Textures
Applying textures to your photographs can create a different look and feel. This can be very subtle to a complete change in the look and feel of an image. Layering works particularly well with portraiture when the maker wishes to convey an old or sandy (grainy) kind of feel. In this example, I applied a photograph of sandstone ontop of a photograph of an Italian town (Monorola). In addition I punched up the colours.
It obviously isn't anything remotely to what I saw with the naked eye. However, since it was raining, evening shot (quite dark) and generally drab, why wouldn't I want to alter it? Who would really want to see the original capture? Not me :)
Experiment with textures. Shoot some photographs of sand, various stones (granite and marble work particularly well), old wood etc. Then copy it as a new layer into photoshop (or our editor of choice), reduce the opacity and see what happens. If you are lazy, just download textures from the various free sites and give it a go.
-Vin Singh
Saturation, Contrast and other settings settings in the Camera
When I shoot photographs with by Digital Camera, unlike with film, I have a variety of setting that I can take advantage of in order to get the right colour, saturation, contrast in the jpeg image (I always Shoot RAW + jpeg). However, I always shoot using the lowest possible contrast, saturation, sharpening etc. Why is that and what does that have to do with the images shown here?
The colour photograph is what the above settings got me in this particular instance. It is not what the scene looked like. It's rather bland looking - no colour saturation or contrast to speak of. But that's all good with me. If I had the contrast and saturation cranked up, I have a more difficult time assessing how the shadows and highlights are more closely recorded in the raw capture. Don't get me wrong, the jpeg will never have the range the raw image has but at least it's closer than looking at a super contrast, punchy image. In addition, it's better to have a low contrast starting point - more for your imagingation to play with.
In this particular image, I decided that the colours were not the important part. Rather the millions of tiles on the rooftops and the diagonal of the street dividig the image in 2 are far more interesting. So the natural thing to do is to convert it into monochrome and then enhance the image by increasing contrast and sharpening in selected areas.
It's what I had in mind when taking the image but I was not sure exactly how I wanted to process it. I knew that I liked the details in the scence and tried to maximize detail by using a tripod, mirror lockup and framing it correctly so that I will not have to crop.
My preferences:
Saturation: Neutral or one step below
Constrast: Neutral
Sharpening: Minimal
Colour Space: The highest your camera will allow (Adobe RGB or higher)
White balance: Choose the correct WB setting for each scence or if you camera does a decent job on auto, use it.
Please keep in mind that when shooting RAW, all of the above setting can be changed when using a RAW converted. Some converters will use your jpeg settings as the starting point.
Urban photography
Urban photography is always more of a challenge for me than landscape. It's probably due to the fact that urban places are far more accessible than remote landscapes. With so many images on the web, especially popular destinations like Venice (Venezia), it's hard to walk through a street and say to yourself "this will be unique" because it most likely won't be. Sure, we can wait for the right set of clouds and lighting just like in landscape but I always feel that in most landscape shooting there are no "streets" to restrict the vantage point.
I'm pretty sure that there are many images of this particular canal but the perspective that I’ve used in addition to the processing and the laundry that was out at this particular day may have landed me a more unique look. I guess that in the end will be what differentiates images of the same street corner or urban scene from one another and is no different than landscape photography.
So do visit the same street more than once, on different times of the day and year to get changes in the light, angle of light, pollution, laundry, people walking etc. Kind of hard to do on destination that involve expensive flights! Maybe we should be photographing or own cities a bit more :)
f-stop, ISO and shutter speed
In the film days most of us chose our favourite film to use (i'm speeking mostly for landscape shooting), packed a bunch of them into the camera bag along with our second choice of film (just in case). With the film already in the camera, there where only two adjustments to be made f-stop and shutter speed. With digital we also have ISO sensitivity.
All 3 work together to expose your image correctly. However, your choice in either one may effect the final look especially when there is movement in the subject.
A 'stop' denotes a doubling (or halving) of light. So f1.8 to f2.8 is known as one fstop which means that you have 1/2 the light going through and hitting your sensor. from f2.8 to f4.0 is another stop, so another 1/2 less light. From f4.0 to f5.6 is 1/2 less again. We have gone down 3 stops which means 1/8 of the light from f1.8 to f5.6.
Shutter speed works the same way. Each doubling (or halving) of the speed is known as a stop: 100 to 200 is one stop 200 to 400; 400 to 800 etc.
ISO, ditto shutter speed.
From the above you can see that f-stop is harder for most people to get down. You basically just have to memorise them (or look at your older lens collection). f-stop increments are: 1.8; 2.8; 4.0; 5.6; 8; 11; 16; 22
Let say you put your camera in Aperature mode and point it to your fast moving subject and get a reading of f4.0 at 1/200s and you have your ISO setting at 400. If there is motion blur, you will need to increase the shutter speed. Say that you need 1/800s to achieve a good sharp image. Now, the problem is that from 1/200 to 1/800 is 2 stops less light (1/200 to 1/400 to 1/800). You will need to compensate the fstop by allowing the aperature to open 2 stops (4.0 to f 2.8 to f1.8). What happens if there is no f1.8 but only an f2.8 on your lens? You will need to set the f-stop to f2.8 (which buys us 1 stop) but also have to change the ISO to 800 to buy us the second stop (with a very slight degration of image quality).
In the days of film we might have needed to change the film (there were other work-arounds), but with digital cameras today we can save ourselves with the ISO quite easily to ISO 800, and on some cameras all the way up to 12800 and still get amazing results (and if really needed another 2 stops more!). Please understand that ISO settings do affect image quality, if all possible, it should be kept to the base (default) ISO which is ususally 100 or 200. However, in this example there was no other choice.
As a tiny aside, the lower the f-stop selected the less depth of field you will have. That is why in landscape photography, we have to readily use tripod. Landscapers want to maintain maximum depth of field. So what does that mean? Essentially, high f-stop, low ISO (for better quality) and to compensate for the little light coming through, they have to use longer exposures. Which translates to tripod or else everything shakes and the image blurs.
In the next article I will discuss how you can use all of this wonderful knowledge when shooting near pitch black conditions so that you don't waste a lot of time with trial and error.