BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Composition Thoughts

In my Creating Visual Impact class going on right now, there was discussion about placement in the frame of key objects, and a question arose about my comment that 'we read from left to right...' in western cultures. I thought it would make a good blog in general to talk about how we enter picture spaces.

In western cultures where we read from left to right, top to bottom, our normal, comfortable entry point is from the left. A psychology study I read years ago talked about this, that we entered a picture from the left/top and circled around. I have always considered the rule of thirds in my compositions, and most times, have found that I like the upper right or lower left for placement the best, for pictures that have harmony. But I never place something there if the space is going to be too empty on the left then; in the case of this rock and fall color reflection, it worked to put the rocks on the lower right. You enter the picture, travel across all this blaze of color, and come to rest on the rocks. You've seen my whole picture at that point. For my class, I decided to flip the picture to show the difference. In the flipped version, it actually still works, because the rock is shaped such that you follow it to the point of the rock and then jump into the pool of color. But I still prefer it with the rock on the right; it's more peaceful to me that way. (you'll have to cover one with your hand to really get the full effect of each picture in both sets).

Original.

Flipped.

Unique Composition in Washington DC

by Jim Zuckerman

When I visit a place that has been photographed by literally millions of people, it’s hard to come up with an idea that hasn’t been done before. Last weekend I was in Washington DC, and I hadn’t been there since I was 11 years old. I’ve been all over the world – 66 countries to date – and I hadn’t photographed the capital city of the United States. I was determined, therefore, to return home with some good shots even though the sky was leaden gray, it was freezing and I wasn’t prepared for the cold, and it was lightly snowing.

In walking toward the Washington Monument, I was struck by the beautiful forms of the bare trees against the sky. It was virtually a black and white scene, so that’s what I focused on. This 16mm wide angle shot had to be done quickly or else the snow would land on my lens and melt. I like the stark graphic forms and how they dominate the composition, yet the dramatic Monument is really the focus of attention.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Getting the Most From a Background

By John Siskin

I have seen a lot of good images taken with a sheet for a background, but I have seen more images that would have been better if they were made on a real background. I want to talk about what a real background is and how you can use it. The first thing you need from a background is size. I think that 9X20feet is the minimum. Why so big, well the first reason is that you can do a head to foot shot on this size drop and have the subject standing on the background. Even a king size sheet isn’t big enough for the subject to stand on. Another important aspect of a big background is that you don’t have to worry about whether you have enough on the sides. This frees up the photographer to move around in front of the subject. The other thing a big drop provides is the ability to move the subject away from the background so that you can adjust the light separately on the background from the subject. This provides a lot of ability to manipulate the color and density of the background without changing the subject. The extra distance between the subject and the background means that we can solve the problems of shadows from the subject falling on the background. I generally want at least 5 feet between the subject and the background, frequently I will use more!

Camilo A. with Dark Background. © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

I set up this shot to show how you can change the light on the background in order to change the way the background appears. I used a middle grey background. I think this is the most useful background to have, particularly if you are changing the color of the background with lights. I asked Camilo sit in for this shot. He has a strong face, which is good for the hard light I used in this shot. I used a single strobe for the subject with a small umbrella. I used the umbrella as a shoot through, and positioned the light very close to the subject. I didn’t think this would be flattering but it did reduce the light spilling on the background. I wanted to do this shot to make a point about backgrounds not shooting portraits. I placed a light panel with a black cover between the light and the background to further reduce the light falling on the background. If you mix light from the subject with the background light you’ll get less vivid color, more of a pastel. Above is the shot of Camilo with out any light on the background.

Set-up for Camilo A. Shots © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Here’s the way the set-up looked. Notice the distance between the subject and the background.

Camio A. with Blue Gel © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

In this shot I added a blue gel. The background light and the subject light are at the same power. Pretty vivid blue, huh? Of course I wanted to make a point with this, in an actual portrait I would make the background darker, which is just a simple adjustment of strobe power.

Camilo A. with Orange Gel and Neutral Density © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Here I reduced power to the background light and used an orange gel. I think this is a very useable background.

Camilo A. with Red Gel Through the Background © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

In this last image I put the background light behind the background and put the light through the background. I like this look; it seems more three-dimensional.

Thanks, John

Wildlife Photography in Florida

By Jim Zuckerman

Florida has many areas where photographers can get very close to birds that nest and hunt in marshlands. I photographed this great blue heron in Wakodahatchee, which is not too far from Palm Beach. This area was developed by the Water Department, and there is a long boardwalk above the water that photographers can use to get close-up portraits of herons egrets, ibises, lampkins and many other species. It’s open to the public, there’s no charge, and it’s a great place to visit at sunrise and sunset to take advantage of low angled sunlight.

This picture was taken with a 500mm f/4, and I had to move back several feet because otherwise I would have been too close to the cooperative heron.

Tungsten Lights

By John Siskin

I really feel a need to write about one of the great light sources, Tungsten lights. First a definition, tungsten lights have a filament and the filament is inside a bulb; the light bulbs in your house are tungsten lights. When these bulbs were made specifically for still and movie use they were made to run at very high temperatures so there would be more blue in the light and so the light would be brighter. If you make a light to run that hot in a regular style bulb it will start to change color in just a few hours and fail very quickly. These household style bulbs are available and fit in fixtures by Smith-Victor and other companies. These are very inexpensive and they can be good tools for learning how light works, but since they do not have stable color they are not great for professional usage because their color shifts.

There are also quartz bulbs, which are more useful!

Smith-Victor Barndoors © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

I had such a wonderful time with these when I shot film. These bulbs have stable color for as much as 60 hours. Because you could run exposures of more than a minute with film and you didn’t have to light the whole shot at the same time there were many creative things you could do. I am attaching a shot I took with two quartz lights and a Kodak slide projector.

