In today’s Thursday Travel Photography column I am going to talk about cropping. The second part of this article has weekly image reviews. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
CROPPING
The camera sensor or a frame of film has a fixed dimension. However, the image you have in mind may not always fit in those dimensions very well. Consciously or unconsciously, we tend to live with the picture that we have got from the camera. Sometimes, getting rid of unwanted part of an image can enhance it by a great deal. A tasteful cropping may improve the aesthetics of the image, but in many occasions, it is simply a practical tool that doesn’t demand much intelligence or an artist’s eye. You can just eliminate parts of a flat sky on the top, a disturbance in a corner or an element that doesn’t fit well with rest of the frame.
This is very straightforward when you look at the examples below. The picture of Thanjavur Temple and the cropping speaks for itself and needs no explanation.
Let’s look at it in some more detail. Why did I even include the garbage in the first place? Small elements may creep in unnoticed in a picture. But here, that is obviously not the case. I could have recomposed the shot by removing the lower part and including the sky instead. But there are two reasons for not doing so.
First, the cropped image to the right is how I conceived my picture irrespective of what the camera would capture. Be it sky or the ground, I was going to crop that excess anyway. Second, I chose to include ground instead of the sky, as it would allow me to hold the camera horizontally. Including more of the sky instead would need tilting the camera vertically, and would have resulted in a distortion, making the towers look converging. Allowing the garbage to seep into the frame and cropping it later was the easy choice.
In many occasions, choice of cropping is not necessarily so obvious. In the picture below, where people are intensely watching a cham dance performance in a monastery in Ladakh, there are no obvious eyesores similar to the above image. However, getting rid of the portion beyond the right pillar helps create a neat and good looking frame, and removes a distraction in the picture. Also note that I got rid of the cable hanging on the top.
There are several such occasions when cropping can help. Here is a quick list.
1. When there are unwanted elements in the image, like the garbage in the picture of Thanjavur Temple.
2. To provide a neat uniform look to the image by removing any distraction, like in the second example above.
3. To get rid of too much of bland elements that may not add value to the image, such as a very plain sky.
4. To emphasize your subject subject and keep the viewer focused on it. For example, if you are shooting a particular building, you could crop any neighbouring buildings that sneak into the frame, if you can’t avoid them at the time of framing.
5. To remove technical errors that may crop up in the image. For example, wide angle lenses may produce images that are slightly skewed at the edges.
Cropping helps you to overcome the physical limitation created by the size of the sensor. I would advise having a cropping in mind at the time shooting, like I had with the picture of Thanjavur Temple, than try to look for a crop at a later point of time.
IMAGE REVIEWS
The image below is posted for review by flickr user mallumax
Flowers rarely fail to make good choice of subject. Same applies to this too, and focusing on just a part of the flower usually works well. The simplest way this image could have been improved was to shoot it against a clutter free background. A completely green background would have easily made the subject stand out in against background. My earlier article in the thursday-travel-photography series on backgrounds gives a better idea of how a uniform background makes a lot of difference to the image, and ways to achieve background blur.
If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique. Only tagged images are taken for reviewing. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
Today’s Thursday Travel Photography is slightly technical, but is important to know for everyone who shoots with a digital camera. If you are already familiar with white balance adjustments, feel free to skip this section.
The second part of this article has weekly image reviews. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
WHITE BALANCE
Sometimes you would have noticed that a picture you have taken has a tint of blue or yellow. Although it is unnoticeable or doesn’t exist in most pictures, a few images may turn out so blue that it spoils the photo, and makes you wonder where did it come from. The answer lies in white balance.
Most light sources that we normally see, except daylight, tends to have a tint. For example, tungsten light has a yellow tint. Early morning light before sunrise tends to have a bluish hue. Evening sun, before and after sunset has a colour varying from orange to red. Sometimes when the colors are very saturated, we notice it easily, such as in case of a colourful sunset. But after a few minutes of getting adjusted, our eyes adapt well enough that we don’t explicitly notice the tint.
