Photo Philosophy | Time and Time Photographer

Aug01 5

The Photography Tip of the Week #072

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Processing, Photo Technique, Podcast

The land of Crop-a-lot

There is whole discussion one could have on cropping focused solely on whether one should crop or not. That discussion would go into whether you should use cropping as a way of making a photo better verses getting it framed properly in camera. This isn’t that discussion.

We are going to assume that you do crop and you have a need to crop your image. Those needs often fall into one of the following situations:

1) You want to create an image that will be the right size or aspect ratio for you final output. This is by far the most common reason for cropping. You can’t force your camera to make an image in camera that’s the perfect aspect ratio or final pixel size of the intended use. And you probably wouldn’t want a camera that did that in the first place. Even if you did know exactly what and where the image’s final destination, doing absolutely everything in camera is a bit silly and counter productive since most likely you’ll need the photo a different size.

Cropping for aspect ratio

2) The second most often reason for cropping is to get rid of something in the image, be it extra people, vehicles or your light stand with the umbrella protruding into the frame. These are things that were never meant to be in the image in the first place, but for some reason you couldn’t get them out of the way or you just didn’t see them there when you pushed the shutter button.

Crop unnecessary info

Most people think that’s these are only two reasons for cropping but there is a third:

3) The third reason for cropping is to correct the angle of the image. So you think correcting the angle of the image isn’t cropping? You may be right, but cropping does occur when you fix the angle of the photo so everything isn’t sliding off the end. This may be unnecessary information in your image, but it’s still cropped.

Crop to fix angle

You know three reasons why you crop, but when should you crop? I find so many photographers crop their images before they even color correct them. This is a big mistake. You want to keep as much information in the image during any editing before you crop. Cropping should be the very last operation you perform before sending the photo to print or sizing it for the web. As many new photographers find out rather quickly, if you don’t crop your images before you send them to print, the printer will automatically crop or put borders on your prints, and that just doesn’t look very professional.

Jul29 0

Burn baby burn

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy

I’ve been online a long time and I’m no stranger to flame wars. It’s amazing how often these topics continually come up: Mac vs PC, Canon vs Nikon, Aperture vs Lightroom, Flash vs HTML5, etc. These are just tools and no one tool is better than another. It’s not the tools you choose, but how you choose to use the tools that makes the difference. It’s just preferences, so for those that care here are my preferences:

Mac vs. PC – For me it’s Mac. I’ve used them both and for the way I work the Mac is faster and more stable for me.

Canon vs Nikon – I know there are more brands out there but I bought Canon many years ago and now I have an investment in lenses so I’ll stick with Canon.

Aperture vs Lightroom – Lightroom wins for me only because i’ve never really used Aperture.

Flash vs HTML5 – I really like the consistency you can achieve from Flash websites, but I’m in the HTML 5 camp for more universality.

Crop vs Full sensor – You didn’t know I was putting this in, but I’m a crop sensor guy. I like that added zoom factor for the same lens. I did have to get used to the difference but now I’m so used to it, it’s second nature.

Will my preferences work for the way you work? Possibly, but you evolve to work a certain way. And what works for you may not work for someone else. So what are you preferences and what compelling reason do you have to use those particular tools. Here’s the truth of it all, if any one of these tools consistently underperformed their rival, we would have a dominate tool everyone would would be using.

Jul25 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #071

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Print Big, Print Often

071 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

That’s the tip, I suppose that’s it…. I guess you want to know why you should even print your photos in the first place. I know there are a lot of photographers that love the fact that you can display your work online and not ever have to print or handle another photo. In some respect I’m one of those photographers when it comes to bulk printing of photos. But one thing I do take pride in is large prints of my photography. So why should you print your photos and especially why print them big?

The tiny LCD on the back of your camera makes every photo look good, so you can’t trust it for seeing what you need to do to better yourself. I know it’s a bit silly thinking that you may only look at your photos on the back of the LCD screen, but I’ve known a number of people to do this. At the very least your photos need to get on a larger screen, but that really isn’t enough.
You love to share your photos with family and friends and there are many ways of displaying your work online for all to see. Nowadays you cannot not display your work online. If you are a pro or semi-pro, displaying your work online is a big part of your social marketing. If you are just an enthusiastic amateur, you can’t hide your photography. The joy of photography is getting other people to enjoy it as well. But displaying them online is like showing someone a little 4×6 print. (My apologies to readers outside the United States, I’m used to the American print sizing.) That’s not large enough to show any detail. Even though it’s better than the back of your camera, it’s still small.
Probably the most important reason is that printing is your ROI or Return On Investment. That large print says a lot about you as a photographer. When you display large photos for all to see, you are showing what’s important to you. People see big beautiful photos and want to know more because they see that it’s your passion. They are great conversation starters and even better at getting you business, if you’re into that sort of thing.

