How to Take Better
Pictures: Digital Photography
Tips
How to Compose an
Image:
1. Evoke Emotion:
Emotional impact outshines
any “rule of composition.” Research
subjects in advance and put heart
into your image. Trust your eyes, not the camera - check the image on
the LCD or EVF after every shot to see if it matches what you saw. Trust
your gut
reaction. Listen to your audience feedback. If you know something
emotionally crucial but not
visible about
the subject, imply it visually through graphic impact.
2.
Fill the Frame.
Exclude
distracting or unrelated elements. Tell a visual story using emotion,
motion, humor, color, tone,
pattern, texture, detail and/or contrast. But simplify. Choose vertical
or horizontal
framing which
best enhances the flow of the subject.
3.
Create Contrast:
Place a bright subject on a dark
background, or vice versa. Juxtapose varying textures
and shapes.
Or
place a colorful subject on a background having a complementary
color (such as red on green; or
violet/blue
on yellow; or cyan on orange).
4.
Fill with Flow:
Arrange &
balance subjects within the frame so that viewers’ eyes actively
circulate
within the image without leaving. One, three or five subjects often
flow better than two or four. A gazing animal or a pointy subject
creates directional
flow which may need balancing with use of space or another subject
in that direction. Choose a directional feeling suitable to the
subject: Diagonal
or curved
lines can excite or distract. Horizontal lines
can
comfort or bore. Vertical lines can impress or overpower.
5.
Apply the “Rule of Thirds”
to start your composition.
Imagine a tick-tack-toe board over the image
and put
main subjects on the intersections or lines. When shooting landscapes,
place
the sky levelly at about one third or two thirds of the frame (or one
sixth or five sixths can also feel more dynamic). Novices, beware
that centering subjects
often makes a composition feel static and
lack flow. Experiment, and remember that “emotional
impact outshines any rule of composition.”
6.
Ponder
Perspectives:
Try
different camera angles by moving
yourself around: Crouch low, step
high, move in or back up. Consider all zoom settings, and vary your
viewpoint.
Minutes after shooting, review image sequences in your LCD or EVF: Sense your gut reaction, analyze potential audience impact,
and re-shoot as
needed. People or animal portraits look least distorted when you
keep the
camera at the subject’s eye level.
Scout for Scale:
Wide,
telephoto & macro lens perspectives
can astound your
audience with unusual juxtapositions.
Human eyes normally perceive
at about a 40 degree angle of view, like through a “normal” 50mm
lens (in terms of 35mm film cameras).
Lenses which radically depart from this “normal” view can surprise your
eyes.
- Widen your vision: Moving
your body closer to a subject while using a wider
angle lens
keeps the foreground subject big while shrinking
background objects, thus playing
with relative size perceptions. Stitching
several shots into a panorama cleverly widens your lens
limitations and presents novel image proportions to your audience.
- Compress subjects together: Moving
your body away from a subject while increasing telephoto
zoom enlarges
background objects in relation to foreground, i.e. makes
mountains bigger
behind foreground figures.
Telephoto lenses emulate your human visual ability
to focus sharp attention on a distant subject.
- Magnify your world: Macro
lenses (or modes) can
focus closest and reveal small unseen worlds of wondrous, infinite
variety. Macro lenses
can be wide,
normal, or telephoto.
Read your camera manual, and write down & memorize how close
your camera can focus
in macro and normal modes: ______ .
My Best Tip: “Instant
Click”,
and avoiding overexposure
[Comments for advanced photographers are shown in brackets.]
Mastering this simple tip can really improve your photography:
Point the camera centered upon an edge of the brightest subject; press the shutter
release
button halfway to lock the exposure; then point the camera to your desired composition; wait;
then fully
click at the right moment. The click will then be instant, even with
compact cameras having slow shutter lag.
Right: Sunset: The last rays of sunset
hit Machhapuchhre, the Fish Tail Mountain (22,943
feet / 6997 meters elevation), a sacred peak in Nepal. Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags fly
from a monument at Annapurna South Base Camp (ABC, at 13,550 feet
elevation) in the Annapurna Sanctuary.