However, when taking pictures, the camera needs to make some compensations to ensure that photograph doesn’t register a tint influenced by the light source. Nearly all digital cameras have inbuilt processing capacity to compensate for the light hues, ensuring that the picture you have taken simulates the colours that the objects would have in a neutral light source. This is called White Balance Compensation.
Sometimes cameras may not be able to compensate accurately in some environment, resulting in incorrect and artifical looking hues in the picture. Look at the example below.
The above image is of a rock in the sea, taken in the evening hours. The picture to the left is straight out of camera with auto White Balance settings. You can see an obvious tint in the image. The picture to the right has gone through some corrections on the computer to fix the white balance. As you can realize, the image to the right is closer to what one would have seen, and does not have the unnatural tint like the first.
GETTING THE CORRECT WHITE BALANCE
Thankfully, most modern digital cameras can automatically detect the color of ambient light and compensate accordingly, letting the photographer forget the complexities of White Balance. However, they may fail on occasions like in the case of picture of the rock above. In such occasions, it is necessary to make manual settings in the camera to ensure that the white balance compensation is correct.
Besides the auto white balance, most cameras provide some default white balance settings, such as ‘indoors’, ‘daylight’, ‘tungsten’, ‘cloudy’ and a few more. Make sure you check your camera manual and understand how to change these settings. Only in cases when you notice that auto white balance is not performing up to the mark and creating color casts, try to change the white balance setting depending on the environment you are in. Most of the times it should work well and reduce the color cast.
UNDERSTANDING COLOR TEMPERATURE
The hue of the ambient light, often called ‘Colour Temperature’, is measured in Kelvins. Neutral daylight is said to be at 6500 Kelvins, or 6500K. Anything less than 6500K is usually bluish in colour (also called cooler tones), and above 6500K tends to be yellowish (warmer tones). Some cameras let you define the exact colour temperature of ambient light, which allows perfect compensation. If you are shooting RAW images, the same correction that is set in camera can also be performed in RAW image processing software. This means if you are shooting RAW, it is not necessary to give significant importance to setting the white balance, as it can be corrected later.
If you are shooting jpg however, it is important to ensure that White Balance compensation in the camera is working well. It is difficult to make corrections after the picture is taken.
IMAGE REVIEWS
The image below is posted for review by flickr user Meghana Behere
What charmed me instantly to this picture is the different colours of the two flowers that otherwise look the same. The composition at an angle beginning from bottom-right corner works well for the image. The leaf on the top works like a loose frame and helps viewer’s eyes to focus on the flowers. There are two areas where I feel the picture could be improved. The first is the background: the mix of blue and yellow in the brownish background are a disturbance and doesn’t go well in the frame. Second, the flowers are best shot when they are in full bloom. I am not sure if the flowers in the picture are wilting already or that’s how they are in bloom, but I feel the picture would have looked better if the petals were young and not bent.
The second picture for review is posted by flickr user rajolisudhir
As I can guess from the picture, the primary focus of the image is the ficus tree and the water body. There are a few distractions in the image, like the house to the right, men standing and the blue plastic sheet on the ground. I feel it would have been better to go closer to the tree and eliminate these distractions. Shooting from a location to the right also would have helped. Personally I would prefer to go very close to the subject in a scene like this and eliminate all distractions, including the sky which is bare and white at this moment. For my suggested composition, go to the image page and see the notes.
If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
Thursday travel photography is now on for a month. I would love to get your feedbacks and suggestions on the feature, and know what more would you like to see in this column. Please comment. Starting next week, I will also be answering any questions or doubts related to photography that are nagging you. If you have a question to ask me, you can leave a comment on this post, and I will answer it next week’s article. Alternately, you can also post it as a new discussion thread on India Travel and Photography flickr group.
Today’s article has two sections as usual, with the second section on image reviews. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique.
