7 Photography Composition Tips You Don’t Want to Miss

7 Photography Composition Tips You Don’t Want to Miss
33 Amazing Photos of the Most Beautiful Abandoned Places on Earth (Album)
How to Remove Fence Lines from Zoo Photos (Video)
Interesting Photo of the Day: Hot Air Balloon Ride In Cappadocia, Turkey
Exploring Miniature Photography With a LEGO Minifigure (Video)
Workflow Tips in Lightroom and Photoshop
Solar Telescope Timelapse Captures the Sun in Amazing Detail

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 10:14 PM PDT

Photography composition, like any art composition, depends on individual preference. Nevertheless, there are some rules which may be a great help to photographers. Having said that, rules are, in my opinion, something which you have to work with well, get comfortable with, and then try to go beyond (i.e., break them).

What I’d like to share here is not a list of textbook based rules of photography composition; instead, I’d like to share how to get creative around the basic rules to get amazing photos.

1. The rule of thirds is still important. When you want to play around with photography composition, the basic foundation you should be comfortable with is the rule of thirds. This is simply where the viewer’s eyes go when they see your images.

“Abbey Reflection” captured by Brian Clark (Click image to see more from Clark.)

2. Move away from common angles. An image of flowers taken from the side is boring. Try to take it from a lower angle and capture the blue sky along with the flowers. Not only is the color combination more attractive to the eyes, but the impact of low angle strengthens the effect of the flowers.

“Bug’s Perspective” captured by Spencer (Click image to see more from Spencer.)

3. Simpler is stronger. Keep your image simple. Simple images leave stronger impressions on the viewer. Also consider that sometimes a background is not necessary. Filling the frame fully with the main object can be an alternative.

“Horses” captured by Lilia Tkachenko (Click image to see more from Tkachenko.)

4. Synergize. Reduce and eliminate elements that don’t support your main subject in the image. Composition is all about choosing angles that get rid of unnecessary objects and enhance your image.

“Serenity” captured by Joost Lagerweij (Click image to see more from Lagerweij.)

5. Check and recheck your composition. You have to be quite a detail-oriented person when dealing with photography composition. Minor details, many times subtle, can damage or reduce the message you want to deliver.

6. Practice makes perfect. No matter how talented you are, the rule of thumb is that repetition is the mother of all skills. Take as many photos as you can. Learn from your experience to sharpen your instinct and improve your composition skills. The only way to gain the ability to produce high class images is through hours and hours of practice. I do hope you really like taking photos, or otherwise this process will be painful.

7. Learn from other people’s experience. I get inspired to explore the possibilities of composition by simply looking at other photographers’ work. In my early days in photography, I only shot pictures from eye level, and I put everything in the middle of the frame. Looking at pictures online really helped me to gain ideas and tap into a new paradigm of photography composition.

“The reason is you” captured by Bazli (Click image to see more from Bazli.)

While composition has a lot of rules to it, it is still an art. There is no right or wrong in art. The only burden you have is the limit that you set for yourself. Keep exploring the possibilities to improve your photography.

Good luck and have fun!

About the Author:
Gde Putra is a hobby photographer who hopes to grow the love of nature among all people through his images.

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Article from: PictureCorrect Photography Tips

33 Amazing Photos of the Most Beautiful Abandoned Places on Earth (Album)

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 06:21 PM PDT

There’s something eerily beautiful about an old abandoned building or vessel. To imagine the lives of the people who once lived or worked there, to wonder how a boat ended up to rest frozen in shallow waters or how an entire village became a ghost town, to witness new life emerging from the remains of abandoned history. Here are some of the world’s most eerie, mesmerizing, sad, and stunning abandoned places:

Whether nature rejected or thrived on these man-made structures, the final images all tell a story. The house in Kolmanskop, the abandoned blade mill in France, and the ghostly Colombian hotel are so incredibly attention-grabbing and breathtaking.

What are your favorites? Do you know of any other beautiful places that aren’t on this list? Share them with us!

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Article from: PictureCorrect Photography Tips

How to Remove Fence Lines from Zoo Photos (Video)

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 05:25 PM PDT

Zoos and wildlife-oriented parks provide perfect opportunities to photograph exotic and often dangerous wildlife without traveling halfway across the world to stalk them in their natural habitats. However, thick security fences often make it difficult to create truly excellent shots.

In the following video, photographer Glyn Dewis provides a detailed walk-through of a useful Photoshop technique that will forever rid your photos of those pesky fence lines:

Blurred fence lines cause at least three problems when they cut across a photograph: they alter and fade colors, they add flatness to shadow areas, and they compromise sharpness. Dewis’s technique for removing fence lines compensates for all three of those key affected areas.

