Pushing the boats out

[Spam]

I spent a good 45 minutes walking around this marina, looking for good shots. Didn't really find them. I sort of like the composition in the first shot, but there's not that much compelling in it. I really like the contrast in the second, but the composition's messy and there's no focal point. I've also realised I really need to go to school on sharpening techniques. At the moment I'm faced with just-not-sharp-enough, or chromatic aberattion up the ying-yang.

[ionian]

Hi Simon - some thoughts on the pics and then some thoughts on sharpening below.

The first image is hampered by those gates at the start of the birth, and the rest of the image is very busy. Therefore your main subject, the line of boats along the central jetty, is both obscured and gets lost in all of the detail.

The second image is better, as it has more space to breathe although the background is starting to get a little cluttered. Could you have shot from a lower angle, with a slightly wider field of view? This would have obscured some of the boats in the background.

I don't see an issue with sharpness - if anything, they are oversharpened. Similarly, converting to mono has eliminated any chromatic aberration.

What processing software do you use? Lightroom has a check box that, once ticked, eliminates 90% of any CA, and the rest can be removed fairly easily with the manual sliders. I have it set to automatically remove it from my images on import, and I've not worried about it since I started using teh software. Of course, a better lens will produce less CA, but that's an expensive solution to an easy processing issue.

Sharpening - what are you using to sharpen? Again, in LR, sharpen at 100% on a high contrast area so you can see the effect. Then check plain areas like the sky. In both these images you appear to have introduced noise into plain areas because you haven't masked them. Again, LR has a masking slider - hold alt and slide slowly to see everything that is being sharpened (the white areas).

In Photoshop or elements, I use a high pass filter for most of my sharpening (having not yet learnt the nuances of the more sophisticated sharpening tools). I can talk you through this if you use the software although I suspect others will have much better photoshop sharpening workflows that you should try.

If you don't have the adobe software, I apologise - the principals apply to all processing but the systems may be different. If you are umming and ahhing about getting it, just do it. Lightroom is relatively easy to learn and extremely powerful, and Photoshop can do anything though you might spend more time on google than in the programme itself!

[Spam]

Thanks for that, Simon. I do have Photoshop, as well as the Nik collection. I'd appreciate any tips, but I've just had a quick look and seen there are loads of existing threads on sharpening, so I'll browse through those.

[IzzieK]

There are some good tutorial for sharpening right at ACR. Here is one:

How to sharpen in Camera RAW - Tip Squirrel


and since you use Nik's too, look at Digital Sharpener.

[Spam]

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That's a great image on the front page of your website!

[ionian]

That's a great image on the front page of your website!

Many thanks Simon! We had a bit of a debate about the vignette on here, but I like it as it is.

Have a look at post #11 in this thread for a brief description of sharpening using a high pass filter.

For Photoshop, i love the phlearn tutorial videos on YouTube. Here is Aaron's vid on sharpening - well worth a watch:

[Astramael]

I won't hit any of the technicals on these because Simon has done a better job than I can hope to. However, I did want to get a word (or many) in about a rule I break all the time... so hypocrisy admitted and self-criticism taken on board.


Everything In Service of Story

I've been using the word story a lot and it seems kind of loaded. What does this really mean and how does it apply to photography? This idea started maturing when I read a book called The Illusion of Life. It's a treatise on Disney animation, and I was intrigued by how the decisions made by technical animators centered completely around story. These people weren't writers or storyboard artists or directors, they weren't creating the story. But they took it upon themselves to be as involved as an actor would be. They lived and breathed the story. And what they produced was entirely focused around the motivations and moods of the scene and the characters. It's no accident that people like Disney, their movies communicate intensely.

In order to communicate as a photographer I need a story to share. Taking a technically great photo of a thing isn't good enough. Only through an an event arc can we create drama, emotion, and connect to others. We have to project into the future, the past, or both, purely by what is captured in a single frame. I don't want to throw a bunch of my own images into your thread because it's rude, but I'll show just one example here.



This frame has an entire narrative. We know that in the past this section of tree was attached, it was a whole tree even. We know that in the future it will be on the ground, the tree will be removed. Because the motion is communicated we understand that right now we are at the peak of the action. In traditional dramatic structure terms we are directly at the climax. Events prior are rising action and events on the ground are falling action. Not to say this is a great photo or anything, there is plenty wrong with it, but it is a functional example of a very forced story.

