Something Is Wrong With My Picture - Part I

I understand that there are so many reasons why a picture could go wrong because of the many variables involved in taking a picture like light, composition, camera settings, etc. With point and shoot cameras, to take a picture it is as easy as point and... shoot, which makes the massive production of "wrong" pictures a piece of cake.

Among the factors that contribute to mistakes is the tilting where an image is either "falling" to the left or "falling" to the right. It is very easy to make this mistake and there are several theories that explain it but I would say that we are generally concentrated on the subject and we forget the background. The direction of the tilt varies but it seems to tilt more to the left because we grip the camera with the left hand and control it with the right hand, the latter being lighter and delicate.

The end result of a tilted picture is that it transmits a sensation that something is "wrong" and unpleasant.

Let's open a parenthesis here: sometimes, pictures are taken diagonally with the purpose of seeing things from a different perspective. I am not talking about these "tilted" ones because they are in fact diagonal.

Therefore, a picture is considered tilted when the inclination of the horizon line in the picture (imaginary or present) lies between the actual horizon line and those diagonal pictures (that is, the pictures intentionally taken tilted). The objective here, then, it is to correct the tilted pictures or the "wrong" ones.

Let's consider the example below.

Fig 1 - A fisherman in Etretat, France.

Overall, it seems to be a good picture. There is a story to be told there where the center of attention, the fisherman, is having fun in the late afternoon and the whole place is beautiful in its nature.

Nevertheless, he seems to be struggling not only with the fishing rod but also with the fact that he is "falling" to the left. Also, the viewer has the impression that the piece of white rock in the background will fall on his head any minute.

Therefore, this picture sends a message of struggle and pain although taken in a beautiful place simply because it is tilted. Given that our natural reaction is to seek "protection" against pain, we tend to ignore it and go for the next picture.

To start the fix, you have to find an obvious or logical line in the scene that you know is leveled up like the horizon line, the surface of water against the horizon, any kind of frames like doors, windows, edges of buildings, etc. In particular with buildings, you must be careful because they might distorted or be shown in perspective in relationship to the borders of the picture due to the angle that the picture was taken. Use them only as the last resort.

Fig. 2 - On the way to make it straight.

Sometimes, although you feel that the picture is not right, there are no obvious references to guide you in situations like grass and bushes or a forest. In this cases, you just have to guess and interact with the software until you feel that the picture is straight.

In the photo above, the obvious reference is the water line and the next step is to straighten it up to the it becomes something like the Figure 2 where there was around two degrees rotation to the right. The black area displays this.

After the rotation, you just need to crop in the dotted lines to produce the final image as shown in Figure 3.

If this photo would have been taken in such a way that water line would not be visible, another alternative to find its right alignment would be to imagine a vertical line that goes through in the middle of the fisherman's head all way down to the middle of his legs. Although not perfect, in this case it seems that he is quite straight and this approach will work quite well.


This procedure is quite simple but there is a better and even simpler alternative to it: to take the right picture in first place for two main reasons:

1) There will be no need to spend time fixing the picture;

2) Depending the amount to be fixed (namely, the rotation applied), significant portions of the picture will be cropped out which might render it unusable.

Fig. 3 - Now, the fisherman is spending all his energy to do his real job: fish!

The rules to take the right pictures are also very simple and only require a little practice. Instead of pointing and shooting, pointing and shooting, just point to your scene, observe how the scene is being displayed in your display or viewfinder, notice the horizon or feel it whenever it is not there and then - very gently - shoot. You are going to notice much better results coming out from your camera.

A trick to assist you in doing the proper alignment is to set a grid that some cameras have available. This grid usually divides the screen in 3 by 3 rectangles and provide a good reference.

Where do you go from here? Basically, you need some tilted pictures and a software to correct them. Regarding the pictures, I am sure that you must have plenty of them just like everybody has (including myself).

As per the software, the piece of choice par excellence is Photoshop, quite sophisticated and expensive too.

You can download for free GIMP which tries to mimic Photoshop.

