Strong, colourful geometric shapes make this picture

The bright colours and the geometric shapes are what make this image pop. The bright blue wheel in the background, the yellow and red squares created by the black, protective netting and the arcs of colour all work together to hold this image together while framing the picture subject.

The bright colours worn by the little girl help her to ease into her surroundings while the organic flower design on her skirt and the cartoons on her shirt all help to distance her. It is a nice mix.

This is an image that would just jump from a page in a family photo album and, as soon as I find the time to make a print, it will.

Sharp is relative

This picture is not truly sharp but it looks good at this size.

One attribute of many good pictures is sharpness. Back in the days of film, one way of eliminating negatives not worth printing was to examine one's negatives under a magnifying loupe. If the negative was out of focus it was out of the running.

Today, thanks to digital photography and the sharing of images digitally rather than as prints, the rules for what is sharp enough have slackened.

Be aware that when you sharpen an image in Photoshop, you do not truly sharpen the picture. You add edge contrast. It is a line effect. But, it does give the illusion of sharpness if the image does not demand too much sharpening enhancement or if the image is played small and displayed on a computer monitor.

Today's picture of my granddaughter is not dead on sharp. Subject movement, not enough to be artsy but enough to be annoying, mars the image. I gave it some sharpening in Photoshop and have played it relatively small on the computer monitor.

It looks good now, just don't look too closely.

The world is a 360-degree experience

The threatening storm rolling into London arrived accompanied by threats of possible tornadoes, heavy hail and high winds gusting up to 110 km/h.

I walked across the court to take some pictures. As the storm moved closer I looked down. Ah, there was the picture. I forgot the storm.

It is important, as a photographer, to never forget that the world is a 360-degree experience. Always remember that there is more to the world than what is shown by your viewfinder.

This can be tough. You don't want to miss what you initially wanted to capture but keep an alert eye for alternate picture opportunities. The flat light of an approaching storm can make pictures of wildflowers pop.

I should also note that there are times that I miss the wonderful picture quality of my old professional DSLRs. The image taken with my FujiFilm HS10 is good. It does the job. It makes me smile. But it is not in the same league picture-quality-wise as those from my old Canon EOS monsters I once carried about while working at the local newspaper.

Tell a story

A picture that tells a story is often a stronger picture. A chap walking for his health is one picture but a chap pumping a bit of iron while he strolls is another picture — a better picture. There is no doubt why this fellow is walking through the park — no question whatsoever.

The barbells also add a little extra dash of interest, always a plus.

In cropping this image,  the bright yellow dandelions on the left were retained as was a little bit of green grass on the right. Both help to define the paved path and while softening visual effect of the hard, wide, asphalt walkway.

The long lens on the Fuji FinePix HS10 was zoomed almost to the max. This helped to throw the background slightly out of focus by keeping the depth of field shallower than it would have been if shot at wide angle.

Lastly the bright, red shirt underlines the importance of the subject in the picture. The combination of red on a green is a classic. This placement makes the red pop.

Bright values pop, attracting the eye

These mushrooms did not pop into our view from the forest floor but they do command our attention here. Why? Well, they are clearly the brightest objects in the picture. Their bright value makes them pop out from the work. Also, this image has been "printed" with increased contrast in the "digital darkroom."

Plus their placement and clarity, the mushrooms are among the few objects in focus in this shot, just adds to their control of the visual territory.

I've talked about depth of field before and how images with shallow depth of field force attention onto the in-focus subject. With point and shoot cameras controlling this effect can be difficult. But, when the light is subdued, as it was in the forest, and the camera lens is set to a wide aperture in order to capture enough light, shallow depth of field is the natural outcome.

If you are shooting with a point and shoot and you find all these promising possibilities coming together, take advantage of the moment and shoot lots. You may get a winner. I got two!

Imitating selective focus

Shooting with a point and shoot, there is one thing that I really miss: Selective focus. Choose a fast shutter speed and mate it to a wide aperture and slash the depth of field in your picture.

Depth of field being the depth of sharp focus in front of and behind the point at which you focused when composing your shot. The smaller the taking aperture, the greater the depth of field. About one third of the depth of field is in front of the true focus point and about two thirds is behind that point.

Use a wide aperture, an f/stop with a small number, and the background in your shot will be rendered out of focus. This can make the subject of your picture, the think on which you focused, pop right off the page. It is a nice effect.

