PictureCorrect.com: Gigapixel 7 to Super Scale Any Image

In photo editing news, Topaz Labs just announced a sale on their Gigapixel AI upscaling program. Designed to increase the resolution of your photos by up to 600%, rebuilt from the ground up to be better and faster. Deal ending soon: Gigapixel Version 7 at $20 Off

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Great for large-format prints where every pixel counts.

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PictureCorrect.com: Getting Organized as a Street Photographer

I believe that editing is just as important of a skill in street photography as shooting is. We all capture a lot of junk out there, and editing is how you protect yourself from showing that junk. If you saw all my junk, you’d be able to see how terrible a photographer I actually am.

Organizing your street photographs

But more important than that, editing is where you assess yourself. It’s how you slowly build ideas, a style and, ultimately, a vision. The more time you put into editing, the better you are going to be as a photographer when out shooting.

Organization

The most important step by far in the editing process is your organization and choosing your best photographs. The nature of street photography pushes us often to take too many photographs, and when you load them up on your computer, this can cause a lot of problems.

Rating your photos

To fix this, I will go through a folder of photos quickly, giving them five stars for the best, three stars for the ones I’m not sure of and zero stars for the worst of the bunch. There are almost always more zero stars than anything else. I delete all of them. This keeps my archive lean. Within five to ten minutes, you suddenly have a tight, organized group of photographs that you can easily access.

I always go back to old folders later on and make sure to look through the three-starred images. You will find by doing this you will occasionally locate incredible photographs that you missed the first time around. It happens to me all the time.

Only show your best photographs

Finding your best shots

The side benefit of being organized is that it helps you become better at figuring out your best shots and not getting lost in giant folders of photos. People will judge your work by the worst photographs, and if you show too many, they will not have the attention span to go through it all and give your work the attention it deserves.

So be ruthless in choosing only the top photographs and forget the rest.

Collections / Projects

Assembling collections

Start to classify your work into different collections. Search for photographs that fit together based on expression, emotions, ideas or places. The connections could be anything, but as you start to bring like-minded work together, this is how your vision will begin to grow.

Collections will typically start loosely, but over time you will make them tighter and tighter as the work starts to improve. They will evolve significantly from your initial ideas. You will notice more moments when out shooting and eventually come back with better work for it. Also, you will start understanding yourself and your goals better. It’s a fascinating process.

Consistency

Developing consistency

As your vision starts to develop, so will your consistency. The work will begin to fit together better in theme, idea, emotion and look. As a photographer, you will start to shine through in the work as well.

Now, this isn’t to say that different projects and collections need to look and feel similar. They can be completely different! But this consistency will still show throughout your work in both obvious and subtle ways.

Sequencing and book mockups

Sequencing into a story

As your collection tightens, the next step is to sequence it into a “story” of sorts. This is a difficult but incredible process wherein your vision starts to take more of a concrete shape. Think about an arc, what photographs work well early, what works in the middle and how the ending might look.

Place importance on how photographs look next to each other, near each other and how they play off each other. Are photographs too similar to work together, do they match too well or are they too different? What do different photographs bring out in each other? The sky is the limit with what you can do here.

Consider whether you want to print out your photographs and paste them into notebooks to sequence, or whether you prefer to try something like the Book Module in Lightroom, which allows you to easily sequence a book and upload it to Blurb to have a mock copy printed for you. I love and utilize both strategies and they both have their purpose.

Photographer research

Finding your vision

Alongside all this is photographer research, which is a necessary step for finding your vision. Search for photographers who you relate to and whose work has a feeling that you want to include in yours. Look through their projects and purchase some photo books to get a sense of how sequencing works.

This will educate your eye, help give you ideas for what to shoot when you’re out in the world and help to focus your projects. While you don’t have to copy these photographers exactly, feel free to steal from their ideas and weave them into your vision. Take the best of your favorite photographers and bring it all together to improve who you are as a photographer.

It’s a long, fun, rewarding process doing all of this, but please don’t try to rush it. Shoot a lot, edit a lot, look at great photography a lot and you’ll find yourself improving each day. Slowly but steadily, you will see your work improve in such an incredible way.

