Photography 101
 

"F8 and show up"

There *is* more to it than that, right? Of course. I know that.

I take a lot of pictures. Goodness knows I've subjected many of you to many of them, and your patience and forbearance is sincerely appreciated. But I do yearn to learn. I want to be better. I read a lot, I take a *ahem* lot of pictures. And I continue to struggle.

I have seen some of footfootfoot's artistry, and we have all enjoyed his wisdom. I found this remark especially instructive.
I could have posted it in the HoF, but I chose to use it as a springboard here.

Many times I have read something and failed to comprehend it completely. I wished I could have had a place to ask my question. This thread is that place for me now, and for others.

I hope to learn from dwellars here. I'll post some questions, and some pictures as examples. I'm not going to be shy--my mistakes will be standard fare. If I have something neat to post, there's a place for that already, and other cool threads. They're not likely to be pretty, but I do expect them to be instructive.

Class is in session.

First question:

I don't really understand "exposure".

Increasing exposure, stops, etc. I (think) I know some ways to do it. That is, I'm sure there's more than one way to do it. And each different way has different "side effects". Increasing the aperture, the size of the opening behind the lens. Naturally, this will increase the amount of light entering the camera.

Or, increasing the length of time the shutter is open. That also lets more light in.

And making more light reflect from the subject, like with a flash, that also increases the exposure, right?

Stops? I'm confused. And to what extent is six of one indistinguishable from half a dozen of the other when it comes to trying to reach a certain point?

I'm trying to clear a backlog of unarticulated confusion, and I'm certain that shows. I'll organize my questions better in the future, now that I have a place to put them.

Thanks.

There is actually a book called "Understanding Exposure"! It comes highly recommended. (I admit I've never gotten around to reading it in depth.)

You're simply dealing with the amount of light entering the camera. One "stop" represents either double or halving (depending on which was you go) the amount of light coming in. So f/16 lets in twice as much light as f/22. (Why 16 and 22? I dunno. It's probably some math thing about inverse square laws but I don't really know.)

As you say, you can manipulate the camera (aperture and shutter speed) to control the amount of light, or you can add artificial lights such as a flash. strobist.com is a great site for info about combining off-camera flashes with existing light.

I don't know anything, I just wing it.

Check this thread out Bigv: http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=1...hlight=shutter
Might help ya a bit. Keep asking questions though, one of us is bound to have a halfway decent answer for ya.

I'm a total amateur, but I think I get the notion of either you let a lot of light in for a little time, or a little light in for a lot of time. But I don't understand how, exactly, you vary the amount of light you let in.

I could see how different lenses would let more or less light in, depending on their quality, but I don't understand how a camera can decide to let less light in.

There are two basic ways. Change the size of the hole the light's going through. (Many camera lenses have a variable aperture.) Or, change the amount of time the shutter is open.

To expand on what steve is saying...
inside the lens is an aperture ring. It consists of a bunch of 'wings' that roughly simulate a circular opening, measured in f-stops and usually able to move between 3 (or 4.6) and 22 (or even 30 in high-end lenses); in OLD, old cameras, pre-automatic, one had to physically turn a ring on the lens which would open or close this hole. Now, the cameras do it automatically with motors. Then, secondly, inside the camera itself is the shutter. on most DSLRs and film SLRs the shutter can stay open for up to a minute (or 30 seconds, depending on the camera; my old Minolta only goes up to 20 seconds, while my Olympus digital can go up to 90 seconds I think) down all the way to 1/2000th of a second.

'But', you say, 'why would I need TWO variables there?' The answer is twofold. A smaller aperture, confusingly referring to LARGER f-stop numbers, results in a bigger depth of field. For example, at a wide aperture, like 4.6, the depth of field might only be 2 or 3 inches deep, meaning less of the picture will be in focus, while a small aperture, for example 22, would result in a much greater depth of field, meaning that background and foreground elements would be much clearer. Thus, if the intended effect is to have a very small amount of the shot in focus, like a macro shot, a wide aperture is used. And so, the shutter speed would change to reflect this; f.22 would require a longer shutter speed. This ends up taking us to the second point; the shutter speed. A longer shutter speed would be used to create affects of, say, motion blur, or used with strobe lights or repeated flashes to create the affect of multiple exposure; a short shutter speed, to 'freeze' action like at sports events. However, dark situations, like indoors or at night, would obviously require a long shutter speed AND a large aperture; this makes night/dark condition photography very problematic without a tripod or a powerful flash.

