10,000/365 Days 16 and 17: Backlighting and Sidelighting

Today felt like Groundhog Day, in the sense that the sun would periodically peek out from the clouds, see its own shadow, and then skitter off again, leaving the day nearly as overcast as most of the past week has been. However intermittent, I’ll take it over no sun at all. Here’s the result of squeezing yesterday and today’s assignments in between bouts of shadowboxing with old Sol.

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Day 16

Postcards to the Shore

A couple of months back when Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey, I shared information in this space about several individuals and nonprofits in this area who’ve been helping out in various ways. Part of the rationale was so that those who needed help might be connected to what they needed; the other part was to encourage those who might want to help, but who weren’t quite sure where to start.

To that end, I’ve launched a project called Postcards to the Shore, which I’ve set up as a means for people to share their stories of the Jersey Shore, in whatever form those stories take. If you’re reading this and you call New Jersey home — or maybe you’re a transplant to or from the Garden State, or you’ve just vacationed here — feel free to head over to www.postcardstotheshore.com and tell your story, in any way you’d like to tell it… through photos, video, fiction, memoir, haiku or koans. The site’s admittedly a bit sparse right now, but with your help (and your stories), it won’t be for long. Then tell a friend, and encourage them to do the same.

We don’t need to wait for the history to be written; we’re in the middle of it, living and writing it day by day. Our stories are our history, our testament, our love letters and our hope.

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10,000/365 Day 15: Reflections

I don’t like shooting in the rain (well, that’s not entirely true; I just don’t like my camera being exposed to the elements when it’s crappy out). But since that’s all we’ve had for the majority of this week, I found myself a good doorway and made the best of what I had. If you’ve got the right rain gear for your camera, shooting in the rain — especially at night — opens up some interesting possibilities.

With all that said, it’d be nice if the weather cooperates for Day 16, which will be side lighting.

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Full Frame vs. Crop: Which is Better?

A short while back, I explained the differences between full frame and crop sensors. I’ve since gotten the question, “Well, which one’s better?” The short answer? Both. And if that didn’t work for you, here’s a slightly better short answer: Depends.

Since neither of those answers is particularly helpful, let’s try this again. Let’s start, in fact, by re-framing the question, and then looking at the pros and cons of each. Which one will work best for you, and why?

DX has a “crop factor,” typically in the neighborhood of 1.5x to 1.6x. Here’s what that means in plain English: first of all, it means that the image you’re taking will be enlarged, similar to the effect of using digital zoom but without the loss in optical or image quality. Second, it means more reach on your long lenses. You bought a 200mm lens? Congratulations. It’s going to work like a 300. If you bought a 300, it’s going to give you the magnification of a 450mm. Great news if you routinely photograph things like birds and wildlife. DX, in other words, is like having a built-in teleconverter, minus the added cost and hassles.

Now the bad news. Shooting architecture? A 24mm f/1.8, which would generally be adequate on a full-frame sensor, is now a 35mm. Wide, in other words, but not that wide. You want a “normal” lens, you can pick up a nifty fifty, only to find out that it’s closer to 75mm (so you might end up going for something in the 28mm-35mm range instead). There are wider lenses for DX (several of which start in the 18mm lens, with other options starting anywhere between 11mm and 17mm), but some of these are terribly expensive, or distort at certain apertures.

I’ve also heard crop sensor shooters complain that they’re losing too much at the long end if they shoot in full frame. Having done both, I’ll concede you have a point there. Full frame cameras generally have a crop option built in, however, so you can always switch to that if you need the additional reach. This wasn’t always a great option since you’d lose several MP in resolution, but one upshot to the new crop of FF cameras having a ridiculous number of pixels is that you can now shoot in crop mode at 10mp or more. That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that several older SLRs only shot 6MP. Those 10MP give you all the image quality of a Nikon D60, itself no slouch. That’s also with a newer processor and larger pixels, so it’s not a bad tradeoff.

How about depth of field? As a rule of thumb, smaller sensors give more depth of field, even with all else being equal. f/2.8 on a point-and-shoot, versus a crop-sensor SLR, versus a full frame SLR, will all give different degrees of DOF, even at the same distance to the subject. For some purposes, that added depth of field is a great thing (landscape or macro photography, for instance), but at other times (say you’re shooting portraits), it becomes more of a challenge to throw your background out of focus, and yet rendering your subject with a reasonable degree of sharpness. Remember, even though your lens might shoot f/1.4 or f/1.8 wide open, lenses are usually going to be sharper once you’ve stopped them down by at least a full stop. On a small sensor, that can end up making a significant difference.