About the Author:
James Maher is the author of Essentials of Street Photography, which covers everything about the genre even down to specific post processing techniques that can bring the best out of street scenes.

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PictureCorrect.com: The Photographer’s Secret Weapon: Creating Mood

A mood is created in a photograph when it allows the viewer to place themselves in the moment, or it causes them to remember a moment that stirs up an emotional reaction. It’s a complicated subject, but it’s imperative for photographers to understand how to express different moods in their images.

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Getting the Right Mood Across to a Viewer

Photo captured by Atharva Tulsi; 29mm, f/4.5, 1/40s, ISO 400

Warm colors, including yellow, often evoke feelings of happiness, optimism and energy, which is in direct opposition to the woman’s pose in the photo above. Her expression and the choice of camera angle emit a more somber and thoughtful mood.

Critical Thought: When you’re trying to establish a mood in your photos, make sure you don’t send mixed signals to your viewer. Pay special attention to the lighting, background, pose, props and expression to ensure that they all project the mood you wish to convey.

Discovering How Color Affects Mood

Color weighs heavily upon the mood of a photo. Color theory is an entire industry. It influences everything from the paint you’ll find at local hardware stores to how a grocery store organizes their fruits and vegetables.

Photo by Emma Francis

Remember this: Here’s a shortlist that describes the psychological effect (the mood) of different colors.

• Blue: trust, cool, cold, calm, stable, powerful, strength, reliable
• Yellow: friendly, warm, enlightening, optimism, energetic
• Green: natural, fresh, wealth, soothing, balance, restful
• Red: loving, passion, danger, hunger, urgency, daring
• Pink: compassion, faithful, beauty, love, sensitive

What mood does the landscape photo above create in your mind? Do you think the color of this photo was chosen to set a mood?

Below is the same photo with the color corrected back to what the scene really looked like. Notice how it does effectively ruin the mood.

By skewing the color balance toward blue, the photographer created a mood of cold, isolated beauty.

Your Turn

Pick a color from the shortlist above. Plan out a photo session where you will set the mood by incorporating your chosen color. You can accomplish this with light, background, props, camera settings and even in your post-production processing.

A photograph will hold a viewer’s attention longer and set a mood when it touches as many of the senses as possible, including sight, sound, taste, smell and feel. When a photo touches these senses, what we are talking about is the concept of mood.

Photo by Tina Hand

In the motel signage photo above, we can easily see the desolate landscape. Can you also imagine running your hand down that pole and feeling the rusty scratches? Can you hear the wind whistling across the landscape? Perhaps some of the sand hits you in the face, cuts across your lips, and you taste the earth’s saltiness.

What do you smell? When I look at this photo, I smell old grease from a diner and a faint whisper of aging pool chlorine.

This photo sets a very distinct mood, and a big part of that is in the post-processing. The tones were left flat, and the colors unsaturated to create an atmosphere of deserted isolation.

Here’s an exercise to stretch your thinking when it comes to creating a mood in photography.

Select a photograph from your portfolio that you believe has a distinctive mood. Now, using post-processing, change the feeling of the image to something completely different. When completed, share both versions with family and friends. Ask them to describe how they feel when viewing your two different versions of the same picture.

Photo by Juan Ordonez

Key Thought: When photographing people, the most influential elements to establish mood are facial expression and body language.

A critical component of mood in photography is your choice of the camera angle. The right camera angle can set a mood or ruin a feeling that you’re trying to create.

Remember This: When photographing people, a camera angle that looks up at the subject sets a mood of power and control. Looking down at a subject sets a feeling of submissiveness and approachability.

Numerous mood-setting factors are working in the portrait of the young man above. They include the lighting, the chosen colors, facial expression and body language—but most importantly, the slightly lower camera angle is looking up toward the model’s eyes.

If everything were the same, except the camera angle was high and looking down on him. It would completely change the mood of the photograph.

Try this: Grab a willing subject and shoot pictures for a couple of hours. Place your model in various locations and, in each area, change the camera position to create different moods.

Weather

Clockwise from top left: Photos by Hassan Ishan, Sebin Thomas and Rory Björkman

No matter what genre of photography you’re creating outdoors, weather plays a critical factor in establishing mood.

