Jim Lovell is a landscape photographer based in Hobart, Tasmania. Jim's recent work has been focused on capturing the essential elements of the Tasmanian landscape using long exposure techniques.
Something that took me a while to get used to when moving from film to digital was that it no longer costs anything to take a picture. That's a great freedom. With digital photography you're free to experiment with different compositions, camera settings, lighting etc. As you do this, you learn what works and what doesn't and the experience pays off. So the hint this week is to just take lots of photos!
The other benefit is that when you've got a moving target or targets, like a family group, you can just keep taking photo after photo. Many of the resulting pictures will be poor with someone squinting or pulling silly faces, but chances are there will be some good ones too. So keep the good ones and discard the rest. Easy.
A selection of photos taken of my 4 and 6-year old kids recently. The 'hit rate' was pretty low: I was happy with only a few of the 30 or so photos taken. But that's OK, I can delete the ones that didn't work and it costs nothing.
When we take a photo, we tend to concentrate on the main subject and not think too much about the surroundings or the background. Then, later on we look at the picture and realise we placed Uncle George right in front of a lampost and it looks like it's growing out of his head! Similarly, when taking a landscape photo, we might be concentrating on getting a good picture of a mountain but not notice the garbage bin in the foreground. This hint is all about avoiding these situations.
Some of the best images are the simplest ones, with nothing to distract from the subject. A painter has the option of leaving things out from a scene by simply not painting them. In photography, the camera captures everything, so it's necessary to make the camera see just what you want and leave out the rest.
There are various ways to achieve this. If you're taking a photo of a person, you can put them in front of a plain background or set the camera to a large aperture (i.e. a small f number) so that the image will be in focus on the person's face but the background will be blurred. Like this:
In this photo I've used a plain background (a grassy bank) and made it even less of a distraction by using a large aperture to throw it out of focus. Your camera may have a portrait mode which will attempt to do this for you automatically. Or you can use aperture priority and set a wide aperture (check your camera manual) . If you have a zoom lens, use a long focal length (zoomed in) as this will also help keep the background out of focus. Be careful though not to make the aperture too wide as you might find only parts of the subject's face are in focus. In general, portraits need to have the eyes in focus at least.
For landscapes you obviously can't move the subject, so you have to move the camera to a good location. When framing the picture, look for any distracting objects and move around or zoom in a bit to try and avoid them. For this one, I wanted to capture a still misty morning on Dove Lake near Cradle Mountain:
Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain
If you have a tripod, you can experiment with longer exposures. This can have a very nice effect on water or cloud, smoothing it out and simplifying the image. Sometimes the bright or contrasting colours in a scene can be a distraction. Try converting the image to black and white.
Sometimes foreground objects are great for providing context or for leading the eye into the scene, in which case you want to keep them in but have them in the right place. That's a topic for another time...
One of the things I like most about digital photography is that there's no film: pressing the shutter button costs nothing. This means you're free to experiment with camera settings, composition and lighting and you can see the results immediately. I bought my first digital camera way back in 2002 (it had a whopping 2 megapixels!) but I learnt a lot from books and on-line, and by just taking lots of photos.
This post is the first in a series that summarises some tips and techniques I've pick up over the years, things I wish I'd known when I started playing with digital cameras 9 years ago. The first one is a simple rule that can really help improve the composition of a photo: the Rule of Thirds.
Rule of Thirds
Images generally look better if the main subject is offset from the centre, and in many cases the Rule of Thirds can be used to help decide on the best composition. When looking through the viewfinder, imagine that the frame is divided into a regular 3 by 3 grid, like this:
Try composing the photo so that the main subject is at the intersection of a pair of these lines and/or one of these lines follows the horizon. Here's an example:
Note how the horizon follows the lower one-third line and the brightest part of the sky is lined up to intersect with a vertical one-third line. For a landscape, deciding where to put the horizon depends on what the photo is about. In the case of this photo, it's obviously the dramatic stormy sky at sunrise, and the sun beginning to break through the clouds. In the following example, it's the amazing reflections in the water on a very still morning:
Mt Rugby Reflections, Bathurst Harbour
The horizon is placed near the upper line, leaving plenty of room for the reflections. And here's an example of a portrait of my son taken using the rule of thirds with his face on a vertical one-third line:
I put his face on the left line so that his shoulders were turned in toward the centre of the frame. It's usually good to have the subject turned toward or moving into the centre of the image. The photo would have looked odd on the right hand line in this case.
In fact many cameras and camera phones give you the option of overlaying a 3 by 3 grid over the live view of the scene. It's worth turning this feature on if you have it so you can line up on the grid.
One last thing: rules were meant to be broken! While the rule of thirds works well in many cases, it may not for every situation. Some very striking images can be made with the subject dead centre.
