Tag Archives: cropping

Alternative aspect ratios

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Bruce Percy, one of my favourite photographers, posted another interesting entry on his blog a few days ago. As you may know if you’ve read other entries on my blog, he is not only a gifted photographer, but also offers brilliant photography workshops. This particular blog posting was (provocatively) called “Abolish 3:2 (35mm)” and discussed aspect ratios: the size/shape of the viewfinders and resultant images in cameras. From the early days of 35mm film cameras to today’s DSLR cameras (as well as most compacts etc.), the format has stayed the same: all images are a multiple of 3 x 2. This makes for relatively long images, horizontally or vertically, but it’s not a very “natural” format, particularly for landscape imagery. After all, we don’t see the world in this way: our (peripheral) vision is much broader than this, and we see more in all directions. I have to say that I think the 3:2 format can work well for portraits because it can be used for the length of the human body. But for landscapes, a “squarer” format often tends to work better, either a real square (i.e. with sides of exactly the same length) or nearly square (such as 4×5 or 6×7 or similar). One of things Bruce tries to encourage is visualisation: “seeing” the image as you want it to be, even before you squeeze the shutter. He’s written quite a bit about this in his ebooks too (especially in “The Visual Sense“). His blog posting was picked up by others (for example, The Photographer’s Ephemeris and then Tim Parkin, and a lively discussion took place about all this (on Twitter).

However, it is not always easy to visualise in a different aspect ratio to the one the camera offers. Tim Parkin pointed to a product that did this for his DSLR (though Tim is mostly a large format, not a DSLR photographer). That seemed like a good idea, but even if it were available for my camera, it seemed like an unnecessary expense to a poor person like me, so here is my version of the same thing for my Nikon D90, manufactured at great expense (er… yes… that is a wonky piece of card I’ve cut to size and jammed in behind the plastic cover of my screen…):

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

It does present problems when I want to see all the settings, as some of the key menu options are hidden under the bottom piece of card:

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

Nonetheless, once I remembered to use the “liveview” function on the camera rather than composing through the viewfinder, it did change how I went about composing: rather than guessing at what a 4×5 ratio image would look like, I could really see it on the screen. It is stating the obvious to note that it does make quite a difference to see the image in the proportions I am ultimately aiming for - even if I intend to crop the image later.

4x5 template for D90

4x5 template for D90

Of course, what I want next is a quick and easy way to convert this template to a square format.

And for my film camera… er… I can see the argument for a new investment coming…

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Lightroom 3′s lens correction feature

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It’s bit geeky, but I’m very excited by the arrival of Adobe’s Lightroom 3, which was delivered this morning (although Adobe clearly got very confused about delivery - they initially said it would come yesterday, then it was predicted for the end of the week at the earliest!). I know that many people have been trying out the pre-release beta, but I didn’t have the time to play with that and hope to make it all work consistently, so I’ve been waiting for the full release.

I installed it this afternoon and tried out a couple of new features, and the most impressive for me so far is the lens correction facility. For a whole series of lenses (mostly Canon and Nikon, of course, reflecting most people’s usage) there are pre-programmed profiles, and for my Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR DX the correction really seems to get it right! I’m sure more lenses will be added over time; it’s also possible to create your own profiles for less common lenses (this doesn’t seem too complex, but I haven’t yet tried it).

I would offer a couple of my own images here to demonstrate how it works, but this short video from Adobe does a better job of explaining it all than I could. The crop tools are the same as in Lightroom 2, so if you know that you might want to skip the first little bit, but from about 5 minutes in, the video does a great job of showing how buildings (for example) can quickly and easily be ‘re-straightened’. Of course, this has always been possible in Photoshop, but doing this in Lightroom in this way is so incredibly easy: not least since multiple images can be dealt with at once without opening each image in Photoshop. And because all Lightroom edits are non-destructive, it is easy to undo/adjust any changes (incidentally, I almost always only ever make changes to virtual copies of my images - that way the original is readily accessible in case I want to take a completely different developing approach).

I don’t expect this to be perfect in all circumstances, but it will work in many. The nice thing is that this will go some way to ‘rehabilitating’ my 18-200 zoom, which I was beginning to only use at around 24mm because that is the only time when straight lines really come out as straight.

