a1 Photo Tips

One of my favorite subjects is landscapes. I guess it has to do with my interest in being outdoors, in nature. It makes me feel good. And since I like being there, it feels natural to make pictures also.

Now, the problem with landscape shots is they very often fail to communicate the qualities of the actual scene. In my experience, landscape pictures often turn out dull, flat, and disappointing. And why is this? Well, for starters: an image is two-dimensional while your experience was three-dimensional. It is tricky to translate your real experience into a flat picture surface. Tricky, yes - but there are also tricks for overcoming the problem. Here I will talk about some of the most obvious ones.

1. Simplify!

See the picture above? It is a neat example of how to add impact to an image by getting rid of all clutter. Clutter is the enemy of any picture, and especially landscape shots. The natural landscape is full of details. There are trees, shrubs, clumps of grass, dead leaves and so on… The problem is turning all these items into a simple and coherent composition. If the image is full of details while lacking an overall strong structure, the result is a boring mess. Actually, you are always striving to get as few and as strong elements as possible into an image.

2. Note the Foreground!

Another shortcoming of many landscape pictures is that they lack a foreground. If you make a panoramic shot of a serene landscape scene with, say dramatic mountains in the distance, then there is a need to include something in the foreground also. The reason is, again, that the finished picture is a flat object; and to get a sense of depth when looking at it we need to see an obvious contrast between what is “near” and what is “far away”. The beach picture here is a beautiful example of how you can add interest to a scene by including objects close to the camera when making a landscape shot. Note also how the rocks form a diagonal line which leads the eye into the scene; and how a very slow shutter speed was used to get the little waves lapping the rocks to show some motion blur - making the water come alive!

3. Bold the Sky!

In many cases you don’t need to include the sky at all in a picture, but in a landscape shot it is often an inevitable part of the scene. To take the picture of distant mountains as example - those mountains will of course be seen with the sky as backdrop. It is then very important to make this sky as interesting as possible. (Advanced users of image processing software solve this by simply putting in a nice sky afterwards; there is even special software that generates various sky types digitally!) A dramatic sky with bold and colorful cloud formations will add enormous interest to a landscape scene.

The photograph here shows a famous landscape scene made by Ansel Adams in 1942. Back in his day there was no easy way of putting in cloud formations in pictures - you had to be there when they showed up. (Since Ansel was then working for the Government, this picture is legally in the Public Domain.)

Also, to enhance a blue sky you can use a polarizing filter. This filter, if properly used, can make a clear sky show a deeper and more intense blue. Without a polarizing filter, the blue sky will often look washed-out. The reason is that the sky is so much brighter than the ground, and if you expose to get the ground right the sky will be over-exposed. A polarizing filter blocks out some of the light from the sky, thus solving this problem.

4. Depth of Field!

Typically, in a landscape image you want every part of the scene to be in focus. This means you need to set your digicam to get the largest possible depth of field. And how do you get that? Remember: small aperture equals great depth of field! A small aperture, that is, a small opening for the light to enter the camera, is then what you need to use in most landscape shots. You may want to set the camera to Aperture Priority, to get control over this feature.

This may mean that the shutter speed needs to be so slow that you can’t hand-hold the camera - you have to use a tripod. You may have things against tripods - heavy, clumsy and so on - but if you are serious about making great landscape shots I think you are likely to need one. Also see my photo tip number 2. “Note the Foreground”. If you follow that advice, you absolutely need to use those small apertures.

5. See the Light!

Do you see the light? What I mean is: Do you make very conscious observations of how the light shapes everything around us? For instance, things look very different if the light that illuminates them comes from behind us, as opposed to from the side, or if the light comes from behind the subject (”backlight”).

Usually, you like to avoid the first situation - light from behind you - when making landscape pictures. The reason is that then the shadows will fall away from where the camera is, making the features of the scene look flat. Your chances of getting a great-looking result are much better if the light comes in from either side. Shadows will then be clearly visible, bringing out the three-dimensional shapes of the landscape features.

Backlit scenes, as in the beach shot here, are trickier. The light is coming straight at you, so that objects show their dark side. The result tends to be silhouettes, like we see in this example. The effect can be very interesting IF we manage to SIMPLIFY (see point number 1. above) the composition - as is successfully done here. Otherwise, the result is again a boring mess.

You may get truly great pictures by experimenting with special light conditions like fog. Fog makes everything gradually disappear into a mysterious haze - as in the fine example shown here.

Photo Credits: Green field by helmet13; beach with rocks by Chris Gin; backlit beach by Ortiz Q.; misty slope by helmet13.

A picture taken in red light will look red - won’t it? And the same goes for pictures taken in other types of colored light. What you may not notice is that ordinary daylight can have very different qualities, and give very different results, depending on the time of day and other factors.

When the sun is close to the horizon, most of the blue rays are filtered out in the atmosphere and the light becomes reddish. And conversely, at noontime when the sun is as high up in the sky as it gets, the light is rather more blueish. This is especially true in the tropics - as in the image here above. At high altitudes, the light also has a very blue character since it has a shorter passage thru the atmosphere.

On an overcast day the cloud cover blocks much of the red wavelengths and for this reason the light that reaches the earth is rather cool.

Our human eyes adjust to these varying qualities of light, and unless they are quite extreme we don’t notice them much. The camera, however, faithfully records them as they are. Therefore we may be disappointed when we see how our pictures come out, with color casts we don’t like - unless we learn to understand how to deal with these effects.

