The Art of Seeing

What stands between you (a photographer) and a picture? Only two things.

1. Composition (or Framing)
2. Exposure

These are the two things that need to fall into place to get the image from the outside world into the recording medium (film or digital sensor). If you get these two things straight, you will get a good picture of what you saw. But whether you made something art depends on your vision and skill as a photographer. To make good pictures one just needs to translate the scene faithfully into the medium. To make art, one needs to interpret the scene and shape it to what one really "sees". I define photography as the "Art of Seeing". But before one starts to make art (I am still learning to), one needs to make good photos. And this article attempts to explain from my perspective what needs to be done to take good photos. Note that I have made simplifications at many places so that the message stands strong and is not lost in the details of every nuance and exception. Note that I am not saying anything on what to photograph, or when to photograph. I am just explaining part of the How-to.

Composition
Put simply, this is pointing the camera the right way. Irrespective of what camera/lens you use, you need to pick from the infinite possibilities of the scene into one that will be ultimately captured.

First start with the lens you want to use. Choice of the focal length of the lens decides how much of the image you want to cover in your picture. When using a 35mm SLR camera if you wanted to take a picture of the New York skyline or the Grand Canyon, you would opt for a wide angle lens to translate the breadth and the beauty of the panorama into the picture. On the other hand, if you wanted to capture a small bird chirping away sitting on a branch a few hundred feet away, you would need to use a focal length to get an image that just covers the bird. Using a wideangle in this situation would make the bird insignificant and lost among the thousands of other things in the picture. So you would pick up a telephoto lens to make such a shot. If you were rich and had a single lens that had focal lengths from 20mm to 300mm, you could now just by turning the zoom ring get from a wide angle lens to telephoto lens in an instant. Either way you have to pick the focal length you want to use.

Once you have picked the focal length of the lens. The next step is framing the image. From the infinite possibilities pick the elements you want in your photograph and position your camera so that your viewfinder shows what you want in the image. Some basic rules :

Rule 1 : Fill the frame.
As simple as it sounds, its something that makes a huge difference. One of the most annoying things of baby pictures I see is that the baby is about 10% of the entire picture. It should be 90%! At 10%, your baby picture will have extraneous toys, furniture, household pets and other things filling the picture. Someone will not be able to see what the baby is doing, his/her facial expression or his/her eyes. So fill the frame. And remember again, fill the frame.

Rule 2 : KISS, Keep it Simple, Stupid.
This rule is more of a corollary of Rule 1. Keep your image as simple as it can be. If there are multiple items in the scene which are all interesting, take multiple pictures. Every distracting object takes away something away from the beauty of the picture. The reason if one thinks about it, is simple. In our daily life, we see thousands of things in our view and never things in isolation. This is one of the primary reasons that we do not extract the beautiful out of the ugly and commonplace. In general when you follow Rule 1 and fill your picture with 90% of your subject, you don't have much opportunity(or space :) ) to put anything else.

Ok, now you complain that the subject is so close to other things, that even if you try to isolate it, other things end up in the background. This brings us using your camera effectively to isolate the subject and blur the background. This will be covered in the exposure section below.

Exposure
If you have a point and shoot (film or digital) camera, you can pretty much skip this section and reread the composition section. :-) Using a point and shoot camera, or an SLR in the automatic mode will result in the camera's computer taking all the decisions about what exposure to use. Mostly it will result in good images. The key word is 'mostly'. In certain situations, the computer will guess wrongly and you will end up with a lousy picture.

ok, so you do have a SLR or a camera that allows complete and full control of exposure. Read on.
Exposure refers to the decision on how much light to allow into the recording medium when taking a photograph. The basics of exposure are (again) just two things.

1. The sensitivity of the recording medium (Film Speed)
The amount of light falling on the recording medium

2. Amount the camera shutter is open (Shutter Speed)
Size of the opening of the camera shutter (Aperture size)

1. Sensitivity or Film Speed
Yes. Sensitivity is a scientific term. But no, you don't have to understand it. But what you need to understand, is what it means as a word. Its the "ability to be affected". Higher the sensitivity the more easy it is to affect it while a low sensitivity means it is very hard to affect it.

