Compositional Rules

In any pastime or activity there are people who will tell you that there are certain rules that you must not break. Photography is something of an exception in that you will rarely be introduced to the 'rules' such as they are, without also being told that they are there to be broken. What you will also be told however, is that to break them effectively, you must first understand them. In this section I will introduce one such rule. It's the most well known of the compositional rules and it is usually referred to as 'The rule of thirds'.

Before we get into that though I think it important to mention balance. This is the balance of an image and its composition rather than that of the photographer, who may be extremely lopsided with no negative impact on their pictures... Sometimes you will see an image that feels awkward, lopsided, or weighted too heavily towards one side, or the top or bottom of the frame. Often in images seen in magazines or online portfolios, this is a deliberate choice by the photographer to induce a sense of unease in the viewer, usually considered appropriate to the subject matter. There will often be a story associated with the image, which the feeling of awkwardness somehow enhances. Conversely though, many photographs seen in magazines and particularly on posters will feel very relaxing as your eye wanders over them; as of everything is in its right place and the whole thing feels balanced. Left and right are given equal precedence whether that be subject points, large background elements, or similar levels of nothing. The foreground and the background (usually frame bottom and top, respectively) each have something to offer, whether that is interest or space. This is compositional balance, and is what many photographers strive toward, much of the time.

And so to the rule. If you take a typical scene with a main subject, some background interest, maybe some empty space, and imagine you're looking at it through a 3x3 grid, like a noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) board. The image is split equally into nine squares or rectangles. The rule of thirds asserts that if you place your main subject on one of the four intersection points, and any horizon or other horizontal dividing lines across either the top or bottom third, you will likely end up with a more balanced and interesting photograph than if you point your central focus point directly at the main subject and fire the shutter. Go back to those landscapes on the net or in magazines or on posters. Many of them you will see follow or almost-follow this rule, and the ones that don't are not even close, like they set out to deliberately go against it. Even those where the subject is central or symmetrical horizontally will often have a horizon or other dividing line on the upper or lower third boundary.

As I said, the rule is meant to be broken but first (grasshopper) you must understand what you are breaking and why. Take the rule of thirds with you on your next landscape photography trip, or next time you visit a stately home or monument, and see how different your photos turn out from those you took before. Sometime soon I'll return to 'the rules' and discuss how and when to go about breaking them.

Infrared Pics

It was sunny on my way home tonight so I stopped close to work and took some test shots with the Canon Powershot G5 and my Cokin P009 infrared filter. Here are the results after some basic photoshopping. I won't win any awards for composition or subject but I'm happy with the result of the test. :)

By the way...

The pictures from the stately home on the roll of Velvia from the Halina TLR came out really well. There's something about a well focussed and exposed 6x6cm slide that blows pretty much everything else out of the water. No matter how big the print, a 6x6 Velvia on a lightbox will always grab the eye for me.

Wow long time no write

Well it's been a LONG time since the last post. Over a year in fact. During that time I have done photos at weddings, photos on holiday, photos of airshows, but only in the last couple of weeks have I actually done any creative photography, and for that I have some old technology to thank. Film. I'd started a return to film for some of my photography - mostly high speed black and white stuff like the lovely Ilford Delta 3200 - a few months back, when I spotted a good condition EOS 3 on one of the used equipment sites (probably Ffordes though it may have been Mifsuds) and decided to treat myself to what was my absolute dream camera all through the latter part of the 90s. I've not been disappointed and it's a beautiful piece of kit, but that's for another day. I then ended up at Jessops in the Trafford centre buying film to put in it. £60 later I was the proud owner of 5 rolls of Kodak Portra, a couple of Sensia process paid slide films, a Velvia, a Delta 3200, and a couple of rolls of 120 Velvia and Provia to put through my Halina TLR. Most of it is still in the fridge if I'm honest (which is more than I could say of Jessops, where film has been consigned to a wooden drawer full of a hotch potch collection of plastic bags and multipacks beneath the counter), but I have been through a few films lately.

Like many people I suspect, I've had a few rolls of exposed film kicking around in the bottom of a bag for a while, and some still sat in the last camera I used them in, partly exposed and abandoned. Some of them dated from at least five or six years ago, some black and white, some colour slide, one infrared black and white that I was sure had been spoiled by the way I changed the film in shade instead of complete darkness, not fully understanding the process of how to use it at the time. I checked around for a place that still understood infrared film (not quite trusting Tesco or Jessops...) and found Metro Imaging in London, where the very helpful Tony reassured me that he knew exactly what needed to be done, but warned that really, it did need to have been handled in complete darkness. Hedging my bets I elected process and same-size contact sheet and didn't expect much from it, so imagine my surprise when it turned up and pretty much every frame had come out, some complete with the trademark white leaves and black skies of infrared photography.

