SIMPLE TIPS FOR BETTER PHOTOS 5 – DON’T RUSH YOURSELF, COME BACK TO THINGS WITH A FRESH MIND – AND COLLECT DATA

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This is the fifth in a series of posts, aimed at novice photographers, that discuss simple ways to enhance images.  The other four posts are here: ONE   TWO   THREE   FOUR   .  THREE might be the most worthwhile in a fundamental sense.

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DON’T RUSH YOURSELF!

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There’s no getting away from the facts – I enjoy creating images and I enjoy posting them onto my blog.  There’s the simply vast creative potential that digital photography brings – the potential to realise our visions! –  and then there’s the ability to send images out around the world at the touch of a button, to find out what like (and unlike) minds think of them.  Never has photography had it so good!

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But a real downer that has often happened to me is as follows.  I’ve been out with a camera since early in the morning, taken a stack of shots, got home and got them onto my computer, sat down full of anticipation and enthusiasm, looking forward to posting something from the day’s shoot – only to grind to a dead and dispirited, creative halt.

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As often happens, my wife got it right first time, with the simple “Maybe you’re tired”.  And I thought yes, maybe so, but that didn’t really make an impact.

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But reading Amateur Photographer magazine (22 March 2014 edition), something about this issue appeared, that really has hit home.  In an interesting interview, Jonathan Chritchley ( www.jonathanchritchley.net ), a well known photographer of the sea and many associated things, talked about his journey into photography and, three pages in, revealed the fact that, after going out on a salty shoot, he downloads the resulting images >>> and then forgets about them for several weeks!

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So that when he eventually returns to them, he is rejuvenated and fresh, and he has “a clear head”.  He talks of looking at these several weeks old images, almost as if they had been taken by someone else.

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As soon as I read this, I realised that, in most cases, its what I’ve been unconsciously doing all along.  I have posted the odd (and sometimes very odd …) shot directly after coming in from a shoot, but in most cases I’m going back to images captured long before – often very long before – and looking at them in a new light.

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So my messages here – following good sense from both my wife and Jonathan Chritchley – are to give yourself time, not to feel that you must rush things – and this goes both for processing your images, and for getting them out to the world.  And also to return to your images sometime – maybe a long time – after capture, when you may well see them in a new light and have new ideas about them.

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FOCUSING A THIRD OF THE WAY IN FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE SHOT

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And in the same interview, Jonathan Chritchley, spoke of something that I learned years ago, and largely do as a matter of routine now – focusing one third of the way into images, to maximise the depth of field.  This is obviously not something that works with every subject, but it is something to think about if you have depth in your composition – here is a link discussing this technique.

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DON’T FEEL THAT YOU MUST ALWAYS FINALISE YOUR IMAGES AT CAPTURE – COLLECT DATA!

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It has to be said that I’m a firm devotee of getting as much right at image capture as I can, and here I’m talking mostly about the technical sides of things – most importantly, focusing (or lack thereof), minimising camera movement (assuming I want to), and exposure, because I know that if I mess any of those things up, my image may be ruined or, at best, retrievable only after much hard work on my PC.

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I also like to have some sort of composition at capture too, the way I see what’s in front of me, how I’m hoping to present it, to display it.  And this done in the full knowledge of course of the vast and easily applied benefits that digital photography has brought to image cropping.  The ability to change an image’s format from the 35mm rectangle, to square, or letterbox-shaped, for example, and the ability to exclude unwanted things from the frame, either via cropping or erasing.

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But there also arise the occasions, of course, when looking at the contents of a shot, I decide to produce an image – or IMAGES NB – that are quite different to what I initially had in mind.  Ideas which will at once be met with howls of protest from those with more puritanical views that see no worth in a image unless it is pre-visualised pre-capture, and who insist that I must, pre-capture, already know whether I’m intending to present the image in black and white or colour.

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Well, if you want to go down that route that’s your choice and, as I always say, we are all different, not least in our visual and photographic preferences.  But I see no worth in those purist approaches, and I stick 100% with my mantra which is, “If an image looks good then it is good” – end of story!  It matters not at all whether the final image reflects my initial plans for it, I am simply happy to have produced something that I like.

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And this leads to something mentioned in Amateur Photographer magazine recently, where a budding photographer had an epiphany – a moment of true revelation – on being told that he shouldn’t see his photography as necessarily demanding that he create perfect pictures at capture but, rather, that he should see it as COLLECTING DATA – taking pictures of things that appeal to him, and then looking at them on his computer, to decide how he should frame and crop them, to decide their final appearance and qualities.

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And of course this approach encompasses the possibility that NONE of the images will be any good, such that you have to go out and try again, but this is not about the end of the world – it is all about gaining valuable photographic experience.

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And this approach does benefit from cameras with larger sensors, since they provide larger cropping potential – there’s simply more detail in the file to play with.

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FULL FRAME DIGITAL CAMERAS

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And finally, talking about cameras with larger sensors – and acknowledging that money is obviously a factor, although costs are coming down –  I would urge anyone reasonably serious about their photography to use a full frame digital camera, i.e. one with a sensor the same size as a frame of 35mm film – for two reasons.  First, obviously, the larger sensor captures more information, and so makes its files more amenable to the cropping techniques discussed above.

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But second, there is a rather less obvious point – that full frame sensors allow lenses to display their true, 35mm characteristics – in particular, depth of field (DOF) characteristics.  Because the smaller the sensor, the larger the DOF, which is great if you want everything in focus, e.g in some abstracts – but hell if you are looking for subtle differential focusing, e.g. only a child’s eyes sharp in an otherwise soft portrait.

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And of course smaller sensors cause focal length magnification – which is great if you’re looking to extend the reach of your telephoto, but not so great if you glory in the vast fields of view of wide angle lenses.  Let’s take Nikon’s DX format cameras, which have a focal length magnification factor of 1.5 . If you use a 24mm wide angle on a DX camera, it becomes (1.5 x 24) = a 36mm lens, substantially less wide angle.  But if you want to extend the reach of your 400mm telephoto, you can do it – (1.5 x 400) = 600mm!  It is of course possible to buy lenses made for this DX format, to give, for example, wider fields of view – but there still remains the fact that you’re ending up with a smaller image file. 

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