Everything is An Argument

Applying Trigonometry to Composition!

2012-01-21T10:08:00.000-05:00

The weather was sunny and balmy here in North Carolinaearlier this week, so I decided to go out and try to illustrate some basiclessons in composition. Although thereare no hard and fast “rules” in photography, and although it is completelypossible to be self taught, there are some universal esthetic principles thatdate back to the Greeks (look at pictures of the Parthenon,for example) and which were first put to extensive print analysis in LucaPacioli's Divina Proportione in 1509.

Usually known as the Golden Rectangle, a mathematical theorywas developed by the Greeks and explored more scientifically by Pacioli whichhas been followed by artists ever since. Distilling this theory to esthetic principlesis known as the Rule of Three or Thirds in photography. Essentially the goal isto divide your frame into third, not halves or fourths. The thought here isthat thirds give a picture some dynamic tension, whereas halves or fourths areso centered they tend to make the picture feel “at rest.”

In any even the goal of thinking about this “rule” as youtake pictures is as much about getting you to actually “think” about your compositionas it is to get you to follow any “rule.” In other words, position your primaryobjects carefully ,and above all, avoid clutter! Think about “three” – no morethan three major objects or groups of objects in a picture (often including sky and other blank space). And above all, don’t center yourcentral object – have it slightly off center to create the feeling of dynamictension I talked about above.

With that in mind, I explored an old country store andrelated outbuilding – carefully setting up each shot, always knowing exactlywhat was in my frame and where each object was. How do you think I did?

Revisiting Depth of Field

2012-01-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

I can never say enough of Depth of Field and how importantunderstanding and manipulating it is for your pictures. As stated in otherplaces, the key is to create a “shallow” depth of field, with just that area ofthe picture you want in focus and the rest out of focus. This creates a dramaticimpact on your central image in the photograph.

To accomplish this, you need a “long” (telephoto) lens –zoom your digital camera out (T) to the max. You also need a fast as possibleshutter speed, because this forces the lens aperture to open (see lectures onAperture). Finally it helps to get as close as possible to your centralsubject.

All of the photos above were taken this past summer with aNikon D80, using a 135mm lens. In the top picture, of our grandkids, noticethat the dark background is completely out of focus, thus providing nodistraction from the central subject. The next two pictures, from a localrodeo, were a little trickier – there wasa lot of motion going on and it waslate evening. But the effect I was looking for, of motion, worked out pretty well,with the background completely out of focus and a bit of blur to the central objects toshow they are moving.

The two flower pictures are from our neighbors garden –notice the sparkly effect, called bokeh, to the background, as well as theearly morning lighting.

If you have a point and shoot without all the bells andwhistles, most still have a close-up function – use it and get close, to createthe out of focus background.

Photo Editing - Black and White

2011-11-18T10:45:00.006-05:00

Besides cropping, enhancing the blacks and increasing the vibrance or saturation, another photo editing skill is to know when to turn a color image into a black and white one. Those of you who did Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Minor White or Robert Mapplethorpe for your PPTs already understand the power of black and white photography.

Having grown up in the days of "Pan-X" slow speed, fine grain back and white film, I have often missed, since I went digital, the pure joy of loading up my old Nikon FM2 and heading out for a day of intense shooting with an eye towards shadows and lines.

So, take a look at the above two pictures I took last week along North Carolina's Blue Ridge Parkway. Which do you think has the most "power"? Please consider this as you edit your own photostory pictures. My own thought is that when color does not dominate the picture, either in a direct way or a subtle way, then the image may often be more striking in black and white.

In Photoshop you can change the "mode" in the "Image"menu. In Microsoft Office Picture Manager go to Edit>Col0r>Saturation. Click here, http://www.photohowto.info/how-create-black-and-white-image-using-picasa, for the instructions in Picasa,

More Rainy Day Photography

2011-10-28T15:37:00.003-04:00

I love rainy day photography. As I explained earlier, the lack of shadows and the fine mist help mute the contrasts while at the same time making each individual color stand out. Harsh sun does just the opposite, washing all the colors together into one nearly white glare. These pictures were taken this afternoon just down the road from where we live. They are shot as Raw files and opened in Adobe Bridge, where I could increase the blacks, play with the fill light and increase the vibrance. In Photoshop I played with the curves a bit in the tree trunk picture.

Framing

2011-10-24T13:31:00.002-04:00

A composition tip that complements the rule of threes or thirds is to “frame” your picture. This can force the viewer’s eye to the dominant part of the image. In these images I tried two approaches – the top picture has a sharp background, to illustrate the dominance of the mountains over this little valley, and in the bottom image I let the frame be the sharpest point, to highlight the autumn leaves of the tree I was using to create the frame. I’m not sure which I like best.

Shooting in “Raw” files

2011-10-20T11:59:00.001-04:00

For those of you with high end digital cameras, if you can go into the menu and change your settings so that the digital file your camera records is a “raw” file (.NEF) instead of a jpg file, you will be greatly pleased. Although these files take up more space on your SDI card, shooting this way is well worth it. I’ll get to the reasons in a second.

On my Nikon D80, I went to the “Shooting Menu,” and for “Image quality” I scrolled over to “RAW.”

The next thing you need to do is run over to Follett and get your $30 set of discs of the complete Adobe Design Suite – this contains Photoshop, but more importantly it contains Adobe Bridge.

Once you have all this installed (you better have plenty of disc space and a big processor with lots of RAM), open Bridge and find the folder with your files. Bridge is like a “light table,” in which you can see large thumbnail views of all your images. Select an image you want to manipulate, then right click on it and tell it to open in “Camera Raw.” When you do this you see some neat tools, including “Fill Light,” “Blacks,” and “Vibrance.” Once you manipulate your picture to where you want it, tell it to “Open Image” (bottom of the Camera Raw screen), and the image will open in Photoshop, where you can resize it, save it, etc.

Above you see before and after pictures, in which I increased the Blacks, adjusted the fill light, and ramped up the vibrance. The final version is what I had in my “mind’s eye” as I took the original picture.

Returning to the Scene

2011-10-14T17:21:00.001-04:00

Much like a burglar, I love to return to this scene, where I have taken many pictures over the years. I’m always looking for new light, and today I found a new view. The first view is the traditional telephonto shot showing the house and the fall color behind. I like it. The color, composition and “texture” are all pleasing. Frankly, though, this is a hard scene to mess up.

The second view, however, is my favorite, at least for now. I crouched low in the weeds this afternoon and used the house as background and texture – notice how out of focus it is. You can still see it, and it is still effective as a central subject, but the soft focus with the sharp weeds in front provide a unique look. In other words, a fresh look at an old scene can be very worthwhile.

Rainy Day Photography

2011-10-13T07:23:00.002-04:00

Rainy day photography can be especially fine. I still remember the days of ASA 25 Kodachrome II film, which produced slides of amazingly vibrant color. Although this was an incredibly slow ASA (now known as ISO) and thus required wide open lenses and a steady hand, a day trip in the rain always brought back spectacular results. The pictures above, taken with my little 10 megapixel Nikon point and shoot, capture these days gone by. The beauty of rain is that it softens the colors and eliminates all shadows, thus providing a wider range of tones than you find on a bright sunny day. These pictures are opened in Adobe Bridge, where I was able to intensify the blacks and the vibrancy.

Rule of thumb – the lower your ISO, the more vibrant your colors to begin with. If you can, set your ISO as low as possible to still have sharp, steady pictures. Depending on the light, your lens, and the subject matter, 100 to 200 is ideal.

Christmas Gift Idea!

2011-09-22T16:40:00.001-04:00

3x5 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.

You can use your own photos to make gift cards (photo by Worth Weller)

Combining the Rules

2011-09-15T11:47:00.003-04:00

As you work on your blogs over the next few weeks, I’d like for you to keep the lessons of Unit 1 in mind. Although we talked about “rules,” it is important not to think of these as separate entities: all good photographs combine careful control of lighting, depth of field, and composition. In the above photos, taken this week near the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, you can see these elements at play.

