Often, it is not possible to perfectly compose the photo at the moment of shooting. This is particularly true for action photography, but it is quite common in most real-life situations when we don’t have total control of the model, the background and/or have limited time to take the shot.
Post-processing can dramatically improve a photo, and one adjustment that has the highest impact is cropping. Cropping affects composition, which is the most fundamental element of a picture. It allows us to emphasize the subject and remove non-essential or distracting parts. In Adobe Lightroom
Recently, I have been taking increasingly more pictures with my iPhone. Before sharing them online, I often make some rough adjustments using the editing mode of the built-in Photos app. Cropping is usually one of them. Here is what I typically do to improve composition:
- Straighten horizon.
- Cut off unnecessary/distracting elements that do not contribute to the story I am trying to tell in the picture. When in doubt – crop tighter.
- Try to use “the rule of thirds” (position the mail element of the picture at the intersection of imaginary vertical and horizontal lines that divide the width and the height of the picture into thirds). for example, in the image above, the face of the fisherman is positioned 1/3 of the frame height from the top of the frame and 1/3 of the frame width from the right side.
- Crop the image so that any diagonal lines intersect a corner of the photo – it helps leading the viewer’s eyes into the frame. Again, in the image above, the strings lead from the bottom left corner of the frame towards the middle. Also, the diagonal planks on the hull of the boat lead from the bottom right corner.
Note: It is a good idea to keep these points in mind during the shoot itself to avoid excessive cropping in post-processing, which reduces the number of pixels (i.e. resolution) in the final photo.
Recently, I was taking headshots of the faculty members of my daughter’s dance school for their website, and looked into various ways of cropping the portraits. One rule of thumb for cropping a headshot is that cutting off the top of the model’s head makes the portrait more appealing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this kind of close crop emphasizes the person’s eyes and make her/him appear engaged with the viewer.
is an excellent lens for this situation. Sigma also makes a good quality 35mm f1.4 lens (
), which is quite a bit less expensive. (By the way, these are just recommendations based on my experience, and although the links are affiliated by Amazon, they are not sponsored in any other way). In fact, compactness would be a very good reason to choose a cell phone over a pro camera – after all, it is a dinner first and a photo opportunity second. Having said this, I shot this photo with a 
, which is anything but compact. My family is probably getting used to me lugging a huge camera. I’d like to think that the photos are worth it. (Still, I am waiting impatiently for my new iPhone 6 plus, with its image-stabilized camera…)
, to photograph a fluorescent helium jet seeded with acetone in near darkness in our lab at UVic. But that hardly qualifies as a common photography situation, so it’s a subject for another story.
.
, positioned overhead, as the key light, another studio flash without a diffuser on one side and a 
on the opposite side. The flashes were optically triggered by another Speedlite (camera-mounted) in a manual mode. Note that E-TTL setting 
. Since I only wanted to select 3 or 4 best images, theoretically, there was more than enough time to select and post them in the remaining 6 minutes of the halftime. However, I found that changing my habitual workflow of culling, or selecting the best images, was not easy. My usual “shotgun” approach is to go through all images in the gallery mode and give one star rating to those that appear to be interesting and technically acceptable (sharp and reasonably exposed). The problem is that what I deem interesting results in about 10% of all images, which means that I would need to look through them again (and sometimes a third time) to further down-select to a set of not merely “interesting” but hopefully unique and generally the best. Clearly, this two- or three-stage process is not time efficient when only 3 images are needed to begin with. The only logical conclusion is the one needs to relax the quality of the selection process, i.e. accept the fact that the selected 3 images (which, by the way, must be determined in a single pass) might not be the best of the entire set. Basically, the timing of delivery of the images must take priority over the quality of the delivered photos. This is difficult to come to terms with, because from the artistic standpoint, we are emotionally attached to the photos we’ve just taken and intuitively want to show off the best of them. Here, the professional side of being a photographer must come into play. What helps me rationalize the process is that I know that the “best” images are still there, waiting in the Lightroom catalogue, which I will have other opportunities to review, hopefully, without the time pressure.
, and so was low light performance. The focussing speed depends a lot on the lens, of course. 
for that day, but I already knew that it was very unforgiving. One really needs to practice following the subject and anticipating the action, and even then, some missed shots are expected. It’s all worth it, though, as the shallow depth of field of this lens is unmistakeable and very appealing.
in this role. At first I was skeptical – I thought that if I would be limited to a single focal length, all photos from that shoot would look largely the same. However, I now think that shallow DOF provided by f 1.4 compensates for the absence of zoom, and the images actually look more interesting than those taken at f4. I am beginning to agree with a friend of mine, who said that if an image does not have a shallow DOF it does not look “special” (his background is in portrait photography; this does not apply apply to landscape, for example).
workflow to preserve the bokeh while applying the effects to the subject: