Long Ride Home

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Straight Monument

Rules, Laws, directives … or what ever name you want to put on that concept are nice to follow in photography, should not be overused.

Today, we will see, together how we can go further the rules to make a poping photo.

Location

At that time, I was walking on the streets of Princeton, New Jersey. I was just in front of the University, North-East side. Well, it was a sunny but cold day. I decided to go have a walk to enjoy the first days of bright light.

Situation

As I said, I was just walking, looking for something to shoot. Actually, I wasn’t searching but I was waiting for a shot to hit me. I saw these building and I said to my self that something is going on here. I didn’t really know why, but I knew that a shot had to be taken. I don’t know, maybe the colors or the different shapes or maybe the texture.

Post Processing

It is only at home that I tried to work the shot. I realized that lines and shapes are the main Hotpoint of the shot. I had to increase it and make it less “normal” or “common”. Well, against all thoughts, I inclined the photos so that the roof’s line corresponds with one of the diagonals. That is it! That’s what I was looking for!!
I also increased some colors and contrast.

Critic

Warm but strict, this photo give us the impression that we already know that situation, a situation where you have to go over a big step of your life while you are still looking back at your childhood. 

Rules aren’t laws. You can break them unpunished

Grossly over-exposing a photo doesn’t have to mean it won’t look good. (click for bigger on Flickr)

Read the sentence above. That’s all I really wanted to say with this article. So if you’re in a rush, or you think I use too many words to say something simple, then read that sentence a few times, and go check out XKCD for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that while the guidelines are there to help you, there’s no point in following any rules or guidelines unless you fully understand (or grok, if you’re geeky and/or well-read enough to be familiar with that concept) why.

The best reason to understand why a rule is there, is to break it. Some times, you might find that your photos actually come out more interesting – better, even, perhaps – when you break the rules. Other times, you’ll try to take the same photo twice; once whilst following the rule, and once whilst breaking it, and you’ll realise why it’s a good idea.

Just remember: Never follow a rule just because you’ve read somewhere that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Follow it because you understand it, and because you know what happens when you don’t.

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The exposure triangle is the most important consideration you will make when controlling your camera to shoot in manual.

If you’re already there and a pro with the triangle or just starting out, let’s talk about it! Of the three settings for perfect exposure – aperture, ISO and shutter speed – what do you personally feel is the most essential and important one to you? When you start to dial in your settings, which do you always think of first?

I’d say for me, control of ISO is probably the most important first step in my exposure triangle. I hate shooting at high ISOs (I’m a pixel peeper) so the most important thing to me is keeping that as low as possible.

After that, I consider shutter speed. Because I mostly shoot kids – and kids move fast – I have to keep my shutter speed above 100.

And this leaves me with aperture. Unless I’m purposefully going for a certain look which requires me to pay special consideration to my aperture, this usually ends up being whatever it needs to be to complete a perfect exposure.

What about you? What order do you dial in your triangle?

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In photography, vocabulary is very important. Still, some of us are still using unclear words to mean pricise concepts. Over and Under Exposure are one of them. I will first give a definition of these words and then I will show you how to use every days tools to make the right choice at the perfect moment.

Overexposure

When a photograph is overexposed it simply means that the photo is too bright. Typically colors will look washed out and highlights will often be “blown out” or completely white.

Truno Monument

Underexposure

When a photograph is underexposed it means that the photo is too dark. Often you’ll lose details in the shadow or darkest areas and can often cause them to look black or near black.

Exposure Controls

Almost every camera comes with some sort of exposure control function. If you like to think of light as water (as in flow of information) then you can think of the exposure controls as a valve. This “valve” allows you to control the “flow” of light hitting your film or sensor. The default setting is neutral so that the camera controls as even an amount of flow of light to the sensor as the settings would suggest.

When thinking about the exposure controls as a valve you can control the camera to allow more light or less light than the camera’s light meter would normally suggest.

Exposure Histogram

Most digital cameras allow you to set the viewfinder or LCD to display the histogram either before or after the photograph has been taken.

The black bars in the exposure histogram indicate the distribution of light and dark values.

If your histogram shows a tall clump of bars to the left side of the histogram then your scene is probably dark (to the light meter) and may indicate that the photo is underexposed.

If the bars are tall and clumped to the right then your photo is likely overexposed as the histogram and light meter are indicating an excessive amount of bright area in the scene before the camera.

Not All Scenes Are Created Equal

The average scene will likely have some varying amount of both light and dark areas. You will come across scenes where there simply isn’t a way to avoid overexposing or underexposing an image. There will be times, as well, where you will have areas in one scene were the histogram is indicating both overexposure and underexposure!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that!

You can have some really dark areas of your photograph or blown out highlights if that’s what you’re looking for as an end result. Remember that photography is a creative pursuit so allow your creativity to push the envelope from time to time.

Go now try it out !!

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The ultimate battle ensues for the top drawer in my toolbox: presets versus actions. What’s the difference and what are the pros and cons according to Elizabeth?

First the basics: Presets are Lightroom’s way of applying many changes to a photo in one click. They can be made by you for a way in which you commonly treat a photo and would like to apply your own recipe in one click. Alternatively, they can be the recipes of other photographers which you purchase from them as .lrtemplate files to import into your lightroom catalogue of presets. Even better, some photographers give their presets away for free! Keep reading for those.

Photoshop’s one-click version are called actions and they work in the same way. Scroll through the effect names, choose one and click. You then see your photograph go through a makeover in a split-second. Again, you can record your own action sequences or buy them as .atn files from other photographers.

I prefer LR presets. I’m a control freak (big time) and I want to have complete, effortless control over every last pixel of my work. I appreciate the foundation that presets can lay in my editing process, but I never click once and move on. I always then play with the sliders to make every last element of my photo exactly what I want it to be. With actions, I feel that I lose control and unless the one click produces exactly what I had in mind (it never does), I don’t prefer to use them. The few times I’ve used actions, they always end up being from Florabella because she makes them work with a variety of layers which you can then tweak. But still, I don’t feel that I have enough control.

So what actions/presets do I love? My first love came from the ‘Lightroom Killer Tips’ website. Matt gives utterly amazing LR tutorials and gives his presets away for free. He even invented a preset extractor program which extracts LR setting from photos on Flickr and that is free as well. Genius! For actions, I use Florabella. She is the love of my textures life and also makes smashing actions. Another place for free actions and presets is CoffeeShop. For presets, my loves are Rebecca Lily and One Willow’s ‘Retro Candy’ presets with delicious names like ‘cotton candy’.

Keep in mind that most presets are created to work on RAW files, so if you’re not shooting in RAW yet, look into starting that before using presets. If you’re not sure about RAW vs JPEG, read this.

Which method do you prefer? Who are your favourites?

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