My proof refutes itself
I took this photo and immediately knew it was a good one1 (I recommend you click to embiggen):
“What a great illustration of how I need a wide angle lens!” I thought to myself.
It wasn’t until I posted it that I became enlightened. The picture that I chose as proof that I needed a new lens, was, in fact, taken with the old lens. It is a great picture. Furthermore, I could not have taken it with the new lens.
So do I need a wide angle lens or not? My inner zen teacher tells me I am asking the wrong question.
I suspect this lesson could be applied to many aspects of the current economic crisis.
UPDATE: I added the image. And a footnote. Yep, I’m a moron.
[1]: Not that I whipped the camera up to my eye and immediately took the shot, and that was it. Look, that kind of thing rarely happens. Noah has a really great story of one of those; remember the San Francisco Bay bridge photo that he took at sunset? With the sun just behind one of the bridge pillars? He took that out of a moving car in a break between trees; just whipped the camera up and clicked. That almost never happens, I mean, keep trying and stuff, but for me, 99 percent of the time my camera is in the wrong mode, the other 99 percent of the time I’m moving too fast or the object is moving too fast (usually I don’t have enough light or, yep, my camera is in the wrong mode), and the other 99 percent of the time I screw up the composition.
Yeah, so we were at Pizza Hut. One of the last, real, honest-to-God sit-down Pizza Huts, with the red roof and everything. I had been taking photos of my daughter all evening. Occasionally she would lean over and try to get a mushroom from Peggy so they were both in the frame, and I had a couple of those shots, but towards the end of the night I had an idea to try to lean way back and try to get them both at the extreme edge of the frame.
Here’s my contact sheet for the evening (click to enlarge):
Notice first off that I overexposed the first 3/4s of the shots — I had the camera in manual mode with an unfortunate combination of shutter speed and aperture. From this fact alone you can deduce how often I look at the LCD screen after I take a shot. In situations where I *have* to get a shot I check it more frequently, of course. And in fast moving, repeatable situations I’ll check specific shots for focus if I’m not sure I got the focus right and I have another chance at the shot — remember, I’m at f2.0 all the time! And my lens focuses s-l-o-w-l-y.
Notice also the difference between the white balance as shot, and the last frame which I took the time to edit. This is why you either need to pay attention to your white balance when you shoot, or, you need to have a good editor that makes it easy to change the white balance. (Preferably both.)
I’m particularly interested in photos where the subject is at the extreme edge of the frame. It’s one of those things, like creative under and overexposure, that I keep meaning to try and experiment with but generally forget to actually do anything about (actually I have a creatively underexposed shot that I quite like that I took recently, although it only half counts because I did the underexposing during editing).
I only took two shots at that framing, but I spent 30 or 40 seconds trying out different compositions and variations on this idea. 30 or 40 seconds doesn’t sound like much but it was actually a lot of (mental) work. In fact I think I took the third to the last frame while I was trying out that idea and my daughter was bouncing back and forth from her seat to my wife and back.
I mention all this in the hopes that it is helpful. Geof, I appreciate your comment, it might even be true, but I’m not some photographic genius. Nobody is born working a camera from birth, and if you think this comes naturally to me you are sadly mistaken. We’re all learning. If you like my photos and think my stuff is great, don’t worry, you’re only a few years behind me. I haven’t been doing this digital photography thing very long in the grand scheme of things. Honestly, I’m doing good if I get one post-worthy shot for every 100 I take. Much of my early stuff I took with my DSLR is unusable because I let the shutter speed go too slow all the time. I could get away with those shutter speeds on my smaller digital camera because it was lighter, easier to hold, and had a wider angle lens, at least when it was zoomed all the way out. That took an embarrassingly long time to figure out (like, over a year.) Now I never drop my shutter below 1/(35mm equivalent focal length), ever. I’ll underexpose by 2, even three stops first, then bring it back up in post.
Original comment at the bottom of the post: This is completely unrelated, but I just looked down and Wordpress said “Draft Saved at 3:13:37 am.” I am officially awesome. And I think I can count the number of people who will get that joke on one hand.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I see no photo, but I do think you’re elite.
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:46 am
As I said on Twitter, my previous comment was proof of my guy love for you. ;)
I find myself there, too, but I’m finding that I’m embracing negative space a lot more. And I really like this shot, man … and yes, it would’ve worked with a slightly wider lens, even if you’d had to come back and crop a bit. [Of course, you wouldn't get the vignetting you might want around the edges, but I find that vignetting at the edge when the subject is at the edge can be very hit-or-miss.]
Consider, for example, this shot of Stephen that I took quite as a mistake. There’s a lot I’d like to do in re-taking the shot to not suck, but I don’t think I’d get the happy mistake that I got.
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:40 am
Well, I just woke up so I haven’t checked twitter yet. Thanks ;)
I bet with your full frame camera you have to deal with, worry about, and rejoice over vignetting a lot more than I do. I checked to see whether I had added any vignetting in lightroom and I haven’t, in this photo. Having taken a closer look at this one and the previous one I think that the light falloff at the edges of their faces is a happy accident of lighting.
Adding vignetting in lightroom is often a cheap way of making a photo better (or you can get an old ‘crappy’ lens!) By darkening the edges of the frame you draw the viewer to the center of the frame. I am always surprised (and slightly dismayed) at how often the vignetting slider improves my photos. It’s gone from “hey this photo could use some vignetting” to “let’s add vignetting and see what it looks like.”
I suppose if I had fancy Lightroom 2 with localized corrections I wouldn’t need to rely on the vignetting slider so much. If there’s a bright wall or a distracting street light at the edge of the frame I’ll use vignetting to tame it down. Many times I find myself sadly moving the slider back and forth, wishing that the light in the original photo was different and somehow hoping to compensate for it in post.
This rarely works.
Remember the eye goes to the brightest part of the photo first. Your monkey brain wants the brightest part of the photo to be the subject, and while you can break and flaunt this rule for the sake of breaking it, it can be hard to get a result that looks objectively good.
The real lesson I’ve been learning is that I want my subject to be the brightest part of the photo, for the most part, and not “woo, vignetting!”
Of course like anything else it can be overdone: http://www.mintweddingphotography.co.uk/yorkshire_wedding_photographers_contact.html
Just do a GIS for “wedding photographer” “wedding photography” or anything along those lines. You’ll see tons of examples, both good and bad.
Of course Geof, you need to understand why I wrote what I just did. You said “vignetting” and my brain went “Okay, here comes the brain dump on vignetting!” Pure stimulus-response; what I just wrote is what I think, not what I think you should think. If you like vignetting and want to go “woo, vignetting!” go for it.
March 22nd, 2009 at 3:32 pm
:chuckle: I love it when you go off on a tangent and I’m totally following you, John. :)
April 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am
uh, wow, yes you are. I’ve NEVER been here before, just liked
the title on a blogroll somewhere. I’ve made a few hundred
contact sheets in my day, and my days were in the last century.
Excellent 1 in 100 shot there. but mostly I’m commenting because
you said ‘count on one hand’, and this makes #5.
Hope you’re polydactyl!
April 12th, 2009 at 12:20 am
haha anon, nice catch! What I meant was that I could count the number of my readers that I know about who would get that joke on one hand.
Obviously if I get some new readers I’m going to have to come up with new hands!