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Composition Help
The other day, I was out at sunrise and saw a beautiful grass-covered
hill tinged with orange. Along the top of the hill, the tall grass drew attention to its wavy outline against a clear blue sky. Halfway up, a herd of glistening black and white cattle was grazing. Why does my photo not match what I thought upon seeing this sight? The sight was beautiful, the photo is just a hill with spots on it. Is it possible to get so much into one photo. I took the photo from the road, from a distance of approx. 200 yards. I was using a Fujifilm 500mpx camera, but I don't that that is the issue - I would just like to know what others would have done vis-a-vis distance, angle, height, etc. Thanks. |
#2
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Composition Help
mmills wrote:
The other day, I was out at sunrise and saw a beautiful grass-covered hill tinged with orange. Along the top of the hill, the tall grass drew attention to its wavy outline against a clear blue sky. Halfway up, a herd of glistening black and white cattle was grazing. Why does my photo not match what I thought upon seeing this sight? The sight was beautiful, the photo is just a hill with spots on it. A photograph is an abstraction, and what you see with your eyes is too, but it is a different one. The trick is to learn to realize what the photographic abstraction will be like, and how it changes when doing different things with the camera. Then you adjust the camera to get the abstraction you want (which may or may not actually be visible when you look at the scene by eye). For example, you scan a scene with your eyes, keeping track in your mind of all the various parts, but actually you only look at one part of it at any time. Yet the camera takes a picture of the entire scene at once, and then how much of it you look at depends on how the image is displayed. For that reason a photograph looked at up close might in some ways be closer to what you saw with your eyes than would that same photograph when viewed from a greater distance. And various techniques such as soft focus and/or selective focus might provide a photograph that is closer to the abstraction your eyes originally saw, even though the abstraction is created in your mind in a slightly different way. Colors might be different too. To the extreme in the case of Black and White photography! Is it possible to get so much into one photo. Sure. Or too little. Depends on what you want and how you arrange it. I'm reminded of large paintings where there is a huge canvas and yet your attention is riveted on 1/10th of it... or others where you can spend hours exploring every inch of the canvas finding odd little things the painter hid in the details. Photographs are no different. I took the photo from the road, from a distance of approx. 200 yards. I was using a Fujifilm That sounds as if you needed either a lens with a longer focal length, or perhaps to just get closer with a short focal length. The effects are different, but both are valid depending on what you want the viewer to see when looking at the photograph. If those cows that became specks were interesting, either getting closer or using a longer lens would have made them more prominent. But getting close with a short focal length lense can make the background appear distant (granted it is easy to keep it sharply focused), while a longer focal length lense can have the effect of making two very distant objects appear equally "up front" (and then the trick is getting them both to be in focus). 500mpx camera, but I don't that that is the issue - I would just like to know what others would have done vis-a-vis distance, angle, height, etc. Thanks. Asking here isn't really a great deal of help. Go look at pictures. Look at *lots* of pictures. What you want to see are pictures that have descriptions or data that tell you something about what made it what it is. There's no point in looking at wonderful images that do not give you a clue as to what techniques make them wonderful; at least not until you get enough experience to be able to figure it out without help. (I take pictures of people or things that describe people, and just love looking at photography by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Walker Evens, and Dorthea Lange for example. I like reading what Ansel Adams wrote, but his greatest images to me are merely boring technical examples of his interesting text descriptions!) Once you do get enough experience, then you can look at hundreds of pictures at one sitting, and none of them will be interesting as such (fabulous to look at, but...), and then one will stand out! The reason it stands out is that it appeals to you and something isn't immediately obvious, either why it is appealing or how it was done. Either one is a show stopper, and you have to spend time analyzing the picture to decide if there is something there for you to learn and build on. -- Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) |
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