Photo by Josh Hild

Critical Thought: When the weather is beautiful, it’s easy to think about getting outside and taking pictures. However, it’s bad weather that brings drama and mood to almost any scene!

Lighting & Shadow

Clockwise from top left: Photos by Dollar Gill, Peri Stojnic and jplenio

These three example photos evoke an intense mood—from inviting to somber to almost scary. By carefully selecting your lighting and shadow placement, you can send a strong message to a viewer.

Don’t forget that you can alter the lighting of a scene. In the example photo of the building with the cross, the photographer placed a light source inside the structure to create an eerie mood.

Photo by Anuvith Premakumar

Idea: In the television, movie and music industries, professional lighting directors carefully select the lighting to display a mood. By paying extra attention to these example resources, you can develop your light and shadow ideas.

Space, Aspect Ratio, & Crop

Clockwise from top left: Photos by Anastasiya Pavlova, Karina Tess, David Todd McCarty, Mahir Uysal, Mariana Beltran, David Todd McCarty and Mahir Uysal.

The use of space is an art term that describes the arrangement of objects within your final composition.

How you use the space in your photo plays a crucial role in setting a mood.

An image with a large area of negative space could indicate a mood of open airiness and happiness. A tight crop of a photo might make a viewer feel cramped and claustrophobic. Cropping off important elements, such as a face, can create tension. Squishing a picture in or dragging out in post-production can radically set a mood.

Space Experiment: Get into your photo files and select a photo that you love—but be sure to choose one that also has some negative space surrounding the subject. It doesn’t have to be a lot of space, as indicated in the cowboy portrait below.

Now, try cropping your picture into a variety of images. Use different aspect ratios. Divide up your use of space differently. Get super-creative and do what you would typically consider an oddball crop.

When you’ve created six versions, look at them side-by-side. Does the mood change? Could you also alter the color or tone of your picture for even more mood effect?

Critical Thought: Creating a mood with your photograph involves many different aspects of the process. However, one that you may overlook is the final presentation. This advice includes your use of space, aspect ratio, lens choice and cropping.

Creating Mood with Motion

Photo by Vince Fleming

Activity, a motion of any kind, can add a definite mood to a shot. Sports or school activities are fantastic arenas to practice this form of capturing a mood.

From top: Photos by Marcis Berzins and Erik Dungan

Here are two photographs involving motion that are almost identical in terms of subject matter—and yet they each convey a very different mood.

Critical Thought: When putting mood into your photographs, rarely will one suggested technique work well. It typically requires several techniques to drive your point home. The above photos both use motion. However, they differ in color, light, shadow and the use of space.

Photo by Harry Quan

When trying to establish a mood, don’t be afraid to direct some motion specific to your need!

Conclusions

• A mood is created when a viewer of your photo feels something and places themselves at the moment.
• Color plays a significant role in setting a mood. So much so that entire industries are devoted to the study of color theory!
• When trying to establish a mood, don’t send mixed signals. Every aspect of your shot should push toward your chosen atmosphere.
• A photo will grab attention and signal a feeling when it touches as many of the viewer’s senses as possible: sight, sound, taste, smell and feel.
• When photographing people, pay attention to both the facial expression and the body language when setting up a mood.
• Your camera angle is important. Think about whether you’re looking up or down on the subject.
• Weather is a fantastic mood-setter. Go outside when the weather is acting up!
• When considering your use of lighting and shadow, ask, “What would a movie director do with this?”
• Lens compression or expansion along with format ratio and cropping can drastically change the mood of a photo.
• Motion almost always generates the potential for atmosphere. However, it must often be used in conjunction with other techniques to work fully.

It’s time to grab your camera and capture some mood!

About the Author:
Kent DuFault is an author and photographer with over 35 years of experience. He’s currently the director of content at the online photography school, Photzy.com

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PictureCorrect.com: Camera Tweaks: Popular Custom Settings for Photographers

Photography is an art where technical know-how meets creativity. To get the most out of their equipment, many photographers customize their camera settings to suit their unique styles and shooting conditions. While some settings are essential adjustments, many others are personal preferences that enhance workflow efficiency and creative control. Here’s a look at some of the most commonly customized camera settings that photographers use:

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1. Back Button Focus

One of the most popular custom settings among photographers is back button focus. By separating the autofocus function from the shutter button, photographers gain more control over focusing. This technique is particularly beneficial for:

• Sports and Wildlife Photography: Allows photographers to track moving subjects more efficiently.
• Portraits: Helps lock focus and recompose without the camera refocusing.

