Composition

Composition is the art of arrange the visual components of a photo inside the picture.
When you observe the subject of your photo, your mind builds a rich multisensory representation with sound, smell and a wide angle 3D view, so it's not surprisingly that a simple picture can miss some points of interest.
Your task as photographer is just to recreate in a small image all the relevant information working on three different dimensions, the selection of the elements to include in the picture, their relations and the overall balance.

- selection
The rule of thumb is to understand what you have to include and what you have to exclude from the picture.
If you exclude everything that can distract the observer you emphasize the meaning of your photo.
On the other hand you have to look for secondary elements useful to clarify your target, for example in a portrait you can include the something (a tool, a home, a toy, …) to add information about your subject.
You can also evaluate the possibility to shoot at a particular area of the subject to focus on the most important aspect, for example in a portrait you can include only the eyes or the smile instead of the whole body or face.

- relation
After the proper selection of the elements of your picture, you need to have all of them working to strength what your mean.
For example if you are shooting two little brothers, you can focus on how they understand each other or try to catch their resemblance.

- balance
Finally, you have to build your picture, positioning all the elements in a proper way.
Avoid an obvious composition, like putting the subject on the center of the photo – instead use the “rule of thirds”.
This guideline states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in photograph.
This simple tip will help to obtain more interesting compositions, expecially if you draw the viewer's eyes through the photo using some kind of path, like a street, a row of telephone poles, or a line of chairs.

Ficus wake

Ficus wake by ~mtarantola on deviantART

Tell a story

Focusing on a story can be useful, even if you normally are not much interested in this kind of fotography.
To me, a perfect occasion come when movie stars Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes came near my house in Bracciano to have their wedding in the beautiful Odescalchi Castle.
As usual, to reach your goal you have to focus on some hot point before you start.

- Have a strategy
I know Bracciano, so I know that Tom, Katie and all their friends could reach the castle without be seen by their fan and photographer.
So I decided to show not the stars (obviously impossible) but the madness of a little town full of fans, anchormen and photographers for a day.

- Choose carefully your equipment
With this plan in my mind a selected a very lightweight equipment composed by just my Finepix S5600.
Normally having no backup batteries or memory card can be a problem, but in this case my house is near the castle so I decide to download the memory card and recharge the batteries at lunchtime.

- Have a tactic
I remember the Joel Spolski suggestion “Fire and Motion” (if you are into computer industry you have to read his www.joelonsoftware.com).
Instead of trying to get a place in the first row in front of the castle, which was full of professional photographer, I take a walk looking for more intersting place like:
- shops with Tom and Katie picture (I found even a metal detector shop and a butcher shop…)
- the Castle Plaza, full of fans and photographer
- the palace in front of the Castle with a photographer at each window (they paid 100 euros…)
- the municipal building, full of van with trasmitting antennas
For the rest of the day I just walked from a point to the next one, shoting at everything actracted my attention and having fun.

In the gallery you can see some of the 500 picture I have.

P.S.
Congratulations, Tom

Improve your exposure

Exposure is one of the most important factor in photography, because it affects the contrast, the tone and the quantity of visible details.
You can improve these properties in editing, but it’s important to have it at good level from the start.
Modern camera can get good exposure automatically using a so called matrix algorithm, but you have to develope the ability to set it or optimize it manually when needed.
There are three techniques you can use:
- bracketing
- spot exposure mode
- correct manually the exposure
Using braketing, your camera will take three pictures for every shot, the first with the automatic exposure and the others with darker and lighter settings.
Having three shots for every photo is a minor problem considering how cheap memory cards are , and obviously you can really improve the chance to get at least a perfect exposure.
The spot exposure mode is an automatic exposure that use just the center of the scene, so it can be useful when the composition has both dark and light areas.
Using the spot mode you can choose the portion of the composition you want to use for the exposure, just pointing your camera.
Manual correction is the ability to modify the exposure setting one or two stops more or less when you think that the automatic setting is not giving you the right exposure.
The secrets of the right exposure is getting the most from the peculiarity of your digital camera, mainly by looking the image in your LCD and checking the histogram.
After each shot watch the result in the LCD so you can immediately know if you need another shoot with a different exposure (for example using the manual correction).
Histogram is a powerful and only apparently complex tool: is a graphical rapresentation of the picure data that shows how many dark point (left side of the histogram) or light point (right side of the histogram) you have.
A good exposure has a centered histogram, very large and without too many high or low peek.
Learning to read the histogram you can improve your ability to evaluate a picture exposure, and you will know very fast if you need another shot to get the best exposure.

Thunder God

Thunder God by ~mtarantola on deviantART

From the start to the end (3 of 3)

- Ready for presentation
At the end of the editing phase, it must be clear if some shots are good enough to be included in you gallery.
For that image you may want to give some further touch, for example adding a signature or a border.

- Presentation
Working at your personal gallery is really important if you want improve your technical skill, because it gives you the opportunity to collect feedback about your work.
Listen to comments can let you understand your strength and weakness, so you can improve your ability.
You can use different strategies to show your photos, but I suggest to use the site DeviantArt (www.deviantart.com) which is the best from a technical point of view and has a big community of users.
In DeviantArt you can build your personal homepage (the mine is mtarantola.deviantart.com), show your photos and get comments from the users.
You can also access to others gallery, and learn a lot just watching the works of better photographer.

- Restart
Now you have finished your workflow, from the initial idea to the presentation of your best efforts.
If everything worked, you must get the following result:
- fun
- some good image
- some clue on how to improve your technical skills and become a better photographer
You have to read articles and books of photography and expose yourself to the works of the masters of this art: then restart.

From the start to the end (2 of 3)

- A first selection
Let’s start looking at your works carefully.
I like to use Picasa 2 from Google, which is free, easy to use and doesn’t need too much power from your PC hardware.
Properly configured, Picasa can detect new photos in your archive and automatically loads its database, so you can start to analyze your images in small format and select the most intersting with the Special function (the button with the yellow star).
In this phase you have to use your need to be critical sense and your theoretical acquaintance looking for composition, sharpness, contrast.
At the same time is really important to understand the strenght and the weakness in your photography technique: you have to select the area you need to improve so you can focus your theoretical studies and practise.
When you select your photos you have to remember to not look for perfection or for image you can immediatly use, but simply choose the best ones, selecting for 8 or 10 good photos ready for the next step.
With the Export function you can copy the selected photo in a new folder and then leave Picasa: its time for Photoshop.

- Editing
To edit your photo you need a good software, like Photoshop to minimize imperfections and obtain, starting from the images you select in the previous step, a couple of really good shots.
It’s a time consuming task, which also need a specific technique and experience, so be patient and do it step by step.
The tipical workflow looks like the following list:
- retouching little imperfection
- works on tone, light and color
- saturation and contrast
- editing
- crop
- final touch
In the future will cover all these steps in detail.

(continue)