Photo critique by Rozov: redistribution of brightness in the frame

This time I have to critically analyze the photos submitted to the Nikon photo contest submitted by the readers to the Photo&Technique magazine photo contest, the results of which were published in № 1 44 2013.

I have to admit that every time it becomes more and more difficult for me to find among hundreds of the best pictures, pre-selected from all the pictures sent to the editorial office, the ones suitable for this section. No openly weak work in the list. The problem is that the photographic literacy of our readers is steadily growing: they learn to think in photographic terms, and compose their pictures so clearly and correctly, that it becomes difficult for me to penetrate into their works with my innovative suggestions.

I’m very happy about that. I am sure one day I will not be able to find any photos for the “Criticism” section in our mail. But this time I suggest to pay attention to not quite precise minus correction, positioning of the main subject in the center of the frame with a stop motion, redistribution of brightness in the frame, cropping and color harmony, cropping with tonal separation of plans and increasing micro-contrast, choice of depth of field.

“Waiting for the Storm.”. Alexey Glyva d. Saratov .

The photo about waiting for the storm is, in my opinion, a very striking example of photographic understatement. The author did everything right. I have thought over the composition and adjusted the color, for which I completely discolored the upper part of the picture. I raised the contrast of the clouds, and then they flew straight at the frightened viewer. In short, I liked the picture so much that I wanted to add some photographic spice to it, to make it memorable, catchy, and arresting at the first glance. For this I only changed the brightness ratio of some spots.

The road in the foreground was darkened.

Muted and discolored the green of the water on the left.

Pressed underbelly of clouds on the left side of the sky.

I darkened the sky near the horizon line in the right part of the picture to a medium gray. Now it has become really stormy.

The yellow stripe to the right of the horizon line was brightened. This is often the case before a summer thunderstorm, when a ray of sunlight shines through the gloomy clouds.

On the left in the foreground – enhanced the micro contrast. The grass is now more convex, and the whole picture is deeper spatially.

The landscape, already quite dramatic, now looks threatening. I wouldn’t have missed it.

“Gloomy clear day”. Alexey Ogloblin r. Kirov .

Minus correction with loss of important details

A classic example of how differently a source file can be read by different people. In the original, which the author of the photo sent to our editorial office, you wouldn’t see a clear day if you wanted to. But there is a realization of the old as the world photographic technique. In my youth, this was a familiar cliché. A red filter was put on the lens and the picture was taken with the minus correction. The sun would magically change into the moon and the day into night. The “wow-effect” as they say these days was achieved through some simple technical manipulations.

I don’t know why Alexey turned “A cloudy clear day” into a landscape with a rising moon, but the minus correction of no less than two stops turned the whole lower half of the picture into a zone of almost complete absence of any details.

Meanwhile, it’s enough to pull out the details from the shadows, and the photo, from my point of view, becomes almost symbolic. I remember very well such pictures of visual devastation, I saw them thirty years ago in many northern cities like Dudinka, Igarka, Yeniseisk. On the streets of such settlements, built up with “very slotted” barracks, which were solemnly called dormitories, I felt like a small, powerless cog in a huge soulless System, set up to produce something iron. There is nothing human around: poles, wires, barbed wire fences, rusting construction equipment, heating pipes hanging one meter off the ground, icy cranes of the river port, and a village store with vodka for two Dollars. 87 kop. with a sprat in tomato sauce as an appetizer..

I can’t say that this shot, which stirred up almost forgotten images, pleased me, but it excited me and made me pound on the keyboard.

I have to mention that “Gloomy Day” after “developing” turned out to be a very interesting subject for detail research and analysis of compositional interrelationships of spots and lines that fill it.

Let me remind you that most of the photographs, built on the arrangement of the main spots strictly parallel to the borders of the frame, are dead. Life runs out of them. Motion falters. In my opinion, the only exceptions to this rule are technical architectural shots made at the request of an architect or a construction company, for which it is important to see the exact reproduction of a three-dimensional object on the screen or in the picture.

Composition of “Gloomy clear day” is very skillfully composed. It’s as if by accident all the horizontals in the frame are not horizontal: cables, roof lines, billowing smoke, heating pipes – everything is oblique to the horizon. The verticals – the poles and most of the walls of the buildings – are blocked. Strictly vertically oriented only the figure of a man carrying home a bag of provisions. “Street, street, you, brother, are drunk!

The diagonal line of the road and the trails left by the sledges crossing the road add dynamics and liveliness to the picture. If you look closely, on the right, in the middle of the photo, you can see the outline of a modern parkett or all-terrain vehicle. Consequently, the file was shot not at the time of building communism, but quite recently, and this strikes you even harder than a simple reminder of the past. Congratulations to the author. He created a netleneck! Document of the era!

To sum up, it would be much easier to process the file if the minus correction was done by one stop instead of two.

“Eyelashes.”. Kirill Kotov from New York, USA . Lesnoy Gorodok .