2. Custom White Balance

While auto white balance is convenient, custom white balance settings ensure more accurate color representation in various lighting conditions. Photographers often use:

• Preset White Balance: For specific lighting conditions like daylight, shade, tungsten, or fluorescent.
• Manual Kelvin Adjustment: For precise control over the color temperature.

3. Customizable Function Buttons

Modern cameras come with customizable buttons that can be programmed to access frequently used settings. Commonly assigned functions include:

• ISO Adjustment: Quick changes to ISO for different lighting conditions.
• Exposure Compensation: Easy access to adjust exposure without navigating menus.
• Focus Area Selection: Swiftly change focus points or focus modes.

4. Custom Shooting Modes

Many cameras allow photographers to save custom shooting modes, which are preset configurations tailored for different scenarios. Common examples are:

• Portrait Mode: Settings optimized for shallow depth of field and flattering skin tones.
• Action Mode: High shutter speeds and continuous autofocus for capturing fast-moving subjects.
• Landscape Mode: Smaller apertures for greater depth of field and vivid color settings.

5. Autofocus Settings

Photographers often customize their autofocus settings to match their shooting style and subjects. Key adjustments include:

• AF-C Priority: Choosing between focus priority (ensuring the subject is in focus before shooting) and release priority (taking the shot immediately).
• AF Area Mode: Selecting the autofocus area, such as single-point AF, dynamic area AF, or 3D tracking, depending on the subject movement.

6. Exposure Bracketing

Exposure bracketing is a technique where multiple shots are taken at different exposure levels. It’s commonly used in:

• HDR Photography: Capturing a wide range of highlights and shadows.
• Uncertain Lighting Conditions: Ensuring one shot has the perfect exposure.

7. Custom Menus

Custom menus allow photographers to group frequently used settings in one place, reducing the time spent navigating through extensive menu systems. Typical settings included in custom menus are:

• Image Quality and Size: Quick adjustments between RAW, JPEG, and different resolutions.
• Metering Modes: Switching between evaluative, center-weighted, and spot metering.
• Drive Modes: Changing between single shot, continuous shooting, or self-timer.

8. Flash Settings

For photographers who use external flash units, custom flash settings can significantly enhance lighting control. Commonly adjusted settings include:

• Flash Exposure Compensation: Fine-tuning the flash output to avoid overexposure or underexposure.
• Flash Sync Speed: Adjusting the shutter speed to sync with the flash for optimal results.

Summary:

While the basic camera settings are crucial for any photographer, customizing these settings can lead to a more streamlined and personalized shooting experience. From back button focus to custom white balance and programmable function buttons, these adjustments help photographers adapt to their unique styles and varying shooting conditions. Experimenting with these settings can unlock new creative possibilities and make capturing the perfect shot even more intuitive.

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PictureCorrect.com: Photographing Traffic at Night in the City

Moving traffic is like a city’s bloodstream—it’s always moving, pulsating through veiny streets, which can bring your photography to life if you know how to capture it. When it comes to traffic moving in the evening, you have a few technical options to catch a cool scene. It all boils down to shutter speed: a slower speed will blur the traffic more, while a faster speed will blur it less. That much is obvious. But what’s less obvious are the qualitative associations we make about blurring traffic.

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How Much Motion is Too Much Motion?

People often assume that more motion blur is better, but that isn’t always the case. Using a super-long exposure against a small amount of traffic won’t make the image look better—it’ll make it look desolate. (Which might be what you’re going for, of course, but if your intention is to show a bustling city, that won’t be the best way.)

Whatever shutter speed you choose will largely depend on the time of night and what other settings you’re working with. If you have a set aperture in mind, you’ll need to wait for the time of evening to match your desired ISO speed. Try waiting a while for the sky to change colors, and you’ll find your traffic blur will necessarily change, too. There’s no “right” or “wrong” exposure—just what you’re going for.

