The Day Tripper
Some helpful tips offered on summer photos

By Paul W. Ross
Special to the Coastal Point

I’ve been taking photographs for many long years, with various degrees of success. Recently, I’ve had to come to grips with some of the issues of digital photography, as I’ve made the transition from film to digital. With a little understanding of some basic ideas that apply across the board to photography, be they film or digital, you can make your photographs from your trips much more interesting.

There are two basic technologies for obtaining an image; film, which has been around in some form for well over 100 years, and digital, which is of more recent vintage. It is clear that — except for specialized niches — digital photography stands to displace film photography.

Eastman Kodak has moved the majority of their business to digital. They have used their extensive expertise in coating papers to make an excellent line of color printer papers, as well as incredibly convenient cameras and docking/printing stations for home use.

In light of these changes in photography, let’s focus on digital photography in this article.

The most common storage formats for digital images used on the web and in our digital cameras is called JPEG. JPEG is the image compression standard developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, in case you ever wanted to know. It works very well on natural images, such as people, or outdoor scenes, versus images such as cartoons and line drawings.

We need to remember that the JPEG image algorithm is what we call “lossy,” meaning that we achieve data compression, resulting in reduced storage space, by discarding unused or unneeded information.

Why can we get away with this? The eye doesn’t need a lot of fine detail, nor does it need a lot of color information to produce what appears to be a satisfactory image. This is why you can store so many small snapshots on the internal memory in your digital camera and still have them look quite satisfactory.

When you take pictures with a digital camera, you can often set the degree of resolution and compression. For sending photos over the Internet, don’t use any more resolution than you need, and take a more compressed mode, if possible. In this way, the files that you send will be of manageable size, and won’t take so long to send. This is especially important if you have a dialed network connection, but less of a consideration if you have a high-speed connection.

It might also be noted that there are online photographic services where you can send your digital images and have them send you prints in return, even in a convenient album format. This is perfect for our vacation snapshots at the beach. You can also often make these online images available to friends, if you wish. They can then order prints on their own, with most of these services.

Now, what about taking good photographs? Like many things in this world, there are some basics of good photography that apply, from the days of Mathew Brady and wet plates to Eastman Kodak’s film cameras to the most modern digital cameras. These techniques can make for much better photography. They are not carved in stone, so to speak, but provide an excellent starting point for making better photographs.

The classic compositional rule in painting and photography is “the rule of thirds.”

Imagine dividing your image into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, like a tic-tac-toe board. Then place the main subject in one of the four locations where a horizontal line intersects with a vertical line. The left-hand intersections are the best, as most people’s eyes follow from left to right in the image.

This strategy is surprisingly effective. If you look through any magazine or watch any movie film or video with this principle in mind, you will be surprised to find it used so frequently. An off-center subject is much more pleasing than one simply plopped in the center.

A powerful alternative to framing our image in this way is to “crop” the image, showing only the main subject, or maybe only a part of it. Showing only part of the main subject will give you more compositional freedom, probably without losing meaning.

Clean, simple compositions are particularly important for images destined for the Web, where low resolution can compromise the effectiveness of visually busy photos that seemed fine as larger images. Cropping can be done in the computer, after reading it in from your digital camera.

However, keep in mind that we may very well loose some resolution in the results. This is a case for capturing the digital image at a high resolution, as we may throw some of the image away.

Careful cropping lends to less-busy compositions. Some of the image manipulation software that comes with most digital cameras allows this. Even the drug store printing kiosk software allows for easy cropping. Don’t be afraid to use it.

Visual continuity in an image is important if there is more than one visually prominent feature of the photograph. Does the eye naturally move from one feature to the next? Or, are your eyes led out of the picture? Appreciating how the viewer’s eye will move around the image is a useful skill to develop. If the image doesn’t seem sufficiently engaging, revisit our “rule of thirds.”

The “rule of thirds” plays an important part in such things as landscapes. Don’t place the horizon line in horizontal center of the picture! Move the horizon line near the top of the picture frame, or near the bottom. Try to get some clouds in the sky, and consider using a circular polarizing filter or haze filter to darken the sky for greater “punch.” Some advanced digital cameras allow you to alter the color balance. Try a few shots and see what happens.

Now that we’ve made you into professional photographers, you can have the most tremendous summer photographs. But where did I leave my camera, tripod, and the extra batteries?