Then there’s ISO. If, like me, you like shooting in low light without flash (or you’re shooting sports, and can use an extra stop or three of shutter speed to freeze action), good performance at higher ISO is extremely helpful. Sensor technology – and the processor technology to which it’s linked – gets better every year. My current compact (a Fuji X10) runs rings around the Kodak that it replaced in terms of IQ and high ISO performance, but it couldn’t hold a candle to my old D7000 or my D600 in either respect at high ISO. And I’ve seen a significant step up in noise control between the crop sensor D7000 and its full-frame counterpart, the D600. High ISO may not be your be-all and end-all (especially if you’re shooting with flash, or a full lighting setup), but on the off chance that it is important to you, sensor size can (and often does) make a difference.

Finally, there’s image quality. There are several variables that influence how your images will look (exposure, sharpness, good lenses, filters of good quality if you’re in the habit of using them, camera settings, et cetera, et cetera). With that said, larger sensors tend to give higher picture quality (partly due to resolution, partly because the photosites (pixels) are larger) than their smaller counterparts. They also tend to give more latitude in terms of dynamic range and rescuing shadows or highlights that are under/overexposed. Take a look at the photos out of a Phase One or Mamiya medium format camera versus your average SLR, and there’s a pretty significant difference there.

These are hardly the only considerations, of course. There’s weight, cost of bodies and lenses, controls, and a lot more. The broader point, then, is if you’re buying your first interchangeable lens system – whether it’s going to be Micro 4/3, Four Thirds, APS-C, Full Frame or something else altogether – you’ve got some serious research and thinking ahead of you. You’ll want to think about your budget, and what you’re comfortable schlepping on a long day’s shooting, to be sure; but don’t forget to give some thought to your subject matter, as well, since that’s going to have a significant impact on the kind of bodies and lenses you’ll want to check out.

Your turn. Have you shot with multiple formats (including those of you who shot with film for years before shooting digital)? Sound off about your experiences!

Suspicious Birds_mini

10,000/365 Day 14: Shadows

I rather like shadows. They’re useful; after all, they emphasize texture, create a mood or sense of mystery… and it’s really hard to create silouhettes without them. Every once in a while, you can even get a shadow that’s more evocative than the thing that’s casting it. Don’t be afraid of contrasty, shadowy photos; embrace the dark side!

Postscript: Cheated slightly on this one; it was shot on the last sunny day we had here. While I got a couple of shots in earlier today, overcast lighting really isn’t the best thing if you’re chasing shadows.

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Day 14

10,000/365 Days 12 and 13: Texture and Light

This weekend’s subjects between them could easily inspire several blog posts (and some time soon, they will). I’ve put them — along with tomorrow’s subject, shadow, together because each relies on the other to a large degree. Used correctly, light can emphasize — or obliterate — nearly any aspect in a photo, whether it’s shape, texture, color, or quite a bit else. Texture, on the other hand, can be used to give your photos a sense of dimensionality, and can even be used as a subject unto itself if you’re in that sort of mood.

More to follow.

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Day 13

10,000/365 Day 11: Color

Today was a dull, overcast day — which is great for catching color, generally, but it was also raining, which tends to put a damper on photography when you’re used to shooting outdoors to change things up. Today’s photo is an object lesson in why you should always have your camera (since I snuck this photo under the noses of the people in the local supermarket).

It’s also about color.

Color has always been a factor in photography, even before color photography (it was common to hand-color prints in the days before color processes became common). And it’s no wonder. Not only do we see in color, but color also has different cultural, artistic, and even emotional associations that can add layers of resonance to a photo when it’s used properly.

That’s a post for another day. To whet your appetite in the meantime, there’s a very good explanation of color theory and its use in photography here: http://www.framedreality.com/color-in-photography-color-theory

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Apple to Oranges
Apple to Oranges

10,000/365 Day 10: Shape

If we want to strip photography down to its barest essentials, it’s all about two things: lines, shapes, and light. Think about it a second: everything else can either be stripped away (take out the color and you’ve still got a black-and-white) or related back to one of those things. Depending on your personal preference and style, there are different ways you might choose to deploy those things, or visually “accessorize” them, but those are the essentials in your toolkit.

So today, it’s all about shape.

Sometimes your shape is your subject. For instance, you may find yourself wanting to emphasize the shape of something if that’s the most striking thing about your subject. Luckily for you, there are several ways to do this:

  • Backlighting can help to wipe out some of the surface details of something by portraying it in silouhette
  • Backdrops can be useful for subjects that can be moved or posed
  • Black and white is a good remedy if the shape of something works but the color in the image draws more attention than the shape (as in the two photos of the meters below)

At other times, the shape of something might be incidental to a larger subject, but still serve a compositional purpose. It’s also useful to remember that shapes are themselves collections of lines; because of that, shapes are capable of serving the same compositional purpose that lines do in terms of drawing attention to or through a particular part of the photo. And don’t be afraid of asymmetry, since asymmetrical shapes, besides having a certain visual appeal, also do a better job of leading the eye through a photo.

