Organize Complex Scenes

If you've been reading this blog a while you'll know that I'm a big fan of simplicity when it comes to composition. My underlying philosophy is that the fewer image elements that you have, the stronger and more graphic each element becomes. But sometimes you find yourself with an interesting subject that is just too complex to even think about simplifying--and the key to composing them powerfully is to keep things organized.

In the scene of an old Connecticut mill town shown here, for example, it was the complexity of the various layers of the scene that caught my eye. I wanted the scene to feel complicated and interesting--as if the longer you studied it, the more you'd find. Here are a few guidelines that you can use to help you organize such scenes:

• Include some visual anchors. In this shot, the two large buildings facing the camera are the major structures and by placing them high in the frame, they dominate everything else.
• Keep things level: There are a lot of both vertical and horizontal lines in this shot and keeping them parallel to the edges of the frame is very important. Look at how the lines of the large buildings, the blue smokestack and the light posts are all parallel to the sides of the frame.
• Shoot in overcast light. If I had shot this scene in contrasty light, the shadows would have turned the scene into a jumble: shadowless lighting kept things simpler.
• If possible, use a simple background. The trees here serve as a nice plain background to the entire scene--the eye stops exploring at the top and returns to the main scene.

Experiment with complicated scenes when you see them--it's good practice in visual organization and you often come up with very unusual and complex pictures.

Blow Yourself Up: A Really *Big* Print Sale

If you're never seen one of your photos blown up big--really big--you need to try it. Seeing your photos as an 8x10 is fine, but when you see a 20 x 24-inch print, or better yet, a 30 x 40-inch print, it will blow your mind.

My friend Dave Z who owns ConnTech Imaging here in Connecticut has just announced a summer print sale that will let you see beautifully made color enlargements of your work at amazingly low prices. I've been using Dave's lab for years to make both personal and commercial client enlargements and the prints are the best you'll see anywhere--and I'd say that even if he wasn't my friend.

All of the prints are made from digital files on lustre finish Fuji Crystal Archive photographic and they will probably outlive your kids. I had Dave make some prints for one of my clients last summer and the client (an oil company) was blown away--they immediately had the prints framed for their office lobby. All that you have to do to get a print made is send a 300 dpi file (they'll help you set up an ftp for file transfer) sized to the size of the enlargement you want. Color corrections aren't included at this price--but the lab will match your file colors precisely. (They do, of course, offer color correction and other lab work for additional fees, but if you send them a great file, you'll get a great print.)

The lab will print from jpeg or TIFF files and they'll ship prints for $5 priority mail to any address in the United States. Here are the sale prices (the sale ends July 31st, so don't procrastinate!).

16x16 $7.00
16x20 $8.75
16x24 $10.50
20x24 $13.10
20x30 $16.40
24x30 $19.65
24x36 $25.90
30x30 $26.60
30x40 $32.75

As I've said before, I don't like to promote anything commercial in this blog, but this is a great print sale and worth knowing about. You can call the lab if you have questions: 203-878-8100. Or just go to the ConnTech site and get more details.

Night Photos: Experiment with a Ferris Wheel

I lust after subjects that combine three things: color, light and motion. And no subject provides those three things better than a Ferris Wheel at a canival. Where else are you going to find a fifty-foot tall wheel of light that spins around in the night? (And personally, since I'm terrified of heights, I'm perfectly happy to be on the ground looking up.)

Last summer while illustrating my exposure book (Exposure Photo Workshop) I spent many days and nights wandering around carnivals with my cameras and tripods photographing all kinds of rides using a whole range of long shutter speeds. It was great fun and I got hundreds of cool shots. In fact, we ended up using a variation of the shot here as the cover of the book.

Oddly enough, I first got the idea to use long exposures with carnival rides when I was a teenager. A policeman who was working at a carnival where I'd gone to take some snapshots saw my tripod and asked what shutter speed I was using. Innocently I told him I was shooting what the meter told me to, usually 1/30 or 1/15 second. He told me to put the shutter speed dial on "B" (bulb) and leave the shutter open for 10 or 15 seconds--so I tried it. Turns out he was a serious amateur photographer and had done a lot of time-exposure shots. When I saw the slides (this was 30 years before digital) a few days later, I was blown away! The photos were just big rich circles of color and they were the wildest shots I'd ever seen. I couldn't wait for more carnivals to come to town--and I shot every one that did.

There are no hard rules about how long to expose for and I experiment with exposure ranging from 1/2 second to 30 seconds (a lot depends on the speed of the wheel, too). I just put the camera in manual, set a small aperture (say f/16 or f/22) to keep everything sharp and to give me a range of long shutter speed options, then bracket widely with shutter speeds. Don't speed up your ISO or you'll introduce too much noise; I leave my camera set at ISO 200 since I'm ignoring the meter anyway (again, I bracket based on what I see on the LCD).

Look at your results as you're going along and you'll know which exposures are the most interesting. And change lenses (for the shot here I zoomed in to just take the center of the wheel) or your shooting position every 10 or 20 shots so you're not just locking in to one composition. I often shoot from a half dozen different positions just to be sure I'm getting the most creative angle.

Slow Down and Let the Shot Come to You

The best advice I ever got on travel photography was from the great travel shooter Catherine Karnow. Catherine has done dozens (probably hundreds) of wonderful travel-photo essays for magazines like Islands, National Geographic and National Geographic Traveler. I interviewed her years ago for a book I wrote on travel photography and essentially the advice she offered was to slow down and let the place and the moment come to you. She told me that often she'll plant herself in an interesting location (by a harbor, in a marketplace, etc.) and spend the day slowly exploring and watching as opportunities evolve. This doesn't mean she doesn't explore far and wide to find shots, just that once she finds a likely location, she slows down enough to let the moments happen. It's great advice.

