Avoid Clutter

In my previous post, I insisted on keeping the frame filled meaningfully. The important part here is "meaningfully", or in other words, we shouldn't clutter a frame just to fill it.

For example, consider the following shots:

In the first image, the frame is very well filled, but the frame is too busy to have a 'pull'. The second shot with my daughter is again nice, but there is too much background details close to her face which distracts the viewer's attention. In the third shot, the background ducks are adding the clutter to the frame. These different types of 'cluttering' prevent the shots to have clear focus points. How can we avoid this?

Blur the Background

One easy way to increase the focus on your subject is to blur the background. You can do this by

1. using a lens with larger focal length ("high zoom");
2. moving close to the subject;
3. using a larger aperture (low f-number) of the lens;
4. any combination of the the above three.

Note that (1) and (2) above might contradict each other, but not always; also, to achieve (3), you have to move away from the "Auto" mode, preferably to an "Aperture Priority" mode. The application of this concept can be seen in the shot on the right: here I used a 120mm lens to blur the background. Unfortunately, I accidentally used F/16, which tried to keep both fore and backgrounds both in focus, which reduced the bluriness of the background; I could've simply used an F/5 here to produce a better shot.

Isolate the Subject

Even the previous technique of "blurring the background" is a way to isolate the subject. But a direct approach is to change your vantage point to avoid any cluttering coming from the background.

In both shots above, I just changed my angle to remove the disturbing background details; note that, the duck here is the same as the one from the beginning of this post. Both the shots here also applies the previous technique of blurring the background (even if there is not much background here.)

Wait and Go in Close

Sometimes, we on principle don't want to avoid the background or blur it. This happens when you want location shots -- i.e. to record that "I was there." Even then you must avoid clutter. For that, you can either wait for the background to de-clutter or try a closer shot to minimize the noise from the background. Take a look at the following examples:

The first shot here is taken a few seconds after the shot I included at the beginning of this post. I still wanted to show that the photo was taken at a park and hence I included the background people. But in this shot, my daughter ducked to play with a ball and thus the people in the background are not interfering with her face any more; I also kept the background a bit blurred. In the second shot, both my wife and the University of Toronto building are both in good focus. To get the shot clean, I:

• waited for a while to have the frame clear of the people in the background;
• went close to her and got a tight frame to avoid covering any extra background and keep her in a larger portion of the frame;
• added flash in day light, so that my wife is a tiny bit more illuminated than the background so that she still get the first attention in the photo.

Always try to go in close and take a shot with waist up for you location shots. Otherwise, your subject will be unimpressive in front of massive landmarks. For example, if you try to cover your partner and the statue of liberty both from head-to-toe in a shot, your partner will occupy only a 5% of the shot and nobody can recognize the person in the shot later on.

But Add Interesting Elements

While keeping the shot clean, sometimes you have to let one or two extra elements into the frame to make the shot more meaningful.

In the first shot here, I waited for a human to walk into the frame. It adds a story to the shot than an empty snow-covered landscape. The boat on the second shot is much more meaningful than the man on the first shot; it emphasizes the massiveness of the Niagara waterfalls. Also note that the man and the boat are inserted at the 'rule-of-third' attention points.

(Off) Center of Attention

The one photography technique that everybody with a camera can and should master is the composition. This technique has nothing to do with the capabilities of your camera – it is all about what you can do. And you can do this; no sweat.

Composition is about how you fill the frame of a photograph. Despite of everything you do (good lighting, beautiful model), if you do not have a proper composition, then the shot will be unimpressive. There is really only one rule for a proper composition: fill the frame of a photograph completely and meaningfully.  In this post, I am trying to illustrate how to apply this rule.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Center is not the center of attention in photographs:
Look at the shots of my wife posing with our daughter in Fig 1 and 2. The mistake here is that I centered their faces in the shot. This is the most common mistake I see in others' photograph. What is wrong with it? Look at all those wasted space around them; remember that the rule is to fill the frame. So I zoomed in and placed their faces off the center to get a better picture Fig. 3; notice that the whole frame is filled with my subjects.

Fig. 3

If you have empty space, make that too meaningful:
I applied the same technique for the landscape orientation (horizontal) as shown in Fig. 4.  But this still has a bit of wasted space around them. Again this is because my wife and daughter are still horizontally centered in the shot. So I moved them to a side and produced a better shot as shown in Fig. 5. You can still argue that all the space on the left is now wasted. May be a bit, but not really. Because my wife is slightly turned towards the left of the frame, the empty space on the left give you some meaning – like something is there (that's why I moved them to the right of the frame instead of the left.) It would've been more meaningful, if she or my daughter is really looking in that direction.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

While the above shots are no way close to be considered as professional shots (inferior lighting and sharpness), they still serve the purpose of explaining the concept of composition. They were taken with a compact camera to emphasize the fact that composition is independent of camera model.

