Photography Tips

Photography Tip - fill the frame corner to corner - Florida Pelican Fine Art Photography

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Fill the frame corner to corner to make an impact with composition - brown pelican St. Petersburg Florida Fine Art Photography - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 200 1/250th

At any given moment, you can find a brown pelican to photograph in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida.  Chances are you already have numerous pelican photos in your archives.  This can be said for any number of common subject matters.  So how to make such a common subject stand out?  One way is to use a more creative composition, like having the subject fill the frame corner to corner.  Use the shape of the subject to fill the frame in the most complementary way.  For the pelican, with it's long narrow head, going diagonal corner to corner allows for filling the frame with the subject.  Also, going through the edges of the frame creates a very different impression than fitting everything inside (with any subject it also helps to have a good, clean, complementary background; in the above photo the dark water of Tampa Bay combined with the large aperture I chose creates a smooth, gray bokeh).

When you go out shooting next time look for a subject that you can frame corner to corner.  

Photography Tip - Invert colors to make photos look psychedelic

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I often hit Invert in Photoshop by accident because the command for resizing is close to it and as I often work very quickly in Photoshop, sometimes a very crazy looking image flashes on my screen.  However, this also means happy accidents happen too.  

I was editing this ordinary pool photo from a real estate shoot and as I was finishing it and preparing it for web size, I went to hith CMD-SHIFT-I but missed the SHIFT part and instead only hit CMD-I resulting in the below inverted color version.

Looks much cooler, right?  So if you are needing something to spice up a photo, try hitting CMD-I in Photoshop next time and you may be pleasantly surprised!

Photography Tip - when to leave space above subject in a portrait and when not to in composition

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During my 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons students often practice portraits, which means I often have to be the subject.  I alway let the student use their instict first for composing a portrait, rather than giving them composition tips first, so I can see their natural eye for composing.  A vast majority of the time this results in a portrait of me looking tiny and kind of in the photo by accident.  By that I mean I am usually dead centered (an issue for a future photography tip) and very low in the frame with lots of space above my head.  This results because I was composed to be dead center horizontally and vertically and most of the time was cut off at the waist.  I doctored the above photo to show excess space above the heads of the subjects that is just doing nothing.  It adds nothing to the photograph and in fact just makes the subject look smaller in the frame for no reason.

This is how the photograph looked as I shot it in the field, with minimal space above the heads of the subject allowing the subjects to fill the frame vertically and look like normal adult sized people and definitely in the photo on purpose.  

The rule here is:

--when photographing people from the waist up do not leave space above their heads

If you photograph someone from the waist up and leave a bunch of space above their head, then it looks like you might not have intended for them to be in the shot in the first place.  At the least, the person looks lost in the frame and tiny, which is not very flattering!

In contrast, when framing the shot to include the subject from head to toe, especially in portrait orientation, leaving space above the subject's head can add perspective to the shot.  The space above the head is then not just empty useless space.  Since you are showing the entire body of the subject, it puts the subject into a proper, normal looking perspective to the viewer.

Even in landscape orientation, if you show the subject from head to toe, leaving lots of space above the subject's head will help to show the scale of the environment the subject is being photographed.  In the example above, showing the wide open beach and water surrounding the children (shown head to toe) does show them properly as they are, small kids.  

The next time you make portraits, be mindful of the space above the subject's head.

Photography Tip - watch out for horizon intruders

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When the horizon is contained in the composition of your photograph, a lot of attention has to be paid to it.  The first thing is to make sure it is straight.  Then where it is positioned in the vertical part of the frame is another thing to be mindful of (read about that photo tip here).  Add to your horizon checklist the search for intruders at the edges of the frame.  In the above photograph, only part of the condos on the left are shown.  This makes them intruders to me.  Either have the condos completely in the frame, or not at all.  Now, on the right of the horizon are some trees.  These are part of the natural landscape and I do not view them as intruders.  The trees do not breakup the natural flow of the horizon when looking at the photograph, but the condos at the edge do.  Buildings are what you need to look out most for at the edges of the horizon.  Overall, always pay close attention to the horizon when composing a photograph for the best results.

Photography Tip - Change all your DSLR settings in under 10 seconds

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Photograph opportunities often are not available for an infinite amount of time.  In fact, most are very, very finite and there are many times you have just one shot at making a photograph.  How can you insure you will always give yourself the best chance at making a great photograph even if you have just one shot at it?  By being able to change the settings on your DSLR very quickly.  

How quick?  

It depends on your particular DSLR and what dedicated buttons you have available.  No matter what DSLR you have, even if you have an entry level one, you should be able to change all five necessary settings for making a well exposed and sharp shot in ten seconds or less.  If you have a fully functional DSLR, i.e. two dials for changing settings, a top LCD display and dedicated buttons for all five things, then your goal should be five seconds or less.  Very rarely are all five things needed to be changed, but you should practice changing all five at home so that when you are out shooting you will be prepared.

