Sebastião Selgado

Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. He focuses on stories of images which come usually in a sequence, such as these images are from his collection of manual labor, named "Workers."

He tries to convey power through the way his images are framed, such as in the image below of the worker stood by ladders full of people, Sebastiao Selgado shot this image from a low perspective to show that the man is powerful and brave due to the manual labor he is doing.

Selgado uses the same technique as before in this image of a manual laborer protesting against the police.He shot the image from a low angle and also from an angle where the policeman is lower down than the worker, this shows that that worker has power over the military police which are supposed to be powerful themselves.


                                                                      

Selgado also uses the strong black and white images to add to the sense of the oily and dirty, hard labor that these people have to do, because of the deep tones our eye is locked within the image. To the left of this image he shows the worker being sprayed with oil and then the huge explosion in the right third of the frame. this shows that he is working in very dangerous conditions and the composition in this image separates these two thirds to add more impact to the image.

Focal Length and Sensor size

Focal length is a very useful tool, it is basically the amout your lens is "zoomed in."
Lenses come in different focal lengths, some have only one focal length such as 50mm, 105mm, 35mm. These lenses are called Primes and generally have low apertures such as f/1.8 or below.

Other lenses are called varifocal lenses, basically a lens which can zoom in and out (its focal length can be varied) These lenses come in many different focal lengths but the most common which comes with cameras is an 18-55mm lens, this means that its shortest (zoomed out) focal length is 18mm and its longest (zoomed in) focal lenth is 55mm. Also with lenses, the more that you zoom in (the longer the focal length) the depth of field decreases and you can get the same effect of a 50mm at f/2.8 even using a 200mm at f/8.

Sensor size is the size of your sensor compared to a 35mm full frame (standard for film) for example a the cheaper canon dslrs have a sensor called APS-C which basically means its smaller than the "full frame" by 1.6x. This 1.6x size difference means that the lenses on the camera arent actually the focal length that they state. An 18-55mm standard zoom on a full frame camera would be 18-55mm focal length, whereas on an APS-C sensor, the focal length is x by 1.6, therefore the focal length is actually 28.8-88mm.

The disadvantages of a smaller sensor are that if you want wide-angle shots, the lens you buy isnt as wide as you may wish, for example a 10mm fisheye is actually a 16mm and not as wide. The other disadvantage is that the quality sometimes isnt as good as a full frame sensor in low light. The advantage is that this extra "zoom" proves useful in many cases such as for sports photography and wildlife because it can save you alot of money on buying longer focal length lenses.

Exposure Triangle and Mode dials

The exposure triangle is the collaboration or "reciprocity" of the three exposure controls. Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO. Each of these three controls have their own effect such as Aperture changes depth of field, Shutter Speed changes how movement is recorded and ISO increases the cameras sesitivity to light. All of these have one thing in common, they can change the Exposure (amount of light let into the camera.)

The "correct" exposure is an image that has the right balance of light and dark but photographers can purposefully under or over expose to add effect to an image. for example in a night photograph which is trying to show darkness, you would want to under expose by about 1 stop on the exposure meter to portray darkness because you wouldn't want the "correct" exposure as this would be too light. this happens because the camera takes a reading of the scene at an average and compares it to an average light reading.

The exposure meter is located in your cameras viewfinder for easy and quick reference.

 Mode dials are a very useful tool that comes with most cameras, especially every dslr. It is located on the top of the camera body, the mode dial accommodates a variety of different selections which are different with every camera, for example beginner dslrs have a variety of automatic selections such as sports mode and portrait or macro. These selections are not always on more professional dslrs because the photographer can create a "sports mode" by simply changing his shutter speed and macro mode by using a macro lens, it is not the camera which does the macro-ing...

 This is the mode dial on a Canon 600d (semi-pro) as you can see it has alot more automatic modes.









This is an image of the 5D mark 3 mode dial which as only one automatic mode as it is a professional body.

Henri Cartier- Bresson, Image analysis

Image Analysis - Henri Cartier-Bresson


Henri Cartier- Bresson is a famous street photographer from the 1900s. He is known for his black and white, well composed street photography where he follows compositional techniques strongly and used them to convey different emotions in his imagery. 



