Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Student Examples … Better and Better

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Successful Evolution: Story, skill, and image Marie’s Self Portrait Self Portrait: Re-shoot The breathing technique works well for both the photographer and model to relax. Notice the improved light angle giving sparkle to Marie’s eyes. Processed: Color was cool shifted due to the recommended Skylight which is easily corrected in Photoshop. Marie’s eyes looks more sparkly in this processed version.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Feedback: It’s a matter of story telling and not of right or wrong (black and white). Frame centered snap shot look. Flat lighting from too high a position causing Marie’s eyes to be in shadow. There is even a distracting glare in the anemic looking background.. Slightly off center with a better lighting angle but the under exposure and the cool color shift takes away from seeing the improved assignment shot. Basic image processing took care of the exposure and color issues. Easy retouching using the Clone Tool in Photoshop would have removed the background distraction.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Fine Tune: Making improvements Both of Lee’s shots ‘work’. It’s a ‘degree of success’ matter. In the re-shoot, the prop adds to the story without competing for attention with the subject. Be very careful when using red in a prop. Red is the most attention getting color. In the re-shoot, the red is on the shadow side which reduces the intensity (saturation) for a more balanced final image.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Framing: Avoid crowding Crop tight but leave a 10% safety margin around the entire image. Both images are cropped too tight. But the first image is suffering from a distracting ‘tangency’. The re-shoot is framed even tighter. This is usually an ‘intermediate’ skill development warning. The novice warning is to crop tight and even tighter. Please be warned that rules can change as your skill develops.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Framing: Optical center Position the focal point in the ‘Optical Center’. It’s a more optically balanced position than the dead center. If you’re subject calls for horizontal frame centering, always go for the compositional ‘sweet spot’, optical center.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Another mantra to use… Always crop properly in the camera. After- the-fact-cropping can easily become problematic. Until you’re more experience, please keep your subject and composition simple. Also avoid white, black, or shiny surface characteristics on the subject or background.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I x More, Better and Better

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Stage 1 to Stage 3 Improvements: Huiwen’s first Thing Shot was a competent ID shot. I gave my online student some ‘Next Stage’ camera position and propping suggestion. I did so with certain amount of trepidation considering the potential difficulties. My suggestion was to lower the camera to the subject’s eye level. And to have her dog make an appearance in the background as a blurred suggestion hinting at the subject’s dog-toy use.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Lucky Ignorance: On my part… Had I known that the dog in question was a puppy, I would have never suggested including a dog in the background. Shooting an uncooperative and energetic puppy is a challenge even to a seasoned pro. I was more than pleasantly surprised when I saw this re-shoot image. I had vaguely envisioned a suggestion of the dog blurred somewhere in the background.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better In Hindsight: Ooooops I was so happy with Huiwen’s success, I failed to notice that the image was cropped. All assignment images must be cropped in the camera and not processed in any way which includes cropping. I asked Huiwen to upload the full image to WebCT.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Better and Better: Bravo, this is much better. It’s a more comfortable framing. It’s tight without being claustrophobic. Getting a shot this low to the ground would have been impossible without having a swivel type LCD monitor.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Cropping Suggestion: The dark partially translucent layer is the cropping frame. It black with the FILL set to 72% to allow the you to see what was cropped out. I will go over this cropping technique in the near future.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Lab Work Suggestion: This image was brightened to show more detail and to increasing the feeling of depth in the image. Use the keyboard Up & Down arrows to compare this with the previous image.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Retouching Suggestion: Retouching is about making changes to the image to improve the story telling and image presentation. Notice the three white circled areas. They’re distracting image details taking focus away from the story. Before

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Clone (retouching)Tool: Compare this After image with the previous Before image using the Up and Down arrows. Clone Tool is basically a stamping tool with many cool controls. More on this later… After

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Clone Tool: Soft touch Notice that the leaf can still be seen if you know what to look for. I use the Clone Tool at 12 to 18% strength to ‘partially’ stamp out natural image detail. I try not to go too far. My intent is to leave behind natural image detail as texture.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Avoid Going Overboard: This area can easily be cloned (stamped in) with more grass blade and green texture details. But that might be over doing it and it would take more production time.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Other Considerations: The three (3) marked areas are visually similar creating a nice triangulation and also a foreground background tie-ins. Filling in the small bottom area with grass detail would destroy the circular movement generated by the triangle and also the foreground to background movement created by the visually similar areas.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Better and Better Know When To Stop: It’s all a matter of natural time and experience. It’s kind of similar to camera framing. First your subject is centered and too small. Then your cropping is too tight. Finally you learn to stop yourself from cropping too tight. It all takes time and experience to learn. And, hopefully, I’ll save you some time with my over 50 years of working with visual stuff.

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