Often, what you see in person cannot be captured by a camera's default
settings. In high contrast lighting situations, when you properly
expose the brightest subject, most cameras capture shadow detail as
much darker than actually seen in person (like a silhouette). To
compensate, I exposed on the mountain, used flash to brighten the
shadowy foreground monument, waited for the wind gusts to calm, shot
the photograph as a RAW file to better preserve both highlights and
shadows, and then later used Photoshop layers to brighten the dark monument and fog.
More details on instant click, optimal white balance and exposure:
- If bright portions of the image are flashing a warning during playback on the LCD or EVF, the picture is over-exposed. Delete and re-shoot
with
decreased ( - negative) exposure compensation. Images will print with
better color saturation when not over- or under-exposed.
- The easiest way to decrease exposure
is to point the
camera to a brighter area then press halfway
down on the
shutter button (or press the Exposure Lock Button instead, if
your camera has one), then shift the view back to your desired
composition
before fully depressing the shutter button. To increase exposure, point
the camera to a darker area using the same half-press or Exposure Lock
technique. An Exposure Lock button conveniently lets you take the
exposure from one area then focus on another.
- Study the Histogram for each image:
- The histogram is
the informative bell
curve of light values from darkest to lightest
(left to
right; 0 to 255) shown in a graph on your LCD/EVF. Show the histogram
using your camera's Info or Display button (or a menu choice), in image
Playback mode.
- Always review every shot in the camera's LCD screen or
EVF, to make sure you haven't blasted out the detail in bright areas of
important subjects.The histogram can graphically assist your judgment.
- The image is over-exposed when the histogram
is truncated on the
far right, cutting off the brightest highlights in the picture. Re-shoot with less exposure.
- On advanced cameras, you can eliminate much of the worry about exposure (and white balance), by shooting RAW, instead of
JPEG. RAW captures a much wider range from bright to dark, plus
16 times the color accuracy.
- [Advanced photographers note: Generally, the best exposed histogram curve should smoothly
descend until it just flattens on the far right (a little before
reaching maximum brightness value 255). A sudden stair-step down
against the far right indicates overexposure. For normal daylight images,
the
histogram bell curve should flatten within 4% of the far right (brightness value 245),
as long as none of the image highlights indicate an overexposure warning.
But for shooting a red sunset
(or very blueish dusk/dawn image), the camera may fail to give proper
warning of overexposure in the red (or blue) channel, and I find that I
must leave an extra
20% of empty flat curve on the right of the histogram on my Canon Powershot Pro1
to properly capture all the red (or respectively blue) highlights. The
highly skewed red or blue channel is only later seen graphed on a
computer software histogram (such as in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or Canon
Zoombrowser) which separates the
red, green, & blue channels.]
- Also, avoid underexposure, where the image looks overly dark.
In other words, avoid an image with the histogram bell curve too far
leftwards. Instead, make the bell curve as far right as possible, but
without cutting off the right-most highlights. A proper exposure like
this will better preserve shadow
detail, reduce random noise (by optimizing the camera sensor's "linear
signal-to-noise
ratio"), and reduce posterization
(wikipedia link).
- White Balance: Always
set the proper white balance on every shot when
shooting JPEG or TIF images.
- So long as direct sunlight hits
any subject in the image, even at sunrise/sunset (when the light is
very red), I recommend using White Balance = Sunlight, or else
your reds will be overly exaggerated and may risk
truncation/over saturation.
- When the sunlight source is filtered
through
bluish clouds onto the main subject, then you can use the White
Balance = Cloudy setting.
- You can only depend upon Auto
White Balance to work correctly in images that have a white or
neutral color area somewhere in the image.
- [Advanced photographers note: When shooting in RAW file format, you can
relax and
change white balance as needed later on your computer at RAW Conversion
time.]
- As an alternative to "half-press then instant click", to capture a moment of action, try your camera's Sports/Action mode and hold down the shutter for multiple automatic shots.