Yeah, the thing I don't get is why opening the hole larger works. When I hold up my hand to my eye and make a ring of it, opening the hole larger just makes me see more stuff. I can see how it lets in more light too, but why doesn't it just enlargen the size of the picture?

Your eye and brain adjust for the different light levels.

But note that your "field of vision" is exactly the same. It's just that part of what you're seeing is your hand blocking stuff. When you change the aperture of the camera, the field of view doesn't change any more than the field of view of your eye changes when your pupils contract and dilate to account for different light levels.

Oh, umm, you asked WHY doesn't it change? I don't know.

When I get back home I'll post a text file of some of my lesson plans from my teaching days. Ibby's got a pretty good explanation but has crossed a couple of minor wires.

The simplest explanation for anyone with simple math skills is

Exposure equals intensity * time.
E=I x T Just like any equation you can shift the parts around.

f stops are a fraction. The diameter of the opening in the lens over the focal length (the distance from focal point of the lens to the film plane when the lens is focused at infinity) of the lens.

eg If the diameter of the aperture or opening is 25mm and the focal length of the lens is 50mm then you are at f:2.

Another way of saying it is f: (in this case focal length 50mm)
50mm:2 = 25 mm

That is why when the f: number gets numerically larger, the opening gets smaller, because the f: number is just part of a fraction.
50:25 = 2mm.

It doesn't surprise me that you don't understand exposure since you live in a city which has no light to speak of. (nyuck nyuck)

But An example of E= I x T is getting sunburned.

Anyway, more later

UT, think of it like this

not 'holding your fingers in a circle around your eye
but rather
your actual pupil dilating/contracting.
THAT is our equivalent to an aperture.

Sure, but why doesn't your field of vision get bigger or smaller when your pupil gets bigger or smaller? Or maybe it technically does, but imperceptably so? I did some googling but couldn't find the answer.

Field of vision is the angle of view, ie. how wide you see which has to do with focal length or in this case the shape, size and spacing of your eyes.

Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest object with an acceptable degree of sharpness. There is only one point of focus, but as aperture gets smaller the degree of sharpness increses.

This happens with the human eye as well. You have greater visual acuity on a bright sunny day than you do in the dark. (leaving aside the issues of color vs b&w vision) That is why when you get your eyes checked it is done in a dark room. Your pupils are dilated and therefore at their worst, sharpness wise.

Is spexxvet still around?

I understand those to be true facts. I just don't understand why the size of the opening doesn't affect the angle of view.

Mayhaps, because it's behind the lens?

Let's say you are the retina or film plane and a window in your house is the aperture. Stand as far away from the window as possible and look outside. That is like a long focal length or telephoto lens. Now walk right up to the window and look out at the same thing you were looking at before. Your angle of view is much greater now. I'll make a little drawing.

here you see the same aperture, but different aperture to film plane distances, in other words different focal lengths and different angles of view.

But my retina doesn't move like the left-side line in your picture. What about when the left line sits still, but the two lines on the right move farther apart from each other (up and down, respectively)?

That's right. Your eyes have a fixed focal length and thus a fixed angle of view.
That doesn't affect your angle of view, that changes your depth of field, or degree of sharpness.

degree as in extent, not fraction of a circle.

Yes, I know that is a true fact. But I don't understand why. Why isn't it like this:

http://cellar.org/2008/eye1.JPG

OH WAIT I FIGURED IT OUT! It's because the rays aren't determined by the moving lines (pupil), they're only determined by the lens in front of it. It's like this:

http://cellar.org/2008/eye2.JPG

Okay. I'm happy now. Carry on.

That's right, because it's behind the lens.

Yeah, looking back I realize now that's what you were saying, but at the time the only lens I was thinking of was the camera lens.

Works the same way. The lens controls what you see, and the shutter speed & aperture, how well you see it.

Well, not so fast CF, you are right in some sense. The examples I gave were when the lens is focused at optical infinity or about 50'. In the example you cite, focused at 2" there is actually a shift in angle of view although slight.

In fact, I was recently on a shoot where the (video) camera had a pretty crappy lens and when you changed focus, the entire framing of the picture would change.