Great Places to Find Traffic

Finding the right location for heavy traffic can be tricky. You’ve got to know a city pretty well, or at least have an idea of where the congested thoroughfares will be. In general, though, I find these areas to be wonderful locations for photography in the evening:

• Intersections
• Bridges from above or below
• Highway overpasses
• Road corners
• Forks in the road
• Tight uphill switchbacks
• Stop signs
• Bus stops

The common theme here is movement—traffic in a straight line can maybe be interesting if you’ve got some variety in the shot (maybe skyscrapers or a city icon nearby), but failing that, you’re going to want to see some movement, leading lines and curves. That’s why bent roads and intersections work so well—you can create light lines out of conflict, movement and chaos.

Shutter Speed Comparisons

In the following three images watch the effect of shutter speed length on traffic moving across a bridge as it gets darker in the evening. All other settings constant (f/13, ISO 400) shooting in aperture priority.

0.6 second shutter speed:

Shutter Speed Duration: 0.6 Seconds

3.2 second shutter speed:

Shutter Speed Duration: 3.2 Seconds

10 second shutter speed:

Shutter Speed Duration: 10 Seconds

None of these shutter speeds were “right” or “wrong”, it just depends what lighting conditions and lighting effects you like best. Get out there and try it for yourself!

Don’t Forget Pedestrian Traffic

When it comes to intersections, some bigger cities—New York, Tokyo, Toronto—will have four-way crosswalks, where pedestrians stream across in all directions, stopping cars on all four sides of the intersection.

These make especially great hectic shots, with cloudy masses surrounded by headlights and condo lights.

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PictureCorrect.com: How to Assemble Eclipse Composites in Photoshop

Photographing an eclipse is an awe-inspiring experience, but what do you do with those images afterward? In this video tutorial, we’ll walk you through two creative ways to assemble your eclipse photos into striking composites using Photoshop. Follow along with Matt Kowski as he demonstrates the process step-by-step:

Getting Started: Preparing Your Images

Before diving into Photoshop, ensure your eclipse photos are properly edited. One common adjustment is to tweak the black slider to the left, making the dark areas truly black. This helps avoid any unwanted white edges that can interfere with the composite process. Once edited, synchronize the adjustments across all your photos.

Option 1: Stacking Photos for a Composite

1. Import Your Photos: Select all your edited photos, then open them as layers in Photoshop. You can do this via Lightroom by selecting the photos, then choosing Photo > Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop. Alternatively, use Adobe Bridge by going to Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Stack.
2. Set Up Your Canvas: Decide on the aspect ratio and layout for your composite. You can opt for a panoramic view or a standard photo aspect ratio. Use the crop tool (C) and set the fill to transparent to adjust the canvas.
3. Add a Black Background: Select the bottom layer, then add a new layer beneath it. Fill this new layer with black using the Edit > Fill menu or a keyboard shortcut.
4. Arrange and Blend: Position each phase of the eclipse in your desired layout. Change the blend mode of each layer to Screen to make the black areas transparent, revealing the composite underneath.
5. Align Your Images: Use rulers and guides to align your photos precisely. Press Ctrl+R (Windows) or Cmd+R (Mac) to show rulers, then drag guides from the rulers to help position your layers.

Option 2: Averaging Photos for Enhanced Detail

1. Create a Smart Object: After stacking your photos as layers, select all of them, right-click, and choose Convert to Smart Object. This combines them into a single smart object layer.
2. Average the Layers: Go to Layer > Smart Objects > Stack Mode > Mean. This averages the tones across all your photos, enhancing the details.
3. Refine with Camera Raw: Apply additional adjustments using the Camera Raw filter. Enhance the blacks, increase exposure to reveal more detail, and tweak temperature and clarity for the best visual effect.

Photo captured by Abed Ismail

Final Touches

Add Text: Enhance your composite with some text. Use a clean, professional font like Montserrat, Raleway, or Helvetica. Avoid overused or unprofessional fonts like Comic Sans.
Optional Color Overlay: To add a subtle color tint, create a new layer, fill it with a chosen color (like orange), and set the blend mode to Color. Adjust the opacity to achieve the desired effect.