Inspired by the unexpected success I have since bought some more infrared film (the choice is much more limited these days) by a company called 'Efke', then discovered that in order to shoot it I needed a proper infrared filter instead of just a red like the Kodak stuff of the past, so I've also bought one of those. Next I discovered that I could do the same thing on my DSLR (to an extent) and on my compact so the next accessory was a lens adapter for my Canon G5 to allow me to fit the IR filter to that, and hopefully get instant results. Finally at lunchtime today I got chance to take out the oldest of all my SLRs - my dad's old Pentax ME with a broken shutter button - and shot 15 shots (tripod mounted, remote release, f/16, exposures ranging from 0.5 to 8 seconds) of a power station across a field containing horses. In my imagination, the power station looks dark and foreboding, the grass is white, the dry grass in the adjoining field probably darker, the sky a light grey flecked with streaks of jet black, and the horses look ... perfectly normal. Hint - when shooting infrared, seek out animals in some of your shots. Cows for example are a stereotypical IR subject, as they look entirely unchanged and unconcerned about the white foliage they're chewing on.

So the lesson for me from this whole thing. If you're low on inspiration, go old skool, dig out those unprocessed films from your past, and get them sent off.

Oh, and if you put film in your camera, finish it and get it processed, or even just finish it, wind it back, and keep it somewhere cool and dark. Of all the films I've had processed, the only ones that really showed any image quality problems at all were the ones I left part-used for years. In those ones, the old frames, left wrapped around the take-up spool for years, had faded and lost most of their interest. By contrast (scuse the pun) the ones that were older than these, same film type, but left would back into their casings, in their plastic tubs, in a darkened bag in the wardrobe, came out pretty much fine.

Struggling for Inspiration

I often find that while I may WANT to take pictures, I have no idea what to take shots of, and nothing I can think of inspires me to create in my mind. Sometimes this malaise is broken by a family event such as a wedding or day out with friends, or trip to the zoo (guaranteed to get me filling CF cards) but other times there's nothing of note going on and I have to just work through it.

It's at these times that I take a step back and remember what got me taking photos in the first place. As well as the need or desire to create and record, I've always (well, since my teens) had an interest in the techniques, details and history of photography. A trip to a photo exhibition or gallery, or something like the photography, film and tv museum at Bradford can plant seeds of things I want to try. My favourite ever photo is 'Birth of the Ark Royal' by E.Chambre Hardman of Liverpool, and the National Trust have relatively recently opened up his former studio, preserved as it was throughout the latter part of the 20th century, to visitors at 59 Rodney Street, Liverpool. That's on my list for the next time I hit a dry spell.

Most recently though I went back to my roots and shot some film. I always find it refreshing to only have a few handfuls of frames rather that the machine gun of a modern DSLR. It makes you consider what's in and what's out of frame, as cropping is more difficult; it makes you think about exposure and not just shoot & adjust as you can with a preview screen. My most extreme recent example is taking my £9 eBay Halina TLR out for a day at a stately home, with a part-used roll of 120 velvia 50ASA, giving me about 8 exposures to use. no built-in meter meant using my £4 handheld lightmeter to get exposure right on the fairly unforgiving film. Focuses the mind beautifully. I only took about five shots in the end, but as I always used to be when shooting film, I'll be excited to get them back and see how I did.

Shedding some light on the subject

You may or may not know that the word photography means basically light-drawing or drawing with light. As such, light is the most important thing to consider when taking any photo. That sounds serious, but think about it - too much or too little light for your camera and you can't take the picture at all. I'm not so much talking about quantity of light in this entry however, as much as type, quality and direction of light.

The first choice to make is whether to shoot indoors or outdoors. Unless it's night time, outdoors is usually brighter than a lit indoors area. This means that working without flash or extra lights is often easier outside, with faster shutter speeds available and hence less chance of camera shake or subject movement. If it's very bright outside though, it can mean you're limited in terms of slow shutter speeds and wide apertures, so if you're shooting something you can pick up and move, especially if it's a still life type object, taking it inside sometimes affords you more freedom to shoot how you wish. Inside lighting options include flash, desk lamps, windows, torches and normal room lights among others. If on the other hand you're shooting something fast moving like children, moving outside will allow you more likelihood of being able to catch a sharp image.