So for me, the lens correction alone makes the upgrade to Lightroom 3 worth the investment!

Coping with the rain

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(Stefanie, this one’s for you!)

It rained a lot over the weekend in Torridon. A LOT. Even by damp Scottish standards, there was an excessive amount of rain, and rain in Scotland, as I suggested in my second post about the weekend, has magical properties. Waterproof raincoats are sometimes tested to their limits in Scotland (perhaps it ought to be a legal requirement that all jackets sold as ‘waterproof’ need to have spent at least a couple of days in a proper Scottish downpour before they’re allowed to be described as ‘waterproof jackets’!). But even if you have a jacket that is waterproof, eventually, water still manages to get everywhere - if it’s not rain, it’s rain and sweat! This summer I walked up Ben More on Mull, and it rained almost continuously all the way up and all the way down - about 5 or 6 really miserable hours. I was quite literally soaked through to the skin, to the extent that after I drove back to the house, the car seat ended up being rather damp (but most importantly, both my cameras were safe… I had them wrapped in plastic bags!). Whenever I felt the downpour ease off a bit, I opened my jacket to take a camera out and catch a photo (none of which were any good!). This naturally let in rain, and combined with sweat, the waterproof jacket really couldn’t help me. In Torridon at the end of October, I found that my jacket was ok, but water ran up my sleeves every time I reached out to adjust camera settings - despite the jacket’s elasticated lining on the wrists. And water came in through the pocket area of my waterproof trousers (ha! damp-proof trousers would be a more accurate description!), and and and… like I said, magical properties!

But one of the things that the weekend confirmed for me about cameras in the rain is that rain really shouldn’t be something to stop you creating photographs: although there are special waterproof camera housings that allow easy access to the camera controls whilst allowing the lens free access to the open air, I have found over the years that for most circumstances, a completely clear plastic bag and some strong elastic bands also works: put the camera inside the bag, put the elastic bands round the front of the lens just behind any filters that you’re using, if necessary tear a small hole in the bag to allow the tripod mount to be used (I can just jam my tripod head into the camera holder without doing that - it tears the bag by itself), and you’re done! If you are using a zoom lens, make sure it can move forwards far enough, and you can then take your photographs (if your lens doesn’t have internal focusing, the front of the lens will probably turn when you focus - make sure your elastic bands don’t prevent this, especially if you’re relying on the delicate autofocus motors). The viewfinder will be blurred by the bag, but you’re mostly using it for rough composition in such circumstances: precise cropping can be done later. Take care when removing the bag after the rain - you don’t want to spill water from it onto the camera, defeating the object of protecting the camera in the first place!

The other thing you will need is very absorbent soft tissue for wiping down filters/lenses. Using very soft paper towels from a hotel bathroom works well, or try very soft kitchen roll (the key thing is that you need to avoid using anything that might scratch the delicate glass). I find that if the rain is heavy, I wipe down the filter and - using my remote control - immediately take the photograph. If you haven’t got a remote control, get one - my Nikon one was about £10 and it is invaluable; I’m sure Canon offers something similar.

Why bother with all this? Very simple: when it’s raining the light is often really soft and gentle, with lots of gradual changes in tone and colouration. I think it is such a shame to miss it that for a long time now I have always had a clear plastic bag and elastic bands with me in my camera bag. Especially useful in Scotland…

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3

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We were out again early this morning. The day looked like this:

  • 6:30 meet in hotel lobby, out to location
  • 9h return for breakfast
  • we then had time for washing/packing up (we needed to check out of the hotel room)
  • 11h image critique
  • followed by lunch and departure.