The AC pointed out to me (I was pulling focus) "be careful when you focus this lens breathed like an asthmatic smoking a cigarette and running up a flight of stairs."

I had never seen such an extreme case as that.

So, for the most part angle of view or field of vision doesn't change with changes in aperture or focus distance.

Thank you all for the enlightening discussion. I like the story about the view from a window at close range and the different view from the same window from a greater distance. Interesting and helpful, thank you.

I took over 500 pictures this weekend on a short camping trip. There were some wide shots of the beautiful scenery, a number of extreme close ups in manual macro focus mode, some action shots, some nightime shots, some long exposure shots (the maximum exposure, maximum time the shutter can be open on my camera is 15 seconds. what's that called?)

My current question is about editing. I take a lot of pictures, but I don't discard many of them. I want to have a greater percentage of good pictures. That means taking more better pictures, but also greatly reducing the number of poor pictures I keep.

I recently read of a method, one that reinforced something a photographer friend of mine had told me but I wasn't ready to learn. This method divides the pictures into three groups: delete, maybe and keepers.

The delete group, just delete them right away and empty the trash early and often, reducing the temptation to keep them. "Be brutal", I've been advised. out of focus pictures, ones that are obviously useless. Those are pretty easy for me.

The keepers subset is also pretty easy, I anticipate. I have taken a number of nice shots I'm very happy with. You've all seen some of them.

The maybes.... Right now, they're all maybes with a hasty exit for the obvious deletes and rapid promotion for the keepers. Then I only have to cull the maybes. I just checked my first pass through using this method... I'm not on the wagon yet.

I make a folder for the pictures of a given theme, Scenery, Misc, Family, or a specific event. I make folders like this for each month, in each year. The new twist I'm applying is to make a subfolder of each of these theme/event folders called "keepers". Then I triage from there, deleting and keeping from the maybe folder.

The first pass through looking for deletes yielded 19 deletes, leaving 569 keepers. Next I want to go through looking for, and MOVING the keepers. I want to move them so I don't have to look at them a second time. I want to reduce the number of maybes. I'll make another pass through and report the results.

Every "maybe" should be addressed with the question WHY?

Why are you considering keeping it? Is there someone you want to show it to? Do you want to look at it again for reference? Do you just want to keep it because you might not have a chance to get a better shot of the same subject?

If you show it to someone, and can't spiel three or four sentences why the picture is worth their time to look at it, what's the point? Handing them a bunch of pictures, each accompanied by the words, "more scenery", is mean.

You're not saving pictures, you're saving memories, chuck the ones that don't invoke memories.

In addition to the categories of photos that xoB mentions, create an "Examples" folder with sub-folders for different subject matter (e.g. nature photography, architectural photography, sports photography ... etc.). You're developing your eye for aesthetics (identifying compositional elements that are pleasing to you) by looking at many different compositions for each of various subject matter. A surprising number of pictures that are not intrinsically keepers will have a common element of composition that you either liked; or, disliked (it's fine to save examples of both). By identifying those, you can select just one example to save and label while discarding redundancies. This process will help you cull many of the maybes while preserving guiding examples of your preferences (especially for subject matter you may not revisit frequently). All of that information could be reduced to writing; but, why bother when a picture is worth a thousand words. Didactic study of compositional elements in photography will make this process much easier and your photo reviews go much faster. The number of pictures you take will go down while your percentage of keepers goes up.

If you had to spend a half an hour printing each of those pictures you'd have a much easier time culling them. ;)

Eyes work completely differently. Not as simplistic as a camera.

Exactly! Who ever heard any vote concluded with "The cameras have it"?

That's why the eyes can play tricks on ya!

With a camera; well, ol' one eye don't lie. :eyeball:

I have been reading and rereading this thread, I like it. Thanks to all.

The recent trip to Hawaii produced a ton of pictures. I have been ... less than diligent in my editing. Well, that's not entirely fair. I have been diligent, but I haven't managed to kill many pictures. I'm a keeper, not a killer.

And my discovery of the joy of making mosaics has severely eroded my enthusiasm for deletion. More is better, though it does take a very long time to index the images... *yawn*.