- [Advanced
photographers note: The above "half-press instant click" technique
requires Single-servo AF, which I prefer for almost all subjects
(including weddings) to better time the
right instant, and to save battery power & memory. In contrast,
"Sports/Action" or "Continuous-servo autofocus" continuously hunts for
focus even when your finger is away from the shutter button, and
supports multi-shot burst
mode when you hold down the button. ]
Get a big memory card and shoot extra rather than miss
the
best
images. Edit and delete unwanted images in the field to save memory
space and
time later spent. |
Above: I photographed these friendly Hindu children
in the lowlands of
Nepal. I shot this image on film, which I scanned into a digital
file. I did not use flash here because enough natural light bounced
onto the kids faces. However a slight amount of flash would have helped
make their captivating eyes more visible. Digital cameras make
photography easier than with film, because the LCD lets you immediately
see the effects of different camera settings, which you can immediately
apply and refine in your next shot.
How to use Fill Flash:
When the sun is out, I highly recommend
filling the dark shadows on people’s faces outdoors by
forcing
the Flash to fire, or turning on
Night Mode with
Flash, or popping up the flash ready to fire.
This technique is called
fill flash.
Have people take off their
sunglasses so you can see their soulful eyes. Try to place people with
their backs or sides to the sun or in the shade so they don't squint.
After shooting,
zoom into the camera's LCD or EVF to make sure the image is focused and everyone's
eyes are open. Some cameras let you increase or decrease
flash
compensation to more naturally balance with ambient or background
light.
Beware the following pitfalls when using fill flash:
- Using fill flash in sunny outdoors light will often overexpose the image, losing details in the brightest areas − check
the image (and its histogram bell curve) in the LCD.
- Workaround: Manually set your lowest ISO speed setting (such as ISO 100 or 50) and reshoot. Or turn
off flash and reshoot. [Or use an SLR or camera which supports faster "flash
synchronization" speeds. Or
turn on or add a ND (Neutral Density) filter.]
- Technical details: In
your camera's users guide, check
your camera’s
fastest shutter speed when using Flash (which on my Canon Powershot Pro1
is 1/250th of a second).
If on bright sunny days when forcing fill Flash, and the camera automatically
goes no higher than say 1/250 second, then shots may overexpose, even at the highest f/ stop.
- Canon
Powershot Pro1 users note: If the subject is also
sunlit, Flash forces images to
look too warmly red (it forces White Balance=Flash), so I recommend to save in RAW; then you can
easily readjust Color Temperature (or White Balance)
later in RAW Converter. / The Menu in the Pro1 lets you turn on a handy
3-stop ND Filter, which is great for photographing flowing water, or
for using Fill Flash in bright sunlight.
- Most built-in flashes cannot reach subjects beyond 10 to 20 feet
away. Flash won't brighten subjects which are too far away. Read your camera's users guide, and write
down & memorize how far your flash can reach: ______ feet/meters at wide (W)
zoom, and ______
feet/meters at telephoto (T), at ISO setting _______.
- Using flash can quickly run down your
camera battery, so keep a fully charged spare battery in your pocket.
Fill flash for low light conditions, indoor or
night subjects:
- If you have Slow Synchro Flash...Off, as is the default on most cameras, the subject's
action within flash
range will be sharpely frozen, and the background will be darker (beyond flash range) when indoors or at night.
- Turning
on Slow Synchro…On or Night
Mode lets
you flash at shutter speeds slower than about 1/60
second, which
can magically balance the flash with
ambient (available) light for outdoor evening
portraits or
to make fun blurring effects. For
sharper hand-held Slow Synchro Flash shots, steady the camera against something solid, or use a
tripod.
- As an example, on the Canon
Powershot Pro1, to use Flash
with an exposure less than 1/60th second, you must set Night Mode or Slow
Synchro Flash...On , which is available when flash is popped
up in Av, P, Landscape, or
Panorama
mode.
For Advanced Photographers: How to Optimize Shadows
and Highlights
Most cameras fail to capture dark and bright areas
(shadows and highlights) like your eyes do. To compensate for this, I
suggest using an image editor. Editing can improve most JPEG images,
but you will get much better
results by editing RAW files (supported only on higher end cameras).