In the top photo, of a field of sorghum planted by the NFS to attract bear and deer, you can see the focus “unfold” so to speak – the near objects are in focus, and your view is drawn along as the objects get more distant and less in focus. This effect is very deliberate, and is achieved with a zoom lens and a fast shutter speed.

In the next photo, of some folk art in the small mountain town of Burnsville, you can see the composition and subject matter is divided into thirds, with some attention too to depth of field – I made the background a bit blurry to push your eye to the foreground.

In the second from the bottom photo, of the sorghum again, you can see I deliberately “back lit” the subject, shooting almost into the line of the sun, to give it a glow and set it off from the (out of focus) background. Notice too how “thirds” are at play.

In the final photo, of the Queen Anne’s Lace, this too is back lit. I’ve also paid a lot of attention to how I placed the dark and light areas in the background in relation to the flower – I deliberately wanted the white flower to be against the darkest part of the background.

In summary, I each of these pictures I’ve paid a lot of attention to everything in my viewfinder.

Time of day

2011-08-31T15:13:00.003-04:00

8 a.m.
Noon
4:30 p.m.

These shots show how the color and vibrancy of a picture is affected by the time of day. Normally I'd say stay away from noon. Te goal is to have distinct shadwos that don't obscure the picture but which rather add a bit of variety to it. Color can sometimes (not always) be washed out ion noon time pictures.

Taking your time

2011-08-29T08:14:00.002-04:00

In addition to thinking carefully about composition and lighting, another golden rule is: take your time. Don’t be afraid to get off the beaten path – meandering down back roads on a Sunday afternoon can be equally as entertaining as watching the Colts get hammered by the Saints. Once you spot something of interest, don’t be afraid to walk around a bit looking for interesting angles and shadows, and don’t be afraid to get down on your knees to shot up at your subject for a bit more dynamic tension.

Another golden rule of course is: get CLOSE!!

And the final golden rule is to take your SDI card back home and run those images through Photoshop or some other editing software. The pictures you see here are very slightly cropped (I was using my little Nikon point and shoot); the blacks are enhanced a bit in Adobe Bridge, and the colors are saturated a tad and the curves are adjusted to open the shadows. It takes time, but messing around with the software is fun.

My experience is that ALL photos should be edited and enhanced a bit before displaying. This will be particularly true for your end of course Photostory project – don’t turn in unedited pictures.

Composition and Lighting

2011-08-20T15:54:00.004-04:00

The major components of any photograph are its composition and the lighting of the subject. These pictures illustrate how important each is: each photo here, taken recently in northern Indiana, displays careful attention to the rule of three’s (note that the pictures are uncluttered with just a few central features), or rule of thirds (you can divide each picture into thirds, with nothing centered, not to mention that each is taken late in the evening or very early in the morning when the color is more vibrant and the shadows help outline the images and create a dynamic instability.

For you high end users and Photoshop owners, these pictures are shot in raw, which on my D80 gives much more initial vibrancy to the pictures than jpg files, plus they are photoshopped using the curves and vibrance tools. I open them first in Bridge and play with the blacks a bit, then move to Photoshop for the rest.

Notice too I wasn’t afraid to shoot directly into the sun. You are often told not to do this, but doing so provides many creative opportunities.

Time of Day

2011-05-20T11:14:00.004-04:00

One of the issues we cover in J210 Unit 1 is how time of day affects the color and shadows in a picture. Not to mention that mornings can often be foggy. I got out early this a.m. to catch the fog and slanted light, and of course got lucky with the school bus!!

Notice that I cropped the picture to give it a stronger line of motion (left to right), and I enhanced the color a bit with some of the auto features in Photoshop plus a little help from the "vibrance" tool.

Appalachian Spring

2011-04-16T06:23:00.004-04:00

Here are a few pictures I took earlier this month - the mountain scenes are in Yancey County, and the waterfall is near Hot Springs.

Black and White

2011-03-05T20:38:00.004-05:00

Sometimes when you are taking a picture to capture "the lines," black and white works better than color. Here's an old mountain cabin deep in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains, shot this week. What do you think? Below you can see a more carefully crafted version of the black and white image, using (Photoshop) Image>Adjustments>Black & White and boosting or dropping back the color scales to get exactly the tones n the shadows I wanted. Kind of tricky, and takes two monitors so you can compare as you work (if you right click on the image tab you can get it to open in a new window, which you can move to the other monitor).

More Depth of Field

2011-01-17T10:46:00.003-05:00

Careful control of your Depth of Field can produce some pretty startling results. I like to shoot with a very “shallow” depth of field, in which just one part of the picture is in focus, with the out of focus areas pushing the viewer’s eyes to the most important part of the picture. This is most easily done by using a telephoto or zoom lens and an “open” f/stop, such as f/5.6. The textbook goes into this issue in more detail.

Here are two recent examples of mine: notice that in the guitar picture your eye is forced to this singer’s face, because both the background and the foreground are out of focus. And the picture at the Nats baseball game last summer speaks for itself (in a sexist sort of way!)!!

(You can click on the pictures to get a larger view, which shows the DOF impact more dramatically.)

The Challenges of Snow

2011-01-14T10:05:00.004-05:00

Digital cameras have light meters that interpret color as different shades of gray, hence snow scenes as well as beach scenes that are dominated by white usually come out looking quite dark and dingy. Some digital cameras have settings for snow and beach scenes, and you should use these when the occasion warrants. Others allow you to set exposure compensation or white balance – you’ll need to over-expose snow and beach scenes to get the color right.

I often use my high end point and shoot Nikon when I’m snow shoeing or hiking, and it does not have any of the above features. So this is where your photo enhancement software comes in. In the three above pictures I used Microsoft Office Picture Manager which comes free with Windows computers. I’ve shown the original picture as interpreted by my camera (bottom), then I used the auto correct command to get the tone of the snow correct (middle), and then I used the enhance color command to brighten up and saturate it a bit (top). Most photos need this kind of treatment unless you have a high end SLR and understand how to use its complex settings to your advantage.

Above is the PhotoShop version, using some auto controls as as well as the "vibrance" and "saturate" commands. You can get Photoshop for $30 at Follett, but your computer needs to be fairly robust to handle it. You can see though why I like Photoshop.

Power of Black and White

2010-11-11T15:24:00.004-05:00

I still miss black and white film (but not the darkroom!).There was just something special about loading up your camera with Tri-X and heading out to specifically look for B&W shots. This is the old farm house near Pensacola, NC, that I have photographed many times - this time just two weeks ago, with my Nikon D-80.

The Mind's Eye

2010-11-11T15:04:00.005-05:00

Which version do you think a French Impressionist painter would have put to his canvass? The first is image is what my Nikon D80 captured (near Hot Springs, NC). The second image is from my Windows 7 computer (listening to a little bit of Led Zeppelin on Pandora Radio!)

Appalachian Autumn

2010-11-11T14:49:00.005-05:00

One of the great TVA projects between Corbin KY and Newport TN along US 25. Notice how the 135mm lens brings the background closer to the foreground, almost making the background appear to stand up. This is the real beauty of telephone lenses - their ability to "compress" your picture.

The picture is heavily Photoshopped by the way, with both the background and the foreground being selected separately and lightened accordingly, with some contrast changes also.

Why Photoshop Is Important

2010-11-11T14:40:00.003-05:00

Before and after: the 1st picture shows what my camera captured; the 2nd shows my mind's eye so to speak. As an artist, I see nothing wrong with Photoshopping my pictures - as a photojournalist, the rules are different however.

