a slant, the ocean never runs at an angle, and your mind knows that. It usually makes a shot a bit less effective.

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The solution? I used my editing program to tilt the picture so the fence is straight. Paint Shop Pro XI has a great straighten tool which is very handy for this.

The background is that awful magenta color because I usually put a color as my background which matches nothing in the picture, so that I can clearly see the edges of my picture when cropping. It's also really useful for some other editing as well, so I just make it habit.

Then I crop the picture. I want to keep the base of the pillar the ball is standing on, so I end up with a bit of the magenta background. I use the clone tool to fill this in, and Voila! A little sharpening and clarifying later, and I have the picture I want.

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I was out on a long walk, camera in tow as usual. I came across this squirrel happily munching away on a low branch, so I just pulled my camera out of the front of my jacket where I was keeping it warm and snapped off this shot before the squirrel ran away.

At first the leaf that is now just to the right of the squirrel was in front of it, so I moved a little to my left to get it out of the way. Good.

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However, I made a very common photography mistake - I was so focused on the squirrel, my eye totally edited out the small branch that is running across the squirrel's face. Normally this shot would go straight to "delete" as a result, but I am trying to save my best rejects for here.

Another common mistake I have made in this shot is to place the subject dead in the center of the shot. This is easy to do - firstly, you are focused on the subjece, so it's natural to put it in the center of the frame. Secondly, you want the camera to focus on the subject, so if you are using autofocus, you place it in the middle of the frame and press the button down halfway to get the focus. Then if you are not thinking, you just take the picture.

If you stop and think for a moment, this could be a far more interesting shot if the squirrel wasn't in the middle. Having it in the middle leaves nothing for your eye to do - it's just the way your eye works. It goes to the middle of the shot, and now it sits there. I'm not using the lines in this pic as best I can.

In my defense, I usually take squirrel pics with the intention of cropping anyhow - even with my zoom lens at zoom extension, this is about the closest I can hope to get to a squirrel (though I have been sneaky and managed to get within a couple of feet of one with a lot of patience and a few nuts to share). So I can choose to crop this pic the way I would frame it if I could have gotten close enough. I bought a 9 megapixel camera so that I could get shots like these and crop them and still maintain fairly high resolution in the shot. It's lazy photography though, to always count on cropping to save me.

First thing I notice looking at this pic and thinking about framing is the direction the squirrel is facing - right. While rules are meant to be broken, one good rule is to think about leaving more space in the direction an animal or person is facing, particularly if they are moving. This gives the idea of movement, that they are moving into your shot. Also there are the great lines of the thicker tree branches leading off to the right and top of the picture which can make great lines to lead the eye with, and perhaps add to the sense of movement in the picture, as these are the two paths the squirrel is most likely to take if it runs away from me.

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I like the single leaf below left of the squirrel, so I keep that in the frame, and crop up and across from there. The body of the squirrel is still mostly in the middle of the pic, but it is the eye we are most drawn to in an animal, and that is now up in the middle top, which is a bit better. If I was following the rule of thirds I might compose it a little differently, but I think I like this ok - except for that darn stick!

The squirrel is a bit underexposed (I should have used a slightly lower shutter speed, but then I would have risked overexposing the sky, and that would have been harder to fix). In Paintshop Pro XI I used Clarify (strength 5) to compensate for that, then used Unsharp Mask (Strength = 2) to sharpen it up a little. I might try and tweak it more if it was worth it, but the little branch I failed to notice means it really isn't worthwhile.

One of the best ways to learn to take a good photo is to analyse the photos you are already taking. It takes a little while to learn to look while you are taking the photograph, but once you learn it

Keep in mind that rules are meant to be broken, and that sometimes great photographs don't follow the rules. If you learn the rules first, though, you can learn later how to break them in ways that will create great photos.

These rules change a little bit depending on what  you are taking a photo of - a landscape, a portrait, a street scene, an insect. I'll try and go into some basics now, and get into more detail later.

Subject: A photo should have a clear subject that your eye is drawn to. Sometimes a scene can be very beautiful, but make a very boring photo because your eye wanders around the whole picture and nothing draws it and holds it. Human beings look for something to look at, and any photo is made better when it has a subject. A lot of the time, the photo is of a subject - as in the case of a portrait, and most of the rest of the basics of taking a photo is all about how to make that subject clear and interesting.

