Recently jkc left a comment about close shots. I am no photography expert. I don't even know all the right terminology! I just take photos! To get closeups, I push the button on my digital camera that has a flower. I also have it on the setting with the person, as opposed to mountain or automatic.
Then I take several photos...I have learned that I am not very steady and that digital cameras really need you to wait a few seconds before pulling away. When I upload the photos from the camera, I open them to see which is the clearest first! Then I start to crop out extraneous background. Sometimes for photos like these, on the settings mentioned above, I then crop to the area I want to focus on. Because the photo size is quite large, cropping works in a similar way to zooming in.
To put them on the blog, I resize them to be 30% smaller. This means they are taking up so much of any allotted space. (I wrote some other reasons as a comment on this post.) Sometimes, I resize to 50% if I have already cropped alot. Or 20% if they still seem too big.
For these photos, I wanted to look at the ageing part of the rose. I took the photo on the settings I mentioned at the top of this post. This would be good for inspiration, but I wanted to go even closer so I don't get distracted by what is around.
So, I cropped so that I am only looking at the rose itself. In this photo, I start seeing things I can't see in the first photo...or without getting my reading/sewing glasses out! The curving lines and overlapping shapes start to intrigue my design sensibilities.
But I really wanted the inspiration photo to be about the decay. So, I cropped even further. And now I am seeing things about the texture and the colour changes at the end of the petals as well as the shadows. If I decided to explore the shadows further, I would turn the photo upside down. If I wanted to look at the interesting folds at the tip of the rose, I would crop even further.
So, I cropped so that I am only looking at the rose itself. In this photo, I start seeing things I can't see in the first photo...or without getting my reading/sewing glasses out! The curving lines and overlapping shapes start to intrigue my design sensibilities.
But I really wanted the inspiration photo to be about the decay. So, I cropped even further. And now I am seeing things about the texture and the colour changes at the end of the petals as well as the shadows. If I decided to explore the shadows further, I would turn the photo upside down. If I wanted to look at the interesting folds at the tip of the rose, I would crop even further.
What sort of inspiration could you get from some of your photos?
1 comment:
Hey, my camera has the same settings :) And that's the same technique I use...set it to macro and click away. I did enjoy your explanation of how you use cropping...now that I have Photoshop Elements, I really need to play with that more.
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