Composition: Leading Lines

I discussed the Rule of Thirds for scene composition in my last article. Now consider leading lines. When composing a scene for your photo, leading lines can provide a path for your eyes to follow to the subject.

Recall that a good photograph has a clear subject. The subject is emphasized while distractions are minimized. 

Leading lines can create a sense of motion in your composition. They can also help convey a sense of depth to your two dimensional image. Any objects lined up in a row can be used as a line in your composition. Examples include fence posts, a row of cows walking through a field, a line of parked cars, and street lights. Watch for lines created by such objects as masonry, a sea shore, a mountain range, rivers, trees, roads, and buildings. Lines are everywhere. The key to using them in composition is positioning your camera at an appropriate spot such that the lines help direct the eye to your subject.

In the example photograph shown below, the lines created by the garden path and its border masonry lead the eye to the old English cottage.

 Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.
Philip Wheeler Photography
Trey Ratcliff's Landscape Tutorial (use code SIC-6683 for 10% off!)

English Garden

Composition: The Rule of Thirds

Ansel Adams said, "There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs." Rules for photographic composition are useful, but they do not ensure that you will produce a good photograph. The trick is to know both how to use the rules and when to break them in order to help you achieve that elusive good photograph.

A good photograph has a clear subject, and uses various techniques to emphasize the subject and minimize distractions.

The most common photographic composition places the subject squarely in the center. In general, this is not very interesting. Exceptions exist, however, such as when the subject fills most of the frame of the image. But you should master other composition techniques as well.

One common and useful rule is called the Rule of Thirds. The drawing below represents your image area in the common 3:2 aspect ratio. Within the large rectangle, there are lines dividing the length and width each into 3 parts. These lines intersect at 4 points, marked below with circles. Using the Rule of Thirds, you would center your subject at one of these 4 circles.

The Rule of Thirds was invented by the master painters of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to allow space in the painting to provide some context to the subject, to help tell a story. The eye tends to wander to these four points more readily than to the center of the image.

In the example photograph below, I used the Rule of Thirds to position the flower, emphasizing the subject. I also used a shallow depth of field to throw the background and extreme foreground out of focus in order to minimize distractions.

Copyright 2013 © Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

Flower

HDR Software Notes

Here is a useful tip for HDR enthusiasts who use Photomatix: always convert your RAW files to TIFF first. The RAW converter in Photomatix is not of the highest quality, according to the Photomatix developers. If you use lens correction software, which I recommend, it will probably handle the conversion for you (DxO Optics, Lightroom). Users of PTLens must do the conversion from RAW before the PTLens processing can start so that works out well.

SNS-HDR Pro 1.4.22 is an alternative to Photomatix that is said to be the most halo-resistant of all HDR software. I downloaded and installed the demo version. I loaded it with a set of 5 images I took in the Blue Ridge Mountains at dawn. But first I used DxO Optics 8 to correct the lens aberration and convert from NEF to DNG. Using the default settings, the result from SNS-HDR was very clear and halo-free. I like the feature that asks if you want to save the image as 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF; Photomatrix saves as 16-bit, which is nice if you need it but for my work it just results in a larger file that I need to flatten before processing in Photoshop. (Note that I mean 8-bits or 16-bits per channel.) My first impression of SNS-HDR is positive, although it is a lot slower than Photomatix 5. The demo version places a huge watermark on all finished images.

Expose 3 is another HDR software package that I need to try.

Dynamic Photo HDR 5 is said to be less expensive than Photomatix, but it supposedly has a better RAW file converter. It does not include batch processing, however.

Many image processing software packages include a batch processing feature. This is very useful, for example, when performing lens corrections using DxO Optics Pro 8. You can quickly set it up to process entire folders of files, instructing it as to your preferred settings and output file format. Since it can take well over an hour to process 100 images, allowing batch processing means you can go about your business while the computer works away.

Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

Hen

Choosing a Camera

I have been using a Canon 60D for the past couple of years. It's a great camera, and the kit lens (18-135mm) is a good walkabout lens. But now I would like to expand my lens selection to include a wide angle lens, to start with. And therein lies the dilemma. You can easily invest much more in your lenses than you typically spend on a camera body. Therefore it would be best to purchase lenses that you can use on future upgraded versions of your camera body of choice.