When you shoot in relatively dim conditions without flash or extra photo-specific artificial lights it's often referred to as 'available light' photography. This can be done indoors using windows or the light spilling from another room, or outdoors using street lights, light from a window, or even passing headlights if you're particularly careful about where you set up. The point is using 'borrowed' light - whatever light is already available in a location is what you have to work with, without adding more of your own. Available light photography techniques are often used for portrait and glamour shots, where the subject is lit by light spilling through a blind or from a window a little way away. There's also nothing to say you can't reshape or redirect the light using diffusers and reflectors to fill shadows or deepen them, or reduce harsh direct light. a very useful purchase I made some time ago is a lastolite 5-in-1 reflector which provides, as its name suggests, five light changing options. A diffuser for softening light, white, silver and gold reflectors for filling shadows and adjusting the tone of light, and the intriguing black reflector which effectively takes light away. The black side essentially replaces any reflective surface which is pushing light back onto the subject, with a non-reflective one which may, depending on scene arrangement, itself reflect on the model or subject's surface or skin.

As I said at the top, the first choice is indoors or outdoors, and the best thing about the outdoor option is the range of lighting options it provides when you work al fresco. even though you'll tend to be using one main light source during daylight hours - the sun - it doesn't have to be direct sunlight to be worthwhile. In fact, while bright sunlight is great for warm summer or autumn landscapes (or any time of year - blue skies and fluffy white clouds add to most landscape shots), plus shots of the kids on holiday, and pictures of your house for Rightmove, most photographers prefer things a little more subtle for anything but landscapes. A cloudy sky is like the world's biggest natural softbox and lights detail subjects much more sympathetically. Portraits especially benefit from gentler lighting, and still life shots of flowers, leaves, nature in general do not gain anything from being too harshly lit. Portraits against an important or relevant background are easier to expose for in softer, less directional light too. In short, cloud rules for outdoor non-landscape shots. You just have to be careful not to leave the shots looking flat and lacking contrast. If options are limited and you find yourself shooting portraits in bright light, a little fill-in flash could be your friend, but I'll cover that in another post.

Time of day also makes a big difference to your final image. Sunrise and sunset light for example have completely different attributes and qualities, with sunrise being cooler and gentler as a rule, while sunset is very warm and quite directional. If you can drag yourself out of bed in time to catch a sunrise over your favourite landscape feature, the results can be well worth the effort. Just be aware that some mornings (many, if my own track record is anything to go by) don't really have a sunrise to speak of. I remember one early morning in the lake district, getting up at 5am to head to a spot I'd scoped out the previous day on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake. I waited for the first hint of light, set up the tripod and waited. Three hours later I crawled back into bed. All that had happened was that the sky got progressively lighter grey, as unexpected cloud cover had sneaked up in the early hours. If you want to see examples of sunset vs sunrise over the same landscape, one of my favourite photography books is Charlie Waite's 'Seeing Landscapes' which has just such an example, over a rural scene in Tuscany.

And so to artificial light. Whether used in darkness or light, whether used as the main or sole light source or just to add a sparkle to an already lit scene, adding light gives you ultimate control over the presentation of your subject. First and simplest is the situation where you're lighting the scene using only light sources within your control. This applies to scenes lit with the flash on 'auto', as the camera will usually choose exposure settings which cause the flash to entirely overwhelm the ambient light, leaving the whole scene lit as if flash was the only light source, leaving shadows on otherwise well-lit surfaces behind the subject. The harsh effect of direct flash can be softened in a number of ways which I'll cover in the aforementioned later post, or you can balance it with other light sources using your flash exposure compensation setting, if you're lucky enough to have the setting and a dedicated flash (you can simulate the same-ish effect using a non-dedicated flash with auto modes). What this does is reduce the amount of light the camera will use to expose the scene, by a specified amount. The stops work in the same way as regular exposure 'stops' i.e. Minus-1 stop means the camera will use half the flash power, leaving flash to ambient at 50:50. This is a good first test point if you've determined that 100% flash is not what you need. Once you've seen the result you can adjust accordingly. If you're on film or short of review time, many mid range SLRs have flash exposure bracketing which works like regular bracketing, shooting three images with flash exposure compensation adjusting itself across the three according to a range you've specified.

