Focal length: Focal lengths and different viewpoints

This exercise helped to explore how different focal lengths used in conjunction with a different viewpoint can change the perspective of a photograph. I took some shots of our budgie George in his cage at first standing back from the cage and using the longest focal length on my camera to zoom in:

The shot appears that you are standing just in front of the cage instead of a few meters back from it. As the focal length is long but you are stood away from the subject it still retains a lot of the depth of field. For the next shot I moved forwards to the cage and used the shortest focal length:

Although the length of the lens is much shorter, but moving towards the subject the framing is much tighter and you feel like you are right on top of the cage in terms of distance from it. the depth of field is a lot shallower and George stands out very well against his surroundings. using the shorter length has made the photograph feel much closer instead of further away.

The character of the photos differs in the detail they allow you to see. The first shot has a wider angle of view and makes George appear very small an insignificant in his cage, where as the second image makes him a very prominent feature and larger than usual in appearance. It makes his own character stand out more than the longer length shot.

its very important to consider what length lens to use when you are composing a shot. if you can get close up to a subject does not always mean you should step back and zoom in, nor does it mean you should get close and zoom out. it very much depends on how you want the subject to relate to the viewer and its background. In George’s case he appears much more his cheeky self where I have got close to him and used a shorter length lens to create a short depth of field to put the emphasis on the photo on him.

Focal lengths: Focal lengths

I was asked to look at the way focal lengths record the angel of view in a picture. I have a zoom lens on my camera that ranges from 18mm (wide angle lens) to 55mm (telephoto lens). I took two shots of a scene stood in the exact same spot with my longest and shortest lengths with my lens.

Notice that the relationship between the objects in the scene does not change, they just appear much larger in the 55mm shot. The 18mm shot has a much great angel of view, including a lot of the sky and the surrounding grave yard, where as the 55mm photo contains only a small portion of the same scene, and decreases the depth of field. Using a longer focal length does make the object appear larger and closer, but this is not the same as moving closer to it, which would ultimately change how the subject is perceived, as the angle of view is no longer the same. I think next I will be exploring how the focal length can change the relationship of its subjects in comparison with its angle of view.

Looking through the viewfinder: A sequence of composition

I found this exercise extremely difficult as I didn’t come across many situations that involved people that I could shoot easily. In the end I took a walk around a near by town, Godalming, and took the sequence as I walked down some of its streets. I was to take the pictures as I went recording everything I saw even if the shot was not near to being perfect, getting closer to one photograph that I felt was the best image of the series.

I started at the beginning of one of my favourite looking streets and took the first shot without much thought and noticed some people casually making their way towards me. I took two more shots trying to get the people and the street in together. The first one worked better than the second as the people were blurred in the second shot and we’re more aware of my presence. It seems people get rather shy when they see someone with a camera!

Then I came across an interesting wall outside a house that had been squeezed into the street. I felt i should angle the shot with the symmetry of the stone wall and use my aperture priority mode to enhance the way the wall would stand out against the long road behind it. I think the second image comes across slightly better as it has focus right into the very end of the road where as the first image focuses mainly on the wall. This was my intention at first, but after getting the shots on my PC to view them I could see it worked  better with my second attempt overall.

Almost opposite the wall was a shop that had some items in the window that caught my eye. I tried to take shots that would show the architecture of the building outside and still show the chairs in the window without drawing your attention away from one or the other. The first few tries caught my reflection and the flash in the window , but the last one was much better, with no reflection and just hinting at what is inside the shop. I Like the fact I zoomed out slightly to include more of the building instead of the first two shots that just focused on the window itself.

Next the Star pub had some lovely baskets of plants on the front of it, and the sun had started to come through making it a very pleasant walk. I wanted to try to capture the brightness of the morning as it shone on the white walls of the building and the light falling on the plants and windows

This last shot I thought looked really good. The sun was out in full force shining right down the street and over the top of one of Godalming’s most iconic buildings, The Pepper Pot. It summed up my morning walking through Godalming and its very small back streets, with people out enjoying the weather and the old buildings and streets. The sequence of photos get brighter as they went along, capturing the sun coming out and making the town look its best, with the final picture showing this with the sun rays shining to all sides of the frame.

By capturing all the pictures that were almost right, it helps tell a story and is a good way of seeing how much more effectively you can shoot something rather than just taking one picture and thinking that’s the best you can do. It is very helpful to be able to guide yourself through this process to see what else you can do that will work better for the subject you are shooting. Not everything will work, but you need to see these ‘almost’ shots to help you to improve your composition.

Looking through the viewfinder: Object in different positions in the frame

I used a series of pictures of the lamp in my room for this, placing it in a different position in the frame and studying its relationship to the background.

