Exercise 6: Fitting the Frame to the Subject

I found this branch as I walked along the Thames one day. I am not sure why, but it looks totally fascinating to me. It is so strange. The branch in my living room is zillion times nicer. But when I saw this on my walk, I stopped.


When I first saw it, this is the image I have in mind.

Image 1: 48mm f/5 ISO 400 at 1/60s

The second image requires the object to fit tight to the frame. I thought it will be a good idea to change angle as well. 

 Image 2: 36mm f/5 ISO 400 at 1/60s

The third image requires me to get close. This is what I see:

 Image 3: 52mm f/5 ISO 400 at 1/60s

The last image is too zoom out. I still prefer my original perspective, but let's try zoom out and vertical this time.

Image 4: 28mm f/5 ISO 400 at 1/60s

The last part of the exercise requires me to crop image 4 and see if I come up with something new. I try several crop, but at the end I like image 1 the best. Given that the branch is the centre of the subject, I like it to occupy bigger space and still sitting in the centre of the image. Or else changing it to portrait orientation is quite nice too.

Image 5 (crop from image 4): 28mm f/5 ISO 400 at 1/60s

Exercise 1: Focal Length and Angle of View

This is actually the first exercise out of the book but unfortunately a difficult one because it requires printing and walking with the prints. This exercise requires taking 3 photographs of the same screen on the same spot. The three images will be zoomed at different focal length. I have two tasks here:

1) Look through the viewfinder compare the size of the image by not looking through viewfinder. Find the focal length that roughly two visions are equal in size.

2) Print the images on an A4, then hold them against the actual screen. Move them back and forth until the size is roughly the same as the actual screen.

The lens I use is the 24-70mm f/2.8 and the actual screen is a nearby church (Nice ceiling by the way, I wish I have a ultra-wide that can capture it along with the screen below). So I will zoom at 24mm and 70mm and find the one focal point that the size is similar. 

Image 1: 28mm f/2.8 ISO 3200 at 1/80s

Image 2: 48mm f/2.8 ISO 3200 at 1/80s

Image 3: 70mm f/3.2 ISO 3200 at 1/80s

Because it is indoor and I didn't use flash, the ISO is quite high and I have the aperture open wide. I choose to focus at the text at the end because it is common to three images. I have thought of focusing at the lamp instead, but it's position is too high at the image that I zoom in. I don't like the effect.


The last part of exercise requires me to print out the three pictures on A4, stand at where I was taking the pictures and move them back and forth to see which one appear to be the same size as real life. It is hard to measure distance here given I don't have a ruler at all. The idea should be something like this. We can check an optic text book on the definition of magnification and it is focal length/(distance to object - focal length). For the object I shoot here, the distance is much larger than focal length of the lens, so the magnification (A4 paper/ actual size) is roughly focal length/distance to object. As a result, we see lens with longer focal length will give a bigger magnification and these are telephoto lens. Vice versa.

Exercise 7: Object in Different Positions in the Frame

In this exercise we are trying to put the subject at different position in the frame.


Oddly enough, I was walking on the street one day ans see this line of leafs. I guess it is just the leaf but the combination of the stone path looks interesting to me.


Let's start with the big maple-ish shape leaf at centre but slight near the top.

Image 1: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s

 Now the leaf is on the right hand side of the frame.

Image 2: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s

The leaf is almost centre.

 Image 3: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s

The leaf is centre but close to the bottom.

Image 4: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s 

The last shot below is the shot I like best. The leaf is close to the left side.The determination here is not actually where the leaf is. But but moving the leaf to the left side reveal a trace of leave heading toward the upper right hand corner. I realign the frame so that the diagonal line span from lower left hand corner to upper right hand corner. Sadly the leaf (subject) doesn't have any interesting colour. By putting the subject in this view, other elements in the photographs distract my view from the leaf. If I can set the screen, I will replace it with a red maple leaf.

Image 5: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s

There is a slight concern of the images above. The black metal rod is cropped out from the frame. Originally I was concerning about the leaf and the line, I was not thinking much about the rod. But then when we hit the third image from the top, it sort of getting too ignoring...


Based on the fourth shot (the one I like the best), I take one more shot including the black rod.

Image 6: 50mm f/4.5 ISO 1600 at 1/100s

The image is ok, but now only heaven sees the leaf. The stone path is more the subject here.

Exercise 3: Focus At Different Apertures

Now I notice that the real challenge of distance learning is to allocate time each week to study. It is very easy to slip when your day job get busy. I am guilty for not following up with the blog (and my learning) for the past three weeks.

Now I need to catch up.

This exercise is about taking photographs on the same thing with different aperture. In normal portrait world, we tried to use large aperture to create boken. Such that the background is slightly blur and the focus is on our subject. This is normal practice except for environmental portrait. Since the effect in portrait is so well known, I would like to try something else in this exercise: Let’s try the same thing in landscape.

It is very difficult to find exactly what I have in mind, but I settled with an empty space with grass and with two trees at the end. It would be nicer if the houses are not there and the sky is bluer (ie. not so over-exposed). Colour-wise these set of images is not very good and I struggle to find the right colour I want. Any advice on this will be welcome.

Image 1 is what we will typical do in landscape, small aperture to get larger area of the photograph shape. Notice the grass at the bottom of the image.

 Image 1: 48mm f/18 ISO 800 at 1/60s

Now in image 2, the aperture size has been increased. Now we can see the grass in the front starts looking blur.

 

 Image 2: 46mm f/18 ISO 200 at 1/80s

In image 3, the bottom third of the image is very blur

 Image 3: 46mm f/2.8 ISO 200 at 1/250s

Personally I prefer image 1. I don’t really have a subject in this image so I prefer to keep the texture of the grass. Arguably, I can claim my subjects are the trees in image 3. However, if I am after the tree, I might change the composition to move my frame tighter all together.

It is possible to calculate the depth of field. There is a easy to read article written by Norman Koren here: http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF6.html

In digital world, I find it easier to just take a shot and check from the LCD.