Anyway. I have begun to exercise some new muscles in Picasa, which I love. The muscle in question is "Tagging". I have over 98,000 images in my library. That's a lot of images. Even the Hawaii trip generated about 4500 pics, now down to about 3500 (curse you continuous shooting mode and your evil sidekick, high capacity SD cards) and I have managed to tag most of them. All of them got a hawaii tag, and all of them got a photographer's initials tag. From there it got less global and more specific. Some got snorkeling, house, kid1/2/3, Tink, BigV, scenery, volcano, luau.... stuff like that.

I have a loooong way to go. I've tagged only a few hundred so far. But I think this is a very effective way to manage my library. I will be able to combine it with another feature of Picasa, "Hide picture". I can "hide" an image that I want to keep, but I don't want to keep paging past as I review my pictures. "Hide" and "unhide" are toggles, and there's a third state, "Show hidden pictures" so you can see what's been hidden without changing its hidden status. Nice.

A third aspect of Picasa I'm going to use more is Albums. They work like old skool photo albums. You select a picture, and tell Picasa it belongs to a given album. Picasa makes note of your desire, and displays that image when you view a given album. A given image can belong to more than one album.

And lastly, I will be making more use of PicasaWeb, the online sharing component of Picasa. Very very easy. It only takes a couple clicks to post an Album, for public or private exhibition.

yeah picasa is great. links.
98,000? Buy a video camera. That's nearly 70 minutes of movie at 24 frames per second.

At one frame per second you've got 68 hours of movie there hombre.

temporarily changing subjects here....

After close review of many pictures, pictures I was fairly happy with, I found a new thing to be disappointed about. My composition and focus are pretty good, the exposure is ok, but sometimes, when I zoomed in on the image the noise, digital noise in the images was really noticeable. It is present throughout the image, but most easily noticed when there is a large area of one color. Black, like the night sky, is the *worst*, when it comes to noise. And noise is directly related to the sensitivity of the sensor.

I can't directly change the sensor in my camera. That would require a whole new camera basically. But I can adjust the sensitivity of the sensor--that aspect is called ISO and it is intended to behave like the different speeds of film, different ISOs of film.

The noise looks like specks when the area should be smoothly and uniformly black (or whatever color...). I'll attach a picture where the noise is a noticeable distraction from an otherwise nice picture, tomorrow.

When I went on my most recent trip, I made a conscious effort to choose settings on the camera that minimize the noise. Specifically, I shot at the lowest possible ISO setting at all times. For most of the trip, I was able to use the lowest setting on my camera, ISO 80. A few times I had to dial it up, but I moved it back down as soon as I could.

This decision had a couple of consequences. Firstly, it did reduce the noise in my pictures, yipeee! It also meant that I had to increase the aperture or decrease the shutter speed to get the same exposure. This was expected. I deliberately chose the least sensitive setting for the sensor, so to get the shot, to get the light on the sensor, I had to have more of it or take the maximum I could get for a longer time.

There is a point of diminishing returns with this plan. For one, the aperture will only open to some maximum extent. The iris can only dilate so far. And secondly, the need for a slower shutter speed means that I'm more likely to get shake-blurred photos. Not a good tradeoff.

Check out Noise Ninja.

You're right, it's a tradeoff. I try to stay to 200 or 400 when possible. 800 isn't so bad on my camera. But things get noticeable at 1600.

BigV, I love ya, and yer a sweetheart, but get outta here!

Ansel Adams said: "Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." Now, as great as your images are, and as much as AA ain't everyone's cup of tea, are you telling em you're gonna go mano a mano with the A dawg? As the kids on the cellarnetz say: srsly.

Remember a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, and argument is only as strong as it's weakest point, a portfolio of 98,000 images is the product of a very soft heart. You need more ruthlessness.

propose you upload a set of 36 consecutive photos to picassa or some such and we can have a discussion about actual images and not *your relationship* to those images.

Your glove, sir.

Well V, your an adult, living in the land of the brave and the home of the free.
98 k or 98 million, they are yours, and you have the right to keep them, until they pry your picassa password from your cold dead hands...:f207:



... as long as you don't use them to violate the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, of others.

Sure Bruce, it's attitudes like that which have caused the world wide shortage and subsequent price gouging of pixels...

This one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove

:D

No, this one.

I demand satisfacion!

But you *need* a spellchecker.

this is done. check pm.

