Picture framing can be a hassle.  Ready-made frames often offer a cheap solution, but not all pictures fit standard sizes, and the ready-made frames can be low quality as well.  Professional picture framing is a sure-fire way to get a great result, but also a sure-fire way to break the bank; often it costs more than the art you want to frame!  But there is another alternative: to do the framing yourself.  Perhaps a daunting prospect at first glance, but I propose that with the right tools and time, anyone can do their own picture framing, get a great result, and save a boatload of cash.

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Here’s a new Notes from the Field from a recent trip to Death Valley.  I was in the Badwater Salt Flats (lowest elevation in the US: 282 feet below sea level) for sunrise and came away with this shot:

Sunrise with a Dash of Salt

Full details with videos on how I chose this composition, what camera settings I used, and how I post-processed the image after the jump.

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This page is currently under construction, but will be updated soon.

Ok, if you’ve found your way here, it means that you’re curious about what the heck the aperture on your camera does when you fiddle with its settings.  In the previous essay, we found out that changing the camera’s aperture will change the depth of field (DOF) of your photos.  This is an incredibly powerful creative tool for us as photographers because it means that we can isolate a single subject in our photographs, or we can choose to have a scene in focus from very close to us all the way out to the horizon.

Now let’s experiment a bit to get a better idea of what that means and find out what settings will give us these kind of effects!

The first thing we need to do is set our cameras to aperture priority mode, which is nearly always designated by an ‘A’ on your camera’s LCD:

Next, grab yourself a subject; it could be yourself or a friend or almost anything at all.  I chose a stuffed cheetah.  Now head on outside on a bright day and find a nice, busy background with lots of detail.  Something like a tree, or some bushes, will work great.  Set your subject up so that it’s about 3-4 feet in front of your background and about 3-4 feet out in front of your camera.  Zoom in far enough that your subject fills most of your frame, but make sure you still can see a good bit of your background.

Now take your camera and dial your aperture down to f/22 or as low as it can go (note that if you’re trying to do this is low light, your shutter speed may get long enough that you’ll require a tripod to get a nice, in-focus shot).  Now focus on your subject and fire off a shot and you’ll get something similar to this:

Note that even though I told the camera to focus only on the cheetah, both the cheetah and the background are sharp (in-focus) because a small aperture like f/22 gives us a deep depth of field.  And that even though you can see the cheetah clearly, the background seems too busy and is a little distracting.  Go ahead then and set your aperture to as small an f-stop as you can, like f/4 or so, focus on your subject, and pop off another frame:

This time because of our large aperture (small f-number), we have created a very shallow DOF, which causes the background to become nicely blurred, which makes the cheetah the only thing in focus, and thus it holds our attention much more easily.  And going back to exposure, you can see how the photos have the same overall brightness even though we used totally different aperture settings, because the camera compensated by changing our shutter speed.

To give you another quick example of the creative power of aperture control, here’s a similar series of shots I did with a subject (a houseplant) that is very similar to my background:

This is very neat and all, but I know you’re just dying to know when you should use these different types of effects.  In other words, in what circumstances should we use a wide-open, or large, aperture versus a stopped-down, or small, aperture?  Hopefully the photos above have given you a hint, and though the truest (and possibly lamest) answer is that it totally depends on your own personal tastes, I can at least give you some general ground rules that can be used as a springboard for your own personal expression:

In general, we use a shallow DOF (small f-number, large aperture) when we want to isolate a single subject in our frame.  In nature photography, this usually happens when we’re shooting wildlife, flowers, or anything else we want to pull out from the background.  For example, in the shot of this desert tortoise in South Africa, I used a wide-open aperture (f/5.6) to draw the viewer’s attention to the turtle by rendering the grass in front and trees in back as smooth, blurry shapes:

At the other end of the spectrum, we use a very deep depth of field (large f-number, small aperture) when we have multiple points of interest in our photo and we want our viewers eyes to be able to roam freely around the image.  This large f-number aperture control is used almost exclusively in landscape photography, where we may have a foreground, a midground, and a background which are important to the photo:

One last caveat though: your DOF will change if you zoom in or out or change your focal point while keeping your aperture constant.  If you’d like to know why, click here to read the Nature Photograph 201 essay about hyperfocal distance (which is something that it’s very important for nature photographers to understand anyway!).  Don’t worry if you decide to skip that essay for now: it’s not terrible critical to understand why your DOF changes as you zoom or re-focus, you just need to realize that it does, and that you won’t get that same DOF at f/22 if you’re zoomed in to 200 mm and focused on something 10 feet away as you would at f/22, 12 mm, and focused on something 5 feet away.  There are many tools out there on the net that can help you calculate your exact DOF for the settings you choose, but the basic rule of thumb is that the farther you zoom in, the shallower your DOF gets for a given aperture and focal point.  Aside from that, I’ve found that just getting out there and shooting a lot is the best way to develop an instinct for making the right choices.

But to give you a small headstart on developing that instinct, here are some of my own photos in which aperture control was my primary creative concern:

That’s it for aperture!  If you’re feeling like you’ve got a pretty good handle on this, head on to the next post to learn more about ISO and what controlling it can do for your photographs.

Next: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 4 of 6: Understanding ISO

Previous: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 3 of 6: Understanding Aperture, part i

Light Loss.

Blueing of photos.

This page is under construction.

This page is currently under construction

This Page is under construction

This page is under construction.

In simplest terms, composition is how the scene is placed in your image.  How zoomed in or zoomed out you are, whether your are up high or down low, the angle you shot from, what is in your foreground, midground, or background.  The composition is what creates the impact and tells the story of the image.  In my opinion, composition is the most difficult part of photography, but there is a science to the art of it and once you’ve learned the basic rules of thumb you’ll be creating beautiful compositions in no time.  Here are some of the most important ideas in composition:

Focal Length

Fill the Frame

Rule of Thirds

Get Rid of the Sky!

Leading Lines (Foreground, Midground, Background)

Simplify and De-clutter

Perspective is Everything

Lighting is Everything

Balance

Level Your Horizons

Just Because It’s a Wolf Doesn’t Make It a Good Picture

Focus on the Eyes

This page is still under construction, more to come soon . . .

Next: Post-Processing 101

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, by now you’ve learned everything there is to know about the three basic controls of your camera. You know that you can lengthen your shutter speed to add motion blur to your shots, or shorten your shutter speed in order to freeze time.  You can open your aperture wide to create a shallow depth of field, or you can stop it down to create a deep DOF.  And lastly, you can increase your ISO to make your camera more sensitive to low light, or you can reduce your ISO to help get rid of noise and boost your image quality.

You also know that changing any of these three parameters has an effect on your image’s exposure: for example, opening the aperture lets in more light, so our camera compensates by shortening the shutter speed so as not to blow out the image.  In other words, every decision we make regarding aperture, shutter speed, and ISO is a compromise which is driven by the dominating need to fill our photo up with the “right” amount of light.

But what does that mean exactly?  What is the “right” amount of light?  So far in all of our experimentation the camera has determined what the “right” amount of light is and adjusts itself accordingly based on the decisions we make.  So how does the camera do this?  And how can we change it if we don’t like what the camera is doing?  After all, just based on personal tastes, some people will prefer darker images and some will prefer lighter ones.  There is no universal “right,” even though our camera seems to think so.  This post will take a deeper look at exposure so that you can control your camera to get the right amount of light for you.

First things first: we’ll take a look at exactly how the camera decides what the right amount of light is:  Your camera has a built-in light meter which measures how much light is entering the lens and compares that to a standard reference point called “middle gray,” which is the point perceptually halfway between black and white.  In fact, your camera not only compares the incoming light to middle gray, it actively tries to make the incoming light match middle gray as closely as possible, in terms of brightness.  In other words, no matter how bright or dark your scene is, your camera wants to let just the right amount of light in to achieve that middle gray brightness.  That’s why in bright scenes you will have short shutter speed and small apertures, whereas in dim scenes your camera will tend toward wide apertures and long shutter speeds.  What this means then is that the camera is actually kind of stupid: it’s trying to take things that are bright and make them match this middle gray, and it’s trying to take things that are dark and make them match this middle gray.  You can do a quick experiment to prove this by taking a picture of a white wall; if you’re on auto mode or any of the “priority” modes, the white wall will actually come out gray.

This page is still under construction.  More to come soon . . .

Next: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 6 of 6: White Balance

Previous: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 3 of 6: Understanding ISO