Focus | Time and Time Photographer

Sep12 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #078

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Ho Hum to Hmmm

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.

Aug08 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #073

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

More than just focus

073 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

What are the things that are most appealing about portraits? I have my short list, and an image to illustrate.

1) Off center lighting. The light shouldn’t be coming from the flash mounted on your camera or a flash on the camera.

2) Blurry background. This helps you to focus on the subject and not notice that squirrel in the tree.

3) Eyes that are sharply in focus.

In this image of Lauren, I have those 3 requirements covered quite nicely. The first two are easily achieved. If you have your flash off camera, you get number one. And as long as you know how to dial down your aperture, getting a blurred background is easy. But getting the eyes in sharp focus takes a bit more than just focusing on the eyes. You see one thing many people don’t realize is that there is more to focus than just focusing.

There are more factors involved in getting a sharp image out of the camera than just focus.

You need to have plenty of light on your subject to get the sensor to distinguish between the pixels. You need to have your pixel sensitivity or ISO turned down, 100 if you can but most cameras work quite well at 200. Your lens isn’t at it’s sharpest wide open. In this case I could have set it at f3.5, but the lens is actually sharper between f5.6 and f8. The smaller aperture means that the light goes through less surface of you lens and thus makes more of the image in focus. Since I wanted to blur out the background I chose the more open end of that, f5.6. And finally your shutter speed needs to match. This is a hard concept for many people. When you think of a shutter speed of 1/10 of a second you think you will have a blurry image and difficult to focus. But that’s not the case since we are using a flash to illuminate the subject. The flash will freeze the action, so you just need the shutter to match your other settings for the environment.

1:1 of the original image out of the camera

Don’t believe me? Lets take a look closeup. This is part of the unmodified image out of the camera. There’s nothing done to this image other than the standard color correction. As you can see, the eyes are sharp. They have that classy glassy look to them that comes from being in sharp focus and having the flash (with a big umbrella) supplying enough light for the sensor easily capture the color of each pixel through a small portion of your lens. That can almost be consider an equation, but we’ll call it a recipe for a sharp portrait.

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The Photography Tip of the Week #078

The Photography Tip of the Week #073

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