I photographed the cow here on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania. I loved the background and the setting and the lightly overcast skies were creating a beautiful soft lighting. But the cows, thinking they were going to get a handout probably, crowded the fence whenever I got close. What I really wanted though was to do a portrait of one cow. I walked the perimeter of the pasture for an hour or more and while I was getting impatient and itching to move on, I considered Catherine's advice and just waited patiently. Eventually all the cows got bored except this one that seemed to take a particular interest in me and my camera and suddenly she was the only one in the frame and I had an almost panoramic view of the farm behind her. I later used this shot in my book The Joy of Digital Photography and in several online lessons.

It's tempting when you're traveling to see as much as you can--and that's definitely a worthwhile goal. But often the best shots happen when you give yourself time to know a place a bit better and when you wait for interesting moments to come to you.

Have a Happy Mother's Day

If you're in a part of the world that celebrates Mother's Day today, then have a happy day. I didn't know until a moment ago when I read the Wikipedia article on Mother's Day that is was celebrated all over the world (by rough count it seems like about 75 countries celebrate the holiday today).

I've been away from the blog again for a week, still trying to catch up on my post-book life and to get another book underway (a compete revision of "The Joy of Digital Photography" due out this time next year), but I'll be back at it this week. I'll be adding new posts and filling in the gaps from the past few weeks. I'm still a bit put off that the LCD on my D90 seems too bright unless I set it to its minimum brightness (-3), but I'm going to shoot a lot this week and do some exposure tests at a studio, as well. I love the camera in most ways--it's beautifully designed and a joy to hold and use. Apparently other people are put off by the LCD brightness, because there's a short discussion forum on Flickr. Lots more about the D90 in the days to come. I also have a call in to Nikon to ask them about the LCD and a few other things.

If you're visiting your mom today, don't forget to have someone shoot a picture of you together!

Create a Shooting Checklist

If you haven't used your camera in several days or a few weeks, chances are that you forgot where you left all the settings the last time you used the camera. You may have used exposure compensation the last time you were out shooting, for example, and forgot to zero it out when you finished, so next time you'll be shooting with compensation without realizing it. This kind of thing happens to me all the time (especially when I'm going back and forth between several camera bodies), so it's a good idea to have a written or mental check list to go through each time you pick up the camera just to be sure the settings are where you want them. Here are things I check each time I go out on a shoot:

• ISO: Be sure the camera is at its default ISO if you have plenty of light. This speed provides the best image quality.
• Exposure compensation: This is my biggest mental challenge! I seem to always forget to zero it out and I use compensation a lot, so I end up shooting with compensation that I don't want the next day. Check it.
  
• File size: Check to be sure you're using the maximum (largest) file size and the best quality level. On my Nikon D90 (if I'm in the jpeg mode), for instance, this means "Fine, Large" or "F" and "L." Memory cards are almost free they're so cheap these days, so always shoot at the largest file size.
• White balance: Either set it to the type of light you're using (sunlight, etc.) or just leave it in automatic and the camera will adjust for the existing light color.
• Exposure mode: I usually keep my camera set either to program or aperture-priority to start and then move to another mode (like manual) if I need to. Don't just assume it's in the program mode, check to be sure.
  
• Battery level: Ideally you should have checked this the night before, but always be sure you have battery power. I own several extra batteries that (fortunately) fit all of my Nikon bodies and so I always have at least one fully charged. I've always liked cameras that also accept traditional batteries because that way if you run low you can just run into a drug store and buy a fresh set.
  
• Clean lens: Be sure that your lens (or lens filter) is free of major smudges or dust. I keep filters on all of my lenses so rarely have to clean a lens, but the filters are sometimes a real mess. Use a microfiber cloth to clean them.

If you are religious about running down a checklist each time you shoot pictures you'll avoid a lost of nasty little surprises. Now if I could just follow my own advice every day :)

Design with a Limited Color Palette

The world around us, both man-made and natural, provides a kaleidoscope of colors, but often photographs are stronger when you limit that palette to just a few select colors. The reason is simple: the fewer colors that you include in a shot the more bold and prominent those colors become. In the shot of the lobster floats show here (I shot them next to a pickup truck in Stonington, Maine), by isolating the pattern so that you see just the two main colors, the pattern jumps right out at you--the contrast of just two colors strengthens the pattern of the repeating shapes. Had I included some of the red color of the truck or the yellow house behind it, your eye would start to wander from color to color instead of concentrating on the pattern of green and white.

You can apply the idea of a limited palette to a lot of subjects. In flower shots for example, a row of pink tulips will look stronger when isolated against a plain green lawn than against other colorful flowers. Or, if you're photographing a row of brightly painted blue and red rowboats on a Caribbean beach, isolating them from their surroundings (and other colors) will really make the colors pop.

Interestingly, the combination of colors that you use when you select a limited palette will have a profound effect on how each of the colors is perceived. Photograph a single green leaf against a sheet of black construction paper and the color of the leaf will "advance" forward, nearly leaping off the background; but shoot the same leaf against a red background and the two colors will "vibrate" against one another, competing for your attention. I've been doing some experimenting with color contrasts lately and will publish some of them in future postings.