For some time my girlfriend has been wanting a digital SLR camera, finally at the beginning of this month we went to the shop, dropped some money and got ourselves an entry level Canon EOS 450D.
She really got moving with it, I shouldn’t wonder if she took a couple thousand pictures in the last few weeks. She’s been uploading some to her Multiply page, from a trekking trip to mountains of northern Thailand, a park in Bangkok and last weekend’s trip to Nakornprathom, not far from Bangkok.
I’m biased of course, but I think that she’s getting pretty good at it (though I still haven’t convinced her to shoot in RAW format). So what do you think? I’d like to relay her some advice from people here.
I’m no expert, but I think she’s well on the right track, there are some nice ideas in there.
However, what lets her down is a poor sense of composition. I think she needs to study that up, the easiest way being by going over some of the basic rules only, and comparing those rules with photographs she admires, so she can see how they apply and why that can make for a more pleasing image.
I second the composition remark. She too often puts the main subject of the photograph in the center of the frame. This makes for an ordinary, boring, snapshot-like photo. Anyone can take a picture of a pretty flower in the center of the frame. What makes this flower worthy of a 16 x 20 print hanging in a gallery?
Also, there are pictures of things (statues, for instance) where she cut the feet off. Why?
She’s beginning to be able to see, but she still needs to think in terms of lines and shapes and forms, and not just “oooh, that’s pretty.”
Ansel Adams was the master of composition, while taking pictures of very pretty things. Looking through his prints might be helpful.
All in all, though, she’s got a good start. Her “eye” seems good. Now she just needs some training.
I quite liked the pictures, and some show some promise as far as composition goes, e.g., this one, where the subject is certainly not centred in the picture, and this one, which has a similar tension drawing you away from the centre.
My suggestions as far as composition go are:
(1) move in on your subject (either by getting closer or by zooming in), and eliminate background that does not contribute to the picture. For example with this, I’d try to crop off as much of that grey and distracting road as possible.
(2) Play around with you pictures creatively. For example, with this, the horizon at a 45 degree angle works – but with this example, I’d try getting in close so you only see part of the bunch of flowers.
First off I would recommend this forum which is comprised of folks of all experience levels, most of which shoot with Canon gear. You can get plenty of critique there if you so desire, but it’s also a great resource for lurkers.
Does she have a tripod? If not, she needs one, and a program to process images and blend different exposures to avoid blown highlights like this. To really create a great image that is composed of dark foreground elements and a bright sky, you need multiple exposures.
There is definitely some creativity coming through in her photos; it looks like she’s off to a great start.
As far as composition goes, she might consider reading a book on photo composition. But I like what she has done. Lots of practice, which is easy and fun with digital, and doesn’t cost much.
I can’t offer much in the way of concrete advice but will take this opportunity to again provide this link which clearly underscores the importance of picture taking with and without flash.
For someone just starting out, I actually think it’s rather decent. Definitely better than average snapshots. The centered compositions don’t bother me so much – I don’t think it’s overdone in her work. However, she does need to watch her lines a bit more and pay attention to the edges of her frames and her backgrounds. I like the fact that she uses shallow depth-of-field a lot to focus attention on the subjects (although that may be a happy accident of using a macro mode or an auto mode with low available light). There are a few serious compositional issues in some of her photographs (like cutting off subjects at weird places–this is most likely because she is so focused on the subject that she forgets about the edge of her frame), but I can tell the pictures are made by somebody who is in the learning processes of “seeing” and has some innate ideas of how to compose a photograph. She seems to be doing well in getting close to subjects and not taking all her pictures with a wide angle from far away.
Also, the lighting in her photographs is pretty decent for someone starting out. There’s a few technical issues (focusing in some of the photographs), but, overall, not bad.
Composition is one of the most difficult things to learn, and, for me, the best way to learn it was to go and look at all the photos of the great masters, as well as paintings, advertisements, magazines, graphic novels – any visual artform – to get a sense of what has worked in the past. A book on composition is good to give you a reference point and a base “vocabulary” for analysis, but there’s no substitute for experience and visually analyzing your favorite artists.
Overall, what I see in the photos is somebody who is thinking about the pictures and not just snapping away willy-nilly. Composition needs refinement, yes, but as someone starting out, she’s off to a decent start.
