Photography Basics Archives - Page 10 of 16

Decoding Histograms For Better Photography

histogram picture — The histogram clearly shows the dark elements dominate this photo - Use a fill flash if you're shooting for optimum exposure

I do a lot of what’s sometimes mockingly referred to as “chimping”, looking down at my camera’s LCD screen after taking a shot. Sometimes I’m looking at the picture, more often I’m looking at the histogram.

The histogram is one of the most powerful yet frequently under-used features of high end cameras. Study them long enough at it gets to be like Neo in The Matrix: You can look at the histogram and know whether the photo is good and have a rough idea what it will look like.

At a basic level the luminosity histogram shows the distribution of luminosity values from darkest to lightest. The vertical spikes in the graph show the distribution of brightness levels in that particular scene.

In the example photos I deliberately selected images that were tricky exposures. A fair subject on a white background, brightly lit background with a foreground subject in shadows, and a balanced exposure in daylight so you can compare the histograms.

histogram light — A fair subject on a white background shifts the luminosity histogram the other way

In my Canon 7D, the histogram is showing a 5 stop dynamic range (different than the displays in the photos). That’s a pretty healthy dynamic range compared to the old days, and yet many photos demand more. To fit a photo into your camera’s dynamic range, you have a few options:

– Use the fill flash on the foreground, essentially moving the darks into your camera’s midtone dynamic range.

– Use HDR techniques to expose for different parts of the photo and merge them digitally.

– Use a Neutral Density filter to crush the highlights and shift the exposure toward dark and middle tones.

– Wait for better light.

histogram balanced — This histogram shows a wide dynamic range but fairly well balanced - If the subject wasn't moving, this would be a candidate for HDR processing

Now you might understand a little better why DSLR video shooters always carry a set of Neutral Density filters around. They’re limited to 1/50 of a second shutter speed, which narrows their options for shifting the dynamic range.

Luminosity is only one component of your histogram. In the future we’ll look at even more ways to hack your histograms for better photography.

Tips For Better Holiday Pictures This Year

the golden spiral — The Golden Spiral is just one visualization trick you can use to take better family photos this year

I wanted to revisit two separate articles on the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio and try to merge them into a way of viewing a scene and seeing the photograph within before everyone heads home for the holidays and starts swamping image services with the same family photos with the same really bad composition and lighting we see every year.

Just to review, the Rule of Thirds is a composition guideline that goes back almost as far as recorded time that suggests instead of putting a subject dead center in a photograph, shift the subject roughly a third of the way toward the edge of the frame. The way to visualize that is to picture a screen of nine equal size blocks overlaid on your view screen. The object is to put the subject at the interior intersection of any four of those blocks.

You can apply the same technique to your family photos. Instead of focusing just on the subject, try to focus on what they’re doing. If a family member is in the kitchen cooking, try to pan the camera over far enough to capture what they’re making. By focusing on the task instead of the subject, you’ll actually be moving the subject closer to the edges of the photograph. The same if they’re working in the garage or unwrapping presents. By framing the activity to the center, you’ll naturally be moving the subject toward the thirds.

That rule also provides guidance for distance. Adjust your distance so you can still see the person performing the activity, with what they’re working on center frame. If there’s distance between the subject and edge of the frame, you’re probably too far away. Move in or zoom in, if you can’t take a step forward.

Breaking Up The Police Lineup

Invariably everyone rushes into a line against the wall while someone snaps a few pictures with that dreadful straight-on flash. This year, escape from the police line up by borrowing a trick from the Golden Ratio.

To help visualize the golden ratio, imagine a widening swirl that starts in the upper right third of your camera frame that then curves toward the bottom of the frame, then starts up the other side, ending at the upper left corner.

Let’s say there were three couples in the police line. Break that up by having one couple stand to the back and off to one side. Have the second couple sit or kneel closer to the center of the frame and a little forward, and the third couple sit on a couch or stool off to the left at a medium distance. Now picture the swirl. It should start around head height of the standing couple on the right, sweep down to the couple on the floor, then sweep back up to the couple at medium height on the couch or chairs.

Now you’ve broken up the dreaded police line and created interesting composition by aligning your logically grouped subjects along the golden spiral. The result will be much better family photos!

Some of these concepts seem abstract until you can translate them to something that’s real to you. Experiment a little and look back years later with pride at the pictures you took.

Hack Your Camera’s Presets

The Canon Neutral picture style menu - by Canon

One of the more amazingly powerful and least understood features of modern DSLRs are the camera image style presets. I’m speaking specifically about image presets, also called picture styles, not preset shooting modes like aperture priority or shutter priority.

This topic can get a little confusing because of the sometimes fluid nature of photography terms and because some manufactures implement presets that change both the shooting modes and picture style under one setting heading and they all use different terms to describe the same basic processes. That’s why owner’s manuals are your friend. I’ve never been to a professional photography studio where a dog-eared camera manual wasn’t either on the desk or a convenient shelf.

Today I’m focused specifically on image presets. In the Canon line they have names like Standard, Portrait, Faithful, and Landscape. Nikon implements them slightly differently with names like Standard, Vivid and Neutral.

This is another one of those topics where DSLR video and still photography collide and maybe the video guys have a little bit of a lead. In the old days you’d make this selection by choosing a different film type based on the shooting you were doing that day. Today it’s the Picture Styles menu in Canon and Manage Picture Control in Nikon.

If you’re not using styles, you’re missing out on a huge amount of functionality. In Canon you can switch between Standard and Landscape when shooting outdoors which produces more vivid colors in the green and blue range. Switch to the Portrait style when shooting people and your camera shifts the color and saturation settings to those more favorable to skin tones.

You can also create your own custom picture styles by selecting a unique combination of sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone and then save them in one of your custom preset menu options.

You can also modify the camera preset by tweaking the settings in the menu options. I don’t really recommend doing that until you have a lot of experience. Better to copy the settings into a custom preset and play around with them there.

The best place to learn the particulars of your camera’s picture styles is the owner’s manual. Read it, understand it, and do some experiments in controlled shooting situations that help you understand what’s happening when you change the image style settings.

Understanding picture styles and presets can make a huge difference in the quality of your photographs. It’s not fun, it’s not sexy, but it’s imperative to becoming a better shooter.

Studio Lighting Series – Lighting Styles

This is another installment of a long series of articles shot and composed with the help of professional photographer Karl Leopold at ImagesForever.net in Melbourne Beach, Florida. Karl is one of the top photographers in the area and president of the Atlantic Professional Photographers Association and graciously opened his studio up to us for this series.

Alongside basic three point lighting and understanding light ratios in studio lighting, it’s also good to have a basic understanding of lighting styles. This subject can be a bit confusing as there are sometimes more than one term that applies to a particular style and the application of the terms are not always consistent. That’s understandable as photography is as much art as science the terminology is a little fluid. That’s really okay, it’s not worth fighting over.

There are a couple terms that it’s good to know. Lighting of the side of the face facing the camera is called the “broad” side. The part of the face not showing as much turned away from the camera, is called the “narrow” side.

The most common type of lighting, particularly for women, is called Rembrandt Lighting, named after the old painting master. Its signature quality is a triangle of light on the narrow side of the face. The effect is achieved by placing the key to the broad side of the subject and slightly elevated, the basic setup for our three point lighting demonstration.

Another common lighting technique for women is called Butterfly Lighting, sometimes also called Paramount Lighting, though it should be noted that a few consider those to be separate lighting styles.

Butterfly Lighting is achieved by moving the key closer to the camera and elevating the height, thereby producing a slightly butterfly shaped shadow under the nose.

My personal opinion is that Butterfly Lighting works for men better than women, but it’s really just personal preference. I think men’s features are enhanced by shadows but it detracts from women. Again, personal preference.

After that come the variations. Move the key further to the side and drop the fill for Split Lighting.

Bring the key light toward the camera, move the fill slightly farther away for Loop Lighting, which gets its name from the loop-shaped shadows around the nose. Employed for oval faces to bring out more detail in the narrow side of the face.

Short Lighting is lighting from the narrow side of the face with the shadows to the broad side.

I could have moved the key higher in this example of butterfly lighting

Most of you probably noticed these lighting styles before, but may not have known they have a name. Now you can assign the proper name to the lighting style.

RAW vs JPEG Revisited

raw histogram — For shots like this there's little reason these days to start with RAW

It’s good to revisit subjects in photography from time to time because this is one business that does not lend it’s well to dogma. When habits become entrenched, there’s sometimes a tendency to forget why we started doing something a certain way in the first place.

That’s my beef with photography instructors who think they have start off teaching black and white, because that’s how they learned photography. Most likely when they started, there weren’t a lot of options. Today black and white is a choice you can make at any time in the process of managing a photograph. There are even specialized filters that let you pick which type of black and white film you want to emulate in post.

So it’s good to remember why we do things, like shooting in RAW versus JPEG. Many old school photographers today are stuck on RAW because a few years ago JPEG compressions were not that good. They still insist RAW is better, even though the difference is sometimes hard to see.

A low JPEG compression ratio, like 2:1, is almost indistinguishable from the original RAW file. And camera firmware gets better all the time at doing post-processing image compression. The bulk of the image data that a JPEG conversion is throwing out, and really is data you don’t need, probably will never need.

Most of the work I deliver today started with a JPEG and, in spite of what I just said, I keep RAW copies of every image I’ve ever taken.

The reason is simple. The RAW file is exactly what the sensor reads, plus the header information. Every year image processing gets better and more sophisticated. I keep thinking the day will come that new ways of viewing image data will emerge that may utilize some or all of that discarded image data in ways we can’t even imagine right now.

Occasionally I start with the RAW image, but doing all of my post-processing in RAW, even for commercial work, would add time to my work flow without delivering a significant increase in quality.

Most of my shots are for journalism assignments, so ultra-fine color detail is not required. If you’re shooting fine commercial work, then starting with RAW might be necessary for many shots, but commercial clients are paying for that time.

Which ever way you decide to go, if you can, I’d still keep a RAW copy in the archives. Because those clever engineers are just liable to come up with something that will make you glad you did some day.