The second shot where the lamp is in the middle, I chose as my second favourite as even though being central gives the lamp a prominent place in the picture, it seems to get lost in the space around it, like it's sinking into the middle and you cant look around the whole picture as you are too drawn into the centre. My favourite, the first photo, is placed closest to the bottom left corner, and the rays of light guide the eye from one side of the frame to the other. It uses the background to its advantage to draw your eye around to other areas rather than working against it.

The last two pictures both work by drawing your eye around the rays of light away from the subject and back again but the lamps position being slightly off centred in both feels awkward.

When a subject is placed on a background that has no other focus points, its very important to think of the best positioning for it, as it can greatly change your opinion of the shot by how they interact with each other. Sometimes a central shot is just what you need as you want the attention drawn to only the subject, but at the same time you don't want to over emphasise its presence if the background is important in supporting its subject.

Looking through the viewfinder: Fitting the frame to the subject

I spent a morning at Guildford Castle for this exercise, in which I was asked to take my first shot of my subject without too much thought to it's composition, and then go on to take further shots with specific compositional requirements to help get me thinking about how to compose a photograph and how to see 'images' through the view finder. This was quite fun thinking of other ways to make one subject look very different just by changing the way it fitted the frame and in turn would appear to the viewer.

The first shot is the one I took as I approached the castle, no thought really involved apart from getting it straight and central! This was just to use as comparison for the shots that followed.

Second photo was to try and fit the subject in the frame as much as possible, filling up the entire thing if I could. I like the angle and the vertical orientation I took this from to get it to fit, it makes it look very imposing taking up the entire photograph.

The third picture had to be a close up of the subject, something that would fill the entire frame and beyond, so you couldn't see the edges of what you were shooting. Again I chose to make the image vertically to show the height of the walls, and although there is one edge of the castle in view I thought this added to it's sense of height, and included the flag blowing in the wind on top as it aided in your eye being led up and down the picture, again making you feel the scale of the structure.

The last Image was taken so that the subject would only occupy a quarter of the frame or less. I had to walk a fair distance away to get this and ended up below some trees, and the over hanging branches made for a nice addition to the picture with the castle being focused upon in the distance.

By comparing these different angles, orientations and how much of the frame is dominated by the subject with the first image I put no thought into, I can see how important it is to really think about your photography and how it will be viewed before you go snapping away. The first picture you take may not always be the best way to portray the image. The first image looks very bland and ordinary after I spent time choosing different angles and compositions for the other photos. It does give you the basic information that you are looking at a castle, but it doesn't have the depth or the ability to make you feel anything more like the others do that show how tall and strong the castle really is. I now understand that to get the best out of my photography, a good portion of it will be the thought process and composition behind getting a great shot.

Lastly I had to take one of the images and crop it so that I had alternative possibilities of compositions and where the image would fit within the frame. I decided to use the original first image to see if I could make a much better composition from it than how it had been taken to start with. I came up with the following possibilities:

The first crop I just took a slim section of the original photograph, it sort of just suggests the castle and the tree tops. Its quite interesting because it makes you wonder about the rest of the setting for the castle that you cant see, and your attention is drawn to the left side by the castle instead of just straight into the middle of the picture. The second crop I just brought the edges of the frame closer to the subject. by taking away a lot of the unnecessary back and foreground, the castle becomes much more prominent against the blue sky. The last one I left more back ground and some fore ground to give a sense to the position of the castle to its surroundings, making it appear much larger then the second crop as it is put into perspective by the small shrubs and fence before it.

Cropping can be a very useful tool in making your photographs give out the messages you want them to, about size and position and dominance. It can also add or subtract the details you don't want to include in your shot or take your focus away. By changing the position of your subject through cropping you can change the way people will perceive your photography.

Photographing movement: Comparing the two exercises

I have chosen my two favourite images from the previous two exercises 'Photographing movement', and am comparing why I think they do and don't work, and which over all is the better image. Here are the images I have picked:

Image 1

Image 2

The first one I like the fact that the setting is stationary, and the car is streaking through, making it appear it is going exceedingly fast. The light trails make a really good feature in the picture, and the contrast between that and the cars that are frozen in the background make it seem like it is the only thing moving at speed. It really jumps out at you in comparison. I also don't like it for the same reason that the background is stationary. Even though it makes the main subject stand out, it also makes it quite a cold image as everything is so still and your eye is not drawn to any other part of it. This can mean to some people it would be a very striking piece, but can also put people off by its boldness.

Image 2 is much more fun in appearance, and as I described before the picture has captured the sense of suspense very well by just adding the slight movement to the ball. The movement makes the photograph much more dynamic, but with so much else in focus it can draw your attention away from the action of the piece.

Over all I think that both images work well for their own reasons, and it is very difficult to pick one particular photograph as better as they are very different subjects that need to be caught with different techniques to get across the message you want to say about them. The second image is my personal favourite as it has an emotion connected to it through the colours, movement and suggestion included with the shadow of the basket ball, to make you feel as though you personal could be just ready to jump up and throw it yourself. A good photograph to me is one that makes you feel something :-)

Photographing movement: Panning with different shutter speeds

This I found seriously difficult to get to grips with as there are so many variables. Panning I found easy, getting the subject to fit the frame, but I had trouble with defining which shutter speeds to use depending on what type of object I was shooting, some were quite unpredictable and not uniform in the speeds they were traveling. In the end I got some shots I thought worked fairly well.

As you can see I ended up with three different kinds of photograph, as I attempted lots of different ways of approaching this, including making my dog run up and down the stairs. Unfortunately he soon realised there was no reward in doing this, and he gave up and went back to sleep! The few snaps of his I managed to get were all frozen with no blur to show movement at all, and I had to leave it at that as he wasn't moving again for any one! Luckily my mum and a friend was on hand to help out with the coin and then in the arcade.

The first picture here of the man on the bicycle was actualy a very lucky shot whilst I was the passenger in a car. I was trying to shoot stuff on the move and he happened to be passing at the right speed for me to produce a very pleasing image. It was taken at 1/40 seconds which seemed to be a speed that was about right for a lot of things moving at a medium pace. Anything slightly faster would just freeze the entire image. In some cases this made quite a good shot, but for the practice of keeping blur in an image it wasn't helping! Hence my struggle with finally getting some images to write about.

The next photograph of the coin I chose to show because I think it showed how I was struggling to keep the main subject in focus. This was the best of the entire set I shot of my mum rolling coins across the kitchen work top. It was taken at 1/6 seconds, and although its not in focus in any part of the image, I do quite like the fact everything has some movement involved. I tried much faster speeds and some inbetween but the unpredictability of how the coin would roll proved very difficult to judge. Slower shutter speeds have produced some very eye catching images for me on the whole, retaining just enough focus of the main subject to see what it is. Maybe because everything in the photograph is blurred it gives an impression of increased speed.

Lastly I got the help of a friend whilst we were at the arcades in Brighton. I took lots of photos of her trying out the different games that involved her moving about a bit. The thing I found that hindered me here was that inside I had to use the flash, and what seemed to happen was that most of the actual image was frozen, but I was getting interesting light trails that showed the speed and movement instead. I think this makes these particular images more interesting, as it enhances the brightness of the lights and the sense of fun at the arcade, without taking away from the subject and her actions. It was taken at 1/30 seconds.

I have also included this last Shot, taken at 1/25 seconds, as I like the way that there is only a very tiny amount of blur to suggest movement, yet there is a clear 'shadow' of the ball in mid air, and the way everything is frozen with slight blur gives it a hightened sense of suspense that the person is right on the verge of throwing the ball. Again, I found it hard to judge the speeds I would need, as you can see the difference in the 1/30 and 1/25 shots, the slower speed seemed to produce less movement, but then I haven't factored in the speed at which I might have been moving the camera in conjuction with the shutter speed and the object. Lots of variables to consider every time!

I think with practice this will become less of a process I have to think lots about, and much more fluid with my responses.

Photographing movement: Shutter speeds

Shutter speed is quite a difficult thing to judge, at least I thought so, as it depends on the speed of the object you are shooting, your position to it, the light, and if there is more than one thing moving in a shot at different speeds. I chose a spot on a bridge over the A3 to try and practice using shutter speeds on moving objects; there would definitely be no shortage of cars passing below, I even had a few wave at me!

So to start I took a few pictures at a fast shutter speed of 1/200 secs, as shown in the first image. This froze the scene and the cars below easily keeping everything in focus. I played around with how slow I could take a shot whilst keeping the image sharply frozen, and found the below image taken at 1/80 secs to be the slowest, although there is still a portion of it that is blurred. This was due to the angle of the shot, and the fact that the speed of the cars as they came towards me increased. The closer an object is to you, the faster it appears to move. The cars in the background appeared to move slower so they were captured as though they were frozen, where as the black Audi in the front move faster the closer it gets, so it is the only one in the shot with slight movement involved.

The next image was the slowest shutter speed I took from this angle at 1.8 secs. Any slower than this let too much light into the lense and my camera insisted it didn't like it! I like the way this speed capture the lights on the car streaking past. Using a slightly faster shutter speed would have produced less streaking and kept more of the physical shape of the car intact. This is more apparent in the cars in the background, with the one closest having more blurred movement than the one just creeping into the image at the top. So choosing the correct speed is essential to achieving the right effect for your shot, although this may take some practice and a few goes before you get it right. unfortunately not all shots will wait around for you to get your camera settings right!