Of course you have to know within fractions of seconds what to change your aperture to, or your shutter speed to, etc.  That knowledge combined with knowing your DSLR camera body with your eyes closed (seriously, if you have dedicated buttons you should be able to operate them eyes closed) results in giving yourself the best chance every time a sudden photograph opportunity comes up.

I offer 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons that can help you learn both how to use your camera quickly and what to change the necessary settings to.  Reserve a lesson today!

Photography Tip - Use a light stand for off camera flash strobist photography

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I am a big believer in having the right tools for the right job.  Often one can get by using another tool, but there is nothing like having the exact one you need to just make things much easier on yourself.  Such is the case with light stands.  You could use a tripod to hold a speedlight as you might already have one of those, but using a light stand is just much better.  

A tripod has a much larger footprint than a light stand.  Most light stands can be extended to nine feet or higher, much higher than a tripod reaches.  A light stand is faster and easier to setup.  Light stands are also cheap, starting around $50 for a decent one.  The biggest reason of course is that you can put a umbrella holder head on a light stand so you can use light modifiers.  

One extra light stand tip, if you do buy one, make sure to check if it comes with a head unit.  Most do not come with this necessary attachment.  This is a true story . . . the first light stand I ever bought I had no idea about needing a head unit.  I had no umbrella or softbox, I was just going to use a speedlight with diffuser cap (as seen in the above example).  The top of a light stand does have a standard screw that allowed me to attach the speedlight's foot to.  However, there was no ability to tilt the light down!  I had to have someone tilt over the entire light stand for the speedlight to be pointed at the subject.  I went out and got a light stand head (umbrella holder it may also be called) shortly there after.

When photographing families on the beach, I always use two speedlights.  It allows for even light across everyone in group shots of four or more.

Resize photographs to exact sizes with Photoshop for best online presentation on Facebook & Linkedin

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What is the final step in editing digital photos that you will display online?  Resizing.  This is a very simple thing to do, but very important for presenting your photographs online in the best possible quality.  Just uploading full resolution images is very rarely the way to go for a number of reasons.  One is that it takes up a lot of space and many websites do not allow large file uploads.  Secondly, who knows what kind of recompression and resizing websites use in presenting your images.  This is why every single image you see of mine online has been exactly resized in Photoshop to the best possible size for the location it is displayed on.  

In the above screenshot you can see the Photoshop Image Size dialogue box.  The Mac keyboard shortcut to get to it is: OPTION-CMD-I or you can go into the menus:  Image --> Image Size.  I use pixel count to resize my images.  Every image in the blog section of my website (you are looking at it now) is resized to 600px on the width maximum because that is what fits within the body portion of the blog page.  Photoshop will keep the height in proportion automaticaly when I type in 600px for the width, see it chose 399px for the height in the above example.

There is no loss in image quality when resizing in Photoshop, which is why I use it for all my images.  If I just let Squarespace (my content management system) resize a much larger image for me, that will eat up my alloted storage space much quicker and worse, may not display my photographs in maximum quality.  There could be pixelating resulting from poor resizing.

In the headshot example above, each one is 250px on the width.  The image on the left shows what can happen if a smaller image is stretched to a larger size.  A lot of detail in the image is lost.  The headshot on the right was resized from the original photograph to exactly 250px and looks like the full resolution image in detail and quality.  The same poor image quality can result if you upload a huge image then compact it into a much smaller space.  This has happened with past headshot clients actually.  Most website profile photos are only about 200px on the width, which is the case for popular networking site Linkedin.  So when the client uploads their full resolution headshot (2000px or larger) and Linkedin tries to squeeze that into just 200px worth of space, the image will look horrible.  In the case the client did not have resizing skills, I sent them a 200px version of their headshot.  

Facebook is a photograph displaying disaster.  They remain the only site that degrades image quality that I know of.  It is preposterous that they do it when no other photo intensive site does.  Still, it is an important place for me to show my work so I do upload my photos to it.  Even though I resize my images in Photoshop to Facebook's exact required dimensions, their resampling engines go to work on my images reducing their image quality.  

Since adding the feature to display a cover image to a Facebook profile, I have seen an increase in strangely sized and proportioned images on Facebook.  The exact dimension required is 851x315.  Nice even numbers you can remember easily right?

So how can you resize your photo to fit a Facebook Cover image space and minimize the image quality reduction Facebook will apply to the image anyway?  Load the image in Photoshop, choose the Crop Tool, and enter in the pixel dimensions of 851x315.  Select the area of the photograph.  Since 851x315 is a strange proportion, you will almost never be able to fit your whole photo in that area.  Once you crop the image to the right ratio, you still have to resize it.  Then go into Image Size as described above and type in 851 for the width.  Now you can upload a photo that will fit perfectly into the Facebook cover image spot, but you will notice the quality reduction applied despite this.