For example in this image, Henri uses the "fibonacci spiral" or "golden spiral" to convey a sense of depth. His subjects are seeming to be the children but the main subject is actually the geometry its self in the spiral, the children just act as an aid to the naturally occurring lead in lines of the spiral as we start from the first face and follow the spiral "upwards". Our mind naturally follows the spiral all the way to the centre and sometimes we ignore the children due to the strong geometrical shapes.





This photo is from early 1900s  from Henri. The image follows the rule of thirds with the foreground being the main focal point with the two children on the wall, the middle being the lonely child and background being the never ending wall. Lead in lines of the wall and the blocks of floor force you to look into the background of negative space, this creates a sense of loneliness which aids the loneliness of the children and how by climbing the wall, they are trying to escape that.






Here is another lead in line from Mr Cartier- Bresson, his high vantage point creates the sense of elevation and makes us look down on the image. The geometrical shapes and lines of the railings lead us in and the arch frames the rest of the image and directs our attention. It gives a sense of rest as the streets below have people working and he photo is taken higher up as if we are just watching over them.







Henri Cartier-Bresson uses geometric and organic shapes to draw our eyes into the images. He has a strong sense of composition and can convey emotion and feelings through his photography. He uses black and white (mainly because its old film) but this does not divert our attention and he incorporates people within his shapes yet they are not necessarily the main subject.

Composition

Now we have learned to control our camera and how the settings can affect an image, we need to take the next step in image making.

Composition is basically the way an image is constructed visually. There are some "rules" for composition such as the rule of thirds being the main one and other rules like where to place eyes, how to lead the viewers eyes into the subject of the image and to create symmetry within an image. 

The rule of thirds is the most common rule and most easily used. The rule of thirds grid is basically a 3x3 grid which is usually found on the Liveview screen and also on most smartphone cameras.

This grid can help alot when it comes to beginner photography because it can show you where you can place subjects along the intersecting lines to add interest to the image.

Lead in lines are used to add a compelling and eye catching effect to an image which is very subtle, a line or set of lines in the foreground can lead the viewers eye to the main subject. This effect is also achieved by using foreground interest as a framing technique. By having an object (which is plain and out of focus) in the foreground, this can lead the viewers eye to the main subject, such as in these examples below.                                                         

Foreground interest

Foreground interest

Lead in Lines

             

White Balance, Picture Style and RAW

White Balance

White balance is the “temperature of the colours that the camera can record. The camera cannot see where you are in terms of light, for example if you are outdoors the colour temperature/ white balance will be different to when you are inside under tungsten light bulbs.

White balance is measured in degrees kelvin (K) for example Daylight WB is around 5200K and Tungsten (most indoor shots) are around 3200K. If you set the white balance lower than it should be, then your image will come out with a strange colour cast and look unnatural. White balance is set to ensure that the whites in an image are actually white. This effect can be used to create a different type of image, for instance create a warm feeling to a place, like in this photo of the college; it creates a warmer and more inviting feel to the college.

Picture Style

Picture styles are the pre-sets that the camera has internally to change the image in camera, such as black and white where the image is changed to black and white in the camera rather than being changed in post processing later. This has its advantages because there is no need to process the images and can be uploaded quickly, also you can preview your image in a certain picture style. Disadvantages are that the camera chooses which tones to turn black and white, this gives usually a flat image compared to doing this in post processing where you can adjust the levels manually, also the in camera styles cannot be changed back to colour once converted.

This is put into vivid so the colours are more punchy and saturated.

RAW vs JPEG

JPEG images are images out of the camera which have been compressed to save space on a card as for most applications this is fine. When it comes to professional photography you need to use a quality called RAW a lot of the time. RAW images are the whole image without any compression, therefore you get every detail there is out of an image, this is most useful for editing because you can change most settings such as white balance and you can recover an under or over exposed image which is not usually achievable in JPEG.  The disadvantage of RAW is that the file sises are HUGE, for example an 18mp cameras raw file is on average 18mb per image, the Nikon d800 has a 36mp therefore the raw size is around 36 megabytes!

                This is the image recovered in RAW,
all the detail is retained and colours
 are accurate.

This image was recovered in JPEG and the
 colours are off with alot of detail lost and "noise" included.