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Digital Photography Composition 101
Darren writes "With the 'Rise of the Digital Camera' I suspect we will also see the 'Rise of the Dodgy Digital Photo'. As digital cameras get in the hands of more and more snap happy photographers there will be more and more average images cluttering the PC's of the world. Already there must be millions of self portraits taken at arms length (complete with double chins), countless pictures of Aunt Mildred (cut off at the knees) and just as many out of focus shots of everyday objects in the living rooms of new digital camera owners too lazy to move from the couch. Its time to learn how to take good digital images before its too late! Digital Photography Composition Tips aims to teach the world a few basic guidelines for improving digital photographer's skills everywhere."
I found that buying a camera with a rotatable LCD screen helps immensely when you try to pictures from impossible angles. Also if you know next to nothing about photography or you just need to take pictures 'at the moment' without setting your camera up (like on a crowded japanese train), I suggest getting the Olympus 5060 which is really brilliant at adapting the settings to fit your picture (and it does it in < 50ms).
Props to the GNAA.
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
More *in focus* voyeur pics. Keep tuned in.
I don't want to see any pics of Aunt Mildred cut off at the knees!
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Then read it again.
It's amazing how much better you can make your shots come out just by knowing what you camera can do to help you out of tough spots!
Chris Knight is my hero.
I have to say though... Sometimes I am not out to get the perfect shot with my digital camera. Therefore, my laziness sets in and I will not take the time to get the right settings on the camera, pick the right place for myself and subjects, and throw out the rule of thirds. However, when trying to make awe-inspriing pictures these are all very important tips to take heed of. However, the disclaimer on all of these tips is there are always an exception and a picture might look better if you don't follow that particular rule.
Hmmm.
These aren't tips specifically for Digital Photography, the basics of photographic composition are the same regardless of whether you are using digital or traditional media and these tips are no different to tips you'd find anywhere else for beginning photographers. How are these tips news?
Most of the books I have found assume you are already a film photographer and only cover the difference between film and digital; the books about film photography are not always entirely relevant to digital photography. The books about digital photography seem to assume you can't even take an autofocused picture with flash without help -- that's about as far as they seem to cover.
I'm looking for something that explains what all the complicated settings on my digital camera (regarding white balance, metering, aperature, and so on) mean and do.
Any suggestions?
I store mine in folders by date, in c:\photos\yyyy\yyyymmdd\DSCNxxxx.jpg, and it works very well for me.
--Mike--
If I could moderate a story I'd mod this as flamebait -1... I mean, who cares if we don't take "perfect" pictures. We couldnt take perfect pictures with film cameras either - or with VHS or 8mm camcorders, but who cares? these pictures of my friends and familty are good enough for me to remember the good times.
Don't Tread on Me
Takes lots of photos. Throw out the ones that aren't very good. This will be the vast majority of them, even for a professional.
Actually, this was my technique with film as well. Digital has saved me a fortune.
These tips are great, but i think that everyone would see a big improvement in their picture quality if they followed the #1 of photography - fill the frame.
9 times out of 10, when you're shooting someone or something, you need to prioritize what the focus of the photo is supposed to be, and fill the frame with it. The rest of the composition usually falls into place.
It's the simplest way to get better composition without a lot of extra thinking. Either use your feet, or use your zoom and get closer to your subject.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
David Bailey, a famous British photographer, once said (something like) "The quickest way to double your skill as a photograph is to throw away half your photographs".
It is absolutely true - most professional photographers take hundreds of photographs a day, only one or two of which are likely to be actually seen. This used to be one big advantage professionals had over amateurs - amateurs couldn't afford all that film and developing. With digital cameras, now you can take as many photos as you like.
Personally I just follow three simple rules:
1) Is the light nice? This is fundamental - if you've got nice evening or morning sunlight, your change of a good photo increases enormously. If it's a cloudy grey day, put the camera away.
2) Get closer. Just a step closer would improve so many amateur photos.
3) Take lots of photos. Even if you are taking the same subject again and again, one will of them be better than the others - especially if you are photographing people. Even more so if they are children.
To summarise:
1) Good light?
2) Get closer!
3) Take more!
I'm not a professional nor even a good amateur photographer. However, using some common sense I've found that I can consistently come up with some excellent shots that are comparable to my hard core photography-obsessed friends.
#1. Its digital. Take a ton of shots. Take shots you don't think will turn out; take lots of the obvious shots. Shoot your camera with reckless abandon. It costs you ~nothing~. This technique was validated by a professional photographer friend later on...he claimed that at professional shoots you sometimes have a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 of good vs bad shots, even with an optimum setup and years of experience on his side.
#2. Know the limitations of your camera. If you don't have an big zoom lense, don't expect long distance shots to turn out. Digital zoom is pretty useless. Most digital cameras have a good short-to-middle distance focal length. Anything beyond that and you're pushing beyond your camera's limits.
#3. Next best investment you can make to getting a good camera = tripod. Extend the exposures to get more clear pictures in low-light conditions, or dark coloured subject matter. Lots of shots I took at the time looked good in the LCD screen, but later turned out to be slightly blurred.
#4. Avoid use of the flash. Its a 'brute force' attempt to get good lighting. Work with your ISO setting and exposure levels first. (remember your tripod!). If you don't know about ISOs or exposure, who cares, just take the same pic 3-4 times with different levels...you learn.
5. Be brutal about your pics. Take 200, delete 190. Don't be the guy with the unending home movies... only keep and show the best of your best pics. You'll also get a good rep for taking good photos this way.