Get the subject in focus: Make sure the important parts of the picture are in focus. I'll go into this more in another entry.

Keep it simple: some of the best photos are simple ones. Look at photos you have taken, or look at the photo you are about to take. Is there anything distracting you could get rid of by moving it, or moving your subject, or moving yourself? For example, a great portrait photo can be ruined by a tree or branch straight behind the person - in the photo it may look like the tree is growing out of the person's head. This doesn't matter so much in landscapes, but in portraits it is really important.

Sometimes a photo can be made clearer by cropping or post-processing. Here is a shot I did of some geese, as I originally took it:

goose, original shot, unedited

It's ok. It's hard taking wildlife photos - the geese were all moving around, doing different things. I was taking a photo of another goose that was swimming near me when I saw this goose off to one side stretch up and flap its wings. I turned, refocused and took the shot. The focus was the most important thing in the moment. Luckily the light was still ok, as I didn't have time to change my exposure as well. Snap! - I got the pic, and got the focus right! Success!

This is not a good photo though. It's too busy for one thing. Your eye isn't immediately attracted to that particular goose. Also, it was early morning, and the pond was quiet. There was a great feeling of tranquility with the quiet honking of the geese and the cold of the snow.... that doesn't come through in this picture - at least, not as well as I wanted it to.  There are very distracting elements in this shot.  

Lines are very important in photos. When you are looking at a photo, the lines lead your eye. Look at the geese at the top of the picture - they are out of focus, the exposure is off, and half of their heads are cut off. Their long necks form lines that lead your eye off the top of the page, away from the goose I want you to look at. The two poles in the snow also lead the eye off of the page. There is also the long dark diagonal line of the bank of the pond. Your eye will naturally want to start at the bottom of it (on the right hand side) and this is great - it leads towards my goose. But it also leads past the goose to the very uninteresting geese in the background.

The solution? Crop the photo in a digital photo editing program. There are a lot of good ones out there and I will talk about them another time, as well as a bit more about cropping. The things I observe about the lines in the photo, as well as the distracting elements, lead me to decide on the crop I want:

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 I decided on this crop because I want to keep the reflections of the geese in the water, as well as some of the snow. I couldn't keep the snow without also keeping the feet of the geese on the bank, but they were relatively easy to clone out of my picture (yes, yes, more on cloning and other editing tools in another entry). The subject is in a pretty good spot to satisfy the rule of thirds (which I will explain a little bit more later as well). I also sharpened it a little and increased the contrast to make it the geese stand out a little bit more.

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My Love suggested this even closer crop, and I think he's right. Even in these small versions of the photo, it draws the attention even better to my subject than having the large goose standing in the right hand side of the pic. I really liked that goose, but it does draw the eye away from my subject a bit too much.

The only thing that I really would like to get rid of in this photo is the goose in the background to the far left of the picture under the wing. Notice it has a green tag on its neck, and as this is the only bright color in the picture, it is a little bit distracting. It would also be rather hard to edit out, though, so I have left it. However, when I was photographing geese on this particular morning, one thing I was trying to pay attention to were the geese with tags, as I didn't want them in my shots.

Ok. See how much more simple this shot is now, and how much more obvious the subject is? Unfortunately I had to achieve most of this in post-processing, but if I was taking photos of an easier subject, I would hopefully be able to do this just by moving myself to take the photo from a different angle, or moving the subject if I could, or removing the distracting element.

I think that is enough for now. More photo composition basics to come in other entries...

The easiest way to take better pictures is to just play with it and take pictures of whatever comes into your path. However, there are many common mistakes people make while taking photos, and it's these mistakes that often make the greatest difference between a snapshot and a great photo.

To be honest, it's taking me a while to learn to think before I click the button. I waste a lot of shots that way, but hey it's digital so who cares? But every so often I have a shot come along that I can only get once, and if I miss getting it how I want it because I haven't thought before I took the shot, I really kick myself.

A good way to start is to have a good look at your shots after you take them. I'm going to write more about analysing photos along the way I am sure, but I'll give some basics here at least.

Before I do though, take a peek through this site on common mistakes that people make while taking shots. It shows pictures that depict common mistakes people make when taking photos. Each pic has a "What's wrong" link beside it, so you can have a go at trying to spot the mistake that has been made before you click the link to find out, and also to find out how the mistake could have been avoided.

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Learning photography can be intimidating because it has so many unfamiliar terms. Sometimes I think that like most professions it does this just to be mysterious. lol. I mean, why say "ambient light" when you mean "natural light"?

It is how it is, and just think, once you pick up the terms you will seem all the more impressive yourself to mere snapshot mortals!!!

In the meantime, here are some places online you can look up terms to find out what they mean. My recommendation is that if you are feeling a little overwhelmed, only look up the term you want to find, and avoid reading photography dictionaries - they are full of stuff you probably don't need now, and might not ever need.

Digital Photography Glossary - a basic list of terms, good if you don't want to overwhelm yourself totally.

Kodak Glossary of Photography Terms - a much more extensive list

Dictionary of Photography

Or - Google "photography terms" or "definition _________" (insert term you want to know) - sometimes this second way can be better, you might find a more in-depth article. There is a TON of stuff out there on photography.

I keep a small handful of bits of paper in my backpack on which I have written things to remember. I just went to a site that mentioned white balance settings and thought "Oh shoot, I haven't checked what mine is even set to!" I have been taking indoor shots in ambient light and artificial lights of all sorts, and outdoor shots on cloudy days and sunny... I bet a lot of those pics could have been a heap better. When I first got the camera and learned about white balance I was changing it all the time. I just forgot. I'll probably forget again, remember again, etc. One day the knowledge will just stick though, and I will change it all the time without even thinking. Same with fill-in flash. I forget it all the time, I'm desperately trying to remember... I write it on sharpie pen on my hand every time I go out to shoot something that I think might need it, just to remind me.

The other pieces of paper just contain things I want to remember, or that I need to look up sometime or buttons I have just noticed on my camera or things in my camera menu that I have no idea what they do anymore. Things I intend to look up, anyhow. Truthfully, I hardly ever look at them.... but every once in a while I do, and they help.

Find your camera owner's manual.

If you can't find it, try and look it up online.

Read it. It will tell you what your camera can do. While you are reading, try doing the things it tells you that you can do with your camera. Set the camera timer and take a photo of... anything. Change the white balance settings if it has them and take the same picture with each different one, so you can look at them and see the difference. This is a great joy of digital photography - you can "waste" as many shots as you like! Find out if you have ISO settings, find out what the hell that means anyhow, and take a few shots at different settings, noticing the differency in how grainy the shots look, or the fact that some come out completely black or completely white.

It doesn't matter if you don't understand a thing yet. You will. It's the things you halfway understand that are important, because you might understand them a little bit more when you are finished. You might even remember them for a little while.

If you hate manuals that much, just take one thing you don't know about your camera - a button or a menu function you don't understand, and look it up in the manual and online. Do this every once in a while and you will gradually get better at being able to use the technical functions of your camera.

Irma posted these great links this morning. I am going to start enrolling in the Photo Hunt. I'm in a couple of other photo challenges, but they don't seem to be really swinging yet.

I like photo challenges. They get me out there, get me thinking, wondering how I can get the best possible pic I can on the theme of the week. This week's post is "technology". I am immediately thinking about the photo I once saw of the innards of a computer, all lit up in a dark room. I may go down the small computer store near here sometime this week and ask if I can take some pics. I like taking pics of people at work anyhow. People who are working on something generally stop being selfconscious after a while, and then really candid shots can be taken.

There is an illusion - one that I fell prey to when I got my first film SLR - that a better camera will make you a better photographer. This isn't the case. There is plenty that you can learn with even a fairly basic point and shoot camera, especially if it has a M (manual) setting on your mode dial. You can be a fantastic photographer with one of these cameras, and the limitations of the camera will only serve to stretch your skill.

If your camera does not have a Manual setting, then you are a little more limited in what you can learn. You can still learn heaps about composing a photo, about using available light, about setting up your computer to view the images accurately and about digital photo editing ("post-processing"). These things are the nuts-and-bolts of making a good photo. They are essential. To some extent, you can even learn them with a phone cam.

The two best reasons I can think of for getting a better digital camera are:

1. If you don't have a digital camera (i.e. you're still using a film camera) and you want to take much better photos than you are taking now. With a digital camera you can see the results instantly - it makes it so much easier to learn how to use a camera manually, and you can analyse your photos as soon as you take them. Digital is a LOT cheaper in the long run, especially if you want to view most of your photos on a computer, rather than printing them out. When I am learning something new, or just practicing old camera skills, I sometimes take 300 to 400 shots in one day, and sometimes I only keep three or four of the best shots. I couldn't do this with film. Digital lets me take huge risks without costing me anything but the press of the DELETE button if it doesn't work out.

