Rule of Thirds

It’s been challenging for us to determine where next to go with our blog, but after a few weeks of thought, we’ve put together a list of topics that we’d like to discuss before moving into the technical how to’s in Photoshop.

1: Composition – rule of thirds
2: Controlling motion – shutter speed
3: Controlling distractions – depth of field and background distractions
4: Natural lighting.

First, visit this web site then come back and we can discuss the rule of thirds, and how to apply it using your camera.

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/rule-of-thirds/

Depending on the camera you have, you might have a menu option that allows you to turn on a grid that displays in your viewfinder or LCD screen to help you follow the rule of thirds. On a Nikon D70 or D200, this option is called “Grid”. If you don’t have this option, don’t despair. You can “eyeball it” or as the article states, apply it in post processing if you are shooting digital.

One question that often comes up is “Do you always have to use the rule of thirds?”. The answer is no. Many still images, especially those that are used for advertisement don’t use the rule of thirds. Their product is centered on the frame. When should you use the rule of thirds ? It’s really up to the images that you are taking, but in general one can apply the rule of thirds in about 90% of the images that are taken.

Take a look again at the image of the bee on the link above. If we were taking that image, the first thing we would have done is turned the camera 90 degrees. The flow of the image is longer than it is wider (if that makes sense). We would have placed the bee on the left grid line, and tried to keep the left edge of flower on or slightly right of the right grid line (or as close as we could have). The image as it’s taken here, appears to have the bee dead center. Another option would be to simply crop the image so that some of the green space behind the bee would be removed so the bee didn’t appear to be “targeted”.

One question that you may be asking is how you accomplish this with your camera. Depending on your camera, you may have selectable focus points on the grid lines, and even the intersect points. If you don’t, there is a simple answer in most cases. Simply focus on your subject using the center focus area. Once the camera has focused, keep holding the shutter release button (don’t press it to capture the image yet), turn the camera slightly to reposition the image in the viewfinder, then press the shutter release button to capture the image.

Personally, we try to follow the rule of thirds when capturing the image versus in post processing. Why ? Quite simply, more processing time equates to less time to spend doing other things, whether that’s sharing your images with friends and family, or capturing more images. One thing that you will probably hear us preach often is to capture the image correctly the first time. So many amateurs think “ I’ll fix it in Photoshop later”. Let us tell you from personal experience, that is not the right attitude.

Imagine that you are taking pictures of your child’s 1st birthday party. You’re inside, near a window, the sun is brightly shinning in and you using your new camera in Auto mode. As you are taking pictures, every so often you have a moment to look at them on the small LCD and they look OK to you, but could be better…no worries….you’ll tweak them in Photoshop later. Now, the party is over, and you have loaded them to you PC. You find that the pictures of the kid’s faces closest to the window are too dark, and everything behind them is blown out to white (no details). Those that are sitting farther away are fine, but everything behind them is too dark. You smugly say, I can fix this using Photoshop…well, yes you may be able to…but figure an average of 1 hour per image and that you need a fairly high level of skill using Photoshop to do so. The brightness/contrast sliders aren’t going to fix these images. It’s going to take the use of layers, layer masks, and a lot of manipulation. By the way, the white blown out areas…you can’t do anything to fix that area. There’s no information there…it’s been “blown out” (we’ll talk about this later when we talk about histograms). Bottom line, assume you can’t fix it and take it right the first time. To quote Sean Connery in the movie The Untouchables, “Here endith the lesson”.

In case you were wondering, yes, you can fix the lighting so that the images turn out well. If anyone needs to know now, post a comment to the blog and we’ll answer. Otherwise, we’ll address the problem when we get to natural lighting. By the way, the link above is a great resource. We recommend signing up for their weekly newsletters.

Photo Editing Programs

This week we’re going to discuss photo editing programs.

One of the questions we are most asked, besides which camera do we use, is what software do we use. We use Adobe Photoshop. For last several years, it has been the “gold standard” in photo editing programs. However, it’s price is not for the faint of wallet. Before you give up and decide to go back to film, there are several alternatives that perform well.

For the amateur and advanced amateur, we like to recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements 4. The interface is relatively easy to use for the beginner, but has many of the same powerful features that are found in the full version of Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 includes Adobe Album, which used to be a separate program about 3 years ago. You need only connect the camera/card reader to your PC, and Adobe will import your images (from your camera or card reader) to the file folder you’ve chosen. If you haven’t chosen a location, don’t worry. Adobe sets a default location automatically and using the preferences menu you can change the default location anytime you wish. Once the images are downloaded, you can preview them using the new Organizer (formerly Album) feature. The images are organized initially by time/date taken. However, Adobe allows you to create tags to help you organize your images. The tags can be people, places, things…pretty much however you want to organize your photos so you can find them again. Another nice feature is the timeline feature. If you can’t remember the tag, or didn’t put a tag on your image, but you remember the image was taken on your summer vacation last year, the timeline feature allows you to move to the time the images were taken (from the metadata embedded in the image).

Within the organizer, you can choose to perform simple edits or advanced edits. For 80%+ of the images, the simple edit feature should meet your needs. The function and features found in the simple edit mode are the same ones found on many of the other photo editing programs, like Microsoft’s Image Suite. These functions include red-eye removal, cropping, and color, contrast, brightness adjustments. If you find that you need more than the simple functions, Adobe gives you the advanced editing mode, which is Photoshop Elements. Within Elements, you have many of the powerful editing tools like the healing brush, and cloning tool. Elements also has the ability to work with layers, channels, levels, and contains several filters to help enhance your image. The latest version of Photoshop Elements even includes the ability to extract a portion of an image easily and place it onto another image. Previous versions of Elements, as well as software from other OEMs, required tedious and careful selections.

One of the other reasons we recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 is that once you learn how to use the features/functions in the software, making the transition to the full version of Photoshop is relatively easy compared to transitioning from another photo editing program like Image Suite, or Nikon’s Capture or Picture View. These programs cost about $79 - $129, depending on rebates, sales, and location purchased. At the time of writing this, the cost for the Adobe software was $99 less a $20 rebate. If you don’t meet the requirements of the rebate, Sams Club was selling the software for $89.

One of the biggest challenges for using any software is learning how to use it. There are many books written for “dummies”, “idiots”, and so on. How many of us have the time to read a 200+ page book cover to cover (not to mention usually a very dry book that would put even the worst insomniacs asleep in less than 5 minutes) ? Fortunately, there is a better answer. A few years ago we discovered a web site that provided online training, at a very reasonable price. The site is http://www.lynda.com/ . At the moment, they are only offering training for Photoshop Elements 3. The course is 11 hours in length. The cost is $25/month for access to ANY of their online training tools. So, if you finish Photoshop Elements training in a week, you can also take MS Office training, Digital Photography Training, and so on. It’s a great way to get hand on training.

Another source for Photoshop training (remember Elements has many of the same features as the full version, but not all) is http://www.photoshoptv.com/ . There is also a Photoshop Elements newsletter available that has tricks, hints to help you.

Here are on our blog, we will be starting to discuss different Photoshop and Photography tips.