The Photography Tip of the Week #078

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Ho Hum to Hmmm

078 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Is every photo a masterpiece?  Can any photo become a great work of art?  Is beauty in the eye of the beholder and if so what do they behold?  I see similar questions to these on various photography forums from time to time.  They are basically asking if they should keep every photo and if they do, what should they do to make them worth keeping.  So for this tip I’m going to give you a basic process to bring out the best in any photo.  This isn’t going to make every photo a masterpiece, but you may find a few treasures you didn’t think you had.

Before I begin I must warn you that this will require some post processing techniques that I feel photographers should have, but many probably don’t.  It’ll also require the use of some software that’s more than what you get with the camera, but programs like Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements and even free image manipulation software can handle these steps. Here they are: Crop, Correct, Concentrate.

I recently entered some photos in a local contest and one of the categories was insects.  I generally don’t do a lot of macro photography and I don’t have a gallery of insect photos.  But I did remember that I did photograph a butterfly recently.  When I looked at the photos they were all “Ho Hum.”  So how do you make a Ho Hum photo into one that makes you go Hmmm.

Original boring photo. You could even miss the butterfly.

Step 1, Crop.  This is pretty straightforward and I’ve had tips on how to crop before.  Simply get rid of the background cruft and make your subject large.  That’s one of the beauties of having lot’s of megapixels, you can often crop more than 50% of the photo away and still have plenty of information to make a great image.

Step 2, Correct.  You want to do a color correction based on your subject.  This color correction can include extra saturation and contrast to make your subject pop. Don’t worry too much about the surrounding information, we’ll handle that in a moment.

Step 3, Concentrate.  Finally you want to concentrate the viewer’s focus on the subject by making the surrounding information less colorful, visible or sharp. This is an artistic decision, but I’ve found that you don’t have to be extreme.  Even subtle changes can make the subject stand out.

Much better. Obvious subject and it only took 2 minutes to do.

So these are my 3 steps to convolve a ho hum photo into a more interesting photo that makes you go hmmm.

The Photography Tip of the Week #072

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

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

Crop unnecessary info

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