AVOIDING CAMERA SHAKE
In the days of film cameras when we mostly took 6×4 prints and were happy with it, camera shake was hardly an issue. Since the time the world has gone digital, we see large and magnified images on our computer, and any shake in the camera is easily visible in the photos. On many occasions we come back disappointed to see a what would have been a good picture gone bad due to camera shake. This article explains the primary reasons for camera shake, and explores ways to avoid it. The reasons first:
When we take a picture, the shutter in front of the camera’s sensor opens for a brief while and closes, letting light fall on the sensor. The time for which the shutter is open is often very small, and may be as low as 1/100 seconds, or even 1/1000 seconds or less on a sunny afternoon. The more light we have outside, the less time the camera sensor needs to create the image. In such a short time, even if there some vibration in our hands, it doesn’t reflect in the picture. However, when we shoot indoors or in the evening hours when there is not enough time, shutter speed can drop to 1/30 seconds or even less. Sometimes the shutter may have to stay open for a full second or longer to let in enough light to form a good image. In such cases where the exposure duration is long, it is impossible to keep our hands absolutely still. Slightest movement of hand becomes apparent in the picture when you see it in large size. The shake may not be obvious in a small print size like 6×4, but when you see the full image on the monitor, you will see the effects of unstable hands. Also, when we are pressing the shutter release button, our hand invariably moves a little, and can cause the camera to move.
To add to it, a zoom lens can magnify the vibrations just like it magnifies the objects in the frame. If you are shooting at a long focal length such asa 200mm or more, slightest vibration may appear prominently in the image.
Let’s look at a few ways to minimize, or completely eliminate camera shake.
Hold your camera in the right position. The positions 1, 2 and 3 in the picture below (camera image from Canon website) show the appropriate positions for holding the camera. Most cameras have a grip(a vertical bulge with coarse surface) on the right hand side. Hold the camera here using your right hand, with your thumb supporting the back of the camera and three fingers holding the grip. Let the index finger be free to press the shutter release button.
The position of the left hand depends on how big your camera is. If it has a lens as big as the one in the picture or larger, support the lens from the bottom at the middle of the length of the lens (position 2) using your left hand. Hold the lens gently using your thumb and the index finger. If your camera is small and doesn’t have such big a lens, support the camera at the bottom left corner and hold the body gently. Do not hold very tight from either of your hands. When you are pressing the shutter release button, try to keep rest of your hand stable and gently press the button using the right-hand index finger.
If you are shooting in low light, avoid using the LCD and use the viewfinder instead. Holding the camera closer to the body allows your hand to remain stable.
Use continuous mode. Use continuous mode if your camera support the feature. In continuous mode, the camera keeps taking pictures as long as the shutter release button remains depressed. Consult the camera manual to see how this can be enabled. Some low-end cameras may not support this at all. While shooting, hold the shutter release button until two pictures are taken. The second image is likely to see less shake, as your fingers would have remained depressed and not moved when taking this picture.
Advanced Settings. If you are not shooting full auto and your camera gives you considerable creative freedom, you can increase the ISO till you feel confident about getting the right shutter speeds. The downside of this is, the image can turn out grainy due to the noise introduced at higher ISO. If your camera or lens supports some image stabilization technologies, make sure it is turned on.
Use a tripod and cable/remote release. This is recommended only for serious photographers. The effort involved in lugging a tripod is simply too much unless you are very serious about photography. While in most cases it is sufficient to use tripod alone, best results are achieved if it is used along with a remote release(a very basic remote control that does the function of shutter release button) or cable release(a cable extension with a shutter release button). In case you don’t have a cable release, it helps to put the camera on timer mode and take the picture.
IMAGE REVIEWS
The image below is posted by flickr user manisholiday
This well executed shot is perfectly exposed, which is not easy in the dark interiors of the monasteries. The colours have also come out well, and the line of lamas are well places at a side of the image. The viewer’s eyes clearly lead to the sitting lamas who are the focus of the image. The image would have come out much better if the Dung Chen(the two long instruments) were completely in the frame. With the tip cutoff, the viewer fails to get a good perspective of the length of the instrument and it feels incomplete. Besides, the round long end of the Dung Chen would also add a visual appeal to the image.
If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post it on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag it as itpcritique.