MegaPixel 101

Want to make your photographs look better? Here is part one in the series "Seeing Photographs".

One of your first choices is how much of a scene to show

Whether the subject is a person, a building, or a tree, beginners often are reluctant to show anything less than the whole thing. People often photograph a subject in its entirety. Grandpa is shown from head to toe even if that makes his head so small that you can't see his face clearly. In many cases, it was a particular area of the subject that got the photographers attention in the first place. Things like the expression of a face, the peeling paint of a building, or a bent branch of a tree might have been the original attention grabbers. Try to focus on the thing that made you want to take the picture in the first place.

Get closer to the subject

A famous war photographer said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough". This simple piece of advice can help most beginners improve their work. Getting closer eliminates distracting objects and simplifies the contents of the picture. It reduces the confusion of busy backgrounds, and focuses the attention on the main subject.

What is your photograph about?

Instead of shooting right away, stop for a moment to decide which part of the scene you really want to show. You might want to take a picture of an entire scene and some of the details. Sometimes you won't want to move closer. Photographs of landscapes for example capture the spacious area around you.

Try to visualize what you want to photograph to look like

As you look through the viewfinder, examine the edges of the image frame. do they enclose or cut into the subject the way you want?

Once you have all the technical basics down, where do you go from there? Every time you make an exposure you make choices, either on purpose or by accident. Do you show the whole scene or just a detail? Do you make everything sharp, or just focus on one area? Do you use a fast shutter speed to freeze motion, or a longer shutter speed to blur it.

Your First Step

Your first step is to see the potential of the photograph in front of your camera. Before you take a picture, try to visualize the way the scene will look as a print. Looking through the viewfinder helps because the scene is reduced to a smaller size and confined by what the lens will see. As you look through the viewfinder, imagine you are looking at a print, but it is still a print that you can change. You can eliminate a distracting background by making it out of focus, by changing the position to a better angle and so on.

Try to See the Communication

Try to see how a picture communicates its visual content. Photography transforms a three-dimensional event into a frozen instant reduced in size on a flat piece of paper, which is sometimes in black & white instead of color. The event is abstracted, and even if you were there and can remember how it "really" was, the image in front of you is the tangible remaining object. This concentration on the actual image will help you visualize scenes as the photographs that they will soon become while you are shooting.

With that said, those are the basics of taking a better picture. Over the next few posts I plan on diving in deeper in order for you to see your photographs.

In my opinion, one of the coolest things about shooting in digital over film is Exif. So if it is one of the coolest things, what is it?

• EXIF -Exchangeable Image File Format

Now I can almost hear you saying, that's great, what does that mean? Well in simple terms, every time you take a picture, your camera is recording information. Here are some of the things it records:

• Date & Time
• Camera settings. This includes information such as the camera orientation, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, metering mode, & ISO information.

Can you see why this is cool information? I'll give an example of  something I just shot recently. I thought it would be fun to shoot fireworks. This was something that I had never tried to do before. Back in the days of film, you would have to take notes of all your settings for each frame of film so you could go back and look to see what turned out right and what turned out wrong. With Exif data, I can go back whenever I want to and see the settings that I used. This can be useful in sharing photos with others so they can see what settings you used.

For a simpler example, Exif data has the time & date that you took the picture. (Granted you need to make sure that your camera has this set correctly) Using this data can ease the way that you store your digital photos. You can organize them by date taken & even time taken.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Exif, how can you use it or even see it?

• Windows - right click on the actual image and choose properties. From the properties dialog select summary and your Exif data is shown.
• Mac OS X - this information may be viewed in the Finder by doing Get Info on a file and expanding the More Info section.

Now it isn't a great idea to edit the Exif information using the above methods as it could damage the Exif file, but it is good for viewing the info. If you feel the need to edit your Exif info, an editor made for that is the best bet. There are free editors out there for whatever platform you are running. By doing a simple internet search you can find tools that will work best for you.

1. ISO - the measure of a digital camera sensor’s sensitivity to light
2. Aperture - the size of the opening in the lens when a picture is taken
3. Shutter Speed - the amount of time that the shutter is open

A change in one of the elements will impact the others. This means that you can never really isolate just one of the elements alone but always need to have the others in the back of your mind.

Metaphors To Relate To Exposure

The Window

Imagine your camera is like a window with shutters that open and close.

Aperture is the size of the window. If it’s bigger more light gets through and the room is brighter.

Shutter Speed is the amount of time that the shutters of the window are open. The longer you leave them open the more that comes in.

Now imagine that you’re inside the room and are wearing sunglasses (hopefully this isn’t too much of a stretch). Your eyes become desensitized to the light that comes in (it’s like a low ISO).

There are a number of ways of increasing the amount of light in the room (or at least how much it seems that there is. You could increase the time that the shutters are open (decrease shutter speed), you could increase the size of the window (increase aperture) or you could take off your sunglasses (make the ISO larger).

Sun tanning

Another way to think about digital camera exposure as being like getting a sun tan.

Now getting a suntan is something I always wanted growing up - but unfortunately being very fair skinned it was something that I never really achieved. All I did was get burnt when I went out into the sun. In a sense your skin type is like an ISO rating. Some people are more sensitive to the sun than others.

Shutter speed in this metaphor is like the length of time you spend out in the sun. The longer you spend in the sun the increased chances of you getting a tan (of course spending too long in the sun can mean being over exposed).

Aperture is like sunscreen which you apply to your skin. Sunscreen blocks the sun at different rates depending upon it’s strength. Apply a high strength sunscreen and you decrease the amount of sunlight that gets through - and as a result even a person with highly sensitive skin can spend more time in the sun (ie decrease the Aperture and you can slow down shutter speed and/or decrease ISO).

As I’ve said - neither metaphor is perfect but both illustrate the interconnectedness of shutter speed, aperture and ISO on your digital camera.

Bringing It All Together

Mastering the art of exposure is something that takes a lot of practice. In many ways it’s a juggling act and even the most experienced photographers experiment and tweak their settings as they go. Keep in mind that changing each element not only impacts the exposure of the image but each one also has an impact upon other aspects of it (ie changing aperture changes depth of field, changing ISO changes the graininess of a shot and changing shutter speed impacts how motion is captured).

The great thing about digital cameras is that they are the ideal testing bed for learning about exposure. You can take as many shots as you like at no cost and they not only allow you to shoot in Auto mode and Manual mode - but also generally have semi-automatic modes like aperture priority and shutter priority modes which allow you to make decisions about one or two elements of the triangle and let the camera handle the other elements.