Unconscious conformity - the trap of default camera settings

When we get a new camera, especially digital ones, we often change various parameters to make the cameras “ours”. A couple of examples: setting back-button focusing; turning off the focus confirmation beep; picking RAW output rather than JPEG.

The default image orientation of the Olympus FT is in portrait, so the majority of images end up being taken that way.

But what about all the things we don't change? Or can't? As much as different cameras appear to be designed very differently, there are some common traits that make a lot of photos very similar. A lot if this applies to film cameras, too.

Image orientation

I find it very interesting that when I use my 35mm Pen FT, most of my shots are shot vertical. The images are exposed this way in order to fit 72 images on a usually 36 image roll of film. Same for my iPhone. Notice how people take vertical orientation videos on their phones? It looks awful when viewed on a computer or TV, but the phone is intuitively held that way, and they look acceptable when viewed on the device they were taken on (and most pictures will never leave the phone anyway).

We can switch things up by consciously turning our camera 90 degrees, or switching our image capturing devices for certain situations. I often use a Hasselblad 6x6 film camera for portraits because the square frame doesn’t demand an image orientation decision.

Aspect ratio

A 35mm frame is in the ratio of 3:2, and is the final resting place for most photos. It is interesting that we feel compelled to fix the aspect ratio even when we crop. Medium format digital sensors currently provide a closer-to-square 6:4.5 ratio. You can see what these aspect ratios look like in the blog post I wrote comparing sensor sizes.

Shooting film opens up some alternate restrictions. Some medium format cameras like the Hasselblad 500 shoot in a square format. Some dedicated panoramic 35mm cameras exist, such as the Widelux. Changing the aspect ratio can be refreshing, and can completely alter the feel of a composition.

Ironically, the beauty of digital photography is that we can manipulate images in an infinite number of ways very easily. From square format to super-wide stitched panoramas. It is just hard to pre-visualize these things when the viewfinder is always selling you 3:2.

Of course, aspect ratio and cropping go hand in hand. The image orientation should serve the image. The final use of the image is important here - where will it be displayed? Imaging a great 16:9 composition filled with the subject, but then it needs to be cropped square for Instagram!

One reason most people avoid custom aspect ratios that work for their specific image is that they might be difficult to frame. This is easily solved by custom cutting a mat to fit within a standard frame size, such as cutting an 8x8 hole to mound in a 16x20 frame. I describe this simple process further in this custom mat cutting blog post.

A long 16:9 or a 3:1 (shown here) aspect ratio is really useful to convey a cinematic sense of space. This crop works great for web-page headers or a custom framed print in a long hallway.

Colour

With film, choosing between colour and black and white is a conscious decision. With digital, most cameras shoot colour out of the box and so most images stay that way. 

With digital, it is claimed that “best practice” is to shoot in colour even if you want a black and white final product. Reason being that you can control the tones of each colour individually when making the conversion.

The problem with using a color photo for a final black and white image is that monotone requires a decision at the moment the shutter is pressed, not days later on a whim. Reason being that a satisfactory colour photo may be pleasing, but if each hue is at the same brightness then it will lead to a very flat black and white conversion. Then we spend hours trying to make it look good, or worse, expect a photoshop plug-in to do the work for us. A good black and white photo needs tonal contrast from the get-go. If you are interested in black and white photography, I suggest you immerse yourself in it for a period - you’ll be looking for different things than you would have with a colour mindset. Film might be the best way to do this as you will have to commit to black and white as soon as the camera is loaded.

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 If you have ideas on default ways of thinking that hold us all back, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!

Four questions to ask of a photograph

Photography critiques are tricky. They need to be objective whilst incorporating the artist’s intention.

The worst critiques I’ve observed focus on these common themes:

• they look at the camera settings as part of the analysis

• fixation on irrelevant details

• talk about their own work more than the images being reviewed

• comparisons to standard, even cliché, images and lazy advice to go look at popular photo-sharing websites

I like watching/reading critiques of other people’s work, but just like with books, the best critiques are not necessarily photography ones. When browsing YouTube, I often like to watch critiques on paintings because without a camera, the focus naturally shifts to more useful aspects like composition, tone and emotion. Without a camera. Turns out that the camera is the least interesting tool of the photographer.

And I’ve also noticed the best reviews are from consumers rather than producers of images. It is the art directors and gallery owners (who’s living depends on selecting good pictures) who’s opinion counts much more than a photographer with questionable credentials.

