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What makes a great picture?
- Thread starter jwolf6589
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Good call...
Some of my prime lenses have a minimum focal distance of 70cm. On paper this isn't too far but in reality I might aswell be metres away.
Is that because you can more easily predict the trajectory of a frog in flight once thrown? 😂 Fantastic Nat Geo worthy image
Taking a picture of a jumping spider with the Hubble telescope would be too close for comfort for me never mind a macro shot from an unsafe distance! cringing here just thinking about it
Thank you. It was easy with the right professional set up and advice on hand.
I don’t think this is very constructive. I don’t see any need to be rude to the OP. Getting better at something, regardless of what level you are already at, requires passion and I encourage the OP to post their pictures, ask for advice when wanted and enjoy the hobby of photography and not get discouraged by negative remarks. That is to say, constructive criticism should not be bundled together with negative remarks - Listen to and absorbs constructive criticism, but let’s all be encouraging about it. The comment I wrote you were quoting here was not intended as a jab at the OB - On the contrary, it’s well meaning and while the OP’s original photo wasn’t “the perfect photo”, it also wasn’t the worst photo ever. Advice has been given for improvements and that’s to my mind the value of this thread. And we can all, no matter our existing level, learn from each other and take on board the ideas and mindsets proposed by others, experiment with and conditionally apply what we, in each moment, agree with. Whether someone chooses to be open about it or not, as far as I see it, isn’t worth petty arguments, only encouragement to take things to heart
Remarkable reframing, Molly. Completely changed the feeling of the photo. A lot more breathing room and a sense of open curiosity rather than the more trapped sense of the tighter framing. I think I would personally push the frog just a tad up and to the left still, - I haven’t checked but I feel like you’ve put the top of the frog’s eye in the lower right third, where I’d have pushed it up just a tad so it’d be the bottom right corner of its eye there. That said I haven’t actually tried it out so upon seeing it I might prefer your version anyway, haha. Regardless, really good illustration of the difference it can make - And really seamless “Photoshop magic”. If I didn’t know the source and you hadn’t said anything I wouldn’t have noticed that the composition had been moved around to fit the new framing. Did you actually just move the existing background manually or is there a Photoshop tool at work here? If the latter, do you know if there’s an analogue for Affinity?
Had never really pondered the etymology of the word photograph before but that makes a lot of sense. That’s pretty awesome
Before I wound up a programmer and computer science student I tried getting into film school. There it was always said “The gear does not define you as a filmmaker. The ideas you can execute well do. The gear defines the scope of the ideas you can execute”
No one is inherently being rude to the OP, but he has a history of asking questions then arguing when he doesn't like the answer. Some of us go into self defense mode. But as I said earlier, I do think this is a great topic and discussion line, which is why I opted to go full blown, but also using my own image so that it didn't seem like I was piling on. I used his frog photo since he'd mentioned it in his first post. My comments are really for the "others" in this thread, although I honestly would like nothing more than for the OP to realize the talent that is in the MR photo forum and take our advice with more than a grain of salt. Ninety per cent of the time gear doesn't matter, and most likely his photo really could have been improved during the shot if he'd framed it differently before hitting the shutter button.
For the base image I used the crop tool in Photoshop with Content Aware checked on to fill in all the newly added space. It mostly just filled in all the murky brown color of the water. Then I copied the lily pad from the top right corner, flipped it and added it to the bottom left, and then did the same for the top corner but used the lily pad twice to make a half lily pad. And did a bit of stretching of them to minimize the copy/paste effect. Then I used the clone tool to add back in some of the seaweed stuff and to make it look like there was a longer stick. It's fairly obvious that it was largely done in PS, but this was just an example. I don't know if there is something similar in Affinity photo, but use "content aware" as your search term.
Here are the crop lines. Where I initially wanted to put the frog had his head/eyeballs dead center, so I pushed him down more, but any more than this then it loses its hind legs. I lost a lot of pixels from the original image by moving him so far to the right, but it helped that it made my added lily pads look not quite so obvious.
The alternative to this would have been to just copy and flip the frog in the original frame. That would have largely solved the composition issue also, but in this particular image the lighting is too strong that I don't think that would have worked well. With flatter lighting it does work, and I have used that technique at times in my own images, but right now I can't think of an example. If I do, I'll post it here too. Visual lines are an important part of the narrative of images and how a viewer's eye travels around the frame. The three lily pads in the "new" image act as a triangle to keep your eye in the frame and get back to the frog.