So print photos big. I don’t print anything under 8×10. A 4×6 isn’t adequate to appreciate the detail of what I do. That’s one of the reasons I have large photos on my site, I want you to see detail even if it’s to show you blurriness or problems for photography tips. The photo I have with this tip is one I made this weekend during a photowalk. It may not be the best of the set, but it’s a great example of detail and sharpness with nothing more than a little color correction and export to jpg. These photos deserve to be printed large.

(My apologies for the audio quality of this and the past few posts. I’ve been working on better audio capture and it’s not going as well as I had hoped.)

Jul18 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #070

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Technique, Podcast

Photoblock Challenge – One Shot
070 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

The shot I waited for during my challenge.

There are many benefits of digital photography over ye-old film days. Instant feedback being the primary benefit, but the second important benefit is the ability to take a limitless number of photos for relatively no added cost. If you shoot in JPG, you can get thousands of photos on a single memory card. And if you shoot RAW, thousands of photos are still achievable. I like this ability, because I know that not every shot is going to be great and this gives me a lot to choose from. Yet there in lies the problem. We can amass a huge library of photos in relatively a short period of time with the bulk of the photos being junk. A few years back I showed my portfolio to a mentor and he thumbed through it really fast and said, “You walk too fast.” I instantly knew what he meant and we all fall victim to it during first years of the digital photography craze. Since we can photograph nearly indefinitely, we think it’s our duty to do so. What made photographers great years ago still holds true today, they took their time to make a truly great photo. So the challenge is to turn your digital camera into a film camera for a short period of time.

Scott Kelby had a version of this challenge a month or so ago. In his challenge, he stated that you could only shot 36 exposures, you had to cover up your LCD and you couldn’t look at the photos for at least 24 hours. I have a short version of the same challenge and that is to:

Set aside one hour and only take a single photograph.

Since you can only take one shot, you will find rather quickly that you will want to make that shot count and you will do everything you can to make a truly great photo. If you don’t know what to photograph, then do something like the sunset. At what point is the best photo going to happen? You’ll have to wait for it and see. But once you make the shot, pack it up. Don’t sit around and see if something better will come, you had the one shot, now see what you can do with it.

So why should you do this challenge? As you learn to control when you press the shutter button, you will reduce the amount of time it takes to dump the photos off your memory card. You will severely cut down on the number of images you need to cull, and cut down on the hard disk space required to store that amassed digital dogpile. Not to mention the transfer time required for backup to an online service like backblaze. All-in-all your digital photo life will be much simpler and you will have much more note worthy photos to share.

Jul15 3

Is Photographic Imitation Theft or Flattery

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy

The saying goes, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.” So as a photographer what do you consider to be imitation that’s worthy of the term flattery and when is photographic imitation considered something a bit more?

A friend of mine recently posted an image where he specifically stated that he was attempting to duplicate another photographer’s image. You can see his post at http://knowsphotos.com/site/2010/07/06/seat-by-the-fire-hdr/ and he even has a link to the other photographer’s image which happens to be http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2009/03/19/join-me-by-the-fire/. In this case they are both creative commons images so legally I think there is nothing wrong here. But what if the image you were trying to imitate was copyrighted, is it flattery or theft?

As a photographer I like to “collect” photos to study. If a writer reads to learn how to write better, a photographer has to study the photos of other photographers. I don’t mean casually looking through a portfolio and thinking, “that’s nice, I ought to do something like that.” But really looking at the camera position relative to the subject, what time of day or where are the sources of light. In this case, if I create a similar image in style to another photographer I don’t think anyone would have an issue as long as the subject, background and location is different. But this is duplicating the same image. I don’t know that I would do the exact same image.

Jul13 0

I need a break

Posted by Philip in General, Photo Philosophy

Careful what you wish for… I got a break yesterday, a broken lens. One of my favorite lenses is now broken, my 50mm f1.8. I like it better than the 50mm f1.4 because it’s much smaller and less expensive. Being smaller it’s easy to carry around in a pocket. And it’s almost as good as the f1.4 for a quarter of the price. So I have a broken lens and a replacement on the way. I’ve been meaning to replace it for a while. Somehow it had gotten a piece of lint inside the lens. I suspect it worked it’s way through the focus mechanism to make it’s way to the inside of the lens. On a really small f-stop you could see the log in the field of view, but since I used this exclusively for it’s large aperture, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

So an order to B&H Photo using the NAPP member free shipping code saves the day and some aggravation. So if you are looking at a great lens to buy, the 50mm f1.8 is a wonderful buy. They are inexpensive and if you break one… it’s not too expensive to replace. Once the replacement is here, I may be able to finish taking the broken one apart so you can see what’s inside.