Commanding Exposure

Camera's light meter bases all of its exposure settings on 18% gray, an "average" tone somewhere in the middle between light and darkness. This is great for a majority of picture taking situations and is the reason the light meter is calibrated in this fashion. Understanding this gives us the ability to make an educated decision about whether to go with our camera's suggested exposure or to override it.

Subjects that are lighter or darker than "average" fool cameras and ultimately lead to exposure errors that can ruin even the most well composed photograph. Always consider the tone of the subject!


Exposure Strategies

Look for an average tone
If you find you find an average tone that is in the same light as your subject, take a meter reading from it and lock that reading in your camera then compensate the shot to include your subject. Fortunately for the outdoor photographer average tones abound: tree trunk, most rocks, green foliage and even most skin tones qualify.

Use a gray card
Available at most camera store, the gray card is just that, a card that is coated with a calibrated 18% gray tone often available in a variety of sizes. Take your meter reading off of this card but be sure that the card is in the same light as your subject. For obvious reasons, this is not always an option when photographing wildlife or other elusive subjects.

Use exposure compensation
Most cameras have this feature which allows you to adjust the camera's built-in light meter reading. For subjects lighter than average; exposure by setting the dial to plus 1/2 or plus 1 stop (or more depending on the subject). Darker than average subjects require a minus setting (some cameras have a chart that goes from -2 stops to +2 stops with intervals of a 1/2 or 1/3 stop).

Bracket
Extra insurance for tricky lighting situations and subjects. Bracketing your exposure means shooting over and under the exposure setting recommended by the camera (or the one you set manually). This can be crucial when shooting slide film where even minor exposure errors can result in an unusable image.

Extracted from an article written by Justin W. Moore

Breaking Composition Rules

One big lesson every beginner learns about photography, is that for each desired result, there is a required action. If we want a lighter image, we compensate exposure. If we want a sharper image, we adjust shutter speed, and so on. Understanding the technical side of photography, while not easy, is straightforward.

Another lesson learned in photography is that for composition, exactly the opposite is true. There are no rules to be followed or steps to be taken that can guarantee a well-designed photograph. That knowledge must come from within and for those image design is not intuitive, composition guidelines can be indispensable tools.


Understanding Composition Guidelines
Composition guidelines are loosely referred to as rules. They are, in reality, merely guidelines, proven design principles used by artist and designers to assist in the organization and creation of their work. Obviously, as visual artists, it is our right to compose our images any way we want and there are no hard and fast rules to which we are bound. But the guidelines help, and it is critically important to the diversity of our portfolios that we make the distinction between using them as rules and using them as tools.

Composition guidelines exist to help us organize the elements of a scene. They are suggestions for predictable results and should be used with discretion. When we start allowing guidelines to rule our work, our image themselves can become predictable.


When to Break Rules
Just as there are times where guidelines are helpful, there are times when they can be modified or ignored altogether. Knowing when to ignore the guidelines requires some experience, but the results can be quite dramatic and cause a photograph to shine above the crowd.

Some photographic artists can wield the guidelines as a sculptor and their clay. They blend their understanding of composition with personal interpretation, and sometimes technical experimentation, for magical results that often go beyond the realm of rules and guidelines. There are no formulas for achieving this wonderful ability; it must come from understanding.

Following are four images that have broken major nature and wildlife composition guidelines.

Guideline: Don't Center The Subject
In most circumstances, many skilled artist would dismiss a centered subject as amateurish and unimaginative. Centering a subject provides an average view of a scene and robs the image of uniqueness. For this shot, the concentric circles around the centered bird made the scene special.

The circles, the silky texture of water, the bird looking at the camera, and the subject's perky pose all contribute to the success of this classic bull's-eye composition. If the bird had been looking away from the camera, the image would have been acceptable, but much of its appeal would be diminished because contact with the subject would be lost.

Guideline: Subject Should Face The Camera
The tiny catch light in the young animal's eye was the sole reason for breaking one of the biggest guidelines in wildlife photography. It gives the rabbit a sweet, childlike quality while invoking thoughts of innocence and youth. With the animal looking into the distance, an imaginative person could interpret it as the baby looking at a brand new world with wonder and uncertainty, or maybe looking for its mother. Flash was not used to lighten the dark areas of the animal because by doing so would diminish the prominence of that all-important eye.

The tiny wildflower near its rump, also contributes to the charm of this photo. And finally, the out-of-focus flowers throughout the image mirror the shape and brightness of the main focal point. This creates a harmonious consistency and distribution of the shapes throughout the image.

