Welcome to My Photo Tutor

Hi and thanks for coming over to my blog. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Rob Barron and I have been running a little website called ‘My Photo Tutor’ for a while now. It’s not a business nor a big concern, it’s just me really.

So what is so special about me that you would want to read my blog? Answer: Nothing! I am not special at all, I just love photography, love teaching and so love bringing the two together and helping others to develop their own skills with a camera so that they can get the most from this lovely craft.

I don’t get paid, I do it for the love of it so if you think this blog is not worth tuppence, that is because it is actually less than tuppence but never mind…. I still hope you will find plenty of useful hints and tips in my writings to help you. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer here, I’ll be happy to hear from you so drop me a line at: robbarron@myphototutor.com

Seeing the Picture – The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds

The rule of what? Well, this is one of the most fundamental composition rules in photography so it’s worth giving some consideration to. It is NOT COMPLICATED though so don’t panic!…. Ok, take a piece of paper and draw a large noughts & crosses on it (some people call it tic-tac-toe!) with the lines going all the way to the edges of the paper.

You have now divided your piece of paper into nine roughly equal sections, three across the page and three down. Now, look particularly at where those four lines are: the first is 1/3rd from the left, the next is 1/3rd from the right, the other two are 1/3rd from the top and bottom respectively. Make a note too of where the lines cross. Those four lines and intersection points are going to help you take better pictures!

Let’s take a look at a picture:

Now this is a fairly basic picture but it works well because it utilises a couple of important principles. Let’s see what we can learn from them.

The first is that the stone steps start at the bottom of the picture and go at an angle upwards and lead the eye to the main subject, the Wheal Engine House and Chimney. We call this a ‘lead line’ or a ‘lead-in line’ for obvious reasons. A lead line could be steps, a fence, a row of bushes, some telegraph poles, the lines of a path, or anything else that helps the viewers eye to be led towards the main subject of the picture.

The next thing is the chimney and the engine house. the chimney runs upwards along a vertical line about 1/3rd in from the right while the left side of the engine house is on the other vertical third. This is using the Rule of Thirds to make the composition more interesting to the viewer than if it was plnked right in the middle. Imagine that chimney running straight up the centre of the picture: instead of being a point of interest, it would act as a dividing line separating the left of the picture from the right, something we definitely want to avoid if we can.

I also used the colours of the top portion of the chimney and the brown bracken ferns to provide balance. The  brown chimney stack is on the top horizontal 1/3rd line while the brown bracken is on the lower horizontal 1/3rd, running at an angle which brings us to one final point worth considering…

Keep in mind that triangles and wedges are more interesting and dynamic shapes than squares or rectangles. If we can avoid our picture being lots of straight up and down or left to right lines, we will make the image more dynamically interesting.

In this picture, even though the engine house is a basic rectangle, looking at it from the angle I chose has effectively made it into more of a trapezium-ish shape. The brown bracken is a wedge/triangle shape as is the grass on either side of the path. Because we have taken the shot from low down, even the narrowing of the chimney is accentuated so that it is more of a triangle than a tube.

Ok, that’s some basic points to get started with. Have a look at some of the pictures in my gallery and see if you can apply what we have learnt here to the compositions I have produced. And then go and apply them to your own photos and see if your friends notice the difference

A couple more for you to analyse….

Seeing the picture (Part One)

Photography skills can be learnt, true? Absolutely.

See what is there and shoot it, right? Wrong!

There is a difference between seeing a photographic opportunity and seeing the actual picture you want to capture and that is what this post is all about. I hope you find it at least thought-provoking and better still very practical and helpful. If you do, PLEASE leave a comment as feedback is really important to me. Thanks )

So, what do we mean by seeing the picture and how can I improve my own ability? Well, first we need to understand something important: What you see and what your camera sees are two different things. Why? Because your field of view is much greater than any camera and lens combination can ever be.