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So here I want to lay out my approach to judging photographs for consistency. A rubric for a useful photography critique. I will be updating it over time as more life is lived.

The main things to establish are “what is the Subject?” balanced with “what are the Distractions?”. These alone can make or break an image, but its also useful to consider composition and style.

Remember there are exceptions for every rule. Anyone can identify an exception, but few can use them to their advantage.

1. The Subject

The Subject could be a person or object, but it also includes the actions of the person or object, the metaphors, symbolism or message. How is the subject intentionally established and identified?

• interest, mystery or other reason for the image to exist

• symbolism and metaphor, emotion, nostalgia

• brightness / contrast / size / placement / color / texture

• selective focus

• effects (lighting, motion, emotion, gesture)

2. Distractions

Distractions are the curse of photography. Unlike the blank canvas of the artist, photographers have the noise of the world, and have to quiet it down to only what is desired for the image. Post-processing is where a lot of tidying can be done, but the intentional photographer does as much as possible before the shutter button is pressed. Are there any unintentional distractions?

• secondary/background elements more prominent than the subject

• ugly / untidy objects

• elements crossing the frame boundary

• text

3. Composition

Composition is the arrangement of objects in the frame.

• shapes which provoke certain emotions (think angles vs curves).

• size relationships

• repeating patterns

• framing

• implied motion

• color and color relationships

4. Style

Style is the wrapper of an image, and often the glue for a set of images or an entire portfolio. Its the fingerprint of the artist. It is a configuration of how the subject, distractions and composition are dealt with. The style of an image may act as, or be, the subject itself, or can glue together images as part of a series. Style is a fingerprint, a calling card for the artist.

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I am not particularly interested (or qualified) in critiquing other poeple’s work, yet a clear idea of how a picture can be judged will be useful as I take my own photographs. Over time, I’ll be able to look over my photographic archive with evolving eyes.

Please comment below if you have more ideas on how to judge a photograph, or if you’ve had an experience being critiqued. I’d love to know more.

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For a scientific viewpoint, please read my blog post on “why do we like some images more than others?”

The best photography lessons are not from photographers

It would make sense to learn about photography from photographers, but the more I read the more I realize it is all just regurgitated information from other disciplines (intended or not). I think it is a good idea to work back to the original source of an idea, or at least find a good summary or interpretation of it.

Nature

Leonardo DaVinci said that when average artists just copy each-other, the quality of their work goes downhill fast. It is better to get inspiration from nature, and instruction from a well-diversified old master. This philosophy reminds me to be wary of who to take instruction from. Even taking YouTube as an example, videos from seasoned professionals should trump those from those with less real world experience, even if their productions look more polished. And going out taking pictures the real world yourself is better still.

Classical art

This is the source material for everything we know about light and composition. Why hear it third-hand from a modern mediocre photographer? Da Vinci gives a life time’s worth of wisdom in his notebooks, which are a very interesting read and much of it is still very relevant today. There are descriptions about perspective, shadows and the human form which has elevated a lot of trial and error in the way I compose and light my pictures. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci actually covers a lot of useful things: light, shadow, perspective, posing, composition, how to practice, how to arrange your price list (true story).

Graphic design

Simplifying compositions to their basic elements and shapes makes it easier to understand how to arrange our images. It is interesting that different shapes summon different emotions from us - even the orientation of those shapes can have an effect. The relationships for forms and gaining a vocabulary to describe our compositional elements come from graphic design.

Psychology / body language

Not to gush about DaVinci, but he and other renaissance artists knew that expression is not limited to the face, but must flow through the entire body. This is how you realize a scene and introduce story, metaphor and symbolism. These may be a better third dimension for an image than the illusion of literal depth.  The definitive book of body language by Allan Pease practically describes how you can use clusters of body positions to convey a story. This might be a more practical way to think about posing than to look at books about surficial posing, but don’t necessarily explain the reasons and meaning behind the movements of the human body.

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Without a formal training in photography, it might be easy to forget that it is an art and a science that has built through history. A study of fundamentals doesn’t begin with the exposure triangle, but with composition and connection with the subject.

Using shadow barriers to anchor a viewer on your photograph

How can you hold someone's attention on a photograph? What about making barriers to stop them from leaving?

Photographs are not often studied for long periods of time by the casual viewer, but I think if you can hold someone's attention for 5 seconds rather than two, the image is somewhat victorious.

Many things can grab the viewer's attention - story, metaphor, gore, et-cetera - but in this post I'd like to talk about figuratively bouncing the viewer's eye back into the picture as it is trying to leave.