Cinema produces story in a way people are comfortable with: in temporal form. We can all understand a series of events connected by therefores and buts. This means that cinema can be a bridge to understanding photographic storytelling. It gets a little more difficult when you remove a dimension (time). But there are transitional film makers to help us adapt, such as Wes Anderson. He likes to compose his shots a lot more like stills than moving pictures, often making them extremely simple. Alongside The Grand Budapest Hotel a recent example of this kind of cinematography is Mad Max Fury Road. In fact Fury Road is an especially great example because of the variety of shots used.



Spatial Storytelling

You only have two dimensions to work in, X and Y. Because humans will automatically inject a third dimension into places where we think it should exist, faking Z isn't very difficult. From there things get a lot harder, motion or passing of time are especially challenging. Motion blur being a bit of a brute force approach to project time onto space (or to take it to the extreme, long exposure).

Once the technical limitations are understood you have to make art. Where your mechanical decisions translate into more than just a person, just a post, just a blade of grass. While nobody can tell you how to compose a frame and make it speak, there is a code. Fortunately "The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules.". Thanks Barbossa.

My personal opinion is that too many photography classes and books concentrate exclusively on how to use the tools and follow the code. That is valuable and should have classes, but there also needs to be classes on how to tell great stories. Case studies, discussions, pre-set subjects with interpretive presentations. This is why I talk about movies. We all take for granted that movies are stories told with pictures. It's not obvious that photography is that way, and maybe it should be.



Critique

Fortunately, you are part of a great forum! People here talk openly and listen well. Nobody sees anything as a failure, just an opportunity for learning. So lets talk about those photos.

#1. Mechanically great, lacks direction. I can't say if it would have been a lot better, but perhaps walking down to the gate threshold, picking a closer focus point (midway down the marina walkway), and opening up the aperture all the way. I think there is a story in there about choices and the unknown.

#2. Once again mechanically great. Once again lacks direction. There is potentially something to say about calmness and the zen-like qualities of water? I am not sure how i would reframe. Might go quite wide and put the camera just above the water (don't drop it!).

#3. I like this one the most because I am interested in what the person on the boat is doing. What is his deal, why is he going somewhere, where is he going? There is a character and an arc here. I'm not sure how I feel about it compositionally, but it's got promise.


I will continue to caution people about black and white. It's a beautiful medium, and excels at some things. As scenes gain complexity using black and white to simplify can work very well. However, it can also be detrimental because color can help separate subject and scene elements. Just be mindful about why you are choosing black and white in your shot. If you want to only shoot black and white you will have to be more picky about what you choose to expose.


Thank you for sharing your work and exposing yourself to criticism. Thank you for trying to improve. I hope you don't mind that I posted this here, but to your immense credit it distilled something important for me and helped me learn as well. This post is a response to that, and an attempt to share my thinking. I'm not an expert, just a novice and hobbyist who thinks a lot about their craft.

[Spam]

Thank you for sharing your work and exposing yourself to criticism. Thank you for trying to improve. I hope you don't mind that I posted this here, ....

Not at all, Julian; it's precisely for this reason that I decided to sign up and post some pics, after lurking for a while. My wife and friends constantly tell me my pics are great — and it's not just because they like me; they really do seem to think that — and they get irritated when I frown at them and say, "Actually, they are not". So, it's good to have somewhere like this to get some real and worthwhile criticism.

I agree with you about the story-telling aspect. Thank you for your helpful comments.

[ionian]

Your images are great. They can be better, but I bet every photographer, from Ansel Adams down, has said the same thing!

Just remember that a photographer sees a picture differently to the rest of the general public - and at the end of the day, it is the viewing masses that decide whether an image is "good" or not. Of course, it can be worthwhile without being popular, and unless you are selling prints, the only person who has to like it is you. If you are receiving positive comments then people enjoy looking at your images already. I hope CiC helps you with your technique and composition (the photographer stuff) so that you can be more confident in any shooting environment, get more keepers, and keep producing the goods!

[Spam]

Your images are great. They can be better, but I bet every photographer, from Ansel Adams down, has said the same thing!

Heh. Not so sure about that, Simon. I reckon Ansel Adams had it down pat from the moment he added his first red filter.