‘Ah,’ I hear you saying, ‘but what if you have a super-wide lens? Nope, still doesn’t see what you are seeing. You see, when you look at a massive scene in front of you, you see it in full size, all its wonderful glory. The camera sees it all a heck of a lot smaller. What you saw as a stunning moon-rise over a 2,000 feet mountain is conveyed to your picture viewer as a 1-inch golf-ball rising over an 8-inch triangle! Ok, I am being a bit sarcastic but I hope you will get my point. You can’t print a landscape photo at life size so you need to ensure that your viewer sees in their mind something akin to what you saw when you captured the photo.

Ok, so what principles should I keep in mind?….

First, your viewer is seeing your picture in 2D not 3D but that shouldn’t stop you thinking in three dimensions.

Learn to look for depth indicators in your picture. What do i mean by that? Well, here are a few that you might consider:

• A line of telegraph poles, lamp-posts, receding into the distance.
  As they recede they get smaller which shows the viewer that they are going away from you and thus gives an impression of depth.
• A meandering path, river, road, etc.
  The edges of a river, path or road will converge as it moves further away into the distance, again showing depth.
• Layers of haze, mist, etc.
  As you go back in a scene, haze or mist gets thicker so things in the distance are less distinct than those things which are closer to you.
• Converging straight lines on houses, etc.
  Buildings are generally built in a straight line bu as you look down a long road, the things on the left converge with the things on the right. I have seen people using Photoshop to manipulate straight lines so that they look parallel and so forth. This is silly as it makes the picture look artificial at best and downright wrong at worst. If you have taken a photo at the foot of a building, the lines going up will come together, we call these CV’s (Converging Verticals) and it is exactly how it looks to the human eye so why distort the image by making the sides look parallel when they never did look parallel in real life? Sure, a slight adjustment is fine but don’t go too far.
• Layers of colour.
  A good mantra to learn is this: ‘Red proceeds, blue recedes.’
  What we mean is that if you look at a block of red next to a block of blue, the red will appear to push forward in the picture whereas the blue will recede into the background more. So, a red-bricked house in front of a blue sky will look excellent as there will be a sense of the house in the foreground and the sky receding backwards into the distance. Conversely, a portrait of two people, one wearing red standing behind someone wearing blue will cause a clash in the viewers eye as the red is more prominent and tries to come forward whilst the blue does the opposite even though the blue is supposed to be in front of the red. So, switch the two people round and the picture will harmonise for the viewer’s eye.

I will be adding more to this ‘Seeing the Picture’ series shortly. As always, any questions please do ask )

Understanding Depth of Field

This is one of my video tutorials on what I consider to be one of the most important things to understand in photography.

I have seen it explained as though it were rocket science but it isn’t! If you are trying to get to grips with depth of field, what it is and how to make use of controlling it in a picture, I hope you will find this video tutorial helpful. As always, comments are very welcome as are any questions you may have.

Cheers,
Rob
My Photo Tutor

Understand Light

Photography literally means ‘writing with light’ so if you pick up a camera with no understanding of light, it is about the same as picking up a pen to write with without knowing if there is any ink, what colour it is, etc. I firmly believe that a basic understanding of light is important. After all, if you’re a painter, you would want to understand the different ways in which oils, watercolours or pastels work, wouldn’t you?

Ok, so let me explain a little bit about light that might help you as you look to take better pictures. As with all my articles on this blog, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will answer it as soon as I can.

Luminance levels.

When your camera is taking readings and choosing what settings will give a good exposure, it doesn’t look at lots of different colours in the scene, it only looks at the light levels or luminance. It is not so concerned with the darkest level (black) and the lightest level (white) but instead it looks for the mid-point (grey). In fact, there is a specific mid-grey which is actually 18% grey but don’t worry about the percentage, just concentrate on that colour! Why? Because it is what your camera is doing! It is trying to balance the shades of light around the mid-point.

Black is black …. or is it?….

Well, no, not always!  Let me try this with you by way of an experiment. Take three photos with your camera, one of a white sheet of paper only, one of something black and one of both white and blank. Convert them to monochrome by desaturating them to take away the colour. What do they look like? Well, let’s see….

 

 

 

The left one is of a white sheet of paper …. but it looks grey.

The middle one is of a black cushion…. but it looks grey.

The right one is of the edge of the black cushion on the white sheet of paper, only now do the objects look white and black.