Most camera kits include good image-editing
software for your computer (and some
even offer in-camera shadow adjustments, such as Nikon's "D
Lighting").
For editing images, I
prefer the easy and powerful control offered by the elegant Adobe Lightroom(for
PC and Macintosh computers). Lightroom cut in half my time spent
sorting, labeling and editing images (versus using Adobe Photoshop CS3
with Bridge). Lightroom handily stores all edits in a database instead
of in the image file, so you can easily undo or redo any changes to the
original image. Lightroom can
quickly label and edit large batches at once to create web pages or
shows.
Adobe Lightroom covers 99% of my editing needs. However, my very best images
(less than 1% of all shot) require custom correction using Layers in Adobe Photoshop, as described
below:
Caption for both image copies below: Sea of
Ice Glacier (Mer de Glace), Chamonix,
France (click for more Alps
images).
First image (left): After shooting, I
improved this image as shown, by using computer software. I optimized the
contrast in the darker part of the image, by using an Adobe
Photoshop>Levels Layer with a mask over the sky, using graduated
edges.
Second image (right): This original default image shows how dull
the camera makes
shadows by default when you properly expose the sky (to capture
highlight details).
Cameras have progressed far in the digital age, but they still cannot
see like your eyes do. Cameras are dumb machines, and their
images often must be optimized (as shown on left) before they can
properly portray reality like your eyes saw it.
The above image illustrates how to optimize shadows and highlights,
after
properly
exposing the highlights at
shooting time. When you expose properly to capture
highlight details (such as in
the bright clouds and glacier), unfortunately all cameras will by
default overly
darken &
dull the shadow detail (as shown in the second image). This
undesirable darkening happens for
all
cameras, no matter whether you shoot film, digital RAW or JPEG. One way
to work around the darkening is to balance the exposure with a
neutral-density
graduated filter over the lens at shooting time, which I did
back when I shot
film (before
2004). However, now that I shoot a digital camera,
RAW files retain enough shadow
detail so that I
no longer require a
graduated filter over the lens. I used Adobe Photoshop to
revive the
shadowy flowers of the second image, so they are more naturally vibrant
as shown in the first image.
Editing to optimize the image lets me recreate the accuracy and
emotional impact of what my eyes saw at shooting time (first
image): bright detail in
the
magenta flower simultaneous with detail in the white clouds.
Advantages of shooting digital RAW mode:
- Using digital
RAW files makes photography easier &
better than when shooting film. If your goal is to make larger
prints with better detail in both shadows and highlights, RAW files
give much extra optimizing/editing headroom, with no posterization (wikipedia
link).
- With a digital camera shooting in RAW mode, I no longer
bother with a neutral-density
graduated filter over the lens (which was required when using
film). Instead, I use a "neutral-density
graduated mask", as described in the "How
to" box below. Caution: digital camera shadow areas are much more
subject to posterization than highlights, so expose to the right of
your histogram without
overexposing. Using a neutral-density
graduated
filter over the lens will still help balance many digital shots,
such as a
bright sky with darker landscape, and will retain more accurate shadow
detail. See also my notes on digital
noise.
- Many advanced digital cameras allow you to save images in RAW
file format. RAW files capture an f/stop or two of better dynamic
range in highlights and shadows, and 16 times the color accuracy,
when compared to JPEG
format.
- The great color accuracy of RAW gives you much greater
editing headroom than JPG, thus eliminating the risk of posterization
(wikipedia link)
when using JPG files.
- Dynamic range, measured from the brightest highlights to
darkest shadows, seems to be about 7 or 8 f/stops when recovered using
RAW Converter software. In my experience, the dynamic range of RAW is
slightly better than print film, and much better than slide film.
- Typical RAW files have 12-bit color accuracy, versus only 8
bits for JPG. In binary, this 4 bit difference equals 2 to the power of
4, or 16 times more accuracy.