Tough Lighting Conditions

2010-08-20T13:48:00.004-04:00

This series of pictures was taken under very difficult conditions with a 50 mm lens opened wide to F/1.8 (notice the very narrow depth of field). I used the exposure compensation control on my Nikon D80 to make sure that the automatic light meter didn’t try to overexpose them, as the lighting was dark and digital cameras will often flood naturally dark scenes to bring them up to “medium gray,” which can look unnatural in these kinds of settings. They felt a little dark when I viewed them so I used the Image>Auto Tone control in Photoshop CS4 to adjust to brighten up the lighting just a bit. Then I went to Image>Adjustments>Vibrance to enhance the colors to get richer tones without creating a false highlights. Concert pictures are always very tough – having an exposure compensation feature (darken them down by at least an f/stop and don’t be afraid to play around with Photoshop.

The Vibrance Tool

2010-07-13T15:21:00.004-04:00

Here is a new trick in Photoshop (item 5 in this article). The first picture is without using the command and the second is the modified version. Unlike the color saturation tool, the Vibrance tool just enhances the less vibrant areas of a photo. The differences are subtle but important.

The Power of Photoshop

2010-06-27T10:57:00.004-04:00

The human eye adds a lot more "drama" to a picture than a camera can record. This shot is of a very romantic old farmhouse along the famous Staunton (VA)-Parkersburg (WVA) Turnpike that saw a lot of action during the Civil War. The original image if flat and disappointing (probably because it was taken on a hot summer day around noon). But with the quick selection tool in Photoshop, I was able to selectivel;y saturate different parts of the picture, turning it more into the image I had in mind when I took the picture.

When Less is More

2010-06-23T20:51:00.007-04:00

This photo of this old house in the heart of the mountain conflict in western Virginia between Confederate and Union troops was taken on a hot summer day when the light tended to wash out the colors anyhow. Solution? Convert it to black and white (Image menu>Mode) and up the contrast (Image menu>Adjustments) just a tad. Now, without the distraction of the weak color, the deteriorating lines of the house dominate the image.

Depth of Field

2010-06-21T15:34:00.003-04:00

This is what a good telephoto lens can do. Notice this picture, taken at a Nat's game in DC yesterday, also follows the rule of thirds. The woman only takes up a third ofo the pictures, and the shallow depth of field which puts the bleachers and other fans out of focus pushes her to the sharp forefront of the picture.

Below, BTW, is the original version of this picture, before I cropped it a bit (keeping the proportions), lightened just her face, and saturated the colors, all with Photoshop.

Jamming On

2010-05-17T10:34:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you take pictures just for the bragging rights. This Pearl Jam shot is from a few weeks ago at the Verizon Wireless Center (a birthday treat from my son Ben). My Nikon point and shoot showed its worth as a handy second camera, as you can’t take pro cameras into the concerts. This is the digital zoom at work.

Lucky Shot

2010-05-17T10:30:00.001-04:00

Well, it’s not so lucky, because I did make sure I had a camera when we went for an early morning walk while camping near the Erie-Miami Canal in Ohio recently. I’ve always wanted a good picture of a Blue Heron, but have never before been in the right place at the right tine with the right camera. This shot is taken with my little but powerful Nikon point and shoot. Its normal 3.5x optical zoom goes to 14x in the digital zoom mode.

The Power of Black and White

2010-05-17T10:14:00.003-04:00

I’ve photographed this old farmhouse in North Carolina for many years, and here is my latest version, from last month. I’m sure it is a matter of preference, but I find the black and white version to be much more dramatic and evocative of the old and decaying and historic nature of the scene. Notice how the wintry lines of the trees and the texture of the chimney and old wood are accentuated in the b&w version.

When the Rule of 3 Doesn't Apply

2010-02-19T13:51:00.002-05:00

Sometimes the rule of three won’t apply well – particularly in landscape or architectural shots. In that case, “framing” will help focus the viewer’s eye and hold a picture together. Look at these two pictures I took last weekend (in bitter chilling weather)along CR300E in Wabash county. Which do you think “works” the best?

Less is More (Rule of 3s)

2010-02-07T15:16:00.002-05:00

As in good, crisp writing (see: Hemingway, Ernest), less is also often more in photography. Thus is the power of the rule of threes. This portrait of a German girl from 35 years ago has three basic elements - the bicycle wheel, the girl, and the slightly out of focus and unobtrusive background.

The picture is simple but elegant (and of course the curve of the bicycle wheel also compliments the pleasing cures of the girls legs, face and hair). In other words, I paid attention to detail as I took this picture and composed everything in my viewfinder precisely.

Another Example of using "3rd"s

2010-02-02T15:47:00.002-05:00

I took this picture in Greece, in 1973. Notice how the man’s head takes up nearly two thirds of the frame and the two boys above him take up only one-third. Notice too that there are really only three objects in the picture for your eye to linger on.

Wikipedia gives a pretty cool description of this rule here, and they note the rule dates back to 1797, but I’ve also read it dates back to the ancient Greek mathematicians who developed a trigonometric formula that defined beauty (women like Jennifer Aniston with sharply defined triangular faces are considered to this day to be more beautiful than women with round faces).

Rule of 3s/3rds

2010-02-02T15:03:00.003-05:00

This is a nude portrait I took in Germany in 1972.

It illustrates both the Rule of 3s and the Rule of 3rds: notice that there are only three objects of interest in the picture – the window, the plant, and the nude. Notice too that nothing in the picture is centered – it is clearly composed in a 2/3’s – 1/3 pattern; The window and the plant take up 2/3’s of the picture and the woman takes up one third (the blank space above her was deliberately left in full shadow, and doesn’t count really as part of the picture in this case (because your eye does not focus on it), although background can count, particularly in the case where you get the blurred background known as “bokeh.”

Notice too that the woman is not centered top to bottom – she is in the bottom third of the picture. This is all quite intentional.

Unit 3 Preview

2010-01-29T09:20:00.006-05:00

Unit 3 in J210 covers the Digital Darkroom; here is a preview. Above you see a before and after version of a student picture. Because the picture was taken with the flash on (I recommend most times turning off your flash), the foreground (in this case the big pot) got both washed out and spotted with a glare hot spot.

The picture, by student Kristen Beatty, has perfect composition; she’d followed the rule of threes and the rule of thirds, and she used a shallow depth of field to pop the front of the image out at the viewer as well as to create a pleasing but not distracting background. However, the glare and washed out foreground from the flash is distracting.

The second version is the photoshopped version – I spent less than five minutes enhancing her picture. I used these tools:
• The Quick Selection Tool (in the left menu bar) to selected the whole pot
• The Brightness/Contrast Tool (in the Image>Adjustments menu)
• The Spot Healing Brush (in the left menu bar)
• The Levels Tool (in the Image>Adjustments menu)

IPFW students and IU and Purdue students can get Photoshop for $20 at the book store. Be a little wary, though; Photoshop is a real memory hog, and the whole design suite takes up a ton of hard drive space. Fortunately though, you don’t have to install everything from the suite.
Unit 3 will also provide a few free and legal Photoshop clones.

Lighting - time of day matters

2010-01-28T12:37:00.003-05:00

This is a short video that illustrates how time of day affects both the shadows and the tone of a picture.

A Little Trickier

2010-01-24T11:35:00.003-05:00

This picture is a bit more tricky – I took it with a 200mm lens on a Nikon FM3 camera with T-Max film. In those days (c. 1996) this was considered a “fast” film, which means the aperture would be pretty well shut down tight, causing the back ground to be in focus. However, in this setting, the Anasazi ruins in southwestern Colorado, the light was low, and the aperture had to be opened wide, helping to blur the background. The picture is of a Native American park ranger, with ruins in the background. We had to climb a wooden ladder up a cliff and use some ancient hand holds in the rock face to get here.

Notice how the slightly out of focus background makes the portrait of the ranger "pop out" at you.

Depth of Field Made Easy

2010-01-24T11:21:00.001-05:00

A question I get a lot is how do you achieve the shallow depth of field that pops the subject out of you with a point and shoot camera? The picture above illustrates this in its simplest answer – get close and zoom your lens to maximum telephoto. This is a picture I took in Germany in the summer of 1970.