A lot of people go on and on about being a purist and sticking to whatever comes out of the camera as a jpeg, and there is a time value to that method, but certainly not an artistic value. No one ever batted an eye when photographers back in the day spent hours in a darkroom working on an individual photo. Or maybe they did and we just didn't have the internet to harp about it. But Lightroom/Photoshop/Affinity are the equivalent to the darkroom, so no one should feel bad for using them.
My SOOCs and finished images usually don't look a lot different, but the three minutes I spend on my specific workflow make a big difference in the end product and help to look my images look cohesive. Even you commented that my IG flow has a style that you don't notice when you see them doled out individually.
Is everyone looking for a cohesive style? No, of course not, and I don't think it inherently matters. But I would say that in general, any artist in any genre is really looking to create his or her own style and show that through voice. Editing choices, like fashion, come and go, and likely the images I take in five years will deviate in terms of editing from what I do now, even if I use the same gear setup.
But editing, like fashion, does help to definite our work. I have a very feminine look to my images, and even when I am shooting normal landscape types of images, if you and I stood next to each other with the exact same gear looking at the exact same scene, I can almost guarantee you that my images would still be more feminine than yours, probably both in composition and with editing. This doesn't make me right and you wrong or vice versa, but rather speaks to our internal artistic voice and what we want a viewer to take away from our images. But editing is kind of like the icing on the cake....it's what finishes off an image. The cake is still there, but the icing makes it look pretty (or if I am icing the cake, the icing shows up off the lopsided structure), or grungy, or whatever the photographer's vision is.
I am all for using the tools we have available to us to make our images feel like ourselves. I've been shooting since 2008 and for many years I thought I was a "child/family" photographer because, well, I am a mom and I was the one with the camera at birthday parties. My images were (generally) technically okay, not great, not horrible. I cherish the memories, but in terms of photographic voice/cohesion/etc they are fairly mediocre. When I realized I much preferred sneaking outside for some macro when the kids were napping or at school my work suddenly got deeper. I may only shoot a few petal of a flower at a time now, but there is more of me in my images now than when my kids were small.
No one should ever be afraid to use PS or other editing tools available to hone their voice and style.
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Some of us just struggle with PS. Tbh I spend too many hours sat at a pair of computer screens. It’s why I try to actively avoid that sort of editing where I can. That said, the more you do it the quicker more proficient you become.
For me photography is a reason to get out with the camera and enjoy the outdoors. But mostly these days I’m not getting as much camera time as I’d like.
As others have said the blown highlights are quite distracting. Applied a rather quick fix in Affinity Photo, got 2 of them about right. Were it my image I would spend more time on the third one, probably using a copy and paste or clone approach rather than just a quick 25% fill. Of course refusing to use PhotoShop-like apps does tie the OPs hands behind his back.
And with a slight density and contrast shift, requiring all of 15 seconds in good old Preview. Personally I like the added drama but to each his own.
And with a slight density and contrast shift, requiring all of 15 seconds in good old Preview. Personally I like the added drama but to each his own.
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"The only reason to crop is when you made a mistake or find something after the fact that you didn't like. The goal is to frame the shot properly when taking the picture."
I strongly disagree.
I'll provide an example.
I needed a pic of a new model train engine to go into a control app on the tablet I use to run the railroad. The pic size (on the tablet) will be small, so to be able to recognize the engine it has to pretty much "fill the frame".
Here's the un-cropped pic of the engine:
(taken with a Canon 77d, 18-135 lens zoomed in, actually this is a composite of about 6 shots merged together with Helicon Focus to keep everything relatively sharp)
If I put that into the app, it's going to almost-impossible to see.
So, I cropped and touched it up a bit:
Now, it "fits in" much better.
I crop about 99% of the pics I take, to suit my taste.
To state that a pic must "remain framed" as shot, is like saying that one can type up a paragraph (such as this post), but should not edit it in any way.
Why not claim that it's not proper technique to adjust colors, exposure, sharpness, etc.?
After all, "the goal is to expose the shot properly when taking the picture"...
I strongly disagree.
I'll provide an example.
I needed a pic of a new model train engine to go into a control app on the tablet I use to run the railroad. The pic size (on the tablet) will be small, so to be able to recognize the engine it has to pretty much "fill the frame".
Here's the un-cropped pic of the engine:
(taken with a Canon 77d, 18-135 lens zoomed in, actually this is a composite of about 6 shots merged together with Helicon Focus to keep everything relatively sharp)
If I put that into the app, it's going to almost-impossible to see.
So, I cropped and touched it up a bit:
Now, it "fits in" much better.
I crop about 99% of the pics I take, to suit my taste.
To state that a pic must "remain framed" as shot, is like saying that one can type up a paragraph (such as this post), but should not edit it in any way.