Restoring Color

The first step is to restore color to the lion’s fur. The process is more complicated than simply selecting a normal soft brush, color sampling, and painting, because in restoring the color to the lighter areas of fur, we also want to preserve, and later darken, the shadows underneath—especially in the mane. Here is Dewis’s recommended workflow for restoring color to the lion’s fur, beginning with the mane:

Select Menu > Color Range
Select None from the drop-down menu to see a large version of the photo in full color.
Click on a light area of the mane to color sample it.
Select Greyscale from the drop-down menu to get a black and white view of the photo. The white area represents the color that you selected with the color sampler tool, as well as all colors that are several shades lighter and darker to help with blending.
Adjust the Fuzziness slider to pull in more or fewer similar shades to the white areas. Once proper colors have been isolated, click OK to exit the dialogue box and see a ton of crawly selection layers.
Add a blank layer above the base layer and rename it to “light.”
Change the blend mode of the layer to Color.
Get a normal, soft-edge brush without any settings and hold down the Option or ALT key to use the brush like a color sampler and select a bright patch of fur.
Paint over the areas of the mane that should be light. Continue color sampling and painting similar colors until the mane seems to be colored accurately and evenly. You can press Command or CTRL > H to hide the selection layers if you find them to be distracting as you paint—just don’t forget that you hid them.
Select Command or CTRL > D to deselect the layers and check your work. Adjust the opacity of the layer if necessary to really blend the colors in.
Repeat the process for the other areas of the lion that have been affected, such as his face and body. Don’t forget to work from a new layer on that!

Fence lines affect color, shadows, and sharpness, as shown here.

Restoring Shadows

Now that the lion’s fur and mane are looking more naturally vibrant, we need to restore and darken the areas of the lion’s body where natural shadows have been grayed and flattened by the fence lines. The process for this technique is much the same as the previous color-restoration step:

Turn off the “light” layer and select the background layer.
Select Menu > Color Range
Select None from the drop-down menu to see a large version of the photo in full color.
Color sample a darker part of the mane.
Select Greyscale from the drop-down menu to get a black and white view of the photo. This time, the white area represents the shadowy areas.
Adjust the Fuzziness slider to pull in more or fewer similar shades to the white areas. Once proper colors have been isolated, click OK to exit the dialogue box and see a ton of crawly selection layers.
Create a levels adjustment layer.
Instead of using mid-tones to darken the shadows, drag the slider from white to black until the shadows have been darkened sufficiently and appear to be natural in the image.
Turn the “light” layer back on to check your progress. Adjust the opacity of the layer if necessary to really blend the colors in.
Reorder the “light” layer and the shadows layer so that the shadows layer is on the top of the layer stack.
Hold down the ALT or Option key and click on the shadows layer.
Using a basic brush tool, fill in all areas of the image with black except the shadowy areas that you have been editing. This will cause the shadows that you darkened throughout the image to only be darkened on the lion.

Color Range helps you to edit specific tones independently of others. In this case, Dewis is editing the shadows, which have been isolated in white.

Restoring Sharpness

Dewis recommends using Adobe’s built-in Camera Raw program to restore sharpness to the areas of the lion that have been blurred by those obnoxious fence lines. By using the program’s adjustment brush, sharpness can be restored in only a few simple steps:

Click on uppermost Photoshop layer.
Hold down Shift and click on the bottom Photoshop layer.
Filter Menu > Convert for Smart Filters
Filter Menu > Camera Raw
Get an adjustment brush and increase the clarity and sharpness sliders.
Select the Show Mask checkbox to turn mask visibility ON.
Paint the adjustment brush over the areas of the lion where the fence lines cut across him.
Select the Show Mask checkbox to turn mask visibility OFF.
Adjust the clarity and sharpness sliders, zooming in for a closer look when necessary, until fur and mane details have been restored and blend in with the rest of the lion’s hair.
Select OK to return to Photoshop.

african lion zoo wildlife sanctuary rescue fence lines remove photoshop technique

LEFT: Before editing; RIGHT: After editing.

If Dewis’s process worked for you, then your wildlife should be looking well indeed and most evidence of those pesky fence lines should have disappeared. This technique can take some time, so it is a good idea to try your best to capture as little of the fence lines as possible in-camera if you are planning to edit and use photos of this nature later on.