Another excellent program to start with and use free of charge is IrfanView with lots of other picture operations.

A good alternative is Picasa, also for free, that performs other operations needed for photographers .

Finally, if you have Windows and you installed Microsoft Office, you must have available the Microsoft Office Picture Manager which is a very simple tool to start with.

The White Balance Case

Some years ago, I was a very happy owner of a Canon SX10IS and taking pictures of almost anything I could find in front of me because this camera was a small wonder (by then, at least for me). It was not that small that I could carry in my pocket, but I still could take it everywhere almost unnoticed.

Talking about silence, I muted all the sounds it produced like clicks and clacks and, because of its LCD that could flipped, I was able to take pictures in any places where pictures were not allowed. Pretending to be carrying the camera on my lap, I would twist its LCD to my convenience, take a brief look at the scene there  and then - click - without a sound! This is something that I cannot do with my DSLR now because the mirror always makes that clack-clack music that anyone around 10 meters can hear, specially if you are indoors.

Just a clarification: I am not a spy nor I have the habit of infiltrating myself in secret places just to document in pictures what the world is doing under the covers! Rather, there are situations where you need to be as discrete as possible so that your subject continues acting normally or you don't want to disrupt the moment like when you are in a concert (provided they allow you to take pictures, see my post about Japan), a mass or a funeral, you name it.

Point made, let's continue.

I am going to talk about white balance and how it changed my photography life, if such a technical detail would be able to accomplish such a feat! Therefore, let me just go a bit down to details and at least say - in lame words - what is white balance if you are interested and/or you don't know it. Otherwise, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.


In digital cameras, right after you press the shutter button and before you see the resulting picture in your camera screen, lots of things happen with the light that came in through the lenses, hit the sensor, which produced gazillions of tiny electric impulses, all of them processed by a small computer that produced the image, which is finally written to your memory card, while being displayed on your screen.

Roughly comparing, the lenses are your eyes, the sensor is the retina, which produces electric signals to your computer - sorry, to your brain - which converts these signals into a sensation that you would describe as an image and finally keeps it somewhere as part of your personality and experience in life.

Although similar, let's not talk about how complex or simple a human vision system is in relationship to the camera's; instead, let's just say that both the brain and the camera's processor take the signals and transform them into the best images possible by using "past experiences". Before you jump in disgust, let me explain what is the meaning of past experiences.

Our brain has years and years of experience on how to render an image: it knows exactly what is the meaning of a crooked image, a distorted line, the interpretation of colors under various environments, among other abilities. One of these is to tell us that snow is white and represent it as a white sensation even though together with the snow there is the Sun, shadows, trees and other objects to make the scene very complex.

The processor of our camera, on the other hand, also has years and years of research and its engineers made all the best to feed the processor with tricks to produce a nice image. But, this is not enough and, in many situations, the resulting images are just a composite of the average signals produced by the sensor which makes, for instance, the white of the snow to become blueish. Basically, a camera does not know that snow is white and confuses everything.

That's why cameras have those Scene Modes where we tell the camera that we are photographing snow and not the sky.

In essence, by choosing the Snow Scene, we forced the camera to "balance the white" to produce white snow. In the same way, there are many other settings like the yellows produced by some lights, the intense cast produced by the Sun, etc.

Another point made, let's continue once more.

At that time (that is, some years ago), white balance was just a synonym for Tungsten, Sun, Clouds, etc, which I liked to play to see the results in my pictures. Look at this one taken in Rio de Janeiro from the back of a narrow, crammed, popular and delicious restaurant in Santa Tereza. Since this restaurant was formerly a regular single level house, I had to go through its kitchen to be able to reach the balcony in the back. I conveniently placed my camera at the edge and clicked:

Santa Tereza in Rio de Janeiro, a beautiful place with houses of all types, delicious restaurants and pleasant view from Rio.