Bruce took us to a new location, near Shieldaig (upper Loch Torridon), overlooking water, with quite a steep hill rising up from the shoreline of Loch Torridon. My first reaction was to think: ‘Why did he take us here? Those trees are in the way!’ I realised I was a bit disgruntled about this, and wandered around at first not finding anything I could imagine as an image. I find I often do this: pace up and down looking for an angle, a view, something that is unusual and stimulating that will grab me. But I wasn’t finding it on this occasion. I went down the hill and to the right to avoid the trees, but the view just felt bland - another set of grey mountains with water in front, so very typically postcard Scottish, and at that moment for me, completely boring. So I headed left, nearer to the shore, and this brought me closer to the trees. I was trying to look through them at the view behind, to see if there was any point in climbing up the hill again and looking over the trees. Nothing. As I was stumbling about looking through the trees and muttering away to myself in frustration, I suddenly realised that looking through the trees was just what I ought to be doing. I found myself facing two trees that were distinct and separate from the rest (i.e. the branches were not intertwined). They were also leaning left, which I liked: we often think that moving right ‘leads the eye in’ (see for example, Ken Rockwell’s stair images entitled ‘McCloud, California’ about 3/4 down the page; he shows the image facing both ways), and many of my photographs reflect this. But I think the orientation to the right only works because we read left to right, whereas for readers of, for example, Hebrew and Arabic, this doesn’t necessarily make sense, and given my academic research topics, I felt this spoke to me on that level too. The mountains across the loch formed a ‘v’ just in the middle of the image, balancing the ‘v’ formed by the tips of the trees in the foreground - and so this is the image that I came up with (note that, following yesterday’s post about cropping, this is very slightly cropped at the sides, but otherwise works in the 35mm format):

Torridon

This was my second image of the day, and after taking it I thought, ‘well, it won’t get any better than this, I should stop now…’ - but I didn’t! After my initial disgruntlement and frustration, I felt tremendously moved by the beauty of the light, and began to see all sorts of other patterns:

Torridon

The trees on either side seem to me to be reaching towards each other, forming an upside-down ‘v’, almost like a classic child’s drawing of a house. The other trees in the centre are smaller, almost as if they are in the ‘house’. Bruce later pointed to the four ‘quarters’ in the image that balance each other - I hadn’t consciously seen this, but he’s right, of course. By this stage, I was elated - I realised that even if the images on the tiny screen on the camera had been out-of-focus, I had seen something I thought was special. It’s an interesting issue: here I was, trying to capture an image on a camera not knowing if it would work, but knowing also that even if it didn’t, I would remember this image without the camera’s help. It’s a way of internal visualisation that I will want to explore further at some point, perhaps here.

Bruce came over to me a while later, once I was on the shore line, wrestling with another image, of which more in a moment. He looked at the first of these two images on my screen, and was delighted for me, exclaiming: ‘This is the kind of photograph I always want to take and I never manage it.’ Now although I’m sure that’s not really true, it gives me the opportunity to reiterate something about Bruce: I hope I’ve already communicated something of Bruce’s genius with imagery - but he’s also a genuinely warm and generous person. This is something I felt again and again over the weekend, and although I point to this in a context of his praising my image, I don’t do so to show off (well, ok, maybe I do just a little bit…!), but to say that I saw this repeatedly in his interactions with all the other participants. If you’re thinking of going on a course like this, Bruce will make you feel really welcome, and it will be an affirming and uplifting experience - guaranteed!

The image I was struggling with when Bruce came over to me is this one:

Torridon

Or rather, this is what it became. I felt I wasn’t capturing the mountain behind the first one, which, especially on the right side, looked in part as if it was a shadow of the foreground mountain, but Bruce assured me I was on the right lines. I was sure this could be cropped - it had lots of sky that wasn’t ‘doing’ anything, but I felt I wasn’t really getting the detail in the more distant mountains that I wanted. I knew I wanted this to be black and white, but needed somehow to make that ‘shadow’ appear in order to provide the continuous line of the second mountain that I could so clearly see. Once back at the hotel, I offered this along with the previous two images for critique. From this session, and Bruce’s earlier comments, I was reminded of the complete inadequacy of the screen on the back of the camera, even when zooming in on the image, because the shadow is clearly there, but was barely visible on the camera’s screen. And the lesson is: trust that most of what you can see in the landscape can be seen by the camera, even if it sees it quite differently (note to self: I never doubted this kind of thing with film, so the screen is actually hindering me here! In a different context over the weekend, Bruce mentioned photographers he knows who tape over the screen on their digital cameras and just trust their instincts). In Photoshop, I cropped this down, developed the tones just a fraction, and turned it into a black and white image.