Why not claim that it's not proper technique to adjust colors, exposure, sharpness, etc.?
After all, "the goal is to expose the shot properly when taking the picture"...
It's always better to underexpose a shot when taking the picture, as you can recover the highlights. But you cannot recover the shadows.
Yes, I have cropped photos, but that was because I didn't like the original framing of the shot. I also lose resolution when I crop so I'd rather not do it.
Unless I am using a 64 or higher mp camera.
The goal may be to frame properly, but not all images are best displayed at 4:3, 3:2 or square format. Nor does that allow for any fix of a skewed horizon line other going back and reshooting. Not to mention that there is often an image within an image noticed at the time of editing but not at the time the image was shot.
Anyone who has shot images for a newspaper learned early on that you shoot a bit wide and let them crop as required later on.
Anyone who has shot images for a newspaper learned early on that you shoot a bit wide and let them crop as required later on.
Hey thanks a lot for this.
Funny with the crop-lines overlaid on the photo - I guess the reason I thought the top of the eye was at the thirds intersection was just how eye-catching the eyes are.
I appreciate the write-ups
I think that's backwards, You can recover the shadows but if the highlights are blocked they are gone.
That said I too tend to underexpose most shots by at least 1/3rd of a stop, but my little WP camera does not shoot RAW.
Most modern CMOS sensors in RAW mode can pull back 1-2 stops of highlights. Older sensors, especially CMOS, essentially had no highlight recovery and were like transparency film. The difference, though, was that the old CMOS sensors didn't always have all their color channels blow at the same time, so you'd get ugly fringing around a clipped highlight.
Still, though, shadow recovery, again especially in RAW, has always been at least there to some degree in sensors. A lot of modern sensors are unreal in the amount of highlight recover.
In fact, some modern sensors-especially the Sony-sourced full frame sensors found of course in Sony MILCs and also a lot of high end Nikons-display what is sometimes called "ISO-less" behavior. Basically, to way over-simplify it, underexposing by a whole lot and then increasing the exposure in post can give results more or less indistinguishable from raising the ISO in camera. It's unreal, and some photographers shoot these cameras at base ISO all the time with drastic under exposure such that the resulting image has nearly no visible detail SOOC.
Ansel Adams Zone System: Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights. For Black & White only.
In our photo science classes, it was called the "d log e" curve.
I don't know how modern digital cameras and software applications can do the same.
In our photo science classes, it was called the "d log e" curve.
I don't know how modern digital cameras and software applications can do the same.
Even the photographer explaining how he "creeps" on the Brazilian wandering spiders scares me. I am not afraid of most spiders and tarantulas, but terrible afraid of venomous spiders such as this one.
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Of course negs are the reverse of transparencies. If there is no detail in the shadows of a neg, the detail cannot be recovered. By using developers such as 2 step D-23, Adams could keep the highlights from blocking while maintaining full shadow detail and good mid-range contrast, even in the high contrast lighting that he preferred.
When photographing lights such as the Auroras, some of the light rays may be brighter than the rest. I usually underexpose slightly to avoid blowing the highlights.
I think I must have one leg longer than the other too! I use the electronic level in my viewfinder a lot
That's certainly the case for digital photography. I believe it was the other way round for film.
It depends on the film type.I think I must have one leg longer than the other too! I use the electronic level in my viewfinder a lot
That's certainly the case for digital photography. I believe it was the other way round for film.
Overexposure builds density in color negative film and at least up until you reach the Dmax of the film you can continue extracting detail. The shadows correspond to lower density on the negative and it's quite literally impossible to resolve detail if density goes to base+fog(Dmin) as there's no detail there.
Some of the best color negative films like Porta 160 can have 10-12 stops of dynamic range between Dmin and Dmax. Even 10 years ago, that was better than a lot of digital cameras.
Reversal film(AKA Slide Film) is the opposite. Highlights are base+fog(Dmin) and shadows go toward Dmax. You CAN extract detail out of the shadows to some extent, although it tends to need a really good scanner(sometimes you need to do multipass scanning, which presents its own problems) and the overall dynamic range is typically in the 4-6 stop range depending on the film.
One key difference with film, though, is that the falloff at extremes of exposure tends to be gentle whereas digital, especially older cameras, would chop the highlights rather sharply. That could be really ugly when the channels clipped at slightly different levels and you'd get color fringing. I think the worst camera for that I've used was the Nikon D2H, which used a Nikon-developed sensor called LBCAST that was awful and was only used in that camera. The CCDs used in other early Nikons could have that trouble also. I've been meaning to start a thread here on using early digital cameras, as in a perverse sort of way I enjoy using my D1 series cameras and seeing how far we've come.