Being a point and shoot camera, the SX10IS only produced JPG format pictures and, consequently, the white balance is defined at the moment of the click; you can correct it to some extent later in post-processing, but most of the light and color richness is lost when the JPG file is written to the memory card. This is one of the reasons why I now regularly take RAW pictures but this is a subject for a later discussion.

Anyway, the picture above most probably froze a tungsten setting for the white balance as a result of one of my experiments. The other pictures of the same subject with different settings I discarded. If you pay attention, you are going to notice that there were no such thing as green nor blue lights at that place and it later became clear to me that I was either a genius by being able to capture such an image or I did something very wrong that coincidentally produced something interesting. That raised me a flag that there were more things in Photography that I was ignoring.

I haven't fully recovered from this "The White Balance Incident" when I took this other picture at the Rideau River, almost needless to say that it was at the sunset:

Rideau River, Manotick, Ontario, Canada.

Wow! I was amazed by the result! And all I did was to set the camera on the tripod, fiddle with the white balance, point and shoot. That was it! At that pace, I could be a great photographer!

Well, not so fast, buddy! It was too good to be true and I decided to learn some things about Photography. Bottom line, in both cases I just pressed a button. Not much more than that. Ah! I forgot to tell a secret: I always used the camera's auto mode. Yes, Sir! In capitals: Auto Mode!

Something was wrong and I found it out very soon when I seriously started getting the technicalities of a great picture. I was focusing my success on two pictures and I conveniently forgot thousands of others that were full candidates to be thrown in the garbage bin.

The end of this chapter is that I knew nothing about Photography and that these pictures were just good  accidents. Like any accidents, they don't happen when we want; they present themselves unexpectedly and we need to be prepared for them in order to take the most of the situation. For instance, these two moments above will never repeat themselves again maybe in my lifetime. I was fortunate to be there and I know that there are other different moments in different places where I could take profit as well. But, these ones, most probably, never again!

Let's see one example. I took this picture in Prague (I don't know the name of this church).

This is the original image. The orangy/yellowy tones of the walls almost obliterate the presence of other source of lights. 

After the white balance correction, the blue and green source of lights  are very clear, specially at the top of the church, at its entrance and on the building at the left. Also, the blue sky is very clearly seen.

It makes a big difference before and after applying a simple white balance correction as the right colors of the scene start to show up. In particular, it is amazing to see the deep blue sky as opposed to the black background from the original picture.

My suggestion to you, reader, if you are seriously interested in Photography and you are learning like I am learning, is to read and practice a lot. Items like white balance, light, color, aperture, depth of field, exposure time, ISO, file formats and much more are the bare minimum to give a solid background to start to understand how a great picture can be taken.

It was in one of these readings that I stumble over the RAW format, its advantages and disadvantages. Next time, I will tell you how I managed to take RAW pictures with my Canon SX10IS. I am sorry? Did I hear you saying that you took RAW pictures with this point and shoot camera? You gotta be kidding!...

For more and far detailed information about white balance, please refer to these places:

A very technical discussion for geeks:
Cambridge in Colour

Another great article less technical:
Ron Bigelow

A Branch Story

Were all branches created equal?

Actually, I am not talking about branches that are thick or the ones that are long or even the ones that are as curvy as a snake slithering on the sand.

I am talking about the purpose of a branch on a tree growing by spreading its branches and from the branches there are other branches that finally branch again into leaves. Ultimately, the leaves, together with the roots, are the collectors of the life that keeps the tree alive. And the branches are the complex carriers of this life.

Slowly, the branches grow old, their leaves fade and fall. But, life moves on with the tree with the new branches and leaves.

Interesting to observe how this cycle goes on and on specially when we freeze this action in a picture. We can see there young branches, dead ones, leaves of all kinds... The trick is to observe them closely. But, how, if our lives run much faster then the growth of a single leaf, let alone a branch or even a tree?

A tree can be right in front of our window and yet we only notice its growth when we finally realize: "Hey! Look how tall is this tree! It was this small three years ago!"

A tree is a microcosm in itself. We can admire the whole, the shape, the colors. Branches are others microcosms within that microcosm with again their shapes, disposition on the tree... We could continue with the leaves, then with fibers and so on.