Lighting this portrait from the left, and having the sitter gaze to the left also, I’ve tried to prevent the viewer from prematurely exiting right, even if it is for a fraction of a second.

• Light sources from camera left create shadows on the right so that the eye reads across the image and the shadow returns the eye to the left side.

• If a person faces left, the viewer follows their gaze back across the picture. If they are facing right it is almost like the viewer can skim across the picture and has permission to exit the right side of the frame.

• Bouncing the eye back into the picture is also the purpose of a matte in a frame - that is why wide mattes (relative to the picture) are desirable rather than simply filling the frame just with the picture. It provides a wasteland the viewer must cross to exit, and they may decide to return to the picture by force.

I find this theme interesting because it implies the direction a subject faces, and the position of the key light are not at the photographer's whim, but are best kept constant to capture the attention of a viewer. Of course, the converse is also useful - you may want a rapid flow of the viewer’s eye from the left and out over the right side of the frame.

There are plenty of examples dating back to renaissance paining. The lighting on the Mona Lisa is from the left and her eyes take you back left. Read across Caravaggio's “Calling of St Matthew” and you’ll find Jesus pointing you back left from the shadows. Those painters didn’t leave anything to chance - every minutia of the picture is intentional.

The decisive month

What is the length of a decisive moment?

Henry Cartier-Bresson's images imply the composition changes in fractions of a second. Ansel Adams waited for the movement of clouds and sand dunes over the course of minutes and hours. The temporal decision on when to release the shutter adds a third dimension to the 2D composition in-front of the lens.

Missing the decisive moment

I recently realized I missed a decisive moment, probably by weeks. I took a low quality picture of a Houston downtown abandoned building with a Pen FT. The picture is grainy, but more importantly, it was in black and white. The graffiti on the windows of the building was very large and interesting, but colourful - and it disappeared when viewed in black and white. I told myself I would return later to get a colour photo on a digital camera. 

Weeks passed - and when I returned I found a building with all the windows removed. I guess the building is now being repaired and put back to use. It is still an interesting scene in its own right, but not the image I had visualized.

Waiting, in this case, was a mistake. You have to grab your moments, because you don't know when the moment will end.

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The graffiti'd windows of an abandoned building

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Shouldn't have waited - the windows are gone

Two manual camera settings that beat automatic ones

Between a scene presenting itself and you pressing the shutter button, there are two calculations you or your camera need to make - the exposure settings and focus distance. Eliminating these calculations makes the shot happen faster, and makes the image more important than operating the contraption in your hands. Here is how.

1. Estimating exposure.

Many vintage cameras lack light meters. External light meters can be used, but that is one more gadget to carry around and slow you down. Both film and digital have a lot of latitude with respect to over or under-exposure, so you can worry less about settings and more about making a compelling image.

Just use the sunny-16 rule and relax. In summary, the rule means using f16 and shutter speed of 1/ISO in full sun. Drop one or two stops for cloudy conditions. This is an exact equivalent of shutter or aperture priority depending on how you reduce the light hitting your film.

This method is preferable to your camera's reflected light meter (if it has one) because you are essentially using an ambient reading, and you can ignore the apparent brightness of the subject (e.g a bright white building, or black cat).

With indoor light at night, I find I can shoot ISO 400 film at the equivalent of f2.0 at a 60th. 

2. Zone focusing.

Just because we have auto focus, it is not necessarily the fastest way to focus. The lost art of zone focusing is to use a narrow aperture and set it to the hyper focal distance. This is much easier to do with vintage lenses with lots of distance scale markings. Lenses for modern digital cameras are not as easy to manipulate for zone focusing.

For example, I use f11 and set infinity to the '11' mark on my Rollei 35 lens for walking around cities. Anything 3 meters and further will be in acceptable focus - a picture is ready to be taken at any time. 

TIP: 'Trim' your settings

Pilots use trim controls to keep an aircraft flying in a straight line without having to make constant corrections on the main controls. It compensates for changing wind and weight distribution conditions. In a similar way, I find I'm 'trimming' the settings on my camera as I walk around outdoors even when not actively shooting. For example, if clouds roll in-front of the sun, I'll decrease the shutter speed a stop or two. If I want the background out of focus, I'll set infinity beyond the hyper-focal range. Having the settings trimmed means not fumbling with the camera when a subject presents itself. Read more about the exact settings I use here.

Downtown Houston, Rollei 35s, Ilford HP5.