Another point that can be established here is the purpose of portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) orientations. The portrait orientation (Fig. 3) is generally used for the photographing single person and the landscape orientation (Fig. 4 & 5) is for a shot of a group. Because my kid is so small, both of these orientations worked out fine here, but I still like Fig. 5 the most.

Rule of thirds:
If a person is getting serious about photography, almost the first thing he/she come to know is the rule of thirds. It says that the primary focal points of  a shot is not at the center, but at four points created by a set of three intersecting horizontal and vertical 1/3 lines (follow the link for illustration.) This is basically what my above example shots also illustrate.

Look for this composition rule in others photograph:
The best way to improve your photography skills is to learn from others shots. Next time you look at a photo, check whether it follows the composition rule; and check whether following it (or not following it) makes the shot better/worse. You can also observe this rule in movies. A good cinematographer treats each frame in a movie as a photograph. For example, watch the below video from the movie Thalapathi made by award winning cinematographer Santosh Sivan. Each shot in the video follows the basic rule of composition.

Now you understood the primitive and vital composition rule, please always try to follow them. It is also said that rules are meant to be broken and many interesting shots are out there breaking this basic composition rule. But for an average person, just following the rule always helps.

Camera Specs for New Owners

Canon ELPH 300-HS, 1/3Sec, f/5, 82mm (35mm equivalent), ISO 1600, No Flash

Most of my friends thought of buying a new camera after they are blessed with a baby. The usecases for a camera are much different for an average person compared to a photography enthusiast. An average person's need for a camera would include:

• To capture the sweet moments with their kids: indoor and outdoor.
• To take photos of social events: birthday parties, wedding, etc.
• To digitize the memory of a vacation/trip

The above usecases can be converted into the following requirements. Note that number of these requirements can arise simultaneously in any of the above usecases.

• Shooting in low-light conditions: it can be because you are shooting indoor or because you are shooting into the evening.
• Wide-angle shots: this is when you want to take a picture of a group of people in a small room or when you want to capture a whole mountain range.
• Shooting from far: this is for the situations where you can't or don't want to approach your subject. e.g. your kids playing in a park, tieing-the-knot shot, etc.
• Freezing the movements: this is when you want to capture your kid's first walk or first bicyle ride. You don't want to come up with blurry pictures.

Now, when you buy a new camera, you have to look for specifications that can satisfy the above requirements. I am not going to explain the technical terms here; that your task.

• To handle low light conditions, don't rely on flash. Using on-camera flash almost always results in unflattering photos. Rather, you better use high ISO and large aperature (low F-number.) Therefore, look for a camera that provides the lowest F-numbers (high apertures) and good quality shots at high (as high as 3200) ISO values.
• Wide-angle shots require wide-angle lens. Look at the focal-length specification of a camera. The specification of "optical zoom 5x" is useless, but look for the exact spec that says "focal length: 24–120mm". For wide angle shots, you will need the lower end of this focal length range as low as possible. 28mm or lower in 35mm equivalent value is preferable.
• When shooting from far, you need the opposite of a wide-angle lens; i.e. a tele-photo lens. For this, you would want the upper end of the focal length range as high as possible. Still, unless you are into birds photography or stalking somebody, 200mm is generally more than enough.
• All the cameras provide high shutter speeds and thus are capable to freeze any action. It is just about whether a camera let you choose a high shutter speed when you want it.
• As mentioned above, a camera can be capable of many things, but unless it lets you choose the settings, those capabilities are useless. Therefore, you have to look for some extend of manual control on the camera (shutter priority, aperature priority, exposure compensation, etc.)
• One important thing to consider when buying a compact camera is how responsive it is. Compact cameras will take a non-negligble amount of time to start up and there will be a delay between the instance you press the shutter and the instance the camera takes the shot (called shutter lag.) Even though these delays are less than a second, any value more than 0.1sec will make you miss a lot of shots and can become highly irritating.
• You can also look for optical image stabilization. This reduces the effect of shaking hand, which gets amplified when you use a tele-photo lens.

There are some camera specs an average person doesn't have to worry about. For example, don't worry about camera's megapixels. Unless you are printing posters from your photos, you don't need anything more 6MP. Same with touch screen; you would rather opt for dedicated physical knobs for various camera settings.

Fianlly, as I mentioned in my previous post, you can't get everything. If you go for a tele-photo lens, the maximum aperature you can use will reduce; if you use high ISO, the quality of your shot will reduce; and so on. So again, it is ultimately you who has to make the decision on which specs of a camera is more important to you.

Researching for a New Camera

For my previous post, Vijay referred to an excellent post from his own blog, on tips for buying a new camera. As he mentioned there, "what camera should I buy?" is the most frequent question I also get from my friends. It is the hardest question as well because it is very similar to the question "whom should I marry?" How the heck I would know that?!

What I am saying is choosing a camera is a personal choice; nobody else can make it for you. Are you looking for a beautiful, less expensive girl, I mean camera, or sophisticated, expensive one, only you can know. So what it boils down to is that you doing your own research. And this is where everybody backs off from me ("if I can do that why the heck would I come to you for advice!?") I hear you and I know that camera research is intimidating, but can't help it; you have to do it. More the money you are willing to spend on your new camera, more the time you have to spend on doing research. So instead of I telling you what to buy, I am going to give you some tips on how to do camera research.