Yes, she’s got comments about the composition of the shots from other people too. I’ll have to find a photography book for her to study the subject a bit better than I could explain myself.
Giles, thanks a lot for giving individual examples of things that work and things that need improvement.
Algorithm, yes, we have a tripod. A cheap tripod but still! Last time we went out to take pictures I carried it around but she didn’t use it. I just took a few HDR images to show her how to, but I haven’t gone around to compose them together yet. As for the example you link to, that’s one of the reasons I advice her to shoot in RAW format, I’ve taken a few pictures that look like that in 8bit RGB colour space but after shuffling things around in 14bit RAW the sky turns blue, and the colours shift to better hues.
It’s not as good as a real HDRI but it’s easier to snap a single picture.
I’ll take a look around those forums, it would be good to know how to get the most out of the camera we have.
Oh, yes, I agree she’s a nice thing to rest one’s eyes on.
Brilliant.
pullykamell, actually she shoots in aperture priority mode; so she chooses what f number to use depending on what result she wants. Like low aperture for a tight depth of field for close ups, higher f number for landscapes and very high ones to get lens flaring when shooting bright lights.
img 3212 is fantastic. It tells a story, the composition is good, exposure is good… Great shot.
Tell her to keep up the good work, and bring her camera with her everywhere!
(I recently bought the 1000D, the 450D’s little brother. Its a pretty nice camera!)
Another thing she should look into is something often overlooked, but all the professionals do it, and that’s post-processing.
Cropping to get a better composition, increasing (or decreasing) colour saturation, adjusting the “levels” or contrast to make things more vivid, and “sharpening”.
This is also something that takes time to learn, and should be used judiciously.
It’s good to hear that she is using aperture creatively and purposefully. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t think about it. She even knows about the really high apertures to get the star-burst lens flare. She’s either done some studying or a lot of experimenting.
Yes, the point on post-processing above is important. There’s nothing wrong with cropping after the fact to clean up your composition. While getting it full-frame is sort of a badge of honor among photographers, most of us crop a good percentage of our shots. Also, most photos could use a little contrast tweak and perhaps some dodging and burning (selective lightening and darkening of the image). Just don’t over do it, unless you really, really know what you’re doing.
Two days after buying the camera she took a class that dealt with composition and different kinds of subjects, architectural, portraits, etc. So she picked up some ideas there, like the one for the star shaped flaring of the Sun by using a very low aperture.
She does a little postprocessing, croping, adjusting colours, saturation, brightness, etc… Last weekend I showed her how to turn the image into black and white and play with the contrast, as in the picture CoG888 mentions.
By the way, Sand asks me if anyone would like to share some pictures, their own or some favourite by someone else. so she can learn from them.
Other than Ansel Adams (mentioned above), I’ve always found Henri Cartier-Bresson to be quite masterful in composition. He quite often would judge the composition of prints by turning them upside-down. His reasoning was, so far as I could tell, that when you turn an image upside down, you lose a sense of what it actually represents and you are better attuned to the compositional principles that frame it. I personally find it to be a useful technique when I’m having some difficulty in finding just the right “balance” in my photo.
Since I see an interest in flowers in the pictures, I would also very much recommend Imogen Cunningham’s work with this subject, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s take on it. Cunningham’s work I find more organic, Mapplethorpe’s more graphic and geometrical. Mapplethorpe was much fonder of of centered compositions, and they work in his work. “Rule of thirds” is a great guideline for beginners, but it’s the first compositional principle you throw out when you get a good grasp for it.
Yes, that’s the Robert Mapplethorpe. Other than his famous and controversial homoerotic work, he has a collection of (somewhat sexualized, in the same sense that Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings were sexualized) flower prints. He is a masterful photographer – impeccable lighting and composition, as well as subject matter.
She’s been at it again, went on the weekend to Hua Hin and snapped 600 or so pictures…
She already uploaded a bunch in this album. I think her composition skills are much better now, there are a few pictures that look very nice. I specially like the red bucket with the water reflections, very impressionistic.
So, what do you think?
By the way, as she explains (in thai) at the beginning of the album, the previous night she shoot some night (duh!) photos and set the ISO to 1600, but forgot to change it next day, so all the photos are a bit grainy.
