Julia's Secret Photographic Technique PART 5

[foxgrrl]

Composition

What you don't show in the frame is far more important than what you do show.

I see lots and lots of convention photos, where the photographer has used an ultra-wide lens to get an entire person in the frame, all the way from their head to their feet… But… nobody wants to look at those feet, they're just not interesting. You don't need to fit someone's feet into every shot with them. If the feet are interesting, then take a picture of the feet directly. Give everyone a good look at them, because when they're at the bottom of a person, in the center of the frame, you can't see them — you can't see that much else either. Choose what you want the subject of the photo to be, and only show that. Most people, being animals, find eyes and faces to be interesting. You won't go wrong using those as a subject.

Use a fast lens, at a wide-open aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.8 if you can) to blur out the background too. Nobody is interesting in the background, unless it is interesting. At a convention, the background is a hotel, which isn't as interesting as whatever drove you to take the photo.

The lens which I recommend for everyone to use is an f/1.4 50mm prime. To which most people say: "But! But! How will I zoom?!" The solution is very simple:

If you want to subject to appear larger, move closer to the subject.

If you want to subject to appear smaller, move away from the subject.

If you are at a party or convention, where you can hold a normal conversation with your subject, you don't need a zoom

Take these two photos for example:




I was speaking with veleda while I took these. For the close-up one, I moved myself and my camera closer to her. For the wider angle one^† I moved further away. If you could see that she was laying on a fold-up cot, near the ground, it would only detract from this photo. The subject is her, not where she's laying down.

You're not stuck in one place when you take a photo, move around.

In summary:

Showing less, is actually more. There is less to distract the eye and the mind from the purity of essence, of whatever it was you wanted to capture by taking the photo in the first place. Make your photo be about one thing, and one thing only. The totality of it's meaning should all be focused on it's message.

(I guess you could say "Take a picture, of what you're taking a picture of, and don't take a picture of what you're not taking a picture of.")

(Does anyone think that I should give a presentation on this stuff at FC? "How to take convention photos that don't suck")

---

† Technically, from a scientific-optical point of view, it's all the same angle: 50mm.

Comments

[netik.livejournal.com]

While you're absolutely correct on use of lens and zoom technique, there are some issues with these images.

* Your color/whitebalance is off. I'm looking at your images on a color-calibrated monitor and there's a definite yellow/green cast to the image and they are too dark.

* At 50mm/f1.4, the focus area is approximately 3-4 inches. Notice how on the left image her eye and forehead is in focus, and nothing else is? Going below f/4 (well, maybe you can get away with f/2.8 if you're using average AF focus) isn't going to get the entire face in focus. f/2.8 will provide plenty of Bokeh (that lovely blurred background effect) and give you more of the face in focus.

* In the second image, I'm trying to figure out how you managed to get red eye, and have the image come out too dark at the same time. Did you stop the flash down?

Aside from these problems, the composition is very good.

[katimonk.livejournal.com]

I always knew your photos were something special, this proves it just that much more. I never think of myself as photogenic, but *you* seem to do *something* to my pics so that even I like them! Neat techniques...I'd love to learn more!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Color calibration is a nightmare on the web. Last I checked, Firefox and IE both pretty much threw away any color profile image included in the image. Plus the usual Mac vs PC gamma issues may apply, depending on what you use.

There's definitely some colored lighting going on in the two images used as an example in this post, but the colors look fine on my Powerbook, and the contrast is fine.

[netik.livejournal.com]

Not to be exceedingly cranky here, but that's part of doing photography at low light levels - understanding how to produce a quality image with proper lighting, focus, and white balance under those conditions. I think foxgrrl's work is very good, but I'm offering examples to show that it's possible to get high quality images under bad or no light.

Case in point:

No flash, f1.4 @ 1/60th in a dark restaurant:



No flash, f2.8 @ 1/20th of a second (Image stabilized):