OK, smelling the glove and feeling the love as we speak. Not if you really want to go head to head with me photographically, I must warn you that I am infinitely (that's a lazy 8 to you) more critical of my own work than you could ever be of mine.

Just so you know who you're dealing with...

OK hombre, I'm back and here's the truth as I see it about your work. You better sit down.

A friend of mine wants to sell his work to a stock agency and they told him they don't even consider files made with less than a Canon EOS 1ds MKII or the Mark III with full-frame, 18/22.?MP sensors. (or equivalent) (see this website for a softer version of the hard news: http://www.all-things-photography.co...otography.html)

Why do I ask if you are sitting down? Well if you have 98,000 more images even close to the 36 you uploaded, thenyou are going to have to convince Tink that you need to
a) drop ~$10,000 on new camera gear cause you will need the file size and bit depth. and
b)You will need to quit your hard won job and devote your time to making more images like this.

Your work is really exceptional, there were a few doggy pics in the 36 but only because they were in the company of so much good work. But that is the problem of being in the 99th percentile when you are next to work that goes up to 11... 99 seems so far from the top.

Before you do quit your job, I'd float some of these past a true pro image editor at a stock house and see what they have to say about marketability. EG If these were 50MB images would you have a need for them.

But they are good. Very good. Do you really have 97, 964 more?

That's the penalty of free market pixelonomy. Screw those third world cameras.:p

This 98k number discussion has been bugging me, so I wish to respond.

Yes. I do have over 98k files in my Pictures folder. At least when I posted that number it was at 98,024. Some were subdirectories, some were movies, some were index files, I wasn't discriminating much. By now that number is higher still. I shoot pictures every day.

And I was aiming for maximum inclusiveness when I made the index of images for the mosaic program so it has the maximum possible choices from which to make the mosaics.

But it is a little misleading for a couple reasons. One, a big chunk of those pictures were taken by a robot, not me. They were exposures taken one minute apart for assembly into a time lapse movie of a construction project. That accounts for about 33k of the files.

Also, I recovered SonofV, the Elder's hd for him some time ago, and those picture files make up a big chunk of that 98k, approximately 18k files. That leaves me to account for about 46k images, rounding down. I took most of them. Only several hundred are cataloged. (Almost) All of them are well filed in my tree structure, explained elsewhere. Still, that's a lot of pictures.

I'm going to address footfootfoot's blush inducing remarks in a little bit, but for now I will plainly answer his question. No, the other 97,964 aren't as good as the ones I showed him. I probably have a generous double handful I consider equally good, but at max, only a few per thousand.

Which brings me to why I take (and keep) so many images. Let me draw you a picture...This was really really hard. Not only am I loathe to discard images, I have to say, there are very few images that I don't have a relationship with. (my language skills are fading here....) I see things differently when it comes to the pictures. I do see them as individual images, but in the context of the memories they stimulate when I view them. The best way I can describe it is that they're much like musical notes or chords, or even phrases. The pictures belong together just as a guitar riff belongs in a song, and a song to an album. You might recognize a particular riff, but if it's one you really like, you think of the whole song when you hear it. The pictures evoke a similar experience with me. I don't just collect ringtone samples of my favorite songs, I have the whole song.

Your compliments are enormously gratifying, footfootfoot (and others who have responded privately--THANK YOU). But those individual, contextless images are for me like the "DUM dum, DUM dum" made with a cello voice. I hear that and I think of Jaws. Each of those pictures (my best work) is like a great musical hook. It can be admired by itself, but it needs context to permit its fullest expression.

I've reread this post and I'm only partly convinced I've communicated my thoughts. It's not an excuse, it's a burden, frankly. But one I don't mind.

Keep talking... We're listening...
:)

Of course, but you do realize for me/we, each picture must stand on it'd own merits because we don't know the song, don't you?

So only pictures that can stand on there own, should be displayed to your adoring fans, and the rest belong in your diary.

Don't forget, you asked for help in pruning the forest... then you tell us you don't want to. Make up my mind, dude. :haha:

Oh, btw... nice pics.

I <3 BigV's pics...but where are the ones being referred to in this thread? Am I missing a link to them? Or was it a private party?

You missed the orgy?