So that I think will suffice as the absolute basics of lighting your scene. I'll come back to more advanced topics another time, but apart from using a flash diffuser, I rarely step beyond the bounds of what I've described above.

Have fun.

Decent Exposure Part 2

In an earlier post I discussed the various controls available to you for controlling how your camera exposes the scene before you. However, I didn't talk about how to read or wisely adjust what the camera tells you via its light meter, or what decisions it will be taking behind the scenes.

If you're relatively new to the whole camera thing, you're probably using scene modes or even the full auto 'green' mode present on many cameras. The level of control afforded you in these modes varies, but they all have in common that they will tell you what decisions regarding shutter and aperture they have made, but tend not to allow you to change them. Some allow ISO adjustment, some don't. I would therefore argue that one of the best ways to learn how to take pictures is to find out what the scene modes do, then make those decisions or break those rules as you learn.

I should qualify this with one quick note. The actual decisions taken by the camera are way more complicated in many cases than I'm about to suggest. My description is more of an approximation or ultimate simplification of reality. The camera will usually use a clever metering mode, compare its results against a library of saved 'standard' scenes, and choose what it considers to be the best selection of variables. You (I presume) don't have such a library, so you'll be using rules of thumb mostly instead.

Landscapes
The landscape mode will be attempting to get as much in focus as it can. It will therefore be using the smallest aperture it can get away with whilst maintaining a fast enough shutter speed to give some chance of avoiding camera shake. If auto-ISO is enabled, it may increase the sensitivity to achieve the two aims. Some compact cameras lock the focus distance on infinity in landscape mode, then rely on their relatively high depth of field to make the foreground look acceptable too.

Portrait Mode
In many ways this is the opposite of landscape mode. The camera will select a large aperture (small number) and will usually be focussing pretty close. The aim is to blur the background, thus emphasising the subject. ISO will be kept as low as possible, while maintaining hand-holdable shutter speeds. This is easier in this mode due to the wide aperture in use.

Close-Up (macro) Mode
True 'Macro' photography is defined as producing an image on the sensor which is larger than life-size. This requires specialist gear and is not what the 'close up' mode is designed for. However, the principles are the same. This mode will be expecting you to be focusing as close as you can, often using flash to add light and allow the use of small apertures to maximize the extremely shallow depth of field at close range. Shutter speed is considered to be of secondary importance although at this range, any shake at all will make the picture unusable unless the light is bright enough to allow very fast speeds. The camera will therefore play its usual game of compromise and trade some depth of field for a safer shutter speed for handholding.

Night Portrait
Usually shown as a person's outline against a night sky on the mode dial, this is a mode which allows the use of a relatively advanced feature - slow sync flash - within an easy to use 'beginners' mode. The camera will meter so as to expose the dark scene properly, as if the subject person was not present. With this part out of the way, flash will be added so as to give extra emphasis to the subject, lifting them out of the darkness of the scene as a whole. Due to the potential slow shutter speed needed, this mode may well require the use of a tripod. Think of it as landscape mode (maximising depth of field for distant scenes) combined with a blip of flash. This mode will provide the means for you to get snapshots of family or friends or whomever, in front of darkened scenes such as night cityscapes or fairgrounds. Once you move on to manually controlling your slow sync flash, you'll find it's usually quite customisable for more natural results than the 'stuck on' effect that some auto modes create.

Sport/Action
This one is all about shutter speed. The camera will do its usual compromise calculations to work out how to get the fastest possible shutter speed without making the image unusable. It will do this by opening up the aperture as wide as it can, increasing ISO in some cases etc. It will sometimes also affect the focus mode, changing it from 'one-shot' to 'servo' or 'continuous' autofocus, meaning that there is no longer any concept of locking on - the camera will be expecting you to track the action, shooting as you follow. It will therefore follow as best it can by keeping the AF moving with the subject.

DEP and A-DEP modes (canon only)
if you have a canon SLR then you may well have access to one of these modes, and sadly there's a good chance that it will be A-DEP - the less useful of the two. In this mode the camera attempts to choose an aperture and a focus distance which will render the subjects under the closest and furthest focus points (in the viewfinder) sharp within the depth of field available. DEP mode is much more useful (though still hardly an everyday staple in my experience), allowing you to individually select, using the shutter button, the closest and most distant objects you want to be sharp, then allowing you to recompose before the shot is taken.