As a photographer, I tend to observe things around me whenever I am driving or walking. Even a few steps that I take from my car on the parking lot to the office of one of my clients is a rich opportunity for different shots. I look at the sky, the clouds, the disposition of the trees on the road, the passers by, the way the Sun hits objects.

For instance, when I arrive at the client, the Sun is in front of me and the shapes, the colors and the shades are completely different from the time I would leave the client in the afternoon even though the Sun is still in front of me. But, not only because the morning sunlight is different from  the afternoon sunlight and occasionally the sunset as well, but also because in the afternoon I am walking in the opposite direction which makes me see the same objects as in the morning from a different angle and perspective.

That morning, although I always crossed the same section of the road to reach the client's office, maybe because it was late and the Sun was hitting in a different angle, I noticed this small enclave of bushes and, there, the branch that started this whole conversation. When I spotted it, I immediately sensed that everything seemed perfect for the right picture! But, I had no camera that day... When would it be the next time that the light conditions would be the same or better?

I know, I know... A good photographer always carries a camera, no matter what, because the perfect opportunity rarely shows again if you miss it. Just like the lightning does not strike the same place twice. Or, at least, they say it. If you don't want to carry your bulky regular camera, have a smaller one like a good point and shoot to profit from these situations. Bottom line, it is much better to have on hand 100% of a picture that is 80% alright in quality than a 0% of a picture that is 100% perfect! Right?

Anyway, next time I took my camera but the light conditions were not good. And so, the next time. Fifteen days later, always carrying my camera, I finally took my picture... which resulted in a whole world of disappointment after working it three minutes in Photoshop:

The background was distracting and did not completely emphasize the branches. And, worse, my beloved branches, the reason of this whole digression here seemed flat, without life, almost colorless. That is it! Colorless! Black and white!

Just to recapitulate, I opened my picture in Camera Raw (I always take pictures in RAW format) and performed the initial tweaking by correcting the white balance, correcting the lens distortion, touching a bit the blacks and, finally, the usual clarity and vibrance. I didn't touch much the saturation colors because I noticed it would be almost of no help. However, I experimented the Convert to Grayscale option and sensed that something good might come out of it. As a matter of suggestion, never convert to gray scale there because the corresponding adjustment layer is by far more powerful.

After opening the image in Photoshop, I immediately started with the Black and White adjustment layer and played with the settings. First, the Auto setting, which was just passable. But, the Infrared setting exploded the picture! I adjusted the colors here and there and I got the result I wanted.

The final steps were to apply the Levels adjustment layer to get that punch, the Curves adjustment layer to boost a bit the contrast and a High Pass to sharpen the picture just enough.

Look at the result!

Now, I can see the branches almost graciously dancing with plenty of life, so much that a friend of mine even saw a voluptuous intercourse going on!

I have to admit: these branches are different from any other branches!

Japan

To me, above all, Japan represents a mystique combination of elements as simple as geishas, the pink peach flowers, the Fuji, the buddhist temples, the very peculiar way Japanese act and think, its tradition...


It's an idealized, romantic and dreamy way of thinking of Japan and I am deliberately ignoring its technological and advancements side.


I have never been there (one day I will do it) and, perhaps, these concepts might change. Until then, let me also appreciate its music that I recently had the opportunity to enjoy during a concert with traditional Japanese instruments.


There it was the delicate koto that my absolute musical ignorance would describe as a versatile harpa played, comme il faut, by a geisha.

Interesting is that the player can change the sound produced by the koto by simply moving the holders of the strings back and forth just like they would be sliders in a computer program.

Then, the mesmerizing taikos, with their vigorous sound resembling war beats.

On the Photography side, aside from the few pictures above, I managed to get a few spectators angry with me and my camera as it was so noisy as compared to the delicate sound of the koto and even disturbing when the rumbling taikos were in action. The result was an ashamed photographer and a camera back in its case. 


But, I guess, you can get a bit of the whole idea.