It’s not just photographers who are concerned with this sort of thing. Picasso’s cubist work, and abstracts by the likes of Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian (artists’ names link to representative works) throw realistic depiction out the window and reduce the visual plane to a series of shapes, although in Picasso’s case, the shapes are still — albeit loosely — deployed in the service of something vaguely figurative. We’ll be delving into abstraction later on, but for now, pay attention to shape in the arts and crafts, as well as in the world beyond your door.

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Meters 1Meters 2

10,000/365 Day 9: Perspective

Having experimented with lines, let’s go a step further today and take up perspective. As it relates to photography, perspective is simply how an object appears to the naked eye (or your capture medium) based on spatial relationships. Perepctive can vary depending on several things, such as the lens used, our position relative to our subject, and subjects’ positions relative to one another.

The form of perspective that most of us are familiar with is linear perspective. This manifests in two ways: first, as objects become more distant they appear smaller because their visual angle decreases. Second, if you have strong lines or edges in your photos, they will appear to diminish toward what’s called a vanishing point. The further away you are from your subject, the more pronounced the perspective effect; this is also, in turn, influenced by the type of lens used. Take the photo of the row houses as an example; the part closer to the photographer appears much larger, and diminishes as the distance from the camera increases. If the houses were longer, there would be an even more pronounced vanishing point, ’til the last houses in the row would appear very small if they were visible at all. The building is the same height from end to end, but because of the perspective, its far side appears much shorter than the near side.

Compression depending on focal length: If your photo contains multiple elements, you can use perspective as an element of composition to change the apparent relationship among those elements. Let’s try that again in English. The images of the bicycles below show how the use of different focal lengths effect the apparent “distance” between the bikes. The shots were taken at 24mm, 50mm, and 85mm, with the framing of the shot more or less the same from one photo to the next. You’ll notice that the bicycles haven’t been moved; they’re in the same position. I wasn’t (I had to keep stepping back as I zoomed in to maintain the composition). You’ll notice that in each shot, everything appears a bit closer together even though it’s still occupying the same physical space.

Perspective comes into play in nearly every form of photography, including portraits, nature photography, and pretty much any other form you can think of. It’s a reason to choose your lenses carefully, but it’s also a good reason to decide whether you want to “zoom” with your feet or with the lens, since it’s not just the “size” of the subject that will change within the frame, but also its relation to the rest of what’s depcited.

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85mm
85mm
50mm
50mm
24mm
24mm

10,000/365 Day 8: Lines

I’m a day behind on writing, but still on time with the shooting… which, I suppose, is better than the other way ’round. Anyway, today — by which I mean yesterday — it’s all about lines.

Power Lines
Power Lines

Strong lines in a photo serve a few purposes, but one of the most important is to lead your eye through the photo, or to emphasize a certain portion of it. Paying attention to the kinds of lines you have in your photo, and where they lead the eye, leads to stronger compositions.

Too many lines (as in the shot of the power lines) just create confusion and disorientation. The sidewalk shot that’s featured here, while it’s visually “busy,” features the strong curve of the bricks against the straighter linear jumble of the concrete (and the color contrast also helps). So pay attention to how the lines “work,” or don’t, in your photos. We’ll get to the color, and quite a bit else, in the days ahead.

Strong verticals and diagonals (among other things) lead your eyes upward.
Strong verticals and diagonals (among other things) lead your eyes upward.

Stepping away from photography for a minute, let me give you an example. Think for a minute about church architecture. If you stop to think about it, regardless of what they might share in common in terms of iconography, church buildings all share one feature in common, whether the rest of the building looks like a saltbox or Saint Patrick’s Cathedral: for the most part — inside and out — they feature strong diagonals and other architectural features (like buttresses) that, in addition to any architectural functionality they have, serve to lead your eyes up.

We can do the same thing with our photos; lines are one way of delineating the geometry of a photo, but they also act like railroad tracks, or steeples: done right, they lead our eyes through the photo, adding emphasis to some parts and de-emphasizing others. Just the same as we try to avoid extraneous “stuff” in our photos (like telephone poles sticking out of people’s heads), extraneous lines — too many of ’em, or in the wrong places — can undermine an otherwise good photographic composition.

 

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10000365 08 Lines