"Deep" Depth of Field

2010-01-18T14:06:00.001-05:00

Here’s an example of what you would call a “deep” depth of field. The foreground is very sharp, and the background is still pretty sharp, although the foreground is just a few feet from the lens and the background is a half mile or more away. This effect is captured with a “wide angle” lens and a lens “aperture” around f/16. These are all terms from J210 Unit 1.

By getting some foreground in the picture, it creates a feeling of depth and distance, almost 3D.

The picture was taken about 15 years ago in the South Dakota Badlands.

"Shallow" Depth of Field

2010-01-18T13:44:00.004-05:00

In J210 Unit 1, you’ll hear a great deal about “depth of field.” A short definition of this term is simply the amount of image you have in focus from the “back of the image” to the “front” of the image.

I’m a big fan of a very “shallow” depth of field, which means that only a relatively small and specific part of the overall image is actually in focus, and the rest is blurry.
The blurred part of the image serves two purposes:

It can be quite attractive in its own right
It tends to “pop” the main point of the picture out towards the viewer.

I think you can see what I mean in the above picture that I took in Trier, Germany, about nine years ago.

Architecture pictures, particularly statues and the like can be quite boring in general, unless you work extra hard to create exactly the feeling you were looking for.

Capturing the Mind's Eye

2010-01-18T12:53:00.006-05:00

No matter how good a camera you have, it can’t really capture what you had in your own imagination when you took the picture. Towards that end, in J210 Unit 3 we talk about the digital darkroom and how “enhancing” your pictures can bring them to a new, more vivid and vibrant level.

Above you will see a sequence of three images. The first is the original print from when I took the picture in 1968. The second is the enhanced version, with Photoshop. And the third version is where I let my imagination run with it a bit (I’m a big fan of black and white, when color isn’t really the point).

The picture was taken on a rainy day, when the color was quite muted anyhow. In that kind of weather and with this subject, I was really trying to capture more of a feeling than an image.

Depth of Field

2009-09-21T18:25:00.004-04:00

This beer sampler from the Saugatauk Brewing Co. nicely illustrates a "shallow" depth of field. Notice how the light American lager in the foreground is out of focus, as is the Porter and the IPA in the background; but the English bitter in the middle nicely stands out. This is accomplished with a zoom lens, a high shutter speed and lens aperture around f/5.6.

Framing

2009-09-21T18:18:00.003-04:00

Very often "scenic" pictures, those that have a wide or far way view such as sunsets, mountain ranges and the like, need a "frame" to add depth and perspective. This is Lake Michigan.

Rule of Thirds

2009-09-21T18:11:00.003-04:00

This is taken in Douglas, MI, with the zoom at 210 and a hi shutter speed to open up the aperture. Notice how imortant the background is to the impact and message of the photo.

The "Strength" of Black and White

2009-09-21T14:26:00.003-04:00

Some pictures just are made for Black and White film. Sure, I could have enhanced and saturated the color in the image below, but I think B&W can make a stronger statement. This is the Michigan Dunes at Saugatauk.

Timing

2009-09-21T14:08:00.003-04:00

This is a timing shot, sitting at an outdoor ice cream shop in Saugatauk, MI, over this past weekend, watching the crowd stroll by. Camera was on, lens was extended, and when this young woman stopped to lean against a lampost while her boyfriend went inside to get some cones, I was ready. However, it is a bit like "stalking," so I was prepared to show her the pic and offer to e-mail it to her if she wished.

Below, BTW, is the original jpg file, before I used the levels tool in Photoshop, with a bit of color saturation too in the image above.

A Little Tilt

2009-07-17T18:28:00.002-04:00

I'm not a big fan pictures that are titled for no real reason (this was very popular and rather annoying at the end of the last decade), but occasionally an angled shot can accentuate a feeling of dynamic direction. Ths was take in Durham, NC.

Rule of Three

2009-07-17T17:43:00.002-04:00

Blank sky/bright light/angular water tower; this picture was taken in Durham, North Carolina.

Lucky Shot

2009-07-17T17:39:00.002-04:00

Sometimes timing is everything; this was taken in Durham, North Carolina.

The Power of B & W

2009-06-28T16:55:00.005-04:00

I've wanted to get a good picture of Long's Peak, one of Colorado's 8 or 9 most difficult peaks, ever since I climbed it four years ago, but I never found a view that showed its real grandeur among the rest of the Rockies, until Susan and I and Addy and Julie hiked to a lookout spot in Garden Gate Canyon State Park a bit south of Boulder in the Front Range. Below is what I got on my first attempt. Below that, from a slightly different spot, is the Photoshopped view (think Ansel Adams!).

Back to Photoshop - The Levels Command

2009-06-28T14:56:00.002-04:00

This is Monument Rocks, just south of Oakley, KS. Although when we got there I was immensely pleased with the light, particularly the sky, I felt the pictures were a little washed out (the heat made us feel, indeed, washed out). But a little help from the Photoshop "Levels" command produced what you see below, which is what I saw in my "mind's eye" when I took the picture with my Nikon D200). I find the middle "slider" in the Levels window particularly useful - just play with it.

This is a wide-angle shot, by the way, with my zoom lens set at 18 mm, giving the sky that "Kansas Bowl" look which characterizes the Great Plains.

The Three Basic Elements

2009-06-01T16:17:00.002-04:00

This picture, that I took of the great Mayan ruins at Palenque, deep in the heart of the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, in 1996, combines what I consider the three basic elements of good photography:
1. creative use of Depth of Field (notice that the jungle itself in the background is out of focus, thus pushing the ruins towards the viewer);
2. side lighting
3. the rule of three (you can actually see a diagonal from the bottom right to the top left that cuts the picture into 1/3/and 2/3; plus, the picture has just three elements - the temple at the top left, the stone terraces in the middle, and the jungle in the background.

Fun with DOF

2009-06-01T16:14:00.003-04:00

Here are two pics from Chain o' Lakes State Park over Memorial Day that illustrate creative use of Depth of Field.

More Fun with Picasa

2009-04-10T16:48:00.005-04:00

As fine as the D200 is, a gray, sunless day is just that. Enter Picasa. Here are some before and after shots, taken at Barr Lake (an old buffalo wallow) to the east of Denver, CO.

New Adventures in Photography

2009-04-10T16:33:00.007-04:00

Now that I have a semi-pro digital camera, the Nikon D200, I've become more interested in wildlife photography. This is at 200mm, with the camera set for ISO 200. The D200 picked this up at f/9 at 1/320 of a second. It's cropped and saturated a bit in Picasa. Click on the picture to see how sharp it is.

Perspective

2009-04-07T22:16:00.002-04:00

Mt. Meeker, near Estes Park, CO, is a pretty peak, but mountain shots on their own are often fairly bland. Here a Nikon 200 mm VR lens on a Nikon D200 puts both this church and and the peak into a rather dramatic relationship.

Framing

2009-04-07T22:04:00.005-04:00

We were driving down the Front Range from Estes park when I saw this red walled butte against the deep blue sky. But my first shots were totally without life. I think framing the picture with the telephone pole and wires added a contrast that brings the picture more into perspective.

When Less is More

2009-04-05T21:13:00.002-04:00

This picture, taken on Pearl St. in Boulder, CO, is an example, at least in my mind, of when a small amount of color goes a long ways. The charcoal gray "border" for the picture, coupled with the one poster in the deep shadow, causes the other poster to jump out of the frame.

ISO1600

2009-04-05T21:05:00.002-04:00

Here's the dual advantage of a high-end digital camera: I was able to set the ISO on my new Nikon D200 to 1600 and also set the noise reduction to high automatic; also, because there is no shutter delay, I was able to capture the exact moment I was looking for. This is taken in the book store on Pearl St. in Boulder, CO, April 5, 2009.