After lunch, we all got ready to depart. Before we did, Bruce gave each of us a large brown envelope - without saying more than that ‘it doesn’t contain banknotes’, he just made sure everyone had one. It was only when I arrived home that I found out what was in it… but I’ll leave the discussion of that for the fourth post about this trip, which I intend to write in a couple of days time, after I’ve had a little more mental space to digest what I’ve learnt, what the experience did for me, and so on. However, I hope you’ve gathered that I have had a magical weekend, in the company of and under the guidance of a tremendously creative, passionate and generous teacher and fellow traveller, and accompanied by five other participants who brought light (in all ways!), energy and laughter to the creative process. Many of their images were fantastic too, and I found myself thinking tonight how nice it would be to have a little online gallery somewhere with one of each of our images, even if that is somewhat impractical.

P.S. I did, of course, have a film camera with me (guess which one!), but found that I only used it a couple of times. I think I was concentrating too much on using the digital camera in order to make images that could be critiqued. Insha’allah I’ll be back to Torridon with a film camera to make many more images.

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 2

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Day two of our course began very early. Here’s an approximate breakdown of my day:

  • get up 5:30
  • out 6h (rain)
  • ca. 6:20 arrive on location (a LOT of rain) - we are at Loch Clare
  • waiting in the van
  • rain clears a bit, returning intermittently; we’re out, taking photographs
  • back to the hotel and breakfast for 9h
  • out to another location shortly after 10h - this time Loch Torridon
  • more photos, more rain - then lots more rain (run back to minibus)
  • new location (no rain)
  • ca. 13h rain
  • at Bruce’s suggestion, we decide to return to the hotel and have lunch
  • 14h everyone chooses two photos to critique
  • 15:30 out for sunset
  • periods of heavy rain, and beautiful calm
  • moon photographs (visible for exactly 25 seconds - see below!) and more
  • return to hotel
  • 18:30 in the bar
  • 19h dinner
  • and then blog writing and bed!

An excellent day, though a long one… and I think all six of us felt that.

When out, we all wandered off in our own direction, photographing what we saw. Bruce knows the area, and chose locations that he had either photographed in the past, or that he knew would offer something tangible for us to photograph (after all, this weekend is about learning techniques etc., not about photographing something that has never been photographed before - though, of course, each of us returned with very different images from each location). He then made a point of going to each person and reviewing some of their photographs (we’re all on digital this weekend to help with the teaching process, though I am not the only film shooter here), talking through how they were approaching their imaging, what might work differently, ways to deal with particular compositional or lighting problems, suggesting alternative perspectives, exposures and so on. For example, I have often felt that the metering on my Nikon D40 was out, and have therefore almost always had the exposure compensation set at -2/3. Bruce discussed this with me at length and demonstrated, even on the crappy wee screen at the back of the camera, that this resulted in problems with my shadow detail (lesson: there is a difference between dark and moody… and just dark). I realise that this is also partly Bruce’s style - I sometimes think that although he describes himself as a landscape photographer, I wonder if this not more of a convenient label: his images are often not really landscapes, but images of light that is transformed in some way through reflection, absorption etc. in the encounter with the land. That is what attracted me so much to his art in the first place, and so I have no objection if even a tiny fraction of this sensibility rubs off on me.

I want to describe some images. After breakfast we went to Loch Torridon. Bruce drove us quite high up, and we took photographs overlooking the loch, towards the mountains around the water. In the foreground, there were substantial erratics (a new term I learnt: these are the rocks that have been brought to their present location by glaciers that have long since vanished, leaving just the rocks in their incongruous locations), and Bruce wanted us to try and think about the use of foreground detail as well as background material. The wind was strong, it was raining, but despite water droplets dribbling down both sides of the filter, we managed some spectacular images. When Bruce came over to me, we talked about what I had been trying to do, and he asked me if I had turned and seen a particular tree; I hadn’t. He borrowed my camera, and took three or four photographs. He showed me the last one, pointing out the simplicity of the image, and the ways in which the mist isolated the tree from the mountain in the background, making for a very simple, but very powerful image of the tree. This is his photograph (which I post here and on my website with his permission):

Tree and mountain (Bruce Percy)

I liked this immediately, but also wondered about other ways of taking this photograph. I took several photographs, and ended up with this one:

