My preferred crop for this image of Bridalveil Fall doesn't fit any of the common print sizes.
In the comments for my last critique, Michael Glover asked a question about cropping and aspect ratios. I get this question a lot, as many people feel that they must crop their images to a certain size—4×6, 8×10—for printing. So I thought I would expand on my answer to Michael and address this issue in more depth here.
The problem with cropping to fit a particular aspect ratio for printing is that you can compromise the photograph’s esthetics. The accompanying images of Bridalveil Fall show what I mean. Below you’ll find the uncropped version, with its original 2:3 (or 4×6 or 8×12) aspect ratio, and a version cropped to a 4:5 (or 8×10) ratio.
To me, the uncropped version leaves too much empty space on the right and left sides, while the 4:5 ratio is too square, and a bit static. I prefer the crop at the top of this post, which lies somewhere in between.
Photo Critique Series: “Finnich Gorge” by David Dalziel from Michael Frye on Vimeo.
I decided to try something new for this latest critique, and record my thoughts with video screen capture. I hope this will create a more interactive, immersive experience, as if you were watching me do a portfolio review in a workshop. Let me know how you like it!
To see the best detail, be sure to watch the video in HD and click the four arrows in the lower-right corner of the video to expand it. Once expanded, I prefer to turn scaling off (in the upper-right corner).
This week’s photo was made by David Dalziel in Finnich Gorge, just north of David’s home in Glasgow, Scotland. Recently I wrote about the third dimension in photography, and how lens choice can affect our perception of depth and space in a photograph. Then in my last critique I showed an example of how a telephoto lens can compress space, flatten perspective, and create patterns. This time we’ll look at the opposite: a wide-angle composition that creates a sense of depth, even though it’s not a grand, sweeping landscape.
(Click here if you have trouble viewing this video)
Can you create HDR images in Lightroom? Yes! Well, sort of. Lightroom only works with one photograph at a time, so you can’t blend different exposures of a scene together. But you can handle some high-contrast scenes in Lightroom, without HDR software or Photoshop, by using Lightroom’s tools to exploit your camera’s full dynamic range. I explain how in this latest video.
Like many inventions, this technique was born out of laziness. I wanted to avoid the sometimes tedious process of blending exposures manually in Photoshop, with HDR software, or my favorite plugin, LR/Enfuse. I also try to keep my adjustments flexible by using Lightroom’s non-destructive workflow whenever possible.
This technique only works with Raw images, and scenes where the contrast isn’t extreme, but I keep finding more and more situations where it does work. If you try it, let me know how you make out!
As always, be sure to view this in high definition (720p) to see the tools and sliders clearly.
Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author and photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, plus the eBook Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom. He has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.
This week’s photograph, titled “Steptoe Beauty,” was made by Greg Speasl in the Palouse country of eastern Washington. The image is an interesting study of how a telephoto lens can compress space and create patterns.
Light
Sidelight is usually a great way to bring out textures, and here the low-angle, late-afternoon sun raking across the fields from right to left brings out the beautiful textures and forms of the landscape. The alternating patterns of green and amber also create a nice color contrast.
Composition
Recently I wrote about depth in photography, and how wide-angle lenses can help create an illusion of depth, while longer focal lengths can flatten the perspective and emphasize patterns. This is a great example of the latter—Greg used a telephoto lens (210mm on a full-frame sensor) to zoom in, compress the space, and pick out an intriguing pattern in the sculptured hills. In fact we see two overall patterns here, one formed by the interplay between light and dark, the other created by the color contrast between regions of green and amber.
Reading David duChemin’s eBook A Deeper Frame got me thinking about how we perceive depth and space in photographs, and how lens choice affects that perception.
David says that because photography turns “a world of three dimensions into two,” that “if we aim to create photographs that create within the reader a deeper, fuller, longer experience, it falls to us to recreate that depth.”
There’s no question that wide-angle lenses are better tools for creating a sense of depth in a photograph than telephoto lenses. Telephotos make objects appear closer together than they really are, compressing space and flattening the perspective. Wide-angle lenses make objects appear farther apart than they really are, expanding the sense of space, and, if used correctly, creating an illusion of depth.
These two photographs from my recent trip to the redwoods illustrate the difference. Both images include the same rhododendrons and redwoods.
In the top image I stepped back with a telephoto lens (130mm) and isolated part of the bush against two redwood trunks. It looks like the rhododendrons are only a few feet in front of the trees, but they’re not. They’re at least 20 feet away—illustrating the compression effect of the telephoto lens. The sense of depth is minimal.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
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