More Adobe Lightroom

After I blogged my last blog a friend asked if you could do comtact sheets in Lightroom. Well so you can as these screen grabs will testify. This image shows the control panel which shows that I have set the page out into rows and columns.

This image, of the preview area, shows the thumbnails along the bottom - which are oriented upright - whilst the preview panel is in the landscape view principally because the default setting on my Canon Pixma ip4300 is set as landscape (as I was previously printing landscapes).

Printing with Adobe Lightroom

Before my trial version of Adobe Lightroom ran out I decided to try printing a batch of pictures - about a 100 or so. I was very impressed. My photos were all taken with the same light and so after I had done one to check it was ok I just went through the whole session choosing the image to print from a thumbnail and so was able to set up quite a large batch to print at a time.
Habibe Designs

Where did I leave off

Oh yes! On yesterdays blog I forgot to mention that the Minolta Dimage 7i, that I use, has a Macro button on the lens. This means I was able to get to .30 of a metre with the wide angle setting and in the picture I am putting up today - the Long focal length Macro setting allows you to get to .25 metres. The difference is dramatic. (Those of you who do not have this facility should purchase either/or a close up lens or extension tubes) The wide angle shot was trimmed out of the full frame where the long focal length shot was almost full frame (I just cropped it a bit to make it stand up straight). I have placed a blue line across todays image to show where the point of focus is. This picture is shot at f3.5 (almost the widest aperture). The depth of field is very small and it is difficult to decide where to focus. The most important thing to remember about close up work is to set the lens to focus at a point where you have as much of the subject as you want in frame. Then to focus critically you either move the camera or the subject. At extreme close up ie. 1:1 there is no other way of focussing. USM etc will not help. Of course you might by a flook prove me wrong - but I write from the knowledge of 50 years experience.

Finally. A word about the images I am using. If they are shot with my digital camera I cut the image size down to 960x1280 pixels and then saving them at 30% quality in jpeg. I dissobey my own rule of not saving the image as a photoshop image first simply to get maximum image size reduction. The images on Blogspot are kept in Picasas web storage facility and I dont want to use all my available storage space let alone using precious bandwidth.

Depth of Field and Telephoto -Zoom

The depth of field in a picture is the two points, in front and behind, of a subject that appear in sharpest focus. These distances are governed by four things in the main
Firstly - the actual focal length of the lens. Second - the distance the subject is from the camera thirdly - the aperture that is set on the lens and finally the size at which the image is to be viewed. These are not in order of importance they all effect the result. The two images I am going to use for this do two things they show the difference between wide angle close up and long focus.

The left image is taken with the lens on maximum zoom and the right image is shot at maximum wide angle. They both had the same aperture (fully open for the zoomed shot and stopped down a tad for the wide angle shot).
As you can see the longer the focal length the less the depth of field is - there is more apparently sharp in the wide angle. Shot - but if you click on it to make it larger - there is less apparent sharpness. This is the result seeing the image small it looks sharper than if you enlarge it. If I had used a smaller aperture ie stopped down to the cameras smallest aperture of F8.0 then the sharpness would be increased quite a large amount in both cases.
The only thing remaining is the 'apparent' focal length. My camera says that the wide angle setting is eqquivalent to 28mm on a standard 35mm camera but, it is in fact only 7.4mm. This shorter focal length will produce substantially sharper looking images than an actual 28 mm lens at the same aperture. The reason is the same as for the difference in the above two pictures. Let me know if you still have a problem with that.

Small Studio sets

Sometimes you need to get over the top and look straight down on the subject. In the example pictures above you can see how I have arranged my tripod. The two front legs being vertical with the back leg extended a bit more to make this happen. Naturally mother nature doesnt allow this as we get a centre of gravity problem. To overcome this I have tied a doorstop to the back leg. Any heavy object that is tie-able will do. The lighting was provided by daylight through the window. To light the shadow side of the subject I have simply bounced the light back with some sheets of paper. If you do this sort of thing a lot I suggest obtaining a sheet of white polystyrene from a builders merchant. You may be lucky and find some small enough to get in the car. If you need to cut the polystyrene the cut edge might need taping up with what I know as "gaffer tape".

Just to prove it works I exchanged my trusty old 'Los Angeles Olympics 1984' Canon F1 for the Minolta Dimage 7i and took a snap This is how it looked straight from the camera. To improve things a bit I used a technique described on the Photoshop Heros site. The trick I used was the "Velvia" one where the colours in the picture are intensified to make it look like the effect you got with Fuji Velvia in the days of film (it is still available).

Lightroom

In one of my previous missives I said that Lightroom did not have a very comprehensive printer control. Well obviously I am blind, slightly anyway, the printer controls appear - like all other menus - when you run your mouse over the menu button. My reservation with this is that if you use the print options in the "File" menu these alternatives are not shown.

Composition

Today I am going to try and cover composition. The first thing to say is that every person is entitled to see things their own way and that all rules (in life and composition) should be treated with an element of suspicion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so they say. As an example I am using a simple Austrian landscape. First as shot:-

As you can see - a typical mountain scene with a road leading to a house. It's no prize winner but I think it's OK. With the aid of hindsite I might have cropped it so that the farm house obeyed the Golden Mean or Section rule I suggest that a Google search on this subject would be better than me explaining the concept. But with an image editor (Elements or Photoshop) such a thing is possible.

This is going some way towards my aim - which is to have the road lead the eye to the farm house - but it needed to have slightly more foreground (I cut a chunk off and placed it at the bottom to give more depth). Doing this moved the farmhouse further up the picture so that it was close to the intersection of the image divided into thirds which approximately corresponds to the Golden Mean (Section or Ratio)

This is the way composition works - the eye needs to be drawn to the subject or object of interest. Any way of doing this has the same effect but the Golden Ratio system is meant to be aesthetically pleasing. If you are taking a picture for advertising purposes then anything that draws the viewers eye to where it matters is mostly what it's about. You could use lighting to the same effect.