Mountains and tree

Bruce’s photograph is undoubtedly fantastic (though he said he thought it was a little underexposed; without wanting to sound presumptuous, I’d agree - and also add that mine was underexposed too; I’ve corrected this a little here, but didn’t feel I should manipulate his photograph!). But I also like mine, bringing in more of the mountain outlines, setting a wider context, and offering a different role for the tree. In my image, I realised later, the tree almost serves as an anchor for the mountains, rather than the mountains doing that for the tree. It’s as if the majesty and grandeur of these incredible hills is given additional meaning by the tree’s inclusion in the image - although several times as tall as me, it is quite tiny in comparison to the massive mountains in the background - and thereby it perhaps helps to give a sense of the amazing landscape we were in. I also converted this to black and white, and cannot quite decide which I prefer - the subtle tones of the colours in the original, or the even more simple tones of the black and white (comments on this are very welcome!):

Mountains and tree

As we were driving back in really hard rain, Bruce slowed the minibus and pointed out the view. He asked if anyone wanted to photograph this, and two of us leapt out of the bus, getting ourselves and our dried off cameras wet all over again. This is the image I came up with:

Mountains, Torridon

I post it here as a kind of contrast to the tree/moutain images. Although I think this is beautiful, the large white expanse (that’s the mist…) in the bottom left corner decontextualises the mountains, making them almost more of an abstract series of lines than a mountain range. Although these are pretty much the same mountains as in the tree photograph, in this photograph there is nothing much that anchors them to the earth, and so the photograph becomes something quite different.

Undoubtedly the most useful part of the day was the critical review. We had very little time, but we each had to choose two photographs we had taken, and offer them for review (not easy to choose, when you have just a few minutes and are scanning 150 images!). Bruce had brought a projector and showed us our images on a large screen. We then explained what we had been trying to do, why the image was important to us, what we felt about how it had turned out, and so on. Other participants then offered comment, as did Bruce. This was in all cases incredibly positive and helpful criticism. Bruce then went through the images in Photoshop, and showed us simple and effective ways of manipulating them in order to bring out contrasts, highlights etc. There are many many ‘small’ things that I took from this, but the really major one that I took away was a reflection on image size: even when I crop my images, I tend to leave them in the original aspect ratio (i.e. based on a 35mm film image - perhaps this is a subcounscious desire to ‘retain’ something of the ‘original’? even though I know this is a nonsense), even though most images benefit from different shapes. I’ve often felt my images were too ‘long’, and this session radically opened my eyes to the more pleasing ratios of 4×5, 6×7, or 1×1 as well as arbitrary crops - you’ll see that nearly all the images from today on my website are now cropped in such a way, almost as if to make a point to me, never mind anyone else.

In the late afternoon, we went to another loch, Bruce hoping to offer us a location and a sunset for trying out some of the techniques we had talked about in the critique and other locations. It was very wet. Not just the loch from below, but also the clouds from above. I sometimes think that rain in Scotland must have magical molecular properties that other rain does not have… but more on that later! I went down to the edge of the loch, and also into the loch (very slight shoreline, so that wellies were more than adequate). It was cloudy and overcast, making for very soft light. No real sign of a sunset, but despite this, some of the resulting images were great. I was very pleased with my foregrounding of stones, for example, and the capture of the moonlight, which appeared once, for about 10 seconds, and I missed it; but I saw the clouds moving in such a way that it might reappear. It did, for precisely 25 seconds (I know this, because I took five images at 5 seconds each - and it was gone!). The image originally has the moonlight curving, which I think might be the lens’ barrel distortion (I’ll perhaps get around to correcting this at some point…):

Moonlight, Torridon

Bruce then took us all back to the hotel - and our first shower of the day! The dinner discussion in the evening was stimulating, covering the purpose of this kind of photography (one participant argued that it is to document reality/something ‘real’; Bruce asked if that was so, why was this person using a wide-angle lens?!), the processing stage (are images ‘doctored’ if they’re manipulated in Photoshop to bring out the highlights etc.?), Vettriano (is it art?), the BNP on BBC Question Time (should they have done/should they not have done?), free speech in a democracy, the Iraq invasion/war, the significance of 11.9.2001…