For further training: The Photoshop System

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PictureCorrect.com: Color Isolation in Photography

This article is based on concepts from Creating Rich & Vibrant Color Photography (currently 71% off) if you want to dig deeper for further training.

Color photography can be so confusing.

Why does one color photograph knock the socks off of everyone who sees it, and another leaves viewers feeling bored and uninspired?

Yes, the subject matter does play a significant role.

Yet even a majestic mountain scene can fall flat (euphemistically) – when the color isn’t given an appropriate consideration.

With today’s quick tip, I’m going to share with you a fabulous (and easy to use) tool of color photography that can put the bazzinga into your images.

Photograph #1 By Kent DuFault

Photo #1 is an excellent example of the topic that we will be discussing today.

Here’s your quick tip:

When a given color within a photograph is isolated from the rest of the picture, either through color contrast, composition, or lighting, it creates a visual tension in a viewer’s mind.

Photo #1 is primarily flat green grass. However, it’s the pathways, and the driveway/farmhouse, that create an overwhelming visual tension.

The man is the subject. The red car is a focal point, and the green grass is an isolated color.

If you remove any of those elements, the photograph loses all its steam.

Photograph #2 By Kent DuFault

Is Photo #2 an example of isolated color?

No.

This photo uses a different (and also very useful) color tool known as monochromatic color. We will discuss that at some other time.

But, learn to recognize the difference.

For Photo #1, the green color becomes isolated because the pathways, the driveway, and the house break it up, separating it, and as a result creating isolated blocks of vibrant color.

Photo #2 has nothing ‘breaking up’ the vast expanse of blue. It’s monochromatic (singular in color) across the entire image and thus the color blue is not isolated.

Photograph #3 By Kent DuFault

Isolated color is so visually compelling, that anytime you incorporate it into your photo, you can virtually guarantee an elevated level of reception from anyone who views it!

Photograph #4 By Kent DuFault

Isolated color can even turn the most mundane object into artwork! So go ahead and give it a try. You might be surprised how easy it is to draw viewers’ attention just from using this one quick tip.

About the Author:
Kent DuFault is an author and photographer with over 35 years of experience. He’s currently the director of content at the online photography school, Photzy.com

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PictureCorrect.com: Travel Photography: How to Capture the Character of a Place

Many different elements go into making up the character of a particular destination or location, whether it be a far flung exotic city or your home town. It is the travel photographer’s job to cover these elements in order to present that character to the viewer. This article looks into what goes into bringing the character of a place to the audience.

Photo captured by Jakob Owens

Essential Elements

There are many separate “parts” that make a location what it is, but these generally boil down to landscape, people, and culture. Let’s look at these in a little more depth.

Landscape

Every city, mountain range, or coastal area has its own unique look and feel. This might be created by architecture exclusive to that part of the world, such as Gaudi’s designs that are so prominent in Barcelona. Or well known landmarks (Eiffel Tower anyone?) or rough seas and steep cliffs like those so characteristic of the northern coasts of Scotland and Ireland. What does it look like in the morning? At night? The location might take on several personalities through the day, so it is essential to capture as many of these as you can to give a broader picture.

Photo by m.a.r.c.; ISO 100, f/3.5, 1/156-second exposure.

People

Possibly the most influential factor in the character of a location is the people who live there. The way they look and dress, the way they carry themselves, the lifestyle they live, and the customs they observe. Is there a particular piece of clothing that defines them? Or maybe a certain characteristic? For example, if they are known to be happy and smiling people, show them as such. If they are known to be hardworking, try to include some shots of workers.

Photo by Eric Montfort; ISO 100, f/2.8, 1/200-second exposure.

Culture

This can encompass subjects such as food and drink. Local dishes give an immediate insight into the way of life lived by people of a particular place. Freshly caught seafood may be a specialty of the area, or it may be famous for a particular dessert or drink. Culture can also be shown in the festivals and events held in the particular region. This might be an annual parade where locals dress in the traditional costumes of their ancestors or a huge street party that captures the energy and vibrancy of a population.