Why? Because the camera is trying to average the luminance out to mid-grey in every case. So if there is only white it calls it all mid-grey. If there is only black it will call black mid-grey. If there is both black and white, it will recognise those as the correct luminance levels.

Here is what the light level curves look like for each picture:

The white curve (left) shows all the luminance levels around the 18% grey area. The black curve (middle) also shows the luminance level around the 18% grey area. The black and white curve (right) correctly shows the black areas to the left and the white areas to the right.

Exposure Compensation

So what does all this mean for the photographer? Well, if a picture is coming out rather darker than you expected, perhaps because it is a snow scene with just a single isolated tree, you might need to set the camera to over-expose slightly by using +1 to 2 stops of Exposure Compensation (EC).

If the picture is looking too light, perhaps a black building with a white door (hey, could happen ) then you might need to under expose slightly by using -1 to 2 stops of EC.

I hope this gives you a reasonable understanding of how light values work and how they affect the pictures you are taking, especially in low-light or bright light situations.

As always, feel free to ask if you don’t understand something.

Cheers,
Rob
My Photo Tutor

Pixels Don’t Count!

When people are looking for a camera, it is amazing how many make the number of Megapixels their first priority in making the decision which camera to buy. Let me explain why this is a mistake….

A lot will depend on what you intend to do with your photographs when you have taken them. For many people the pictures will mostly be seen on the internet, in emails or other social networking sites. If that is the case you really don’t need lots of pixels. For other people, the pics will be printed out at a maximum size of about 12″ x 8″. So, how many pixels do we need for these uses?

For use on a computer, you will see them displayed at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch (ppi) so even if you show the picture quite large, say 12″ x 8″ you will actually be showing 864 pixels (12×72) by 576 pixels (8×72). That comes to a grand total of 497,664 pixels in total. Yes, that is less than 1/2 a megapixel. Look at this picture on the right. You are seeing 450 x 341 pixels which is just 0.15 megapixels! Kind of makes those 10 megapixels your camera recorded just a little redundant doesn’t it!

Even for printing, you still only use 300 ppi – any more than that is pointless as the human eye can’t resolve greater detail than 300 ppi! So if you printed out this picture at 12″ x 8″ it would be 3600 x 2400 pixels which comes out at 8,640,000. A big number but even that is only 8.6 megapixels and for most people that is as large as they are ever going to go. Oh sure, some people will have pictures printed onto canvases at much bigger sizes but most won’t and even if you do, you wouldn’t need to print those at 300 ppi as you look at pictures like that from a further distance away so 200 ppi is the max you need to still see a top quality print.

So what should you look for in a decent camera? Well, you should look for one that gives you as much control as possible, especially the following three modes: Av, Tv (or S) and M as well as the usual Program mode that all digital cameras have. Av is Aperture Priority, Tv/S is Shutter Speed Priority and M is fully manual so you set both shutter speed and aperture yourself, allowing you total creative control.

If you are not sure what the last paragraph means, check out some of my video tutorials on my website, www.myphototutor.com as these explain the Modes fully. There is no charge to see them, my sites are all free )

Cheers,

Rob, My Photo tutor

Getting started with your DSLR!

Ok, you’ve got your camera, it looks lovely, it has lots of fancy buttons and dials…. but what now?

It’s important to remember that it is YOU who takes photos, not the camera. The camera is your tool to be used as you wish. What you choose to do with it determines the quality of your photographs.

Like anything, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. So, get to know your camera. Learn the basics of what the buttons and settings do. In short, if you’re a male you might find this difficult, read the manual! Yes, I know. It’s a chore isn’t it. But hey, you have to start somewhere! Want somewhere a little more exciting to start?

Ok, I’m glad you said yes: why not head over to my videos on YouTube where you will find several 10 minute tutorials on understanding a digital SLR camera. There are video tuts on Modes, Lenses, White Balance, Depth of Field and more. They cost nothing to watch and the short time invested now might well prove useful later. I do hope so. To make things easier, I have pulled them all together into my own website so you could just go here to check them out:

My Photo Tutor Video Tutorials

If you’d like to watch one now to see what they are like, this is the most popular one I have made. It’s to help you understand Depth of Field. Enjoy!

Understanding Depth of Field