A good example would be a 'sensitive' personality who would be easily be affected by negative remarks. While the other extreme would be an 'insensitive' personality who doesn't care about other remarks. Just change over the analogy to the recording medium, film or sensor. Highly sensitive film is affected by very low amount of light, while low sensitive film will require large amounts of light to be affected. In the 35mm film world, the sensitivity of film is referred to using the ISO speed rating. Film comes in ranges from ISO 50, ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400, ISO 800 and so on. Remember lower the ISO number, lower the sensitivity of the film.

All said and done, you may ask why in the hell would I want to use a lower sensitivity film for taking pictures. I just want to use ISO 100,000 so I can capture all the light without a fuss. Unfortunately the real world doesn't work as well as we would like it to be. Higher the sensitivity, more the noise in the image. It would be like having a very sensitive person get affected even by good remarks amidst negative remarks.

So what does this mean to you as a photographer. Well, it is simple, use the lowest possible ISO speed film. For 90% of the cases this means ISO 100. Anything more than that, you might end up with noisy images when you make enlargements of your images.

Ok, now you have picked your film sensitivity and bought the film and plopped it into your camera, the first step in understanding exposures is done. On to the next.

2. Amount of Light falling into the recording medium
This is what a photographer controls with his camera when taking a picture other than composition. Lets assume, that for a particular scene, your camera's computer computes that you need a certain amount of light to make a picture. You can fulfill that requirement by turning two knobs.

Controlling the size of shutter opening.
Controlling the time which it is open.
Since I like analogies so much, lets go back to one. Imagine that the camera's computer says that to capture a certain image you need one large bucket of light. To capture this large bucket of light, you can open the light faucet wide open and let it fill up the bucket. If the faucet is wide open, it might take 2 minutes to fill it up. If the faucet is only half way open then it might take 4 minutes to fill up. The end result is the same, one big full bucket of light. So if its the same amount of light why have these controls in the first place? Why don't we just open the faucet wide open and fill it up in a certain time all the while? Excellent question.

The answer is that depending upon the image to be captured, we might need to make a decision on how wide the faucet opening should be or how long the faucet is to be open. One set might be better than the other depending upon the scene.

Lest we spend all eternity on light buckets and faucets lets come back to the camera world. The faucet is in this case the shutter in the camera. The aperture size of the shutter is the how open the faucet is. The time for which the faucet is open is the shutter speed. So first thing to remember is that aperture and shutter speed are complementary things. (Yin and Yang) Reduce one and you have to increase another to compensate.

Aperture size is usually denoted by something called f-numbers. f/1.0, f/1.4, f/1.8, f/2.5, f/3.5, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/32 and so on. As we move from f/1.0 to f/32 we are going from large apertures (f/1.0) to small apertures (f/32). Most cameras don't denote it completely this way but just say "1.0", "1.4" and so on. But they still mean the above.

Shutter speeds are usually measured in seconds denoted by fractions 1/2000 sec, 1/1000 sec, 1/500 sec, 1/250 sec, 1/125 sec, 1/90 sec, 1 sec, 2 sec, 4 sec and so on. Again we move from fast shutter speed 1/2000 sec to slow shutter speeds 10 sec.

Unfortunately most of the confusion stems from these set of unintelligible fractions and terms. But the common sense way to understand it is we are just choosing the opening size and opening time. There are good articles on the web for what and why these fractions are this way.

So why choose one set of values over another? here are some guidelines

Generally a lens is at its best optically at around f/8. If possible you want to operate in this region.
Slower the shutter speed, the more difficult to handhold the camera. We would need to make the camera stable since the shutter is going to open for a long time, which might cause light coming from the scene to get blurred. Normally you want to have shutter speed faster than 1/30 seconds.
Larger apertures will result in will result in smaller Depth of Field. What this abstruse term means is the amount of the scene that is sharply in focus. So if you keep your camera to f/2.0 you are going to get a very small region from your camera which is in sharp focus while the rest of the image is blurred. However, if you set f/11.0 a much larger region is going to be in focus.
Faster shutter speeds can capture a fast moving object without motion blur.
When using a camera, it evaluates the scene and recommends a set of values for the image. Depending upon your requirements you can modify the variable that is most important to you.

Of course there is more to taking a picture than what just has been mentioned, but those nuances come with experience. Usually the toughest thing for someone new to photography to grasp are the fundamentals. Once those are firmly established the rest follows.