Leaving the subject of lens adapters aside, my goal is to use Canon lenses on Canon cameras, Nikkor lenses on Nikon cameras, etc. In previous articles I have written about sensor size and ISO sensitivity, and based on that information I concluded that I want a camera with a full-frame sensor.

In my research I looked primarily at Canon and Nikon DSLRs, but I also looked into the new mirrorless cameras. An SLR or DSLR lets you see though the lens when you look through the viewfinder, and this requires a mirror inside the camera body. A mirrorless camera shows the viewfinder image on an electronic screen. This is similar to the Live View shooting mode common in many DSLRs, and like Live View it has a lag that makes it difficult to use in action/sports photography. The Sony NEX series of mirrorless cameras are tempting: the Sony NEX-7 offers 24MP and 10 frames-per-second shooting speed, and the price is very reasonable, but it has a smaller APS-C sized sensor. The Sony DSC-RX1 has a full-frame sensor, but the price is rather high. At this time, there are few full-frame mirrorless cameras from which to choose. I expect that more will appear on the market in the next few years, and it is possible that they will overtake the DSLR in popularity at some point. However, that hasn't happened yet.

Thus my research came down to finding a DSLR camera with a full-frame sensor from a manufacturer who offers a decent selection of full-frame lenses. Since using FX/full-frame lenses on DX/APS-C sensors results in a cropped image, I concluded that mixing lens and sensor sizes was not what I wanted to do.

Next came the question: buy new, used or refurbished? A factory refurbished camera by Nikon or Canon, purchased with warranty from a major dealer such as B&H Foto or Adorama, seemed like the best choice based on recommendations from a number of photographers who had already gone down that path.

Then I considered design flaws. For example, the Nikon D40 and D80 DSLRs had an exposure design flaw, easily compensated for but annoying just the same. I looked at the Nikon D600 and D800: the D600 had a history of oil spots on its sensor. I found that this seemed to be limited to the early units and was corrected by the factory in refurbished cameras.

The D800 has features that some reviewers don't like, such as the small autofocus coverage and non-intuitive menu system. The D600 has 24MP, and the D800 has 36MP. Another of my articles discussed MP. An additional concern is that a huge MP count requires more disk storage space. I can easily use 5 to 10 GB of storage space in a few days with my 18MP Canon 60D. Add storage space for post-processing and the numbers grow to multiple terabytes per year. The D800 is also more expensive than the D600.

After much deliberation, I decided to buy a refurbished Nikon D600. This will help reduce the noise in my photos and provide a basis upon which to build a full-frame lens collection.

Copyright © Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

Tree

Photomatix 5 Beta

I've been using Photomatix Pro 4.2.7 for a while now. I like the program, and yet it has proven too easy to make the photo look surreal. Halos around objects has long been a criticism of some HDR software, and halos were sometimes created using the standard presets in Photomatix Pro 4.2.7.

Photomatix 5 beta is now available. During image sequence setup, there is now an option to tell the software whether the images were captured using a tripod or handheld. There are fewer built-in presets, but that could change with the official software release. The Fusion presets, for example, are missing, but there are still plenty of Exposure Fusion controls in the left hand tool bar. What is most striking is the speed of the new software: it is much faster than version 4.2.7. Purchasers of version 4.2.7 are entitled to the new version 5 at no additional cost.

A Lightroom plug-in is included with version 5 beta. This allows you to export images from Lightroom directly into Photomatrix. If you use Lightroom's lens correction and other development tools, this direct export could form the basis for an efficient workflow.

Not all multi-exposure scenes can be improved through HDR techniques. For example, the Sherando Lake at the Fall Equinox looks better without HDR processing. After merging with HDR, the water part of the image was degraded: the circular ripple was less distinct as were the tree reflections. These results are due to the image merging process and the changing patterns in the water -- no HDR software can avoid scene movement between exposures. On the other hand, South Lake at Sherando was processed with Photomatix. Since the water was fairly still, Photomatix enhanced the image through the merge (rocks underwater in the foreground are more distinct) and the tone mapping brought out the colors very nicely.

The image rendered below was processed using Photomatix 5 beta (available here). I used 3 images captured at -2, 0 and +2 EV from a tripod. All 3 images were corrected for lens aberration using DxO Optics Pro 8 before being loaded into Photomatix. I applied the Photoshop curve tool to the Photomatix result to adjust the desired exposure level.

Copyright 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

Factory

White Balance

Achieving good white balance is critical for capturing accurate colors. White balance is usually left on 'auto' or AWB (auto white balance) as the default in your DSLR and this can lead to an unusual color-cast being added to your images. Setting a custom white balance is not difficult and it will improve the quality of your photographs.

The camera's built-in light meter sets the auto white balance based on a neutral gray, called 18% gray. This is the shade of gray half way between pure white and pure black. Using AWB, your camera's meter will decide upon some part of your scene that is more-or-less white and set it as 18% gray. Sometimes it is very obvious in the final photograph that AWB was used. For many landscape photos you might not notice it, but if you photograph a subject in a white sandy or snowy scene, your "white" sand or snow will become gray! The photo of the peppers below was taken on auto white balance. The peppers were sitting on a curved white cardboard. But the card looks gray in the finished photo because of the camera's meter and the AWB software. In this still-life photo, it might be considered part of my vision for the photograph, but in practice it was because I was too lazy to set a custom white balance.

Fortunately, setting a custom white balance is easy. Before photographing your subject, but in the same light, photograph an 18% gray card such that it fills the frame of your camera. It does not need to be in focus. Follow the instructions in your camera's manual to use this image to set a custom white balance.

18% gray cards are available from Adorama, B&H Photo, and other camera suppliers. The cards are inexpensive and easily stashed in your camera bag for use in location shooting.

What if you forget to set the white balance? If you save your images in RAW format, you can adjust the white balance during post processing. Both Canon and Nikon provide free software that lets you do this.

It is important for you to set the white balance in order to achieve the best quality photographs. Otherwise there will sometimes be an odd color cast in your images.

Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

Philip Wheeler Photography

Peppers

ISO Sensitivity

In an earlier article I discussed the basics of digital camera sensor size. Diffraction is a wave phenomenon that limits what can be achieved in capturing images through digital photography. At this point, digital camera sensor technology is close to the limits imposed by diffraction. Higher quality can be achieved with larger sensor size, not with more megapixels (MP).

Your DSLR's ISO setting is one of the three main exposure controls, the other two being shutter speed and aperture. In a dimly lit scene, increasing the ISO sensitivity helps you to get a good exposure. But there are limits above which noise starts to become apparent in your images.

ISO sensitivities above 3200 will always introduce some noise into the image. This is explained by the physics of light diffraction. Simon Crisp writes, "Once you get up to 6,400 you should expect photos to resemble camera-phone shots."

 Below ISO 3200 the noise in the image depends to a great extent on the amount of light captured by the sensor. This is why a full-frame sensor will introduce less noise into an image than an APS-C, or cropped, sensor. In turn, the APS-C size sensor will introduce less noise than the tiny sensors found in point-and-shoot cameras and those used in cell phones. Cell phone camera sensors must be small so they can be used with small lenses. If the phone makers used APS-C or full-size sensors, their phones would be huge! So when you read about a high MP cell phone camera (41 MP is the highest I've seen), rest assured that your trusty 12+ MP DSLR can produce higher quality images.

Full-frame digital cameras are now at the point where they can outperform 35 mm slide film in terms of resolution and low light performance. In order to help take advantage of this, it is necessary to use faster shutter speeds and other techniques to reduce camera shake. A shutter speed of 1/60 sec. has been a rule of thumb for the slowest shutter speed to use when hand-holding the camera, but this will not produce the best quality images. A sturdy tripod combined with a remote shutter release or 2-second delay, mirror lock-up, lens vibration reduction, and other techniques are important tools in producing the highest quality images. Proper exposure, critical focus, a steady camera, and good image composition are all needed to make good photographs.

Ultimately, the intended use of your images could drive the image quality that you need to achieve. If your goal is to create Web sites, almost any digital point-and-shoot or DSLR will do. Producing reasonably large prints demands a higher quality image. I suggest that you should always strive for the highest image quality possible.

Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.
Philip Wheeler Photography

Mountain Shed