You may be familiar with the term “color temperature”. Very cool blueish light is referred to as having a high color temperature, while reddish light as in the sunset picture here has - you guessed it - a low color temperature.

There is an international scale for measuring this, called the Kelvin scale. Unless you are seriously into Physics, you don’t need to know much about it, just take a look at the illustration here below to get a general idea.

A digital camera will be equipped with controls intended to compensate for those differences in color temperature of the light in different situations. For instance, my old Canon digicam has such settings as “Sunny” and “Cloudy”, plus a few more including - of course - “Auto”.

It is tempting to just set the camera on “Auto” and then forget about the whole issue. The problem is, as usual, that when you let the camera “think” for you, you also give up creative control over your pictures.

Naturally, how much creative leeway you have depends on what kind of camera you own. Like with my old Canon, I get to choose between a few standard types of lightning - or else set my own white balance. The latter means you point the digicam on a piece of white, or neutral grey, material; and set the camera to use that surface as a starting point for correct color balance in that particular situation.

With more advanced digicams, you could also have the option to set a number on the Kelvin scale directly. This opens the way for very precise and convenient control over the color rendering of every picture you take - provided you have the basic understanding shown in the illustration here.

Suppose for instance you take a picture on a cloudy day, when the colors are a bit on the cool side. You prefer to add just a bit of a warm “sunny” feeling to that picture. What to do? You set the Kelvin scale to a somewhat high number. By doing so, you tell the camera that the light is VERY blueish, and that this needs to be compensated for - by adding more red.

Or you are snapping a picture indoors in available light from incandescent light bulbs. You can then decide just how much of that “feeling” you want to have in the picture. Do you want to compensate fully for the reddish character of the incandescent light - or do you prefer to immerse the scene in a cozy reddish glow? In the latter case, you set the Kelvin scale to a higher number than the actual color temperature of the tungsten light sources, to get more red.

The Kelvin scale generally sees a color temperature of about 5500 K as “neutral white”, as shown above. Lower numbers mean an excess of red wavelenghts, and higher numbers mean an excess on the blue side.

Another situation where you may want to use a manual setting of the white balance is for very monochrome scenes. For instance, a picture of a person dressed in white and standing in front of a white wall. In this case the camera may have a hard time deciding what color balance setting to use, and needs your help.

Photo credits: bungalows by muha…; sunset by jurvetson.

Lately, I have been talking about the Exposure Triangle, and how you need to understand what it is all about to take creative control over your picture making.

In this post I figured I’d demonstrate one of the points of that imaginary triangle - the ISO setting.

Remember what the three points were?

Aperture - size of the light opening into the camera

Shutter Speed - how long time the shutter stays open

ISO Setting - sensitivity setting of the light-recording camera sensor

You may recall that I have told you the image quality gets impaired if you crank up the ISO-setting. OK, now I am going to show it to you, according to the old adage, “One picture is worth 1000 words.”

See the pictures above? Both are shot at the same aperture, but with different ISO-settings. For the one on the left I set my old Canon Powershot digicam at 50 ISO, and right after snapping that picture I changed to 400 ISO and snapped the picture to the right.

Well, in fact both of these are enlarged details of the original pictures; here below you can see what the original pictures looked like (I show the 50 ISO one here, the other looks just about the same).

The enlarged details show very clearly how the image quality gets degraded at high ISO-settings (400 ISO was the highest I could get with my camera, more advanced digicams allow for much higher ISO numbers). The difference is especially evident on perfectly smooth and uniform surfaces, like on cars.

Note how the surface looks quite grainy at 400 ISO.

– Hmmm, I wonder where they use such funny license plates on cars…?

The ISO scale is set so that each doubling of the numbers equals doubling the sensitivity; like ISO 400 is twice as sensitive a setting as ISO 200, which is twice as sensitive as ISO 100 - and so on. In other words, by sacrificing some of the image clarity I have made the camera sensor EIGHT TIMES more sensitive to light!

In low-light situations, this could mean the difference between getting a useable picture or not, like being able to shoot at 1/40 of a second rather than 1/5 - in the latter case it would be very difficult to avoid blur due to camera movement.

You may wonder how this image noise happens? Well, you probably know that a digital image is composed of an array of tiny squares called “pixels“. Each pixel can have its own color, thus forming a mosaic that builds up the total picture. Now imagine there is a tiny goblin sitting at each pixel, with the duty of trying to figure out the nature of the brief light pulse that arrives at that pixel when the picture is snapped.

At low ISO settings the goblin doesn’t need to make up its mind until there is enough light to make a good decision. But if you crank up the ISO-setting, each goblin is forced to decide based on very scanty data - more or less make an educated guess. And therefore the final image will be a bit of a guesswork.

Even if you don’t believe in goblins I’m sure you can follow my reasoning. So what have we learned today? Something like this maybe:

If all else fails, we can crank up the ISO-setting of a digital camera to get a picture where it otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

In other words: avoid upping the ISO number unless it is really needed - or you don’t really care about the image quality. Note: you can set the ISO value on automatic on probably just about any digicam. If you do, make sure you know what is going on to avoid surprises. The camera may have a low opinion of your ability to hold it steady at slow shutter speeds.

Update: I should mention that advanced users may be interested in testing post-processing software which reduces such image noise as you get at high ISO-settings. Since I haven’t tested these myself I don’t know how good they are at improving the quality of such images, but I’ve seen that some swear by them.