- For best RAW results: Optimize everything possible in your
RAW
Converter program (optimize white balance, exposure, Curves, and so
forth). If you will be editing
files extensively for printing, convert RAW using a Color Space of Prophoto or Adobe RGB. Convert the RAW to a
16-bit TIF file, and edit shadows and
highlights using a "neutral density graduated mask" as described below.
Don't sharpen the image at all until after the final step of resizing a
copy for printing or web display.
Neutral-Density Graduated Mask:
How to optimize the
shadows and highlights in a digital image file (JPG, TIF or RAW).
- My goal is to portray
what my eyes saw in reality. This
requires
modifying images to compensate for the limited dynamic range of
cameras, versus human eyes. A "neutral-density
graduated mask" lets you separately optimize the areas of
shadows and highlights in your image, in order to bring out details in
the image more like what your eyes saw in the field.
- Shooting RAW is
much better than shooting JPG if
you plan
to optimize/edit the image. Always properly expose
the highlights at at
shooting time. Make sure the shot is
well-exposed, by maximizing the area under the bell-curve of the histogram. Expose enough to push the histogram curve to the right as without truncating the curve on the far right (.
Exposure is
especially critical for JPG files, because overexposed JPEGs
cannot
recover highlight detail. RAW Converter software can recover an
additional f/ stop of highlight information from the RAW file, which
would have been lost to aJPG shot with the same overexposure (plus 1 stop recovery in the
shadows/blacks). Editing
16-bit TIF files causes very little posterization
(wikipedia link).
You can revive many JPEG shots, but in big enlargements, the quality
can be
noticeably worse than when derived from RAW & 16-bit TIF.
- Create a 16-bit TIF file
from your RAW Converter software
on your computer (using Adobe Photoshop; or your camera's software CD;
or other). Or you can edit JPEG files
if that's all you shot,
but
watch out for posterization
(wikipedia link).
- On your computer, run any photo editing software that supports
Selections or Layers (such as Adobe
Photoshop). Open the TIF or JPG file. To avoid compression
losses each time you save a JPG file, save the original JPG image file
as a non-lossy TIF, and edit just the TIF.
- Shadows adjustment: Select just the shadows
plus non-sky
midtones, excluding the sky as follows: Create a Levels Layer
(Adobe Photoshop>Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels...). Draw a
black mask over the sky using the Gradient
tool. Or click the Quick Mask
button, and draw using the Brush Tool
(set to a very big soft-edged Airbrush).
- Slide the the white value end-point slider ("256"
level) to the left in the Levels 1 histogram
until you start cutting off
the right edge of the bell curve. This sets the white point and
lightens your shadow
selection.
- Adjust the midtone slider in the Levels 1 histogram, making the
image darker or lighter as needed
to match what your eyes saw in reality. Don't overdo it. Readjust steps
4 and 5 as needed, since they affect each other.
- Slide the black value end-point slider ("0"
level) to
the right in the Levels 1 histogram
until you start cutting off the left
edge of the bell curve, or as needed
to match what your eyes saw in reality. Readjust steps 4, 5 & 6 as
needed, since they affect each other. Don't overdo it. Watch out
for posterization
(wikipedia link).
- Highlights adjustment: Now adjust
contrast in the highlights as needed: Invert the above
shadows/midtones selection to
make a new Levels Layer for the highlights selection, as follows in
Adobe Photoshop: Select>Load
Selection>"Channel: Levels 1
Mask". Then choose Select>Inverse.
Then choose Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels.... This makes Levels 2, for the highlights.
- Move the black value end-point slider ("0" level)
to
the right in the Levels 2 histogram
until you start cutting off the left
edge of the bell curve. This sets the black point and darkens the
highlights.
- Adjust the midtone slider darker or lighter as
needed
to match what your eyes saw in reality. Be careful to keep the
sky/highlights looking natural. I usually avoid adjusting the white
value end-point slider "256" level) for the highlight selection (Levels 2).
- Congratulations, you have now learned an advanced secret
for
adding greater emotional impact to
your pictures.
|
How to Take Better Pictures:
Digital Photography
Tips
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