ongopt
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How?
May 08, 2024,04:36 AM
So how do I do it? Well being in the right place at the right time and capturing the light and framing. Digital cameras and lenses are absolute devices. There is no complete balance when taking a shot through a camera, although I try. Your camera also tries to compensate by brightening the dark and by dimming the bright and by various software to capture and process light and color. However cameras and lenses don’t operate like our eyes because our eyes are capable of the complex abilities such as instant adjusting of light balance and color balance by the eyes’ rods and cones, retinal light capture and an almost instantaneous iris response. Plus eyes have overlapping fields of vision to create a 3-D effect. You can work the camera to help by adjusting the lens opening to give more depth (higher number f-spot which also decreases light but can be compensated by slower shutter speed if possible) or less depth and higher light (lower number f-stop), adjusting the sensitivity of light capture, ISO, (with the higher number the more light captured) and by adjusting the shutter speed to determine how fast you want to capture the scene or control the amount of light coming in ( the faster the shutter the better ability to capture motion but less light coming in). Lenses with wider apertures, e.g. 2.8f, are better at capturing light at lower levels. So with experience and knowing what your subject light conditions are you can use a combination of ISO, f-stop and shutter speed to great effect.
So that is the first part of my process. Framing and the choice of wide angle or telephoto lenses is an artistic choice. Framing and rule of thirds is how you want to convince your audience’s eye draw and give a scene a sense of balance and subject focus. I could take a small field with a single tree by a busy highway, crop it so that no highway is showing, and then you might have a scene from a country field. It’s all an artistic choice. However, you could never do this in photojournalism because the very act of frame cutting changes the nature of reality. There are strict rules in photojournalism to preserve reality.
And finally photo processing is the most artistic choice especially for emotional impart. I only use the basic Photoshop Elements and nothing eslse. It’s all about for me to get the right amount of color balance and light and shadow balance. I do use some HDR to balance but it has to be used sparingly. Too much and your photo composition becomes too unreal and too cartoonish. I will however use several adjustment layers of shadow and light balance to get that 3-D effect. So in my photo composition I will lower an overly bright sky or background to such an extent that your eye will be compelled to look more into that sky or background. The harsher the light more offended your eyes are and the less it will want to focus on the background and thus reducing the 3-D effect. The choice of a telephoto lens draws the subject in but flattens the perspective. The wide angle lens pulls your eye in by lengthening the perspective and sometimes past the point of reality but that the fun part.
Finally it’s a passionate process for me as an artistic pursuit. One side note: I’m colorblind! My photos may be saturated at times because I like that effect or, with frustration, I may miss certain overhyped colors. I have let plenty of photos sit for days or even years and go back and think what the hell was I doing!Typically I’m desaturating colors after second, third or fourth viewing. All that being said, and with all the negativity in the world today, let’s all do our best to make the world a little more positive …even if it’s just a few simple photos. ☺️
Cheers!
Pete