Putting It All Together

To put these elements in photographic terms, I like to think of the process as zooming in on a subject. Starting with the landscape element described above, you essentially form an overview—or wide angle view—of the subject, capturing surroundings. Distinctive buildings and landmarks give a feel and sometimes instant recognition to the location.

Photo by Francois Decaillet; ISO 400, f/4.5, 1/100-second exposure.

Zoom in to form a collective portrait of the people, their way of life, and daily activities. It is a good idea to use both posed portraits and candid shots to show personalities as well as customs and way of life.

Finally zoom in further to capture details such as local food and dishes and detailed studies of buildings. Text such as in shop signs shows languages spoken. Also, look for any products that are traditional or well known in the area. For example, leather goods from Morocco or electronics from Japan.

Photo by Esmar Abdul Hamid; ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/400-second exposure.

Travel photography is, in a sense, a very broad specialization. Possibly not a specialization at all. A travel photographer needs to be a landscape photographer, portrait photographer, still life photographer, and nature photographer—often all in the space of a single shooting session. Learn to cover all these elements within the broader subject, and you are well on your way to becoming a more accomplished photographer.

About the Author
Mark Eden is a freelance travel photographer and writer, and the founder and director of ExpansePhotography, a photographic services company offering fine art, limited edition prints as well as stock and assignment photography and publishing services. Mark can be contacted through the Expanse Photography website.

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PictureCorrect.com: The Golden Ratio Applied to Photographic Composition

If you have been using The Rule of Thirds in your photographic compositions, you may have discovered an inherent shortcoming. Composing for the Rule of Thirds involves lining up a subject with one of the recommended intersections or lines. This can sometimes result in the subject being crowded too close to the edge of the frame.

“A quick visit…” captured by Nathan O’Nions

The problem can be minimized, if not eliminated using the Golden Ratio Grid, rather than the standard equally spaced Rule of Thirds grid.

“Thirds” captured by Bronson Abbott

What is the Golden Ratio?

It is worth while taking a look at what the Golden Ratio is before applying it. The concept was discussed as far back as 300BC as being mathematically interesting, and in addition to being called the Golden Ratio it is also referred to as the Golden Mean or Divine Proportion.

In simple terms, it refers to two measurements where the ratio of the sum of both measurements and the largest measurement is the same as the ratio of the largest and the smallest. In other words a + b / a is the same as a / b. This ratio is 1 to 1.618 and is often quoted to be found in nature, architecture, art and music amongst other things.

The mathematics of the Golden Ratio was further explored by a man called Fibonacci to deliver the Fibonacci Sequence of numbers. Start with 0 and 1 then progressively add the previous two numbers together to obtain the next. The sequence would progress as 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on. The interesting thing is that the further the progression advances, the closer to the golden ratio becomes the result of dividing the next to the last number in sequence by the last number in sequence. For example, 55/34 is 1.617647…, and the result of 233/144 is 1.618055…

This sequence is used to generate another composition variation called the Golden Spiral. There are opinions that this spiral can be seen in a Nautilus shell, the seeds on a pine cone, and even the arms of the milky way. Such is the interest in the Golden Ratio that many regard it as the universal constant that all things in life relate to in one way or another.

“Nautilus pompilius LS” captured by Kibuyu

“Beneath the Golden Arch” captured by Carl Jones

How Do You Apply the Golden Ratio to Your Photos?

One simple way to apply the Golden Ratio is to apply it to a rule of thirds grid. But, instead of the three columns and rows being of equal width and height, the center column and row is 0.618 the measurement of the other two. If you place a subject at a row/column intersection now, you effectively move the subject further from the edge of the image frame, giving the subject more space.

You can also employ the Golden Spiral to place the main point of interest within the inside of the spiral. The spiral is created from the Fibonacci sequence, which when plotted as a series of Golden Rectangles with a series of arcs drawn within the rectangles, results in the spiral overlay. You can see this graphically represented on my website.  Adobe Lightroom provides composition overlays for the Golden Ratio grid and for the Golden Spiral.

About the Author:
Terence Starkey is an avid photographer from SLRJourney. Getting your new digital camera is generally a major happening. An event filled with excitement because now you have some serious technology in your hands. It is also a time of anticipation of the myriad of possibilities now open to you in the world of photography, and the journey you find yourself embarking upon.

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