Ferrari Model © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

I used to control all these lights with a pile of enlarger timers, so each light had individual control. This was a really creative set of tools; I made some wonderful shots. Sometimes the shutter was open for more than 15 minutes while I wandered around in the dark. I did this so I could control different parts of the shot in different ways.

Three Roses © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Although you can’t do all these wonderful things in camera with a digital camera, you can do some great still life shots. The key is to remove any other light source so it won’t pollute your color. Another thing you want to consider is that these lights produce a great deal of heat, so they are easier to use in winter than summer. You also want to be careful handling these lights; they really get hot. In addition to light stands and other support equipment, don’t forget the tripod. You exposures will often be longer than 1/30th of a second, too long to hand hold.

These lights aren’t as useful as professional strobes, but they are considerably cheaper. They have one big advantage, since you can see the light you’re photographing; it is easier to learn to light with them. You might want to look at lights from Lowel and Smith-Victor.

Fixing Wide-angle Distortion

by Jim Zuckerman

Wide angle lenses offer dramatic perspectives of subjects because of the exaggerated perspective they create. I find this kind of dramatic distortion very compelling. The downside of it is when structures that should be vertical are angled in unattractive and impossible ways. If a tree is leaning, that’s not really a problem because trees do, in fact, grow in all kinds of positions. But when I photographed Tybee Island Light near Savannah, Georgia over the New Year, I didn’t like the look of a classic work of architecture leaning as if the architects had been drunk when they designed it.

This problem can be fixed within Photoshop by using a single command: Edit > transform > distort. You first select the image with Select > all, and with the distort command you can grab the corner boxes and pull the image into the correct position. It often requires several movements from both sides of the image, but with careful manipulation you can make the subject much more real. Study the lines in both the lighthouse and the home on the left.

In situations where this technique won't do a satisfactory job, there is another more involved procedure to fix this kind of problem that I discuss at length in my Advanced Creative Techniques course here at Betterphoto.

The Problems of Fluorescent Lights

By John Siskin

I’ve been talking about types of strobes for a couple of weeks. I thought I should talk about types of existing artificial lights that we sometimes need to work with. I thought I would discuss fluorescents since they are the one really bad light we come into frequent contact with. There are at least three reasons why fluorescents are particularly difficult to deal with.

1) They do not have a continuous spectrum, if you look at the spectrum of a standard light bulb or of the sun the spectrum is a very smooth color gradation from red to blue. If you look at the spectrum of a fluorescent light there are bright bands that overlay a gradation that is much less smooth that either the light bulb or the sun. This means that even when you filter fluorescents there are some colors that will be too bright and others that will be too dark. It is extremely difficult to use these lights for technical purposes.

Spectrometer displays of various light sources. © John H. Siskikn All rights reserved

2) Fluorescents change their color over a 1/60 of a second cycle. This is because AC electricity is a wave that is moving the electrons in a wire; this changes the color of a fluorescent tube over the 1/60th of a second required for a single cycle (this is the U.S., the cycle is different in other countries). The best way to deal with this is to use a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. This evens out the cycle, multiples of 1/60th of a second will also work, say 1/20th of a second. Goodness I hate teaching with fractions.

3) Fluorescent tube change color over time. Two tubes placed in to the same fixture at the same time may change color in different ways. I think that cool white are more stable in color than other tubes, but the problem is not entirely predictable.

Fluorescent tubes come in different colors. © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Having said all this digital is MUCH better at dealing with this than film was. Digital gets a fair color balance of these things most of the time, but when you mix them with strobe, which has about the same spectrum as daylight, it is very hard to get everything to balance.

Lance illuminated with strobe and fluorescent tube © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Lance illuminated with strobe © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

The best plan with these lights is to avoid them. Plan 2 is to use only fluorescent tube for your shot. If you must mix them try filtering your strobes to match the tubes (Rosco Plus Green filter), this works sometimes.

Photoshop Plug-in Artistry

By Jim Zuckerman

A wonderful subject to shoot is the Old Sheldon Church near Beaufort, South Carolina. This was built in the early 1700’s and then, during the Revolutionary War, it was burned by the British. It was later rebuilt in 1826 only to be burned again by Union soldiers in 1864. It is engulfed by stately oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, and it looks great in either black and white or color. Here, I used one of the Nik Color Efex Pro filters, ‘Solarization: Black and White’ and then used Image > adjustments > color balance to add the saturated blue.

Midnight photography in Charleston

by Jim Zuckerman

There is a new landmark in Charleston, South Carolina that I found intriguing. It is very different than the famous historic ante-bellum architecture that most people associate with this southern city. It is North America’s longest cable stay span bridge connecting Mt. Pleasant with Charleston, and it is truly a stunning achievement. Driving over it fills you with awe, and I was compelled to photograph it. At night, it’s especially dramatic. There is a walkway/bicycle way on one side of it, and I was able to get some dramatic wide angle shots. The lights on the bridge are turned off at varying times (I found the time to be unpredictable), and on the night I took this picture I had walked the mile up to the center of the structure and just as I was setting up my tripod at 11:50pm,, they suddenly went out.

It turned out, though, that they weren’t necessary for dramatic results. Because I had such an unusual sky with moon-lit clouds, and I used an ultra wide angle lens (16mm), I was able to get a compelling shot with good graphic design and, with the long exposure, enough ambient light for a successful shot.

Earlier in the evening, I did capture the lights on the bridge from a distance and I've uploaded that image as well. The orange glow in the background is from the sodium vapor lamps in the port area of Charleston.