6. Learn the basic filters in Photoshop and touch up your digital pics if necessary. I prefer Photoshop sepia and B&W to the filters that come with the camera.
For hard core photographers this may all seem obvious, but for us beginners I found these 5 or 6 tips are what really made the difference for my pics. And they're easy to execute.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
With the 'Rise of Oil and Canvas' I suspect we will also see the 'Rise of the Dodgy Oil Painting'. As oils, brushes, and canvas get in the hands of more and more amateur painters there will be more and more average paintings cluttering the walls of the world. Already there must be millions of self portraits (complete with double chins), countless pictures of Aunt Mildred (cut off at the knees) and just as many poorly drawn renderings of everyday objects in the living rooms of new painters too lazy to move from the couch. Its time to learn how to make good art before its too late! Drawing and Painting Composition Tips aims to teach the world a few basic guidelines for improving painter's skills everywhere.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Ages ago I trained and worked (in the days of hot type, then offset lithography) as a graphic artist and typographer.
We joked, when Desktop Publishing took off, that all it did was enable folks to make bad designs quicker.
Likewise Digital Cameras and production systems allow one to make bad photographs faster than one could make them before.
The truth of the matter is that the medium isn't to blame. The ease of production equates to more crap. But it doesn't stop good stuff being produced; indeed the sheer volume of production should (one hopes) increase the number of good photographs over time. If one can be bothered to filter through all the crap to find them!
A deeper truth, to some, might be that the quality of most design has diminished because now "untrained" people are producing stuff the good and better design & images might simply not be produced now. As in - there won't be any Ansel Adams quality in our future.
I'm inclined to think that's bullshit, though. Mass markets and accessible consumer products don't mean that the few fine art types won't produce wonders any more. Indeed the accessibility of the consumer products might even encourage a few more to take up fine art photography. Just as we've found that Desktop Publishing has raised the game overall ie there has always been crap out there, but the general level of the crap represents a HUGE improvement over what low-end jobbing printers produced before.
The article leaves the "Hold the camera still" to near the bottom of the list. If you practice holding the camera still, braced against your face, a wall, frame or nearly anything, chances that your picture will have much better focus and that you will have at least a chance of a good picture. If you move the camera, it doesn't matter which brand you choose or how well you compose the picture. If you really have a problem with that, then consider a camera with automatic movement correction. (I have not tried them yet, but H Keppler gave it good marks.)(Pop-Photo)
It takes longer than pure digital, it's more complicated, it requires detailed technical knowledge, there is exotic machinery that must be mastered, every tip in this article still works, and you end up with amazing digital images with the warmth and tone of film, much to the amazement and envy of professional photographers everywhere. What's not to like?
Slow burst speed is not a problem with the firmware or the lens/focus hardware, it is a simple I/O problem. Do the math here. If your digital camera could take 5 fast shots of 4 megapixels each, where would it put the data? It can't get it through that slow CF or SD interface that fast, so it has to buffer it somewhere. What the expensive cameras have that the cheap ones lack is RAM for the buffer so that it can store the shots while waiting to push them off to the storage device.
My 3 megapixel camera takes pictures that look great printed at 8X10". Ramp up to a 5 MP camera, and you can afford to crop, rotate, and reposition the subject of the picture in an image editor. In my opinion, more megapixels mean that you can take pictures for maximum flexibility rather than focusing on taking the perfect picture.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
that one of the big improvements to come with digital was the ability to shoot countless images and just keep the good ones without the cost/delay/inconvenience of developing traditional film. Back then it mattered that each photo was good because you couldn't review the photo before several days had passed, and it was important that each shot was good. Now, I tend to just take maybe 20 or 30 shots in rapid succession and rely on one or more to be good - a quick review will tell me if it's ALL bad, and in 30 seconds the memory is erased, and I can start snapping pictures again, this time moving to avoid the backlight or whatever spoiled the first batch.
Not really arguing against learning to take better pictures - selfimprovement through learning is always GOOD (and geekish, mind you). It just doesn't seem as necessary as it once was.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
The article is a very good summary of composition rules BUT the main reason most people's snaps are not well composed is quite simple - they don't look at the scene as a whole before they click the shutter button.
90% of people are only looking at the main subject of their photo. This is why most people put the main subject in the middle of the scene - why almost always results in bad composition.
This is where having either a SLR camera where you see the whole scene in the view-finder, or a preview screen on a digital camera is essential.
Another essential feature is exposure and focus-lock that allows you to focus and take exposure readings off non-centered objects.
..since the basic principles are the same whether you're using digital or film (i'm suprised people don't realize this more often - there's all sorts of articles about how to become a "better DIGITAL photographer", as if one can be a master with a 35MM SLR but pick up a digi and instantly forget everything...sorry, going off on a tangent there).
lord knows my digital shots got a lot better after i took black once you've been formally schooled in composition, even just for a semester, it all just sort of subconsciously falls together in the viewfinder (or on the LCD as the case may be) and you get a lot more passable pictures.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
One low light trick I use in low light conditions (I don't like flash in crowds and because it flattens the image): Set the 2-second timer. A lot of camera shaking comes from the act of pressing the shutter. That shaking is gone after 2-seconds. Doesn't work for action shots, but your shutter is open too long for decent action shots anyway. Bonus tip for arms-length self portraits. My Canon ELPH has a little silver logo-button on the front. When I see my reflection in the logo, I can compose the shot. Fun for vacations.