I should have thought of this earlier; the panel is tomorrow, so there's
not much time for me to benefit from any thoughts out there.
Tomorrow afternoon I've got 15 minutes on a panel on "Taking better
convention snapshots". This is for people attending a science fiction
convention (that's where it's being presented). For those not familiar
with SF conventions, very roughly, that means photos indoors, and mostly
of adults rather than small children or pets.
There's another presenter, plus we're keeping a good chunk of the time
open for questions from the audience.
This is NOT for people who want to become serious photographers. I'm
pretty sure I'd be wasting my time extolling the benefits of fast lenses
on DSLRs and bounce flash; these are people with a P&S camera who aren't
interested in carrying 10 times the weight at 5 times the price.
But they wouldn't be at the panel if they were fully satisfied with the
pictures they were getting now, I wouldn't think.
This is in some sense a photo-education project. So I should have thought
of you people weeks ago. Sorry! Still, I'm still mucking with my outline
and selecting my example photos, so there's time for me to make use of
some suggestions.
I'm planning to have examples on different framings of a photo, and of
simple post-processing.
I'm looking for things I've overlooked and need to add, and for things
that are not going to help this level photographer and need to be removed.
My current outline goes roughly like this:
1. Work harder for better results
Mostly this means paying more attention. That's the most
profitable approach. There is also room for some technical
improvement from spending money on equipment, and hauling
the extra weight around.
2. Taste is subjective. I'm going to be talking in terms of
common preferences, but if the photos are for YOU, and you
have uncommon preferences, shoot for your own preferences.
There's nothing that's "right" or "wrong" in photography
itself (though photographs can have real-world impacts,
so ordinary real-world ethics can arise). There isn't
a "right" exposure, or a "right" cropping, or a "right"
moment to shoot the photo.
3. Learning to see. Looking at a photo, which just sits there and
is flat, causes the human visual system to behave differently
than when we're looking at a real scene. To take better photos,
you need to learn to see what will be apparent in the flat
photo. You need to pay attention to the edges, and to
juxtapositions at a distance (which we mostly ignore live, but
become obtrusive in a flat static photo; the "pole growing out
of the head" is the classic example).
Digital photos are free. Experiment. Deliberately try things
changing one variable at a time. Examine the results and see what
you can learn.
The human visual system doesn't really work the way it seems like
it does. Our eyes dart around, capturing small areas at high
resolution (with a hole in the middle) and everything around at
much lower resolution (and in B&W). Then our brains stitch it
together into an impression that we see everything around us
sharply, and some things leap to our attention (especially moving
things in peripheral vision). What we see is a construct of the
brain as much as it is the input from our eyes.
4. Taking control. Your camera is not nearly as smart as you are.
Moving. Moving towards, away from, and around your subject
changes how it looks in relationship to everything else in the
frame. Think about this, experiment with this. You can get rid
of distracting backgrounds, or introduce interesting
relationships. Don't forget up and down! Very often, a photo
looks better from a bit below the eye level of the subject. (The
technical term for these relationships between objects in the
scene is "perspective".)
Cropping. Decide where the frame boundaries are. And don't be
afraid to crop tighter in post-processing.
Focus. The time it takes the camera to focus is the biggest part
of the delay between pushing the button and actually taking the
picture. Most cameras let you pre-focus by half-pressing the
button (and holding it). Then you can take the actual picture,
with much less delay, by pushing the button the rest of the way.
(DSLRs also focus MUCH faster than P&S, because they use a
completely different technology to do so).
Review. It's easy to check whether you got what you wanted, these
days. Remember that you have to zoom in quite a bit to accurately
judge whether the picture is sharp.
Posing and directing. Getting people to cooperate with you can
help. Another presenter is much more into this than I am, and I
know will be covering it, so I'm not.
5. Flash. The flashes built into P&S are very weak and very
limited. Most of the best flash techniques (bounce flash in
various forms) are not available with them.
Blasting them straight into people's faces gives very flat
lighting that usually looks horrible. Few P&S can get a good
flash exposure more than 6 feet away. Flash falls off rapidly
with distance, so direct flash works very poorly for subjects that
are at a range of different distances. Technology may have mostly
conquered red-eye, which is good.
6. Ongoing projects. It's often fascinating to have a series of
photos of the same thing taken over significant time. Same house
every five years, same person every year, or whatever. Same rose
bush every day. The photos should be simple, and similar to each
other, so that the primary thing you see is the differences
between the subject from photo to photo.
7. Picking and choosing. Big wastebaskets make good photographers.
Shoot heavy, display light. (No, I'm not very good at practicing
this.)
8. Post-processing. You can make a huge difference without spending
much time on each photo, or buying expensive software.
The Gimp is free, and very powerful. Picasa has some simple
tools. Irfan view can do cropping and some other editing, and is
also free.
Adobe Lightroom is at least cheaper than Photoshop, and is more
approachable. Bibble Pro is older than Lightroom, has about the
same capabilities, is cheaper, and is by a small independent
company. But we're still past $100 (LR is about $300).
While Photoshop is the industry standard, and my strong first
choice for producing exhibition prints or doing restoration work,
I strongly recommend against it for people who want to poke just a
little bit at their snapshots. It has a learning curve like a
brick wall and as high as Mount Everest; it will annoy you,
confuse you, and probably defeat you in the end.
Color balance adjustments are often as easy as clicking on
something that's a neutral color with a tool, or picking the
conditions the photo was shot under (sunny, cloudy, open shade,
incandescent light). (There are much harder cases, but mostly you
won't run into them.)
Cropping is easy, just drag a rectangle, and then adjust it
precisely. Cropping is one of the very best things you can spend
time doing to your photos.
Moderate brightness adjustments are easy. Bringing up dark photos
works surprisingly well. Photos that are too bright, especially
photos where the bright areas are clipped (overexposed) pretty
much can't be fixed (if you shoot in RAW mode, which many P&S
don't even offer, you can fix some clipped highlights).
9. Display. Presumably you show some of your photos to some people.
These days the options include online services (SmugMug, Flickr,
galleries on your own website), hardcopy, mobile devices.
10. Preserving memories. Snapshots are often used to help remember
things. So you need to write on the back of them the names of the
people, and where and when the shot was taken.
In electronic form, that means using IPTC data, or picking file
names to encode that information. Both are useful tools. You can
put a lot more information into IPTC fields. (Most programs that
display or manipulate photos will display and manipulate IPTC
fields).
If you put the data in the master file, most programs will copy it
into any derived (edited) versions you make. Most online
galleries will pick up much of it.
11. Backups. No digital medium yet devised does very well under
benign neglect. But an actively managed digital archive can last
forever (so long as the management continues).
Keep a set of backups away from where you keep your primary copies
(if nothing else, sick 'em in a drawer at work). The big benefit
of digital is that a copy is just like the original; exploit this!
Online backup may be workable for you. It's automatic, and gets
you an immediate off-site copy.
Copying to an external disk is probably the best overall choice
right now. Have at least two, preferably three, backup disks; if
lightning strikes while writing your new backup over your old
backup, your can lose your original and all your backups at once.
So overwrite your oldest backup while the newest is not
connected.
Optical disks can be good, but they're rather small, and the
lifetime of media varies a lot. Use good media, ideally MAM gold
archival or equivalent. They are a pain to make and to check,
especially if you're making multiple copies.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