Shape and Form

2009-03-08T15:55:00.002-04:00

Black and white photography is particularly suited to accentuate shape and form. A good eye sees the shapes, curves, and lines, that draw an image together and that also make it unique. As much fun and interesting as color photography is, often the color can be distracting. To really concentrate on shape and form, black and white is the correct medium. The image here is from a black and white 35mm negative exposed over 30 years ago.

Winter's Treat

2009-03-04T16:22:00.003-05:00

Although I'm not a big fan of most flower and other "nature" pictures, I still like composition and vibrant color. So I find such pictures useful to illustrate compositional issues such as "balance" and depth of field, not to mention the rule of three's which boiled down can be explained much like KISS (Keep it simple, Stupid). In that spirit, here are two pics I took last weekend while drinking a wonderful Fat Tire on the veranda of the rotating bar by the big waterfall in the Cascades at Opryland.

Process, Not Product

2009-01-16T14:16:00.003-05:00

I was dialoging today with one of my photo students on the class discussion page, and she was remarking how nice it is with digital cameras these days to be able to take multiple pictures of a subject until you get just the right one. I responded that it is often the case that you sort of "feel" your way into the subject as you shoot. It's much the same way with writing – you tend to 'warm up" and "get on a roll" as you pound away on the keyboard.

As an example of this, I'd like to talk about the next four photos. Most of us in Northern Indiana had a heavy snowfall the other day, so I went out on my back porch with my little Nikon 10 megapixel point and shoot to capture the feeling of the morning. This is what I got with my first snap; not very interesting:

Then I saw our snow encrusted humming bird feeder, and said, "ha, ha"; but still sort of boring and "static":

Then I said to myself, "Worth – rule of three's creates a dynamic imbalance to a picture": picture is less boring, but a little drab:

Enter Photoshop; I lightened the whole picture, then I lassoed the feedings cups and increased their hue and saturation, then I lassoed the central flower ornament, and did the same to it. Now I think I have a pretty snappy picture:

The moral of this lesson is that a good photograph is a process, not a product.

What exactly is art?

2008-10-26T17:59:00.004-04:00

Some may argue that technology should not be confused with art. And I’m sure that same argument first surfaced back in the mists of time when the cave painters progressed from twigs and blood and charcoal and mud to bristle brushes and pigment paints.

For me the “Artistic” tools in the “Filter” menu of Photoshop are a pleasant and creative way to while away Sunday afternoon hours when I’ve had enough of the NFL for one day. Particularly because many of my favorite pictures are in negative format and more than 30 years old, it’s fun to try to artistically capture what I had in mind when I took the picture.

Here are two such attempts – the “nude on the hot tin roof” above is recreated with the “Waterpaper” tool in the “Sketch” command. The second nude, a model you have seen here many times earlier, is done with “Paint Daubs” in the “Artistic” command. In both cases these images recreate, at least to me, an intellectual argument that transcends the mere reproduction of the moment. We can ask, therefore, is art a technical application or an intellectual application? Without looking for binary answers, maybe we can say it is a subtle transfusion of both. Or, we can allways fall back on the old cliché, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The Power of PowerPoint

2008-08-19T09:44:00.002-04:00

PowerPoint is an extremely useful tool for photographers, in that it can crop pictures, resize them, and lighten or darken them. It can also be used to create "logos" or other jpg files which can be uploaded to your wiki, blog or web page, and it can be used to create very effective templates. The following is a short lecture showing how to make logs from your own favorite pictures with PPT.

Capturing the Mind's Eye

2008-08-07T19:27:00.002-04:00

These before and after pictures were taken on Ogle's Meadow, Yancey County, North Carolina, just this week. Several tools including brightness/contrast, color balance, and hue/saturation were used, along with the quick selection and lasso tools.

More Fun with Photoshop

2008-07-16T09:07:00.004-04:00

Not that you can do these kinds of things to journalistic pictures, but Photoshop sure is fun when you are going for straight "art" shots. I used the quick selection tool to select the snow cones and the purse strap. Then "cut" them out. Then used the layer command to make a black and white layer, pasted the color portion back in, and flattened the layers. I took this picture last week at Denver's Cherry Creek Arts Festival, using my little Nikon digital camera.

Composition and Timing

2008-07-16T08:42:00.005-04:00

Composition, particularly the rule of threes, is critical to a good photograph. So of course is lighting. The issue that often brings all these elements together, and the one that is the toughest to control, is that of "timing." These two photographs, taken last week at Denver's Cherry Creek Arts Festival, illustrate the happy juxtaposition of timing and composition. These are taken with my 10 megapixel Nikon point and shoot.

Remembering Segregation

2008-06-16T16:08:00.006-04:00

Durham, NC, 1968

June marks the 40^th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and one of the issues he is remembered for is his very tough stance on enforcing desegregation. The coverage of this tragedy brought up disturbing memories for me: I grew up in the segregated south, took trains through the deep south where the stations still had "whites only" restaurants and "colored only" water fountains; my first job teaching was at a 100 percent black junior high school on a dirt street in Raleigh, North Carolina - I taught earth science in a lab where the Bunsen burners were not attached to a gas supply.

A few months before his death I got my first journalistic break when I photographed a student protest against Governor Wallace who had come to Durham to spread his racist and hateful views. I nearly got my head bashed in by the cops, and I was scared to the point that focusing my camera was problematic. But I did get one picture, of Wallace supporters who weren't interested in a verbal debate with college students but just wanted to bust a few heads, that captured the sense of hatred and that the Duke University student newspaper used the following day. It's printed above, in a deliberately contrasty mode that I think brings back the gritty feeling of the era.

A Wallace supporter makes his point the best way he knows.

Fear and Loathing in Durham - "Wallace Has It! [white skin] Do You?"

Supporting her man

A Duke student thinks it over

Following in the Footsteps of the Masters

2008-05-14T09:08:00.003-04:00

White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona - photo by Worth Weller, 2004

The opening photograph for the History of Photography chapter in Kendall-Hunt's forthcoming textbook, Visual Communication in a Digital Age, is a conundrum of sorts, in that it is not an historical photograph. Instead, it is a picture that I took just a few years ago, on one of my summer Western pilgrimages.

My premise for taking this picture and for using it in the book, of which I am one of four co-authors, is that all artists, be they musicians, sculptures, painters, photographers and even pre-Columbian North Americans scratching in rocks with charcoal and flint, are part of a larger conversation. This conversation, of course, was originally identified by Kenneth Burke, who dubbed it the "Conversation of Mankind." In essence, he wrote that all learners enter this conversation which began before them and goes on after them, to participate in the knowledge making of mankind. Thus musicians study who and what went before them, and photographers do the same.

Country Joe and the Fish, the Fillmore East, 1969 - photo by Worth Weller

Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish, was a big fan of folk legend Woody Guthrie and read the poetry of the British anti-war poet, Robert Service. Janis Joplin derived much of her own raspy and gutsy populist style from the earlier works of blues legends such as Bessie Smith and Leadbelly.

Janis Joplin, Duke University - photo by Worth Weller, 1968

In 1966, at Duke University, I was fortunate enough to meet Ansel Adams, and thus I entered into the conversation of photography myself. From the moment I met Adams, I knew I wanted to emulate his love for the American West, and I honed my own black and white photography skills in the hopes that someday I could visit some of the spots he found most photogenic. Adams, of course, was keenly aware of the footsteps in which I was following , and it was no coincident that one of his most famous photographs, of White House Ruins in the Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, was a near exact replica taken almost a century before by one of Mathew Brady's disciples, Timothy O'Sullivan.

Ansel Adams, Duke University, 1966 - photo by Worth Weller

In the summer of 2004 – almost 40 years after I met Adams, my wish came true. Climbing the cliff wall on the far side of the canyon, I planted my own feet in nearly the exact footsteps of O'Sullivan and Adams to photograph this historical scene. O'Sullivan was the first to photograph this exact same view of these monumental Anasazi ruins, in 1871, and Adams recreated O'Sullivan's work in 1962.

