The other day I had discussion with friend and idea of creating summer
photo courses come to discussion. I had that idea for a longer time, but
never really though in details about it. As a professional trainer coach I
played with idea of giving photo lectures for some time. Also my last
article in Dutch ZOOM magazine was about giving feedback on people's
photos.
As we discussed my friend has pointed out that better than making a
specialize course for wanna be professionals, far better would be give some
two day course to holiday people. Show them how they can make their holiday
pictures far better. I like that idea very much. These day almost everybody
has a camera and there are very few technical limitation to capture an
image.
I am currently preparing first of such a course where I will show simple
ideas not only about how best to use your own camera, but also information
about composition, choosing a subject and way to aproach it. Basic ideas
about adjusting image on computer and practical picture taking with
personal advice at the time of shooting will be given. Than reviewing taken
images at the end of the day and giving personal advice.
I would appreciate if you could drop me a note with your though about
this. Plan is to have few of these lecture this summer already in NL, FR,
BE and possibly UK as well. Depends how I succeed to create contacts with
holiday places in those countries and they interest.
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Some time ago J., one of the regular readers of my web site send me two
images and ask me for opinion. I am taking this opportunity to give J,
feedback and showing you what could be part of the course. Here comes the
original image as I receive it:
When I look at an image, mine or from others, first think I
look at is
composition. Some basic issues are presented on this image.
- Assuming primary object, the dry out tree is placed in center. That
creates rather boring and common feel from the image. Is always better to
place primary subject not in center. There are always exceptions, but than
the subject and composition requires that. Here it is not the case.
- The disturbing tree on left side is usurping our attention. It is
keeping us from observing the primary subject and taking space. I learned
that photography is about making choices and removing things. At the point
when there is nothing to be remove without destroying the subject of the
photograph, image is final and ready to be published.
- For landscape shots like this it is alway good when sky and landscape
dividing the image horizontally to two no-equally big parts. 2:3 is
preferred. Here they are almost 1:1 and that creates again very common and
boring effect to the observer.
The image technical quality is the other item I look at when image is
chosen from compositional point of view. It means when I see that image has
potentional from the idea in it and in its own composition I judge the
technical level of the image to see if it can be adjusted to bring most of
the information.
- We see on this original image that foreground is very dark. Cause of
this very common problem is when camera measures light coming from light
background. Than it tries to avoid over exposure (which is unsuccessful on
this image - right upper corner). Lot of can be adjusted on computer, but
far better is to make first the best exposure we can. There are few methods
to do than. In this case I would suggest to move position of camera bit to
the right and point it to the left. By this tree on right side can be
avoided as well as bright sun from the same direction. Some more issues
could be resolved by changing of camera position. Using computer I lighten
foreground and darken the bacground
- As a result of underexposure the color saturation is suffering. Again
I aded a bit of that using computer.
Increasing of contrast is also very useful to bring a bit of life to the
image. As all of these adjustments this one particularly need to be used
carefully.
Now we see far better what can this image bring us. By simple crop we can
solve compositional problems mentioned in first part of this text.
Following is final image which place primary object out of the center and
removing disturbing tree on right side.
By cropping out part of the sky we divide image to two un-equal parts
between sky and landscape. This also remove burned out sky on right side of
the image.
I hope this is useful to some of you and I hope J. is not mad at me for
reworking her image. I would like to stress that all steps I did in post
processing can be done, with far better result at the time image was taken.
When one is going through process I just described often, it becomes
natural to thing same way at the time of taking picture. Post processing
can than give us other freedom to manipulate image in artistic way to
underline our own vision. About that I can write some other time.
--
I wish you all nice time .