Guideline: Leave More Room In Front Than Behind
A well-known guideline for animals that are looking left or right is that we leave plenty of space in front of the animal foe it to look in to. If we compose an image of a bird on a perch and the birds is on the right edge of the frame, but is also looking to the right, the bird would appear to be looking at the right edge of the frame; pretty boring and awkward. There is nothing for our imaginations to use to guess at what the bird could really be watching. Leaving space, depending on what is in that space, can give us a good idea of what the animal is looking at and our imaginations and curiosities can be satisfied.

The butterfly photo ignores this guideline completely but still achieves the illusion that the insect is looking out into space. The key to the success of this shot is the light space in the top right of the frame. The closeness of the leaves and the darkness of the rest of the image indicate an intimate, confined space. But the contrast of the lightness on the right edge of the frame offers our imaginations a wide open space for the insect to look into, and the image works even though both the space and lightness are both on the right edge.

Guideline: Get the Whole Subject in the Frame
Another guideline is to try and get the entire animal in the image. Unless the photographer is going for a close-up portrait where the intended image is only a portion of the subject, truncating limbs gives an awkward ending to the animal. To someone with an active imagination it can even conjure unsettling thoughts of limb amputations.

As far as composition is concerned, an image of an uncropped subject allows the eye to move around the complete shape and inspect every part of the subject. This is not possible with cropped animal as the eyes abruptly stop where the crop occurs.

In the case of this bird, the tail has been cropped. The reason this image still works is because the crop is hardly noticeable. It is lost among the colorful, backlit leaves and most of the viewer's attention is diverted to the important details on the other end of the photo.

It is up to us as photographers to decide when to adhere to the guidelines and when to be a rebel and break every rule you can find. You can't, however, break or follow the guidelines unless you know what they are. There are photographers who do not concern themselves with composition guidelines at all. The rest of us sometimes need a little help and guidelines are like a silent instructor in the field. They gently suggest and guide, but they do not and should not rule your photography.

Extracted from an article written by Gloria Hopkins
All pictures copyright Gloria Hopkins

Laerning How To See

The greatest reward of landscape photography lies not in seeing one of our images hanging on the wall or gracing pages of a magazine or website, but rather in the heightening of our ability to see and appreciate the natural world around us. When you first take camera in hand and go out to shoot landscape photographs, you might very likely get out there and not see a thing that seems worthy of shooting. In fact, you might have a hard time convincing yourself that the little stretch of woods in the neighborhood park could possibly be fodder for landscape photography at all. But in fact - it is.

Here are the 4 - steps exercise to get you started:

1. Select the place you're going to visit.
2. Take note of weather conditions when you arrive and consider what type of mood it tends to convey or what feeling it gives you.
3. Proceed a ways into your surroundings and stand still for a moment. Look outward about 100 feet. What do you see to your left? What do you see in front of you? What do you see to your right? What do you see behind you? Do this same exercise several times, decreasing the distance by about 20 feet each time. Finally, look around at the area within arm's reach and beneath you feet. This exercise will help you begin to look at the big picture as well as the little things that make up the big picture.
   
4. Now, do this same exercise again only this time look through your camera as you view the areas around you.

Once you've completed the exercise above, you'll begin to notice that the world through your viewfinder looks significantly different than the one seen without the aid of your camera. Why? Because the image in your viewfinder is just that - nothing more and nothing less. The image in your viewfinder includes all the little details that our human eyes and mind might tend to filter out. But by the same token, the image in the viewfinder does not extend beyond its boundaries. Our eyes have the luxury of darting to and fro, back and forth, capturing detail and context along continuum of various distances as we scan a scene. But when we press the shutter, we lock in a fixed representation of a scene. A good landscape photograph will appear complete even though it's just a slice of a larger scene.

The next step is to start pressing the shutter in order to capture not what you see in a scene, but the essence of your subject and what you feel about a scene. You might find it easier if you start out small. Limit your scope to, say, an area of about 50 square feet to begin with. This will help you focus your attention and sort out the scene into what's important to you and what is not.

It's difficult to be objective about our own work, so begin sharing your images with others in order to determine if you have successfully communicated the essence of a subject and your feeling about a place. Online photography forums are good places to share your work and view the work of others.

In the beginning it will be more important to practice the art of seeing rather than the art of photography. The more images you take with your camera, the better you will become at seeing how your camera sees. Study what works and what does not work in your images, and plan to revisit the same locations in order to improve upon earlier efforts. An additional benefit of revisiting locations is that you will come to know a few places well, and that knowledge and familiarity will come to be reflected in your work.

Extracted from an article written by Dawn Lane