This picture please me on several levels, mostly for its sly irony. Not only does it fit in neatly with my "conversation of photographers," but it also even references the Pre-Columbian artists scratching in the rocks with charcoal, flint, and organic dyes – notice the petroglyph, the life-size human figure, at the very bottom of the picture, just to the left of center.

Color When There Is No Light

2008-03-25T18:50:00.006-04:00

The conventional wisdom of course is that it takes sunny days to get good color pictures. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Rainy days often make for great color photography, because the very flat and "wet" light tends to saturate what color there is by eliminating bright hotspots and deep shadows.

These three pictures, taken a few years ago along the edge of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where it borders South Dakota's famous Badlands, illustrate this point. As a disclaimer, all three pictures are Photoshopped a bit, because camera light meters often don't register the midtones well under less than "normal" lighting conditions.

The first picture is taken in driving rain looking out over the Badlands; the second picture, also taken in the rain, is of an abandoned church at the edge of the Badlands where they roll into the Pine Ridge Reservation; and the third is of the infamous bar – the only within many miles of the Reservation, at Scenic, SD. Notice particularly in the bar picture how the absence of much other color accentuates the color on the Budweiser sign. The rain makes the church picture practically glow. And the Badlands are subtly awash with spring color, even in the driving rain.

The final two pictures below are taken in rain squalls at Sandy Bay, a remote Miskito Indian village accessible only by boat along Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. Notice how the rain seems to make what color there is practically glow.

“Environmental” Portraits

2008-03-23T09:58:00.002-04:00

Portrait photography, of course, was one of the earliest forms of the craft, taking after the artists at the time, following the development of the albumen coated paper process to record light images. Today's modern "environmental" portraiture is not much different, although sometimes considerably edgier, in that it seeks to portray the subject in a controlled setting that speaks directly to the nature of the subject or which dramatically thrusts the subject into the forefront of the picture. Four of my photographs posted here illustrate this concept.

In the example of the young woman above, the background landscape is "pulled up," so to speak by a telephoto lens which removes the sky and which provides a dark yet still interesting natural backdrop for the subject.

In the second illustration, the woman's face is pushed towards the viewer by the out of focus yet still distinct background.

In the third illustration, this young Nicaraguan child is sitting in front of a shop open to the street – those are strands of fresh garlic and a display of kettles hanging in the background. Because they are out of focus, yet can still be made out, they provide some context for the photo, yet the background also serves to thrust the child towards the viewer. I took the latter two of these pictures with a 105 mm lens on a Nikon film camera. The first is with a 200mm lens.

And in the fourth illustration, below, the "environment" tells the story, as Meiu, nude herself, is a painter of nude portraits.

Photo Ethics

2008-03-17T13:57:00.002-04:00

A serious topic, this musing though is not about Photoshop. Rather it's about trespassing.

Responsible photographers need to always remember that unless they are invited to take a photograph or are on public property at a public event, there's a good chance their efforts to take pictures, particularly of people, may not be greeted in a friendly fashion. Sometimes the reasons are cultural (the Mayan Indians of Mexico and Guatemala), sometimes spiritual (Native Americans), sometimes because the setting is just not appropriate (a religious ceremony perhaps), sometimes because people think it is rude (think tourists taking pictures of "natives") and other times because the people being photographed are doing something they may not want others to see.

Most of us don't get into the later situation too often, fortunately, but the other situations described above take a special sensitivity not easily covered in this short space. The bottom line is that a serious photographer should be thoroughly acquainted with the history and the cultural preferences of the people he or she is photographing. Even as a casual tourist, anything short of this is just plain rude – and could be dangerous: numerous stories abound of tourists with cameras being thrashed with sticks in the great Mayan Church at San Juan Chamúla (pictured above).

We avoided that problem by hiring a guide in nearby San Cristóbal de las Casas – an experience which allowed us to obtain photographs, such as the one below of Mayan weavers in their home in Zinacantán, which could not have been captured otherwise.

Sometimes, though as a working journalist, you find yourself in situations where you have to rely on your own snap judgment, such as when I joined a human rights group on an earlier trip to Chiapas in 1996 to document activities of the Mexican Army in the aftermath of the Zapatista rebellion which rocked Mexico in 1994. The Army was accused of terrorizing remote Mayan Indian villages in the jungles along the Guatemalan border.

The two pictures, above, I took in pouring rain with no interference from a passing patrol. But the third picture tells a different story. Taken of me surreptitiously with one of my cameras by a colleague the following day when the Army sent out a special detail to see what we were up to, the picture shows the risks journalists can run into when they are taking pictures where they are not wanted. Needless to say I did not take the soldier's picture.

Timing

2008-03-15T17:23:00.002-04:00

The three R's of photography are, of course, timing, location and lighting. Alright, I know these don't have any "R"s in them. Nonetheless, all three elements are critical to a good photograph. Photoshop may be able to fix the lighting, but it can't deal with location and timing issues.

In the above picture, all three elements come together nicely, without any help from Photoshop. Notice that I was in the right place at the right time, and that I snapped the shutter at just the precise moment (which takes a film camera or a high end digital camera to accomplish) when she was framed by the two large rectangles in the picture and yet was not covering up the location sign. Also note I was a little lucky in that one leg is fully extended and the other is bent at a nice angle that hikes her skirt high – a timing bonus, you might say. This is one of my favorite photographs, taken quite clearly in France, some 35 years ago.

Although luck is good, it does take concentration to get the timing in a photograph just right.

Which Tool to Use?

2008-03-15T14:05:00.004-04:00

There's no good or easy answer to that question because it is not a good or easy question. Photoshop is a very subtle and complex image manipulation program, and your photographs deserve a subtle and complex approach.

The first step, though, to answering that question is to look at your photo as a collection of individual parts. Divide the photo in your mind into individual areas of interest, and decide what you like and what you don't like about each area. You might look at the highlights – are any too bright? Then you could look at the shadows – is there enough detail in the shadows? How about the colors? Do some areas have colors that are just right and others that are a little off? Another issue to examine is contrast – do the important elements of the picture differentiate themselves from each other enough – are your whites "bright" enough, or is there any overall gray cast to the picture? The final issue is sharpness – is the image "crisp"?

The picture above, of the 13^th century Anasazi cliff dwellings in Betatakin Canyon at the Navajo National Monument in Arizona, was a deep disappointment to me when I returned home from our 1996 Western trip. A rugged and hot hike to these remote ruins did not reveal the images I had hoped for, although I tried very hard to capture the historic and other-worldly feel of the culture that once thrived here. As you can see the image is very "flat," as my Nikon FM2 film camera was not able to record the full tonal range of what I was seeing with my eye at the time. Although I made a few prints initially of this image, using "dodging" and "burning" techniques, there were simply too many areas that failed to reproduce as the eye and brain could see them in their original state. The contrasts between the interior of the cave, which shadows the ruins all year long except for a brief period of several days when the sun is low in the winter sky, was simply too much for a 35mm negative to handle.

Enter Photoshop. I started with the Image>Adjustments>Levels tool, adjusting the three sliders until I got a sharper degree of contrast while darkening the sky a bit and still keeping some shadow detail in the ruins. Then with the "Quick Selection" tool I selected one area at a time, changing the contrast and brightness in multiple areas of the picture with the Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast tool, working from the sky in the upper left first, then to the outside cliffs, then down to the ruins themselves. Finally I sharpened the image with the Filter>Sharpen>SmartSharpen tool.

The result is below – this is what I actually saw when I took the picture. Looking at my History palette, I see that I made at least seven separate adjustments to this picture.

To see a higher dpi of these pictures, click here.

The Smart Sharpen Tool

2008-03-14T14:59:00.002-04:00

Most photographs can benefit from the Filter>Sharpen tool in Photoshop. The preferred tool among photojournalists is actually the Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen tool. As with many of Photoshop's Intelligent" tools, this way requires care and experimentation. The first step is to set the "Remove" drop down menu to "Lens Blur." Then you grab the image that's in the central image box and move it to an area that gives good detail. The final step is to slide the "Radius" bar back and forth – adding more pixels to the width of the sharpening effect generally makes the whole photo look sharper – but you can overdo this, to the point where your picture becomes very "grainy.

The top image shows the negative as originally scanned and brightened up a bit. Below are the tools described above, and finally is the sharpened image – a photo I took at the great Mayan ruins of Palenque, Mexico, in 1996.

The Quick Selection Tool

2008-03-13T11:17:00.002-04:00

Although the Lasso tool works well, the quick selection tool is a sophisticated, practically intelligent tool that selects areas of a photo within the same tonal range. As with the Clone Stamp tool (discussed in a previous post), when you click on this tool another menu across the top opens that lets you adjust the tool size, as well as to go back and forth between expanding the selection area, making it smaller, or adding a new selection area (see below).

In the above image, taken of my Taiwanese friend Meiu when I was a GI in Germany, I selected the painting on the left as well as the full shape of her body and the paint pots to the right, because I wanted to brighten just these areas of the photo to add a bit of a "glow" to the lighting. The image below shows the final results.

The Clone Stamp Tool

2008-03-13T10:06:00.003-04:00

Because many of my negatives and slides are nearly four decades old, some are heavily damaged with dust and even mildew. Once again, enter Photoshop. I had been copying and pasting to cover dust and other damage, but this is a tedious task. Fortunately my son Ben was home this week on his spring break from teaching journalism at IU, and he showed me Photoshop's "Clone Stamp" tool. With this tool, simply "alt" left-click on a spot that you want to "clone," and then mouse over and left-click on the spot you want to clone to (your "target" area). It's a little tricky and takes some getting used to, and it helps to blow up the image quite a bit to get greater control. When you do, though, the tool gets larger too, so you have to go into the "Brush" menu (shown below) to select the width of the brush you want to use for the cloning.

Below is the final (cropped) version, after various adjustments (discussed in previous posts and including some more attention to the "Hue/Saturation" tool) and with most of the damage "cloned" out of the image.

Fine Tuning Photoshop

2008-03-12T13:07:00.002-04:00

The real trick to adjusting images in Photoshop is to select precisely the area you want to specifically work on. One can use the lasso tool for this or the quick selection tool (both in the vertical menu bar on the left). However, a key element of using these tools successfully is to "feather" the outline – this allows you to use the lasso tool in a rather 'rough" and not so precise fashion, and even with the quick selection tool it "bleeds" the boundaries between what you are adjusting and the surrounding areas so that you don't have sharp lines of demarcation.

The feather tool is found after you make your selection by going to "Select>Modify>Feather…." At this point you have to make a judgment – you must set the "pixels" of the feather radius. As a rule of thumb, if you have selected a very small area, try ten pixels. For a large area, try 100. You can tell by the amount of "halo" or demarcation you get if you've not used enough pixels or gone too far.

The picture at the beginning of this post is the original image I took on the island of Crete, of the Greek coast, many years ago – an image with which I've always been disappointed, although I knew at the time I took it that this "portrait" had a lot of potential. Below is the adjusted image. The adjustments included lassoing the man's face and hand, feathering the borders (around 70 pixels), adjusting the brightness and contrast to the selected areas, and then using the sharpen command (in the filter menu).

The Power of Light

2008-03-08T12:25:00.003-05:00

The three fundamentals of any good picture are simple: timing, location, and light. In other words, good photographs are made by being in the right place, at the right time, with the right light. When those three elements are lined up perfectly, all the photographer has to do at that point is frame the picture and shoot. However, none of these elements are terribly easy to manipulate on their own, not to mention getting them together at just the right point in time. I've awoken before dawn and driven at high speed a hundred miles to get just the right light on the famous Ship Rock Peak in New Mexico, only to have the sunrise obscured by clouds at the last moment.

And I've driven past this old gold stamping mill on I-70 just outside of Idaho Springs a dozen times and not liked the light. Because the mill is in a gulch, it is either in the shadows most of the time, or glaringly flat at high noon when the sun can shine straight down, hardly ideal lighting conditions for the rich color that the rusted old hulk deserves.

But once again, Photoshop comes to the rescue. Above is my version after playing with the color balance and brightness/contrast controls. Below is the original version.

And just so you know what I missed, here is the shot I did get of Ship Rock, although it's not the one I had in mind when I broke camp at Canyon de Chelly much earlier that morning.

Photoshop Revisited

2008-02-29T16:26:00.002-05:00

As with all artistic endeavors, there are multiple ways of performing a task and multiple values to be applied. Photoshop compounds this complexity because of the many tools it offers, many of which to some degree duplicate each other but which when used individually and skillfully do produce distinct different effects. Looking again at my rendition of my Taiwanese friend, Meiu, in the previous post, I went back to Photoshop and worked with the Color Balance tool to separately adjust the colors for the highlights, midtones and shadows. I think the results are a little less "garish," a little more subtle, and a little more true to life than that accomplished in the previous post with just the Hue/Saturation tool, which does not distinguish between highlights, midtones, and shadows.

To easily compare all three versions, click, here. The first image is the new one, using the color balance tool; the second image is using the Hue/Saturation tool; the final image is the picture as directly scanned from its original negative. Click here to compare all three images. I think the first, adjusted with the Color Balance tool, is the best, now, because I could correct and change all three lighting "levels" of the image individually.

I did a slight further adjustment with the Brightness/Contrast tool also, which brings up another point: correcting your images really requires subtle manipulation of several of Photoshop's tools in conjunction with each other.

Photoshop Excess?

2008-02-27T09:55:00.002-05:00

Photoshop sometimes puzzles me because there is so much you go can do with it artistically that I'm not sure where the lines between reality and imagination get blurred. But maybe that's the whole point of art – to continue to push the envelope of visual experience. For example, I don't really consider myself a creative photographer. I feel I'm quite competent and can take excellent pictures given the right subject, location, timing and light. But there is nothing edgy or avant-garde about my photos, whereas I admire this streak in others.

That said, however, with Photoshop I can look at my old photographs and recreate the mood I was in when I took or rather saw the picture I had in mind. Such is the case with this picture of one of my best models ever, a lovely, articulate young Taiwanese woman named Meiu (pronounced May-you) whom I knew well in Germany while I was a US Army Signal Corps photographer there in the early 1970s. What you see in the first photo is what I "felt" as I took the picture. What you see in the second, below, is what the film actually captured. The difference is my own imagination and the Hue/Saturation control in Photoshop. My question, though, is have I gone overboard, or have I indeed recreated not just a visual image but also a visual feeling (if there is such a thing)?

Ode to Photoshop

2008-02-19T12:53:00.002-05:00

The more I use Photoshop the more I'm amazed. The power of the image tools equals the power of the photographer's imagination. Oh so often I've seen exactly the picture I want, at least in my mind's eye, only to return with a picture that is dark, muddy, lacking in color saturation and contrast, and cluttered. Such is the picture above – of the famous Mayan cemetery at San Juan Chamula in Chiapas, Mexico.

Below, though, thanks to the cropping, hue/saturation, and brightness/color tools of Photoshop, is the picture I saw in my mind when I snapped the shutter.

The Power of Photoshop

2008-02-13T08:24:00.009-05:00

This image is scanned from a very old negative, one which was never well exposed in the first place. Taken in the early 70s in southern France, the image is of a “menhir,” one of the many great standing stones left cross Europe by Celtic and pre-Celtic culture. Many of course have been lost to war, farming and road construction. Notice how this one has been turned into a Christian symbol – probably hundreds of years ago. Early Christians were afraid of these pagan monuments and attempted to ward off their “evil” spells by carving a crucifix or other Christian symbol into the sacred stone.

