Photo Tips for Mom: Burning in the edges

When I printed in the darkroom, I would usually take a piece of cardboard, and use it to block the light in a way that the edges of the print would receive additional exposure. This was called “burning in the edges,” and it would make the edges of the print slightly—almost imperceptibly—darker. Why did I do this? Well, because Ansel told me to. But the real reason is that our eye is drawn toward brighter parts of the print, and darkening the edges slightly keeps the viewer’s eyes from wandering out of the frame.

Photo Tips for Mom: Querying keywords

Querying, or searching, your Lightroom catalog for photos with certain keywords is done in the Library module.

The search will work by narrowing down, or filtering, the displayed photos to show only those with a certain keyword. So we have to start by showing all the photos that we want to search. Use the panels on the left to choose your starting point. One common option would be All Photographs:

Once you’ve picked your starting point for the search, expand the Keyword List panel on the right side of the screen, and find the keyword you want to looks for. You can do this by expanding the tree, or by using the search box.

When the keyword you want to search for is visible, hover over it, and a right-facing arrow will appear:

Click the arrow, and your displayed photos will be filtered down to those that have the keyword. Note that anything underneath the selected keyword will be included, so searching for Birds will include American Robin.

Lightroom’s filtering capabilities extend beyond keywords. In the Library Filter boxes that appear at the top of the screen, you’ll see that you can filter on all kinds of parameters, such as the lens used. The filter panel will show four things to filter on, but you can change each of those by clicking on a search parameter:

To stop filtering, click None:

Photo Tips for Mom: Applying keywords

Lightroom has a number of ways to set keywords for photographs. Keywording is done in the Library module.

Photo Tips for Mom: Aspect ratio

Aspect ratio is the ratio of the length of  one side of an image to the other. The sensor in a digital camera (or the film format in a film camera) will have a “natural” aspect ratio determined by its size. For 35mm film, the aspect ratio was 3:2 (=1.5), and most DSLRs use the same. Some medium-format film cameras shoot square, or 1:1 (=1.0), images. Your E-PL5 has a 4:3 ratio, which gives the Micro Four-Thirds format its name. The 4:3 (=1.33) ratio is the same as “old-style” television, and is closer to square than the 3:2 (=1.5) DSLR ratio or the even wider 16:9 (=1.68) ratio of an HDTV.

Note: In some cases, people maintain the convention of keeping the horizontal dimension first (e.g. 4:3 for horizontal, or landscape, images, and 3:4 for vertical, or portrait, images). In other cases, they don’t, and think of aspect ratio as being independent of orientation (so a 4:3 aspect ratio could be in either landscape or portrait). Usually the meaning is clear from context.

While your camera has a natural aspect ratio, which is the starting point of your files, you can change the aspect ratio through cropping. The crop tool of Lightroom’s Develop module is accessed through the “dashed rectangle” icon above the Basic panel:

The crop tool lets you drag the border to crop the image. If the padlock icon is locked, the aspect ratio will be locked (so dragging a horizontal border also moves the vertical borders to maintain the aspect ratio, and vice-versa). If the padlock is unlocked, you can drag the borders independently, changing the aspect ratio.

In the Aspect drop-down, you can choose from widely-used aspect ratios like 4x5/8x10 (a common print size) and 2x3/4x6 (the famous 3:2 ratio of 35mm film and DSLR cameras). You can also add custom ratios and save them for re-use.

Why might we change the aspect ratio? There are a few reasons:

1. As we’ll discuss in a future installment, photographic composition depends on exclusion as much as inclusion. If something is distracting, or doesn’t contribute to a scene, we often choose to exclude it. The decision to crop something out of the scene, while maintaining the elements we want to keep, may necessitate changing the aspect ratio.
2. There’s a psychological component to aspect ratio. In horizontal (or landscape-oriented) photos especially, a wide aspect ratio can imply opennness, or a broad vista. It can create a dynamic space—for example, a space for the subject to look or move into. In contrast, a more square aspect ratio, like the 8x10 format, can feel intimate.
3. Our eyes have a narrower vertical field of view than horizontal, so for vertical compositions, I feel that squarer aspect ratios, like the E-PL5’s natural 3:4, or even 8:10, work best.

And now, a rant: Lately, my Facebook feed is full of phone-camera shots in a 16:9 ratio, like HDTV. This is, presumably, the native sensor size of some phones these days. For horizontal compositions, 16:9 is sometimes a good choice. For vertical shots, however, it’s usually horrible. There’s typically a toddler’s head in the middle of the frame, and acres of pointless background above it. Whatever phone designer thought this was a good idea should be dragged out back and shot. If nothing else, the phone should default to cropping more square during vertical composition.

The conclusion: When cropping, don’t be beholden to your camera’s native aspect ratio. Try different aspect ratios to include or exclude the elements you want, and convey a sense of openness or intimacy to the scene.

My first book experience with Lightroom 4

Regular readers of this blog, if they existed, would recall that I undertook a photographic project in the spring, giving up all of my lenses but one for Lent. I found the project to be enjoyable and productive, and—as threatened—I’ve put together a book of the project.

The book is now available for purchase, but that’s not the reason for this post. I’ve had my copy of the book for a few weeks now, and I’m happy with how it turned out, but I generally wouldn’t recommend it for others to buy. My project was a helpful undertaking for my own development. But the result was a bunch of single images that I was very pleased with. It was not a cohesive whole, either visually or thematically. You can find better photography books to spend your money on. (Also, my share of the book’s sale price is truly minimal—probably less than if you bought someone else’s book through that Amazon affiliate link!)

Instead, I’d like to write a few thoughts on the book-making process, as I experienced it.

HDR, photojournalism, and Lightroom 4

On his blog, Charles Apple discusses the use of high dynamic range (HDR) images in newspapers. The discussion raises questions about what constitutes excessive manipulation for photojournalism, and in particular what the impact of next-generation photo processing software will be on these definitions. I don’t know, in detail, the prevailing ethical standards of photojournalism, so in part I’m looking for the thoughts of experts on the topic.

Let’s begin by discussing HDR photography. The sensor in a digital camera is only capable of recording a certain range of scene brightness, from dark to light. A part of the scene that falls outside this range will be “clipped” to pure black or white, without detail. To get around this technical limitation, it’s possible to take multiple exposures of the scene, with different exposure settings (e.g. shutter speed). This will allow some of the exposures to record the bright parts of the scene, at the expense of the dark parts, and other exposures to do the opposite. These exposures may then be combined in software, to produce a “high dynamic range” image, whose range of scene intensities surpasses what the sensor can record directly.