A broken baluster might have caught my eye but the very directional warm late evening light actually emphasized it for me.50mm lens @ 7:15 pm May 15, 2013. Why so precise time? Daylight savings time in the spring means longer days. So the time of the year is significant if you are a light stalker.
As photographers we need to embrace what literally catches our eyes’ attention.
Whether it’s a hot-looking girl or guy, a pretty sunset or just a beautiful garden, we all stop and take a good look and stare.
We may hide the staring behind dark glasses when our significant other is around, but we all do it, we can’t help it.
It explains how we interact with everything around us now that we all have cameras in our phones: we reach for it and take a picture.
So why is it some folks take better pictures than others?
Is it because they know the rule of thirds? I think not.
Drawing or painting versus photography
Riverside Municipal Museum–the most familiar view of most buildings are their facades. Here’s what you see from the street. I was there early when there were no cars parked so I could stand anywhere I wanted. Not very obvious what the subject is, isn’t it? Everything appears sharp. No one element is dominant in size, so what is my subject?
Understanding some key differences in photography and drawing or painting is probably a good place to start.
When we draw or paint, we create an image on a totally blank canvas, we get to decide everything.
If drawing from a real life scene, we can decide how much of the background fills our canvas, the perspective, the lighting and more importantly whether we want only the good parts or pretty parts of the scene.
With photography, we are often looking and finding real objects which occupy a real background.
I was there early enough that the morning sun had not light the statue so I could choose the white wall as the background to emphasize the statue’s form. 130 mm lens setting at 8:04 am
The photographers’ world as it exist, without photoshop, is mishmash of beauty mixed in with ugliness like horribly contrasty lighting or else it is a moment in time that defies capture because there is simply insufficient light to freeze the essential beautiful parts.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s choose an inanimate object as our subject.
A traditional viewfinder is always better than a ‘live-view’ as seen on the back of most cameras in my opinion.
Viewfinders allow you to concentrate on the subject completely.
The black opaque frame lets you mentally block out what’s irrelevant.
“Live-view” can be difficult to see when your surrounding is bright and it’s a drain on battery life.
“The photographers’ world as it exist, without photoshop, is mishmash of beauty mixed in with ugliness like horribly contrasty lighting or else it is a moment in time that defies capture because there is simply insufficient light to freeze the essential beautiful parts”–Peter Phun.
Zooming with your legs
The statue as a horizontal shot at 80mm focal length.8:04am. Playing the statue off the shadows instead of just a straight silhouette of the statue.
The next step, recognizing what to keep and what to throw out in the scene takes the most time to learn.
There usually is no short-cut.
Most folks get better at making this decision through practise.
Once they start to recognize what exactly in the scene is most worthy or eye-catching, then it’s a matter of walking closer to exclude extraneous elements or walking further away to include more.
Because today’s DSLRs and compact cameras are often bundled with a kit lens or what’s known as a zoom lens usually in the range of 18-55mm, their owners don’t realize there is another often better way.
Zooming-with-your-legs has the distinct advantage of letting you be more steady.
You can get away with shooting with a lower shutter speed as you walk closer compared to using a longer focal length setting on your lens.
So a worthy exercise, believe it or not, is to shoot abstract, inanimate objects with graphical elements with your phone.
Since the phone has no zoom lens, you will be forced to learn to zoom with your legs.
While walking around, you might want to consider look down on your subject, or up at it and even tilting the camera.
You are looking for graphical elements so you don’t need worry about the horizons.
Also, because the phone doesn’t have any controls to affect depth-of-field beyond what to focus on, you will be forced to really consider what is important in the scene.
Finally if you are obsessive-compulsive like me, you might consider what the scene might look like if you go back in the morning or in the evening.
A more familiar view of the statue but against the palm trees is one that many don’t see because the casual viewer seldom moves in with a wide angle and crops in the viewfinder to eliminate distractions. This picture now hangs on the walls of the Riverside Convention Center. It is one of 4 BW images the city of Riverside bought from me. It was indeed an honor to be one of only 2 photographers whose work is displayed inside the convention center.