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Interesting Photo of the Day: Hot Air Balloon Ride In Cappadocia, Turkey

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 04:35 PM PDT

The cheerful floating balloons dotting the dreamlike landscape look more like something from Dr Seuss’s alternate reality than a place here on planet Earth. This fantastic image was captured by Gypsy Joyce on a hot air balloon ride in Cappadocia, Turkey:

Balloon ride over Cappadocia, Turkey by Gypsy Joyce (Via Imgur. Click to view full size.)

Cappadocia is a hot spot for tourists searching for cultural, historical and geological treasures. The surrealistic landscape (sometimes called moonscape) has strange rock formations pleasantly dubbed “fairy chimneys.” Cappadocia is also one of the highest ranked places in the world to fly in a hot air balloon. The steady weather conditions and incredible scenery make it hard to beat. And with an image like that, I’d say I would have to agree!

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Exploring Miniature Photography With a LEGO Minifigure (Video)

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 02:26 PM PDT

Armed with nothing but a LEGO minifigure and an iPhone, British photographer Andrew Whyte travels around Britain capturing some rather unique photographs. Whyte poses the little LEGO guy, who has a tiny plastic camera, in front of various real life scenes and takes his portrait. Watch a short interview with the photographer:

The pair have been all around the country, never letting a photo op pass them up:

A LEGO minifigure with a camera inspired the project.

Whyte started his project using his DSLR, but wasn’t happy with the perspectives he could get of the toy due to the bulkiness of the gear. Once he switched over to the an iPhone, he was able to create scenes. He photographs from the minifigure’s level by holding the camera upside down so that its lens is close to the ground. He notes the camera phone also allows him to have better depth of field even when focusing at a close distance.

Whyte takes photos from the minifigure’s perspective.

“One of my favorites is where the figure is sort of standing looking at a rainbow but not actually taking a photo; he’s just got his camera down by his side. And it’s kind of reminding us that…occasionally there’s views where you need to put your camera down and just look and take it all in.”

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Workflow Tips in Lightroom and Photoshop

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 11:58 AM PDT

Creating a tailored and efficient workflow may not seem very important to new photographers, but in all actuality, having an organized way of handling your image files is one of the most important things to have. This is especially true as you accumulate more and more files over the years and need to be able to quickly find specific files. In the video below, Aaron Nace delivers some important tips to get you started on the right track:

Nace’s way of organizing is a highly efficient way to sort image files. While it may seem a little time consuming to get set up, the time you’ll save in the future when looking for an image will far outweigh the few minutes it takes to get organized. His system is superbly hyper-organized, thanks in part to the the hierarchical system in which he arranges his folders.

Rename Lightroom Folders

He starts his process by going through and culling all the images that are not usable so he doesn’t waste space. He then imports them into Lightroom into a file which is named simply after the date the images were taken. This process creates multiple folders, because the images on Nace’s memory card were taken over the course of the day. He then renames one of the folders by leaving the date and adding a small description of the images. For example, he named his file 2014-05-27 Bahamas Shoot.

Cull images that are deemed unusable.

Create Subfolders

The next step is one of the most helpful. In the file he just renamed, he adds four subfolders, one each for:

Capture. This files contains all the RAW files.
Master. This is where all the .PSD & layered TIFFs are saved.
Output. These are the edited and finished files that are ready for web or print.
Selects. This folder holds the RAW files that have been selected for editing.

He now drags all the imported images into the Capture subfolder. Since multiple dates and folders were created in his original import, he will have to drag each of the dated folders into the same Capture subfolder. From there, he creates two more subfolders within the Capture folder: Landscape and Portrait. He now sorts through the images and adds them to either Landscape or Portrait depending on the image.

These four subfolders are the key to the ultimate organization.

Once they are all sorted, you are free to do your edits within Lightroom or Export them to the Selects folder as a TIFF that can be easily opened in Photoshop for further editing. Once all of the edits are done, whether using Lightroom, Photoshop, or a combination of the two, they should be saved to the Output file where they wait to be published!

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Solar Telescope Timelapse Captures the Sun in Amazing Detail

Posted: 17 Jun 2014 11:55 AM PDT

Göran Strand, a photographer who has been featured by NASA and National Geography and whose movie work has been used by the band Coldplay and the Discovery Channel, has been waiting an entire year to shoot a certain sunset:

As he stood at the Swedish National Biathlon Arena in Östersund, Sweden, the sun passed directly behind a large radar tower in a small village called Ås. (Via PetaPixel.) Using a solar telescope and a monochrome camera with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, he captured the silhouettes of the infrastructure on the sun, which was marked with sunspots and filaments. The sun’s yellow tint was added in post-production.