Photography 101 – Everything You Wanted to Know!

Composition, Compositing & More

Composition

the “Rule of Thirds” composition rule showcased with a shipwreck under the starry sky photo

In photography/videography (and painting) composition is the arrangement/placement of the scene’s visual elements and the placement of the main subject of our photo based on various techniques (rules or ratios). Following a composition’s rules generally helps us create a more visually pleasing and balanced photo. The most common composition rule/arrangement goes by the name “Rule of Thirds” in which we split our frame into 3 rows of equally sized parallelograms and our subject is placed carefully on the intersections of the vertical and horizontal guidelines. There are plenty of compositional rules/guidelines, and if you want to capture visually appealing images and you approach photography more as an art than just capturing and saving “memories”, you should really read a lot of books regarding composition. It is as important as knowing how to operate your camera and capture the scene exposed properly.

Compositing

top 2 photos: the original photos, the “ingredients” used to produce the final photo (bottom) using PhotoShop and blending via luminosity masks

Compositing or a composite image, is a photograph that is created by using elements from more than 1 photographs (doesn’t matter if they are photos of the same scene from different moments, or different in angle or focal length, or from a totally different place/subject).

Sometimes a landscape photographer for example captures a very nice remote location, but the weather is bad or the sky is dull (a pure blue cloudless sky is in most cases what we photographers call an uninteresting sky) and since he might not be able to visit again or just wants a visually striking photograph, he can substitute the photo’s sky with a sky from another photo.

Compositing isn’t limited to changing the sky in a photo, or mixing and matching focal lengths and moments in time, there are plenty of other uses such as creating a scene from various subjects/objects shot at different times, places or poses.

Stop/Exposure Value

Very often you’ll hear photographer’s say “reduce your exposure by 1 stop”, “2 stops”, etc. A stop is the doubling or halving of the light captured during an exposure. For example, if you want to reduce the brightness of a captured photo by 1 stop you can cut your exposure time by one half (for example going from 0/100s to 0/200s) by multiplying your exposure times two, or by stopping down (closing) your aperture value by 1 f-stop (from f/2.8 to f/4 for example) or by halving the ISO value (from ISO 400 to ISO 200 for example).

Metering (Matrix/Evaluative, Center Weighted, Spot)

you can see the Light Meter’s indicator next to the 5.5fps text, the “ruler” with the – & + signs on each side

in the top image it is indicating an under-exposure of 2 stops (2 Ev), in the middle image it is indicating a correct (nominal) exposure, and in the bottom it is indicating an over-exposed image (by 1 stop/Ev to be precise)

All digital cameras have a light sensor, a meter that calculates the luminance value/map of our frame/scene. That’s what the scaled bar with a 0 in the middle and plus and minus signs on the sides on your LCD display. It shows you if (depending on the metering mode you’ve chosen) you are exposing your photo properly (proper exposure according to our cameras is when our scene has a neutral, flat looking, not contrast-full overall luminance) or over or under exposing (overexposing will move your indicator towards the + sign, and underexposing will move your indicator towards the – sign).

There are 3 common metering modes on every camera:

• Matrix or Evaluative metering, the meter tries to balance the luminance of the whole scene
• Center Weighted, the meter pays more attention towards having a proper exposure in the middle of the scene
• Spot, the meter only takes account of the luminance values of your subject, that is wherever you have the focus selection rectangle pointing to

White Balance

incorrect White Balance on the top image, you can see a “blue-ish” tint on the whites on the face of our lovely Lemur
correct White Balance made our whites… actually white (bottom image)

Our eyes can distinct which objects are white and “see” them like that under any lighting conditions.
Unlike our eyes, our cameras can’t do that without a “feature” called White Balance.

They too can try to find the correct color on their own, they usually do a pretty good job on the Auto White Balance setting, although sometimes they will miss.

In such cases you can use the White Balance setting to remove any unwanted color casts/tint, etc either by using one of their predetermined settings (presets) if your lighting matches one of those (for example when you are in a room with only tungsten light bulbs as your light source), or use any of the custom techniques (manually set the WB Temperature or shoot something that is pure white and use that as a readout for the White Balance function).