2. If you don't have a camera with a Manual setting, you are probably going to want to buy another camera fairly soon if you want to be able to learn real technical skills with a camera. This still doesn't mean you need a really really expensive camera or an SLR. I lost my cameras two days before going overseas for six weeks. I bought myself a $120 point-and-shoot camera (a Canon Powershot A530) and even though I was a little frustrated with the limited zoom, it was still capable of a LOT. In another entry I will try and go through what I looked at when I was looking to buy myself a new camera.

If your current digital camera is really really old, then I might consider the advances in technology to be a good reason to move up to a camera which will take much better pictures. I'd still sit on it for a little bit... see what you can learn with what you have, first. Start that savings account for your new camera and learn some new skills while you wait...

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There are three basic levels of camera : Point-and-shoot (P&S), which is designed to be easy to use in automatic mode as it says, just point the camera and press the button. Prosumer cameras are more advanced P&S - they just have more features, more capability for using manual settings. SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras have a camera body with lenses that can be taken off and changed to suit your needs, a larger range of choices in exposure settings such as aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It also usually has a better computer and a bigger screen and sensor. These things can improve your photos, but only if you know how to use them. If you aren't taking great photos in the first place, then these things will just make your ordinary photos a little more sharply ordinary. I'm going to mostly deal with P&S and prosumer cameras here, because that is the level that I am at.

One great reason to not jump straight into an SLR is that P&S cameras have a far greater range of zoom than entry level SLR kits. My current camera, (a Fuji Finepix s9100) has a 28-300mm equivalent zoom lens (that's 10x zoom, I think). That's a fair amount of zoom, though I have seen even better. My friend just spent twice as much money as me on an SLR, and now has a 17-55mm lens. Basically I can get a much closer shot of something from a helluva lot further away. He'll have to spend a LOT more money to get as much zoom as me. Once he has spent that money, I will envy him greatly because he will be able to do more than me with that camera and that amount of zoom. Until then, I consider I have the better camera for the range of stuff I want to do. However, since he mostly wants to take photos of his art, it will probably be fine for him for the moment, and all he has to do to be able to do more is to buy more lenses. It's all about what you need in a camera.   

Another reason to keep the cheaper point and shoot camera you have is that it is probably more pocket-sized. Unless you like lugging a bag around with you all the time with camera gear in it, you won't carry a larger camera as much, which means you won't have as many chances to take photos. Also, the heavier your camera is, the more chance your hands will shake when taking a hand-held pic (which causes a blurry image) and the more likely it is you are going to need to lug a tripod around with you to get good pics.

The trick is to know what sort of photographer you are now, rather than the type you want to be. I have seen a few people buy a camera that they hope will take them to a professional level of photography, only to get discouraged with trying to understand all the camera capabilities - or they discover they just don't want to learn that much, or find that the camera can't do what they really want it to do unless they spend a whole lot more money on accessories. If you just want to see something, point the camera and take a picture, then just about any automatic camera will do for you. If you think you might want to get a little bit more serious about photography later, get one that can also be turned to manual, or at least to A (aperture priority mode) or S (shutter priority mode). If you get to the stage where you want to start learning this stuff, and your camera has a manual setting, chances are you can learn a whole heap before  you move up in the digital camera world AND, by the time you decide to buy a new camera, you will understand what it is that you really want to have in a camera and will get the one that is just right for you. In the meantime, camera technology is just getting better and better, and by the time you have saved for your new digital camera, they will be better for a cheaper price than what you can afford right now!

There is no such thing as a "perfect" digital camera anyhow. They just have different capabilities. My Love's camera takes awesome macro photos, but my camera is much better at night shots. His is easier to carry, mine looks more professional. His has a better aperture range (damnit) and slightly better zoom, but mine has a higher resolution, and a much greater range of ISO (film speed). My Powershot A530 took great wide angle shots.

My point is, once you have pushed your current camera to the limits of what you can do with it, you will have a far better idea of what you want in your next camera, rather than buying one to learn the skills on, and then finding it can't do something you would really love to do.