The negative is heavily photoshoped, both in terms of contrast, lightness and color. The screen dumps below show how I isolated the stone for specific contrast and light manipulation; and I did the same to the meadow in the background. Click here to see a PPT that shows the before and after effects.

I even changed the color balance in the meadow behind the stone.

Below is the original version.

Large Format Photography

2008-02-09T14:51:00.000-05:00

Although 35mm photography was a boon to photojournalism, a large amount of detail was lost as cameras got smaller. A negative not much larger than a large postage stamp simply couldn’t contain the same amount of information as negatives such as the 8 by 10 inch format represented by this picture of Notre Dame Cathedral which I took in the early 70s. The problem has been remedied, however, thanks to the advent of modern digital photography. Now with a palm sized Nikon camera, I’m taking pictures than contain 10 megabits of information per inch, producing ultra sharp images on par with what could be contained in a page sized negative.

But back to the 8 by 10 inch negative printed above, look at the incredible amount of detail – you can see the copper plates on the cathedral rook; the flying buttresses look like sharp knives holding up the nave; and look at the detail in the stone work around famous rose window on the south façade.

However, as much fun as my J210 class had printing this picture, I have to admit it was even more fun when I took it home and scanned it and manipulated the image in photoshop. Below is the pre-photoshoped version – muddy and lifeless. For PPT comparison, click here.

In the Darkroom

2008-02-09T13:17:00.000-05:00

We developed this print in my J210 Warsaw class last week as part of a lesson on the history of photography. We’ve gotten as far as the camera obscura and camera lucida of the Renaissance and are sort of bogged down there as we try to get our own pinhole cameras to work. I’m trying to show the class how the next step was the development of fixed images using silver based salts. It’s hard of course to talk about one element of photography without talking about all the elements that go into a good picture, such as composition and lighting. A concurrent theme running through the class is the ethics and power of modern photo manipulation tools such as Picasa and Photoshop. This is appropriate on several levels, one simple one being that you can’t talk about lighting without talking about contrast.

I like the picture above because it is a useful example of several of the concepts I was trying to get across during our little darkroom episode. For one thing, the picture is part of my extensive collection of 8 by 10 inch negatives. I was able to pass around the class several examples, and because these negatives are so large, the students can more easily understand how the light activates and clumps the silver in the negative, turning that area of the negative black. And of course, just the fact it was taken with a camera so much larger and bulkier and heavier than today’s digital cameras fascinated the students. The picture also has historic value, in that it is nearly 40 years old and large format photography is rapidly fading out of existence.

And, as you can see here, the image is a careful study of light, form and composition similar to the painted nudes of the late Renaissance artists and early Impressionists. One of the concepts I’m trying to get across to my students is that photography (and all art) is part of a larger conversation carried on by all who have practiced this craft in the past, those who are practicing it now, and those who will practice it in the future. I entered the conversation at Duke University in 1966 when I took my first Art History class. I continued the conversation when my wife and I visited nearly every major cathedral and ever major museum in Europe during the early 70s. And I continue that conversation today as I talk to my students and my photojournalist son, Ben Weller, and as I seek out new photographers on the web such as the amazing work of Brazilian economist Sebastiao Salgado.

My nude mage is also useful as a classroom demonstration tool because it illustrates an effective use of light (with the only light being the sidelight through the window into an otherwise dark room), the light balance (contrast) is easily manipulated in photoshop. In the image below, I increased both the lightness and the contrast, a net effect which tends to darken the picture but gives the woman greater highlights on her skin while reducing the slight “muddiness” of the original version. What’s neat about having the darkroom set up, is that I can talk about how I could manipulate the picture with polycontrast filters, exposure times and dodging and burning - the students seem fascinated by the darkroom process.

For a PPT version that shows with the click of a mouse the differences between the original version and the Photoshopped version, click here.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that we can talk about this picture in terms of the “rule of three” – the image has just three major components: the woman, the window and plant, and the dark interior of the room above and behind her. These three elements are carefully placed and balanced in this picture.

Photoshop Ethics

2008-02-07T09:59:00.001-05:00

This week my J210 class is continuing our discussion of “Photoshop Ethics.” We are maintaining this discussion in the context of who makes decisions about what is “true” and who determines what we think of certain issues, such as the “standards” for “beauty.” The two are closely intertwined, because with the advent of Photoshop , any discussion of “beauty” takes on a new, digital meaning (just take a look at the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, for instance). So, once again, the question becomes, who is setting the “standards,” and why?

In this limited space, I don’t want to go into a diatribe on advertising and on post-capitalism, I instead just want to point back, to the power of Photoshop. I chose this image (which I’ve already used in its original version in a blog post much further down) because it sets the tone for any discussion on the relation between advertising capitalism and body image and “beauty.” I’ve always liked the mage, a street scene in New York City near Chelsea Market, because of its composition and subtle multiple messages. But it wasn’t’ a sunny day, and the original image as picked up on my digital camera was not particularly “snappy.” Enter Photoshop.

So, the question becomes, am I “cheating” because I enhanced the image to make it more closely match what I had in mind when I framed it? My students pondered this question too in their homework this week, and I particularly enjoyed Justin Mort’s own wrestling and research on the issue. Justin turned to the history of photography to make his points, which is very cool in my mind because I always like to say that history sets us free – it’s is our roadmap to the future. Without knowing what went before, we can’t possible prepare for what’s ahead (clearly a left-leaning extremist Liberal traitorous unpatriotic pinko view to the Current Occupant and his evil twin Darth Cheney).

I think the consensus I’m hearing is that when it is art, the photographer is in charge; but when it is journalism, the rules are more fixed.

The Information Age: Avoiding the Chaos

2007-12-05T18:49:00.000-05:00

The advent of the World Wide Web and the concurrent explosion of instant access to information in literally overwhelming and mind-numbing quantities reminds me of our first reaction to computers and hard drives: some of us actually thought we could end the paper clutter in our lives, whereas in reality most of us just went out and bought high-speed printers and ended up with more, not less paper. The same has held true with my hard drive space (not to mention the soft drive space in my head) – I have so many files in so many folders I hardly know how to find the important ones anymore.

Enter PowerPoint. An organizational tool by nature, PowerPoint, with its hyper-linking capacity, is a great way to organize a collected group of files. By placing the files in question in your IPFW users web space, one can have instant access, from any location around the world, to documents, sound files, image files and a/v files through one simple portal: a PPT designed specifically to organize and display these files.

Such is the case with the PPT above, a presentation developed to showcase my best Internet teaching practices and their justification. Just click on the image and enjoy.

Shadows and Highlights

2007-11-06T20:15:00.001-05:00

I’ve always liked this photo, both because of its very flat depth of field and also because of the lighting – a special hue because of the rain and because, well, because, this is France (it’s not an accident that most Impressionist painting was done in France, with its nearly supernatural light).

But the slide (in this case Kodachrome II, which accounts for the wide aperture setting that produced the out of focus background) never seemed bright enough to me, despite the wet glow of the highlights.

But hats off to Photoshop CS3, with its sophisticated and automatic Shadow/Highlight tool:

Artistic License

2007-11-06T19:01:00.000-05:00

If you been to Venice you know it is everything it is cracked up to be and more: historical, vivid, smelly, crowded, colorful, exotic, old, and most of all, romantic in the sense that just around the next corner is something wonderful you’ve never seen before but always imagined.

Such was the case in 1971 when my wife and I crossed one of the 100s of narrow bridges that lock together this storied city and espied this water taxi taking its Venetian occupants to their next destination. Lucky in timing, I caught the gondola as it moved out of the shadows of a narrow canal and into a sunlight water thoroughfare. Pictured below is what I saw.

But the next picture is what I imagined: with the filtering controls of Photoshop CS3, specifically the Pixelate>Pointilize tool, an “impressionist” rendering of Venice springs to life. Maybe this is not the picture I took, but it is the picture of my “mind’s eye” at that moment. Could Seurat or Monet have done any better?