Anyway, Hiking Buddy insists I have a good eye. I'm like I wear glasses, how can I have a good eye? He just sighs and rolls his eyes. What he means is that I'm able to see things that might be interesting or would make a good composition or what have you.
I was thinking about this yesterday while at Mass. The stained glass windows were making interesting patterns and I thought it was very artistic.
Here's attempt #1:
I like the overexposure on the windows and how I've managed to get some diffraction spikes. Overall, I think this image sucks. The perspective is off. It's too dark in the center. It feels clunky. It would have been cooler had the colored light landed on St. Anne or Mary. This is one of my great ideas that didn't pan out photographically.
This window is on the other side of the Church. Even though this is underexposed (not bright enough) I like how it turned out. There's colored light on the wall and on the floor. I think the corner of the pew give it a nice touch. This photo seems more balanced than the above picture.
As I look at these photos, I'm trying to remember how I decided what to take a picture of and what not to include. They just seemed to look right.
I've noticed that on many of my photos. Yesterday I went to Hawn State Park and took lots of artistic photos. I'm not happy with any of them. Well, I'm happy with the pictures of my dog. Mostly. Some doggie wasn't cooperating. I'm not exactly sure what happens. I just know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. I also know that sometimes photoshop can salvage what would be a bad technical shot. But no amount of photoshopping in the world will fix an artistically bad photo.
I'm not sure how to fix this problem other than reading more photography books and taking more pictures. But the pictures need to be critiqued. I've taken 38,500 pictures with my Rebel; very few have been critiqued. I think even if I do the critique it might make my photography better.
So I'm thinking of doing photo critiques of my pictures too.
1 comment:
Perspective correction is a time-honored way of fixing photos. Back in the old days, this was done with the tilts and swings available on the old field cameras, and nowadays this is done with perspective control lenses or in Photoshop. Perspective correction gives you precisely the same effect that you would have received if you used a wider angle lens and held the camera level.
The human eye tends to see vertical lines as being vertical, as long as you don't tilt your head too much. Perspective correction will show in the photograph what the eye perceives in real life. But only minor adjustments look reasonable: if you want to tilt the camera, tilt it strongly and have strongly converging vertical lines. This was the very first lesson I learned in photography when I took it back up.
Now the problem with artistic images: be aware that digital cameras don't see color and relative tones like the human eye. In can be close, as in bright daylight, but on dismally dark overcast days, the tonal response to light is very different from what the eye sees, due to the Purkinje Effect (the human eye becomes more sensitive to blue light and less sensitive to red). This is similar to a severe problem under fluorescent lighting, where the camera will see all sorts of magenta and green tones invisible to the eye.
There are other factors involved, too. Cameras are designed to conform to internationally accepted technical standards, and do not generally produce the most visually accurate images. The art of photography also includes the manipulation of the recorded image.
But if you *saw* an artistically appealing scene, and if you photographed it well enough so that it is focused and exposed correctly, no doubt you can correct the image in Photoshop to look far closer to how you remembered the scene. This takes lots of theoretical knowledge and effort, because you have to understand what it is that you saw versus what the camera recorded and how to correct for it.
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