Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

Nighttime also provides a great opportunity to experiment with photographing motion. The light reflected off the moon isn't nearly as intense as direct sunlight, so you can leave your shutter open for long periods of time, capturing drastic lengths of motion. Flowing water begins to lose texture when photographed for long periods of time. A one-minute exposure can cause the ocean to appear as calm as a lake on a windless day. I exposed Figure 10–10 for 8 seconds, which caused the ocean to become smooth while maintaining some of its detail.

On nights with a full moon, I tend to include the moon in my composition or to use the moonlight to expose my scene. When the moon is just a sliver in the sky, I like to go far away from the city lights into the wilderness and use a wide-angle lens to compose a scene that has a great deal of sky in it. With such a small intensity of light in the scene, you can leave the shutter open for hours and capture the illusion of the stars moving through the sky. Of course it's the earth that's rotating, but your camera is grounded here and records the stars as moving. This phenomenon is referred to as star trails.

Base your nighttime composition around the position of the North Star because that's the only star that remains in the same spot throughout the night. The other stars circle around it, creating a neat effect in a photograph. Also, make sure your camera battery is fully charged before starting your exposure; otherwise you may run out of juice before the exposure is complete. (Check out Chapter 14 for more info on photographing nature.)

50mm, B sac, f/2.5, 100

Figure 10–10:Photographing a scene at night makes capturing light in motion easy.

The impact of color in your scene comes not just from the color of the elements in it but also from the color of light in it. Each light source you use in a scene has a dominant color. Light burns at a specific Kelvin temperature, and that temperature determines the color of the light. The term red-hot, for example, refers to something that's burning at the Kelvin temperature of the color red. Warm colors are created from lower temperatures (like 1000K candle light), and cool colors are created from higher temperatures (like 9000K open shade).

Here's how lights commonly used in photography fall into the Kelvin scale:

1000K = candlelight

• 3200K = household tungsten lighting/photographic hot lights " 5000K = typical flash bulb used in photographic strobes

5500K-6000K = direct sunlight

• 7500K = overcast sky

" 9000K = open shade (subject is in shadows that are exposed to the blue sky)

Your digital camera's sensor reacts differently to each of these light temperatures, which is why the camera has a separate setting to shoot in each one of them. You access your camera's color balance through the shooting menu. Refer to your owner's manual to find out how your specific camera enables you to choose the color balance.

When preparing to take a photo, evaluate the lighting in your scene and determine which setting will provide the most appropriate results. For instance, when you're indoors and regular household lights are lighting your scene, set the camera's color balance to tungsten. When you're outdoors, shooting in cloudy conditions, set the color balance to the overcast setting.

The way you see things in the direct sunlight is what you use as the standard for how things should look. And your camera does the same. Your white balance is the setting on your camera that determines how your sensor will react to the color of light. Consider the following examples:

• If you shoot under tungsten lighting and set your white balance to tungsten, the camera compensates for the orange light by making it bluer. This compensation makes the light appear to have the color temperature of daylight instead of tungsten light.

" If you shoot in the daylight and set your white balance to tungsten, the image will come out extremely blue. This can be used as a creative technique to produce images with a cool, blue tone.

• When shooting in the open shade with the appropriate color balance, the camera will compensate for the cooler light and make it appear normal.

• If you shoot in the daylight with your color balance set to open shade, the camera will compensate by making the image warmer. Because your scene was normal to begin with, the result will be an image that's very warm.

" If the sun is out and you want to create the warm feeling of sunset but it's only 3 p.m., simply set your color balance to the overcast setting. The result will be a warm image. If you want to make it even warmer, set the color balance to the open shade setting.

On an overcast day, you can set your color balance to the sunlight setting in order to create a photograph that has a cooler tone.

Photographers used to place color filters in front of the lens to achieve all these results, but with digital cameras you can control the color balance with the camera's settings and don't have to purchase expensive filters.

Do some tests with the different color balance settings on your camera in different lighting scenarios and figure out which scenarios cause effects that you find interesting. You can control the color of your photographs with photo-editing software as well. I show you how to do so in Chapter 18.

In This Chapter

Creating a compositional frame within a frame

Formatting your images according to your subject, message, and environment

When you put a photograph in a picture frame, you send potential viewers a clear message. If a frame could speak, it would say, "Hey, look in here." A frame shows viewers exactly where to look and then keeps their eyes inside its borders. You can get that same effect by composing your images so that elements within it surround your subject and ensure that the viewers' eyes go directly where you want them (and then stay there). To make that frame effective, you have to study your scene, determine your subject and which elements successfully frame it, and then compose the image accordingly.

An interesting composition is one that fulfills two jobs: It provides a framed image that's aesthetically pleasing, and it tells a story based on the relationships of the elements included in the frame. Ideally, a composition is interesting enough to keep a viewer's attention for more than just a few seconds. When viewers can explore compositional elements that fit perfectly in your frame and interact with each other in a harmonious way, they're likely to be captivated by your image.

In this chapter, I help you gain and keep your viewers' attention by guiding you in an exploration with compositional framing techniques. I also provide information on determining whether a horizontal or vertical format would best suit your subject and message in a particular scene.

Your frame is the entire rectangle that contains your scene. Within it you may create an additional compositional frame — certain elements that surround the subject. Serving as the outer rim of your composition, a compositional frame keeps viewers' eyes from leaving the image and directs them to the scene's important components. You can make a compositional frame from almost anything, as I highlight throughout this section.

Photographers commonly use trees to frame a subject. Tree limbs bend and twist into dynamic shapes that seal off the edges of your frame. Often, photographers will pay particular attention to trees when shooting exteriors of buildings and structures. I've seen everything from small cottages to the Eiffel Tower framed by trees. In Figure 11-1,1 used trees in the background as a compositional frame to surround my subject.