• First, believe in you. If you can research for buying a car or making a wedding cake, then you can do this as well.
• Short-list some cameras according to your price range and browse through their specifications and features. Your brain will adapt itself to recognize the most frequent terms even though you don't really understand them.
• In addition to the selected price range, you should also have a pretty good idea about what your new camera is for. Now read as many reviews as possible from different sources: while you can find professional reviews at sites like dpreview, online-sellers like Amazon.com carry reviews from average users like you and me.
• Now start noticing things: if the purpose of a new camera is "xyz" and a review says something like "this camera's nice 'pqr' feature makes it excellent for 'xyz'", start digging a bit deeper on the feature 'pqr'. Basically, get the answeres for two questions: what is it? and why is it important? I for one will be delighted to answer these questions. The "?" icons in DPReview's spec sheets are particularly helpful in this regard.
• Consider pushing up or down your price range and redo your research.
• Keep in mind that, there will be always a trade-off between something when you want to buy anything. The ultimate purpose of this research is to understand the trade-off you are eventually going to make.

There are number of good side-effects you get from doing this market research:

• When you ultimately buy a camera, you would know most of its controls which will enable you to use the camera most efficiently.
• You have now mastered the photographic glossary; now it would be easy to master the art of photography as well.
• When reading reviews, you would've gone through a lot of example photos. Get inspired by them; learning by example is the most efficient way of learning.

So basically, rather than asking others which camera you should buy, get their help to understand the area and make the decision yourself. The amount of confidence you get from this process is priceless.

Should I buy a DSLR?

I get this question a lot from my friends (or a variant of it that ultimately boils down to this question.) The answer is quiet simple: buy a DSLR if you are a photography enthusiast, not just because you want good-quality pictures. But, as all the simple answers go, this does not satisfy my friends. So let me elaborate...

If you are buying something, you have to make sure that you are going to use it nearly 100% to its capabilities – it's my policy of buying anything. The same applies to buying a DSLR. Therefore, try to answer the following questions before buying a DSLR:

1. Can you spend $600+?
2. Are you ready to drag along 500g+ camera to wherever you go?
3. Are you ready to spend more than few hours learning your camera's controls?
4. Are you ready to spend more than few hours learning the basics of photography?
5. Will you be comfortable using a big camera in front of your friends?

If you can truthfully answer "yes" to the above questions, then you can buy a DSLR. Don't delude yourself (or buy into a salesperson's pitch) that buying a DSLR will improve the quality of your photos. For example, check the four photos I posted above and guess which were taken by a compact and which by a DSLR (answer below.) The point is, until you spend enough time learning your camera's controls and the basics of photography, your new DSLR will behave exactly like your old point-and-shoot. On the other hand, learning the basics of photography will improve the quality of the photos taken by your compact camera. Learning a bit about photography is not as hard as you think. Of course it will involve learning a bit of new glossary (like aperture and shutter speed), but once you have learned a few new words, your learning curve will dramatically improve.

Don't underestimate the importance of the questions 2 and 5 above. Even though the entry level DSLRs are significantly lighter than the professional beasts, they are still much heavier than the point-and-shoot you used to carry around. More importantly, they are much bulkier; your new DSLR will not fit into your palm, pocket, or purse anymore. You are going to buy a dedicated camera bag and carry it around. Trust me, this extra luggage is much harder you think to carry around – it is not about the weight, but about the dedication it requires to take it around wherever you go. Note that to capture great photographs you should have your camera with you everywhere you go.

Hopefully question 5 is self-explanatory. I had to carry around my DSLR for quiet a long time before my friends stop commenting about it and be comfortable around it. Note that number of cultures/people are camera-shy and for them DSLRs can be quite intimidating. May be the issue is waning as DSLRs are becoming omnipresent, but it is still there.

I also have to warn you about one more thing before you buy a DSLR. The primary difference between a DSLR and a compact camera is the DSLR's extendability – a DSLR is capable of supporting numerous attachments: lenses, external flashes, filters, etc. As far as I am concerned, at least you have to buy an external flash to enjoy a DSLR's full potential (next is a telephoto zoom lens.) While extendability is great, it also means that you have to be ready to spend extra cash, spend extra time to learn more about them, and haul still more weight.

In summary, if you are really into photography, buy a DSLR. If not, first learn to shoot well with your compact and when you understand the real limitations of a compact, you can move to a DSLR. To quote somebody, it is actually the person who makes a photograph, not the camera. Without realizing that, I have seen number of friends abandoning their new DSLRs in a few months.

In the above four shots, only the first one was taken by a DSLR (Nikon D40) in full-auto mode; the rest were taken by a compact (Canon ELPH 300HS) again in auto. No post-processing was done except adding the number-texts and cropping the DSLR shot for 4:3 aspect ratio