Cropping, tonal separation of the plans, increasing micro-contrast

Observation is one of the strong points of a good photographer. All sighted people are able to look, only some can see. The author saw these eyelashes. Not only that, I wasn’t lazy and took pictures. Then he was able to select this particular file from the many passages and took the time to process. It has long been known that the material resists the photographer: now the light is wrong, now there isn’t a cloud in the sky, now clouds on the contrary. In a word, there is no perfection in nature. In this case the subject does not fit into the usual frame window. In my opinion, violating the golden ratio rule while framing served the picture well. I removed everything superfluous, and the eyelashes became the main thing. True, he had to increase contrast and lighten the sky, to tear the edge of the snow drift away from the horizon. The picture was immediately readable, even without an explanatory caption.

But the question arose: do you need color in this case?? Maybe full bleaching or cold toning will enhance the impression of this subject? The decision is up to the author.

“Just a summer rain.”. Evgeny Turkov New York . Penza .

Redistribution of brightness in the frame

Nice genre shot made with the “fish eye” from under the canopy above the bus stop. You can’t shoot the subject with any other lens, as there’s no room for retreat, it’s raining everywhere. Thanks to the wide angle of coverage we can see the whole bus and the space around it, which is painted with smeared drops of rain. The shutter length was chosen very well by the director.

The barrel on the edges of the frame makes the picture specifically picturesque. The distortion in the center of the frame is minimized. The director is well aware of these lens characteristics and used them skillfully, placing the main characters in the foreground, in the center of the composition. I would have been happy to say that I hit the bullseye 100% and congratulate the genre hunter on the excellent shot, but my quest for perfection made me try to lighten up the space above the bus, the girl’s face in the foreground and the micro contrast to the left of the lady with the umbrella. The picture is airier and wetter now.

“View from the Roof.”. Nastya Guban New York .

Cropping, choice of depth of field

“People are lucky,” I thought to myself when I first saw this shot. I thought for a moment that he was really allowed to walk on the roof of the Uffizi. But after taking a closer look at the picture of the famous Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I realized the picture was taken through glass. Reflection of interior lights is read against the sky. Window glasses in cities are rarely clean, so shooting through them is like using a soft filter. It is clear that this makes the outlines of the tiles on the roof of the gallery and everything in the frame float.

The author only tilted the horizon line by 0.6 degrees. But even that was enough to make the walls of the houses warp and the houses begin to fall down. I had amputated part of the foreground on the right, and I wished the author had moved the camera to the left when he shot. In this case the whole bridge could fit in the frame.

I should note that the sharpness point of focus is not quite right. It should be directed exactly at the tiles of the gallery roof, and not at the windows of the foreground, which I cropped. In this case, setting the aperture just two focal lengths wider would have given the author a tangible increase in the depth of field. The Ponte Vecchio bridge would be perfectly clear. I really liked the point of view the author found and the timing he chose.

Evening. The sky is still bright, but the electric lights are already on. The architecture looks festive without being overly showy.

I’m sorry we didn’t take advantage of it to the fullest.

“Speedway. Gennady Chuprugin New York, America . Korolev .

The central location of the main in the frame

The most common mistake amateur photographers make is to put the subject in the center of the frame. The owner uses a central auto focus sensor, which is cross-shaped and easily catches both horizontal and vertical subjects.

On the periphery could be horizontally oriented sensors that can easily track only vertical objects. But if you want to focus on a wire hanging in the sky, for example, it’s hard to hit a thin strip of wire with the horizontal sensor.

However, in this case the author made his task more difficult. Speedway is a dynamic sport. It’s customary to shoot it with a wire to blur the background, leaving the motorcyclist himself sharp enough. This gives the illusion of very fast movement in the picture, and highlights the main thing in the frame.

The very principle of focusing and concentrating on the “sharp on the off” has long been exploited by photographers and has become a familiar cliché. No one is surprised to see this kind of footage these days, which is why I think of it as student work.

The new generations of photographers need to learn as many of the techniques their predecessors invented. Only after that, one can hope that the synthesis of the accumulated craftsmanship skills will allow its owner to come up with something new. In this case the author managed to repeat the method, but only partially. The wire itself and the expo calculation are done correctly: the background is blurred completely, the rider is partially blurred, but the movement is strangely frozen.

The motorcyclist seems to hang in the center of the composition. There’s nowhere for it to move. To make it clear how exactly one creates the illusion of movement, I repositioned the photo. Now the athlete has shifted to the left third zone. This gave him room to move forward quickly, and he didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.

However, the picture after such intervention remained only a correctly performed study on the subject of conveying motion in the frame. In order to surprise the sophisticated viewer, the author has to come up with something that thousands of other photographers can’t do offhand.

“Swifts.”. Alexander Tutaev d. Dolgoprudny, MO .

Cropping and color harmony

Another very nice photo submitted for the contest. However, in my opinion, it is not quite justifiably square: the right side of the picture with the window and the superstructure on the roof outweighs the left one. The combination of yellow and blue is not in itself controversial. However, the unusual brightness balance is bothersome: the lower part of the picture is usually darker than the upper part the ground is dark, the sky is light . Here it’s the other way around: tonally the sky and the roof band outweigh the light wall. To correct the imbalance is quite easy: let the sky lighten and brighten up, and make the wall darker and more textured. Crop the photo on the left and right, and at the same time correct the verticals.

In order not to be unfounded I did this. The picture is balanced. The house has aged and acquired a “history.”. This is how a man’s face changes with age: the signs of life color him.