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I really only began studying photography about 18 months ago when my wife bought me a Nikon D50 for Valentine's Day. Before that, the only art classes I took were in grade school (if you can call them art classes). So to try to improve my photography skills, I've been reading art and photography books, learning a lot from people at ipernity and my local camera club, and signed up this summer for a photography class called Vision and Composition. It was held at the Maryland Hall for the Arts and taught by artist-in-residence and long-time photographer Dick Bond. (There was a recent story on him here: www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/06_22-34/LIF.) These are my notes of this very interesting course, which met for a few hours at a time, once a week (next week is the last class). The notes will be split into two parts. The first day had a lot of lecturing. The others were mostly discussion and looking at photos taken by the class members. I learned a lot from the exercises and really enjoyed the class. I hope some of you enjoy reading these notes and that these can maybe spark a discussion of art/photograph classes you've taken or some positive learning experiences you've had with photography.

I alone am responsible for any mistakes. Please email me or add a comment if you see anything wrong. Feel free to distribute these (license: CC, Attribution + share Alike, as usual).

Day 1

What makes pictures succeed or fail? I don't believe there are rules for composition in photography. It is primarily a visual art. Thinking can get you into trouble! For example, do the "photo dance" (which DB demonstrated by looking into a camera rangefinder and shifting back-and-forth, front-to-back) to frame the shot properly; this is not a "thinking" activity. Photography is not an intellectual  exercise in composition rules, rather a vision-based art. Cameras don't take pictures, photographers do. Knowing the details of the camera's engineering or the chemistry of film emulsion will not help you take better pictures. You must learn how to visualize.

This course will involve exercises in "seeing''. What do we see when we photograph?
 

Light and exposure

You must be aware of light and its peculiarities. How does light work?

Physists tell us that light is both a particle and a wave. This means we can think of light eminating from a candle (the light source) analogous to a pebble being dropped into a still pool of water. Think of the ripples causes by the pebble (light source) as the light waves.

 If you have an SLR camera then after the lens, you have a mirror which must capture the light you want to record for your image. You can see that if the mirror is near the light source then it will capture a higher percentage of the photons that if it were farther away.

When you double the distance form the light source, you quarter the intensity. It satisfies the inverse square law: the intensity is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance from the light source.

It is hard to visualize light exposure because our visual system has a very sophisticated autoexposure system which corrects for dimmer light by dialating the pupil.

Focus

Our two human eyes focus much better than one camera eye. For example, cover one eye, place two fingers 6 inches from your face and look at me between your fingers.  One is out of focus - me or your fingers. On the other hand, if you use both eyes and just look around, everything is in focus! As anyone who plays a sport such as tennis or racketball knows, the focusing ability of our vision system is remarkable.

The human eye has a lens at the front and retina at the back. The brain compensates for the effect that any lens has in inverting an image. The SLR camera's eye is analogous. The mirror just behind the lens flips the image horizonally (flips top-to-bottom). The pentaprism in front of the eyepiece (at the top of the camera) flips the image vertically (flips right-to-left).

How do you improve focus of a far away object? You squint, or narrow the opening of the eyelids. Decreasing your camera's aperature has a similar effect.

On the camera's film or sensor, images which are out of focus appear as circles. The depth of field is the range of distances which are rendered in the camera in focus. The focal length of a lens is defined to be the distance between the lens and the plane (in front of the camera) of sharp focus. The larger the focal length, the more area can be captured in the camera. The smaller the aperature, the more objects in the image are in focus.

The lens aperature is the diameter of the lens opening divided by the focal length of the lens. A relative lens aperature of 1/N is written f/N. The number N arising in this way is called an f-stop (or f-number). The larger the f-stop, the smaller the aperature. For example, the close-up of an image taken with f/2 has all the objects in the background out of focus. However, a photograph taken with f/20 might have all objects in the image appearing in focus.

Shutter speed: Aperature and shutter speed settings are used together to control the amount of light from the subject that reaches the film/sensor. The formula for the exposure is exposure = (intensity) x (time), or E = I*t. Here the time t is measured by the shutter speed.

Exercise

Take 20 images. All must be completely out of focus. Show courage - take color abstracts with nothing even close to being in focus. You will realize how different the eye and the camera imaging system are.

Using motion blur on some shots is okay but you must also get some shots with "genuine circles of confusion''. No computer manipulation allowed! Prefer that you don't even look at the images on the computer before class!

Once in awhile I wondered what a photo would look like with a square format. Of course, you can always crop to a square on the computer but that doesn't help with the original framing of the shot. So, I spent several hours yesterday searching for information on square format digital cameras and thought I'd post some of the information, for those interested.

There are very expensive square-format digital cameras (Hasselblad, for example). I was looking for something very affordable, just to experiment with. First, I found the "toy camera" Minidigi Rolleiflex, but it lacked other features I wanted (I don't remember the price). Then I read about the Ricoh cameras (GX100, GR Digital II, R7, R8), all of which have a 1:1 aspect ratio option. This seemed great, except I didn't really like the feature set on any one of these (though a combination of the R8 and the GX100 would be nice). Ricoh seems to be a popular choice for people who like the square format. Finally, I googled for digital cameras with aspect ratio options. This was the key. Lots of cameras have different aspect ratio options, though not always 1:1. In fact, it was because of this google search that I discovered that my Nikon p5100 has a square format option!