The small sensors in digital point and shoots make blurring background difficult. Depth of field is also dependent on the size of sensor, or with film cameras the size of the film. Cameras that used 4X5 film had very little depth of field. Back in the days of film, 35mm cameras were thought to give a lot of depth of field. Now, with sensors so small in many digital cameras, the 35mm cameras seem in comparison to have been great for blurring foregrounds and backgrounds. They made subjects pop from the image if you took the time to force the effect.

Usual look of a point and shoot picture of a flower in bright, full sunshine.

Digital single lens reflex cameras, the top of the line ones with sensors the size of 35mm film, are great at reproducing the shallow depth of field of the old SLRs. But what to do if one is using a point and shoot with a small sensor. The answer: A photo enhancement program. I have found Photoshop does a great job of emulating the look resulting from shallow depth of field.

The flower picture taken into Photoshop to have the background blurred.

So, how was it done? The pedals I wanted to remain sharp were selected using the magic wand. I also selected the flower immediately behind the main flower in order to keep them in focus too. I felt the traditional depth of field of the past might well have extended as far as that second flower in the image. I inverted the selection. I feathered the edgles about 2 pixels. Finally, I applied the Filter -> Blur -> Field Blur... until I got the look I desired.

Clearly, doing this in-camera is preferable. It is far quicker and the results are better if one simply shoots at a wide open aperture and then takes a couple of other pictures with the lens closed down an f/stop or two. But, if one doesn't have the money for a SLR and one can pick up Photoshop cheap - I did, keep an eye open for sales - then Photoshop, or another enhancement program with this blurring feature, may be the answer.

Shooting RAW

Shot through a kitchen window using a Fuji FinePix HS10 shooting RAW.

For years I resisted shooting RAW. I used a couple of high end Canon DSLR cameras shooting for the newspaper and these cameras did just fine shooting jpgs. A powerful program like Photoshop had no difficulty colour correcting my shots and when working to deadline most of us in the photo department found jpgs quicker to correct and send off to the desk than RAW images. One shooter actually shot RAW briefly and then switched back to jpg. For me, this confirmed that shooting jpgs was the way to go at the paper.

That said, since leaving the paper a big disappointment for me has been the incredible amount of processing performed on jpg images by point and shoot amateur cameras. My early Canon SD10 wasn't anywhere near as sophisticated as todays cameras and I believe it was a much better camera for it.

My Canon S90, as nice a camera as it is, has some faults that are making me question whether or not I have been too accepting. For instance, the in-camera processing will sometimes blur areas in the image. Sharpening and blurring are both done in-camera when saving jpgs but neither is carried out on RAW files.

Unfortunately, shooting RAW turns off the image enhancement features you want along with the ones you don't. The Canon S90 lens suffers from a lot of distortion at wide angle. For the most part, the photographer shooting jpg does not see this. The in-camera computer corrects this distortion before saving the images as jpgs. Shoot RAW and the distortion will be there to see. No in-camera correction.

So, why am I thinking of shooting RAW? I got a real deal on Photoshop a year or so ago. I've got software powerful enough to fix any distortion. Render intricate detail as blurry mush and there is no amount of Photoshopping that will bring back the missing visual information.

Look at the far left of this image, at the little rabbit's rump, do you see how blurry the fur is. My guess is this fur would be detailed if shot using RAW rather than jpg.

For a more detailed discussion of shooting jpg vs. RAW, here is a link to a fine technical site:

Understanding RAW

There was a time I was an I-care-about-the-science kind of photographer. I used to try water bath development to capture detail in church windows while holding detail in the dark, shadowy pews. Slow, I had those concerns beaten out of me. I learned that three years of art school and more years spent at Ryerson earning a degree all worked to fill me with far too much fear.

I learned to focus on the subject to the exclusion of everything else, to strive for images that could be delivered quickly to the desk while capturing the subject accurately enough to keep the editors happy. Heck, by the time a reader saw my shot it had been translated into a halftone, separated into three colours and printed on newsprint. One could easily get too concerned with quality, quality that would never make it to the reader.

Now, some years into my retirement, I am starting to think it may be time to get back to my roots and spend some time getting a good handle on this digital photography beast. It may be time that I learned what my computer-that-takes-pictures (my digital camera) is really up to. The world of silver halide is gone and maybe I need to get in step with the changes.

--- As you may have noticed, this is more a blog than a source of great photographic insight. Follow my tips and you'll be a better shooter but that's all. Maybe better isn't enough. Maybe I should raise the photo quality bar. ---