36 images, 1 of 2
 

Eastern Washington
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...IMG_0424sm.JPG



Discovery Park
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_6107.JPG


Chasing the sun
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...IMG_1437-1.JPG


Destruction Island from Beach 6, Olympic Peninsula
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/DSCN1311.JPG


North Cascades
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/DSC00010.JPG


West of Thorp in winter
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_4275.JPG


Mauna Lani, Hawaii
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_3329.JPG


Liberty, Washinton
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...Plus%20225.jpg


Robinson Canyon
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_6189.JPG


Teary
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_1724.JPG


Seastack at Riatlo Beach, Olympic Peninsula
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_5166.JPG


Screaming trees
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_0717.JPG


South of Cape Lookout, Tillamook, Oregon
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...20%2870%29.jpg


Close formation
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0%28231%29.JPG


Two Union Square, downtown Seattle
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_0272.JPG


On the way to Blake Island
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_0639.JPG


Staves
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/100_1642.JPG


Sk8tr
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_4847.JPG

36 images, 2 of 2
 

Made for looking through, for looking at
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_2164.JPG


Our little pot o' gold
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_0727.JPG


A very happy Father's Day
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/DSCN0806.JPG


Leap of faith
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_4951.JPG


Scary Halloween
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_1654.JPG


aaaahhhhhhh...
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_4489.JPG


Captain of all he surveys
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_1032.JPG


so tiny
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_5189.JPG


Fiddleheads
http://lh3.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/100_1783.JPG


Desert color
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_6608.JPG


Lush
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...IMG_6801-1.JPG


Sticky color
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_6751.JPG


Tiger Swallowtail posing
http://lh4.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_6772.JPG


Strong
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_0884.JPG


Flying turtle
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_3877.JPG


Barn swallow
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...20%2813%29.JPG


Lotus and koi
http://lh6.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_3843.JPG


Spotted Puffer
http://lh5.ggpht.com/alt.fake.mail/S...0/IMG_3907.JPG

It was a private showing for a while. Here they are for all to see now. Please review and comment. I welcome all constructive feedback.

These are really, really great BigV... but aren't these the best out of the 98,000? I thought foot's suggestion was to gather 36 consecutive images, in order to demonstrate how to determine which of the 36 was a stunning shot like the above and which were byproducts. Do you have 98,000 pictures of completely different subjects that all look like the above, or do you have, say, 100 other photos of that skateboarder in various states of motion?

Hmmm.... Clodfobble, I didn't read footfootfoot's suggestion that way at all. But when I reread his remarks after your observation, I think you might be right.

If you are, then I simply surrender. There are just toooo many places where 36 consecutive images could be run up and shot down. I have tracts of pictures that don't approach this level (imho). It would be embarassing and pointless. Those pictures aren't really for public consumption.

Your skateboarder example, yes, I have 26 images in that set. You're looking at one I like the best. Tink picked it out, actually. But I wouldn't impose that set on y'all. I'd be embarassed.

I am shy about it, but now that you mention it, maybe I should....*thinking out loud*... Another example would be a trip to the zoo. The picture "Strong" up there, that was taken at the zoo. I show 191 images in that set, and I only posted that one. There *are* some other nice pictures in that set, not in my "top 36" (more or less...), but still, nice pictures. Snapshots, they're family snapshots of a trip to the zoo with the boys.

Now, a set like that might have a gem like "Strong", and some other well made pictures, but it will inevitably have many pictures that have value to me, as Dad, or Uncle, and be... a boring forgettable waste of your time. *I* choose to keep pictures like that. But I wouldn't inflict them on you in our regular social intercourse.

The Creepy Crawlies thread comes to mind. This most recent camping trip gave me a chance to take a bunch of pictures. Who cares about bug pictures. I certainly didn't take them for the express purpose of showing you dwellars a big ant... I took them for my own enjoyment. But! The thread popped up, and now I had pictures to share and a reason to share them.

I don't suggest that those ten images are great pictures, not even by my amateur standards. But they fit in the thread. I take a lot of pictures suitable for inclusion in a conversation with my friends.

[/thinking out loud]

blah blah blah... what a windbag.

You make a good observation, Clodfobble. Thanks for giving me something more to think about. I might just do what you suggest.

Um yeah, that's what I thought I said. The idea when looking at a set of images, in this case 36 since that relates to this stuff people used to use called film (It's a long story, just trust me on this one) where 36 was pretty much the longest roll of film you could get.

