Just kidding. Anyway, lighting should be in the daytime and projected to the side or otherwise faced towards you in anyway. But in the forest, this doesn't quite matter. If you think about it, the forest is full of trees, which is full of leaves, which block the sun, which allows practically no light. In this case, you don't need good lighting. But, they do allow some light. As Nichole Woods states: "Every forest has a certain amount of light that comes in between the trees" (Woods 66). This is some of the "forest" pictures I took.
Lets say you're walking with your phone. You spot a really cool car and decide to take a picture of it. This is Street photography. You've probably been doing this you're entire life, not knowing what it's called. Nichole woods in her book, Photography, states that there are five rules to street photography.
Rule number one, always bring your camera. "Always take your camera with you, no matter where you go" (Woods 90). Just trust me, I did bring my camera everywhere.
Rule number two, never use flash. "If you want to capture your friends doing something hilarious, the... moment will be gone once they take note of the glaring flash" (Woods 91). You can tell, all my pictures were done in the daylight, so I did not need a flash.
Rule number three, take a lot of photographs. "if you miss the perfect shot with one photograph, you may find that the photos that follow get the perfect image" (Woods 91-92). I deleted all of my extra pictures taken, again, just trust me. I followed this rule.
Rule number four, use zoom. "When children are unaware that they are being observed, there really can be some magical moments captured on camera... If they know you are taking photographs, children will pose and the pose may spoil the spontaneity of the photograph (Woods 92). My lens looks like this below. I couldn't see anything without zooming in.
Lastly, rule number five, be involved in every picture: "the best technique... is... by taking a photograph... to... a low level to gain better perspective" (Woods 92). I was involved with every picture I took, otherwise I wouldn't be there.
I personally would take pictures by these rules because they improved my pictures a lot.
Would you take pictures by the Street photography method?
Below is the shown differences of the two pictures:
Below is a time-lapse of how I edited the picture with After Effects (no audio):
Overall, you probably didn't see much difference until I pointed it out on the third picture. Over-editing is when you edit your picture, further than raising the brightness or compressing the resolution to a lower grade, and by adding unnecessary objects or overlays to your composition. As Nicole Woods states in her book, "some photographers are less concerned about composition, exposure and the quality of their images because they put their trust in their software to correct anything that went wrong" (Woods 85). I thought that maybe the dust on the keyboard would go away, but in the end, I failed to remove the dust from the keyboard no matter how hard I tried.
She also states that pixels are also a determining factor of every picture taken digitally: "When you crop a photograph... you are... chopping off a lot of pixels from around edges of the photograph" (Woods 85). In my picture, the original resolution was 3888 by 2892 pixels at 4:3 aspect ratio. Not many TVs, phones or computer screens support 4:3, so I cropped it to make a nice fitting 16:9 aspect ratio at 1980 by 1080 pixels. This, however, caused the picture to lose 1908 vertical pixels and 1812 horizontal pixels to create a total of 3,457,296 pixels lost. To give you some perspective, the original picture had a total of 11,244,096 pixels. Essentially I ripped roughly 3/10ths of this picture off.
Another tip that Woods gave was to take the largest, pixel-wise, picture possible. "Because quality images take up more space on the card, people often to opt for somewhere in the middle and this is a huge mistake" (Woods 88). At 3888 by 2892 pixels, this is about half of the resolution I could've taken my picture at, 8K UHD or 7680 by 4320 pixels. This is where I compensated for a smaller size picture, data-wise, as she stated in that quote, and now it cannot be edited fully in near Raster range.
Woods also says in her book that if you take good pictures, you don't need to edit them: "Of course you can use a professional software... to improve your images, but imagine if your images became so good you didn't have to" (Woods 86). I chose this picture to prove her point, this picture is bad. Look at the first picture and find the farthest key. What? You can't see it? Well then look at the closest key, Hmm? You still can't see it? Well what can you see? Oh you can see the one or two really dusty keys in the middle? Possibly the worst part of the whole keyboard? I depended on my software to remove the dust and make the picture much better.
In the end, I believe that this over-edit I've conducted was not worth it. It took twelve minutes to make a slightly "better" picture were I had to explain the differences. By editing this picture I threw away 3/10ths of the picture away, tried to remove something that I couldn't, compensated for it's down-scaled size, and didn't even try to take a good picture by telling myself "After Effects will fix it."
Now, ask yourself, which did you prefer? I know that's kind of a hard question to answer with such little information, but try. Most people would prefer the first picture. In my book: Photography by Nicole Woods, she states that "The rule of odds... is based on the concept that your eyes are drawn into the middle of the odd number" (Woods 23). In the first picture there are three dice: an odd number, and two dice: an even number, in the second picture. If you are in the general group of "most people" whom chose the first picture, I can estimate that you were drawn by the rule of odds. If you were not in the general group, you must have chosen the second picture by some other preference. I personally agree with this rule because in most landscape pictures there is only one object or main point, for example, this tree. The tree is by itself, which is one, which is an odd number. I did not take this picture.
My pictures have been downscaled heavily, down to 1980x1080p, roughly 1/4 of their original size.
A focal point by definition in this book: Photography by Nicole Woods, is "something that your eyes cannot let go of" (Woods 36). If we go layer by layer of detail of this photograph to the right, a camera placed between two front-facing mirrors, we can see the mirror behind the camera is out of focus, however we can see the basic shape of the camera and hand being replicated through the other mirrors. But what you don't see is how dirty the mirror is. This is how you use focus to your advantage and exclude doesn't degrade the picture's quality because the main object of the picture is still being focused on. What I have learned through personal experience and through this book is what this book states: "just make sure that you choose something that captures the hearts of those who look at the images once they are produced" (Woods 36). I believe I am getting closer to this quote's description of a photograph's objective by experience. This book gave me a new understanding of photographs with that last quote and I treat photographs differently. Overall, if you don't want something in the picture, either remove it entirely or focus out of it. In this case, I needed the mirror and that's why I decided to focus out of the mirror. All photographs I took are over 4K (3888x2592px) resolution as proof of my improvement throughout my recent photographs.
What do you think of these photographs?
Do you see an improvement on these pictures below and how so?