For comparison I took some extra shots at a slightly different angle and zoomed in so that the cars were passing directly below me. I took one picture at the same slowest speed that froze the image before, but as the traffic was moving much faster from this angle, around 50-70 mph, it produced the following result:

The image is no longer in focus due to its increased speed, but results in quite a pleasing amount of blur to suggest the movement of the vehicle. It will be important to me to practice with shutter speeds so that in time I will be able to judge what shutter speed I need to use in conjuction with the speed of the object to produce exactly the image I had envisioned.

I took one more shot at the slowest speed my camera would allow of 1/8 secs:

The car that passed through this shot becomes like a ghostly blur, and produces a very interesting effect!

Focus: Focus at different apertures

This was just a short exercise to explain how aperture works and affects an image.

In this first shot the aperture was set at f5.6 and I have circled in red the portion of the picture that is mainly in focus. (Please click the images to enlarge them)

At f5.6 only the mid point, the part I was focusing on, is sharp in focus. Anything in the back or foreground becomes slightly blurred depnding on its depth of field.
In this next image I used a smaller aperture of f14, which was about the mid point in the range of apeture my camera provides. Again I have marked in red the area of ths hot which is most in fous. As the aperture has become smaller, the depth of field that is in focus has become wider, leaving only the very front and back of the image slightly out of focus.

Lastly I took one more shot with the aperture on my camera set at its smallest, f36. As you can see the entire image becomes sharp and all depths of field are included. From this exercise I can see that aperture is important in deciding what is in focus within your image. This would therefore mean a small aperture will let you see details at all depths clearly, useful for capturing scenes and landscapes, and a much larger aperture will decrease the depth of field so that you can increase how much attention is given to your main focal subject, dependant on how much you would like it to stand out from its background.

Focus: Focus with a set aperture

This exercise was to find a scene that has depth and take two or three pictures each focused on something at a different distances with the aperture set at its widest, then record which image you prefered. The following shots were taken with an F-stop of 5.6.

Using the widest aperture allows more light to pass through the lense, and creates these lovely blurred effects where the camera is not focused on a specific part of the image. It increases the intensity of the sharpness of the subject you are focusing on, making it stand out heavily and draws in your attention. The first image shows clearly the wire fence and grasses at the very foreground of the image, the background is unfocused causing the objects to almost leap out of the picture. The second image is less clear in the forground but still retains some focus, but the attention is drawn to the grasses behind the fence and the plowed lines in the ground. The third image was focused on the posts in the background, which makes the foreground blurred so that it just hints at the fence infront of the scene.

For me, the most striking is the first image as it stands out most clearly against the blurred field behind, but it is so blurred that you loose the sense of the field. It is the same with the third image which detracts from the objects in the foreground. My favourite is actually the second image, which is more focused from the middle ground to the front, allowing the viewer to still see and appreciate the field, but not to let it dominate the image. The same applies to the foreground where parts are in focus to draw the attention, but do not detract too much away from the field behind. I like the compromise between the elements of the picture and the way in which the eye is drawn from the front of the image to the back by the varied degrees of focus.

Getting to know your camera: Focal length & angle of view

Ok first exercise.

This involved trying to determine how the different focal lengths would make the final image appear, and what the best viewing distance would be. I decided to start by checking out the manual for my Nikon D5000 and see what is said the 'standard' length was for my camera. I've scanned in the page describing how to work this out:

To start with it looked extremely complicated, and my maths is not the best! The diagram really helped me to understand what exactly is being described, its much easier to get to grips with something visual. After studying it for a little while I 'think' I've worked out that a standard size image for my camera would be at a focal length of 23.3mm. If this is wrong someone please correct me!

After establishing this I moved on to the exercise itself and took some shots of a scene at the standard focal length, the minimum and the maximum and a length that with both eyes open, appeared to be the same in the viewfinder as what I could see visually. It turned out that the closest length to what I could actually see was the longest length of 55mm, so below are the three shots I took in the following order: 55mm, standard 23mm and 18mm.

The first image, 55mm, was the one closest in the view finder to my natural vision with both eyes open. In fact if I could have zoomed in a fraction more it would have been perfect. When it was printed on to A4 paper I couldn't physically stretch my arms far enough to make the printed image appear the same size as what I could see, so the best viewing position for this image would have been if I could have pinned it to a wall and taken a step backward.

The second image, 23mm, was most like what I could see when I could hold the print right out at arms length. A little further would have actually been better.

The third image, 18mm, was best when held at exactly arms length.

What I have noticed is that the longer the focal length used, the further away the image must be for it to appear a 'normal' size. Smaller focal lengths produce images that have to be viewed close up to see all of the detail. What surprises me is how much the angle of view changes from what I perceive as normal and the standard focal length, an awful lot is lost. I will have to take this into account when I consider what shots I'm taking and where the final prints might be published. This will also help me to decide on print sizes for future assignments based on how I want to portray an image.