So you look at a set from a single roll and that is your "batting average" if you will. If you hit the ball out of the park every frame, well then, you are hired. If you only get one or two good shots out of a roll, then you should keep your day job, but not quit photography either. That's more than many people get.

My point was to post 36 consecutive images, I'm sure I used that word, to see hoe frequently you hit the ball out of the park slugger. Also looking at a set of images of a single subject tells a lot about how you approach making a photo. Do you stay with a single M.O. and hammer away or do you hunt around searching for the right POV? Do you change lenses (or zoom) or do you stay with a single lens?

In martial arts there are said to be ten different directions an attack can come from; the four cardinal points, EWNS, plus the ordinal points, and above and below. You can approach your subject the same way. Decide which position gives you the best result. Each position has meaning. Generally speaking, when shot from below, the subject is monumentalized, from above the subject is diminished. These are generalities and not rules, there are many other elements which conspire to present an overall effect.

A question to constantly be asking yourself as you look through the viewfinder (instead of the lcd screen) is "Why am I doing it this way? why am I in this spot instead of over there? What am I trying to say about this subject and is this the best way to get that across? What can I do differently? What could I have done differently? And finally, the crusher: Is this the best I can do? or as someone else once asked me:
"Are you satisfied with that..?" Another teacher I had set the standard for a well resolved compostion (note the use of the word resolved, for it is a problem) as being such that if any single element were changed the entire thing would fail. Again, one teacher, one opinion, but very helpful excercise.

And when all else fails some fortune cookie wisdom:
If you hit the bullseye every time, then the target is probably too close.

Some awesome images here BigV, keep it up.

My secret to increasing my batting average is to destroy any negative that doesn't pass muster. My pile of negatives gets smaller, but the ratio of good shots gets bigger. ;)

An update on my journey with Picasa.

I continue to use this program as my principal image indexing tool. I also use it for lightweight editing, mostly straightening, exposure corrections, cropping, etc.

But it has a feature I really love and I'm using more and more. As I've said before, I am mostly just a snapshotter, and my favorite subject is people. I won't embarrass myself by calling pictures with faces in them "portraits", they're not. But they do have faces and Picasa knows this. It has a feature called face detection. This is pretty cool. It can scan a photo and pick out the section of the image that (according to its rules) is a face. It has made a couple (out of thousands) of mistakes, but mostly it's pretty "smart". It shows a crop of the face of a given image, resized so the face fills a thumbnail and then gives you a chance to add the photo to a special kind of album called a people album. In a shot that has more than one face, it will detect all the faces, show each of them in a thumbnail, and give you a chance to add that picture to each of the corresponding people albums.

A word about albums. An album is a collection of pictures. In Picasa, albums work like tags. A picture can belong to more than one album by having more than one tag associated with it. When viewing an album, all the pictures in it are selected from the database and shown as a collection. People albums, or People, work just the same. They're albums that have the title of a person's name, containing images that have been detected by Picasa to contain a face.

Back to People and faces. Not only does Picasa have face detection, it also has face *recognition*. This is scary cool. Once you've seeded Picasa's People albums with a few (or more) examples of a given face, it will continue to scan through the library looking for faces that match the ones already associated with a given person. When it finds some it *recognizes* it will suggest them to you. "Do these faces belong in this People album?". It's awesome.

Some of the the things you can do with this is to click on a Person, and see all the pictures that have that person in them. Also, there's a function called Face Movie, where the contents of a People album can be used in a special kind of slide show where the slides are put together in a face aligned movie. Here's a youtube video of Picasa's demo of this function. I think their model looks a bit like little Miss York at the beginning.



At this time, I have 214 People. And I have 18,875 faces detected but not yet categorized. It's a LOT. And it feels like pushing back the tide, but I take bites at it as I go, I think I'm making more forward progress than backward, so I carry on. Here's a typical screenshot of what I am making my way through.

I've circled a couple points of interest. SonofV appears in the blue circles. The red circles identify a couple interesting shots, one is a mask, not really a face, I'll throw that one away. The others show really dark faces in these thumbnails. I can double click on any of the thumbnails and get the whole picture, from which I might be able to recognize the person given the context. And the yellow circle in the upper right surrounds the slider showing how many screensful of this work I have ahead of me. Fun!!