I was both happy that I already owned a camera with that option and chagrined that I spent so much time on the computer searching for something I should have known. In any case, it was under the "image size" setting in the camera's menu. Apparently what it does is darken a portion of the LCD screen, so that you see a square image. I'll try to post some examples after I next go out shooting.

I'd be interested in hearing if any of your cameras have unusual aspect ratios.

These are the rest of the notes I took of the Vision and Composition class taught by Dick Bond.

Day 2

Your out-of-focus exercises emphasized shape (form), light (exposure), shadow, and color.

• An out-of-focus photo is abstract if its origin is unrecognizable.
• When taken out of focus, a small bright point of light in the distance can grow into a very large circle of confusion, dominating the image. This can have a very nice effect.
• The human vision system has a let's-not-get-eaten-by-tigers "program" which tracks the eye to the most recognizable object. This "program" is not activated for an out-of-focus image.
• Black and yellow always work great for such an image!

For example, a very out-of-focus photo of a fern might have lots of horizonal shapes. Horizonal lines make a photo look static. Pretend the photo was projected onto a screen using a projector. Can you imagine looking down on a photo having horizonal lines? Looks odd. That is because horizonal lines can act as a vanishing perspective. When a vanishing perspective is below us, it makes us uncomfortable. Likewise, take a photo with no vanishing perspective (for example, a photo of your feet). Now, if that photo was projected onto the floor or ceiling it doesn't seem so odd.

Learn this: An image is anything within a camera frame, but there are no rules. Composition rules are self-imposed boxes.

Exercise: Take 10-20 images. Everything must be green. Nothing but green. Can be out of focus, can be cropped, but must be completely green. Warning: This light from the sky gives off a blue highlight. No blue highlights! Some white and black is okay.

Day 3

Your green exercises emphasized shape (form) and texture. It also empahsized the following aspects of photography. It is surpisingly hard to capture pure green photos, even when
that is what you see. Several effects play a role in how our eye perceives color.

• The light source is often not pure white. For example, light from the sky gives off a blue highlight, whether you are in direct light or in shade.
• Light bulbs might seem white when they are in fact slightly tinted.
• A sharp edge which is made out-of-focus edge can color the edge in a way which was not observed before, due to diffraction. Diffraction results when propagating light waves encounter an obstacle (such as the object creating the edge; for details, see, for example,
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction).
• The human visual system uses the brightest nearby object as the "white balance card" of your brain. So if you have a black frame for a photo, that will have a much different effect than a light blue frame in how you perceive the color.
• The effect of "gremlins" is emphasized (a gremlin is an object which creeps into the frame of your photograph the moment you take the picture!).

To eliminate the blue tint from the sky, use a "81 yellow filter" on your lens.

As stated already, shape and form is emphasized when color is "taken away". The more circular a shape is, the less dynamic it will appear. A straight line, for example along a diagonal, adds a dynamic quality to the image. However, if the leading line to this diagonal is out-of-focus, then the effect can in many cases be ruined.

Exercise: Take 8 images, made up of 4 pairs. Each pair must consist of one photo of a scene with "normal" exposure and the other either over-exposed by one stop or under-exposed by one stop.
In either case, the "improperly exposed" image must be an improvement over the original. Any subject is allowed. All exposure setting must occur in camera, but software is allowed for the purpose of cropping.

Day 4


A showing of some of my photos is at the 47 West Gallery on November 15th. There will be a preview on Nov 14th and you are all invited.


I don't use the same exercises each time I teach this. (However, the first exercises, the "out-of-focus" one, is always the same.) For example, in winter you can't always ask for "everything green" shots. One good exercise I sometimes give is:all images must consist of straight or curves lines.

The last exercises was concerned with teaching you how the light metering of your camera affects your photos. As you can see, the light meters' suggestion is generally to be disregarded.

Under-exposure usually increases color saturation. However, over-exposure can bring out pastel colors. Over-exposure will lose texture but underexposure will nor necessarily bring out details. This loss in detail can be good - for example, if you lose detail in the background, you can often emphasize the subject more.

General advice

Photography is not a contact sport. Photos are not taken to get points in a competition. So ignore the "rule-of-thirds"  and other criteria that judges use to score photos in competitions. (However, placing your subject smack in the center of the photo is often not a good idea either!) Judges who always use the "rule-of-thirds" to "score" a photo are petrified (as in fossils)! Styles change, photographers change, what types of photos we like and why we like them also change, even for photography judges. So, ignore rules and let your own growing sense of style be your guide.

Just as placing a subject such as a flower in the dead center of the photo makes it boring, so does taking a photograph at an angle, dividing the photo in two. Try to avoid starting and stopping in corners all the time.

Photographs with more than one vanishing point are problematical. (By a vanishing point, I mean a point in the distance that the eye is naturally attracted to.) Often when these are naturally
separated the photo decomposes into two separate photos.


This is the last class but here is something you may want to do at home:
Find a perfectly white wall or sheet of paper. Photograph it, and increase the stop by 1. Photograph it again, and increase the stop by 1. Repeat this process until the image is black.Now you have your own custom-made grayscale! If you print them out, remember that paper often prints darker than its digital or projector image.