Snapshot versus Fine Art, Part 1

We’ve looked at and worked with the differences between ‘found image’ photography and ‘staged scene’ photography – you are currently working on a series of staged scenes as a narrative.

Another major distinction among types of photography is the snapshot versus the fine art photo, or more simply snapshot versus photograph. One common critique question, heard in art schools everywhere: “Is this photo a snapshot or a photograph?”

What are the differences between a snapshot photo and a fine art photo? A snapshot, of course, is casual, quick, and sort of documentary. It is the speedy photo of kids during a party. The snapshot is informal and spontaneous.  A photograph (or fine art photo), on the other hand, is carefully composed and exposed for artistic reasons, printed with special care, and thoughtfully made at every level of the creative process.  A fine art photo is considered and planned.

Here’s a couple of photos that have the classic ‘snapshot’ look:

Here is a step-up from raw snapshot, a 'snapshot-sketch' of a landscape (Warren Falls, VT)

This photo shows promise... I used it to test exposures and croppings while at the scene considering how to represent and express the richness and depth of the varying water, evergreen, and rock textures. And here is my fine art photo of the same location:

The sketch was impulsive, just a rough test of the scene. I used it to help get to the fine art photo (hence the term ‘snapshot-sketch’). The second was purposeful. It was composed, cropped, toned, refined, and revised. The second one is headed straight for my b/w landscape portfolio.  

You could, of course, for artistic reasons create a series of photos that take on the casual, unretouched appeal of a snapshot. But if you’re doing so on purpose, then you are thinking through the images and designing them for artistic reasons. It’s only when you don’t think it through and do no planning that you really truly have a set of casual, quick snapshots.

And you might also find that there is such a thing as a great, beautiful snapshot – that lucky moment when everything falls together and you get a surprise, an excellent image. And there is also the horrible fine art photo, where the image, its meanings or symbolism, or technical flaws all add up to create yuck. Just because a photo is fine art doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because a snapshot wasn’t intentional doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Meanwhile we all like photography because taking photos is fun, often speedy (compared to an oil painting anyway!) and often memorable. If you’re like me then even while making ‘fine art’ photos you are taking thousands of snapshots… at parties, on vacation, etc. Additionally, with software tools like Photoshop and GIMP, it’s very easy to crop, compose, retouch, alter and adjust almost every aspect of any photo. Many snapshots can be turned into fine art photos. So we must be careful not to think of snapshots as polar opposites of fine art photos. It’s more like subtle degrees of difference from a fairly casual photo to a very planned one.

As a painter, I like to compare snapshots with rough sketches, whereas the fine art photo – wholly composed and considered – is more like the finished oil painting. One leads to the other, and sometimes, the finished paintings create a storm of ideas that become sketches and turn into another artwork later on. These feedback cycles among snapshots and fine art photos produce a lot of the creativity of photography today.

Clarifying the conundrums… a look at the camera settings and processes that yield the look of a snapshot versus the look of an art photo:

Camera Settings for…	Snapshot aka ‘Casual’	Fine Art aka ‘Planned’
note:	‘often accidental’ and ‘relies on other’s engineering’	‘often purposeful’ and ‘relies on artist’s choices’
Exposure	Auto	Measured and selected
Signal to Noise	Somewhat Noisy, medium to poor signal	High signal, sharp and smooth when needed
Lighting	Found and/or Direct Flash	Found, Directional Flash (bounced, reflected, etc.), Controlled or Added Light, or waited for the best natural light.
White Balance	Auto	Custom, or Selected Specific WB
Focus	Auto = averaged, a little soft	Pin Sharp if needed
Shutter Speed	Auto	Selected as needed for action, motion blur, time lapse
F-Stop	Auto or does not apply (snapshot fixed lens camera)	Selected for specific depth of field.
ISO	400, 800 or greater	Usually lower than 400

Here’s a slightly different way of thinking about this, full of value judgments but you get the idea…

Type of Photo	Results for Snapshot Settings	Results for Fine Art Setting
Portrait	-          One light source, harsh -          Red Eye -          Focus not on eyes -          Odd microexpressions (shutter speed too fast) -          Tones and skin colors feel too orange or too green-yellow (auto WB) -          Harsh edge or rim shadows (direct flash) -          Background cluttered -          Person looks worse in photo than in real life	-          Great light = mood, beauty, expression -          Eye highlights add lively feeling -          Focus crisp on eyes -          ‘Human’ expressions -          Colors feel natural -          Softened shadows or reflections (bounced light) -          Background composed -          Person probably looks better in photo than in real life.
Landscape	-          Harsh or Midday Lighting -          Odd crops, no composition -          Found view with extreme ease of access (anyone could find this location) -          Unretouched -          Bland tones or colors, photo doesn’t remind of the scene -          Narrow d.o.f. -          Clouds have blinkies, or shadows have crunges. -          Horizon Crooked -          Image is boring to look at; I’d rather go for a hike and see the world on my own.	-          Magic Hour lighting (dawn or dusk) -          Patient, composed scene, no visual distractions -          Scoped out the best location and waited for the light (more unusual or original view) -          Color retouched or saturated. -          High f-stop = long depth of field, a lot in focus. -          Widest color and tonal ranges (WB) -          Horizon is level (tripod). -          Photo is rich and interesting to look at, I’m happy spending time with it.

And finally there’s subject matter: the fine art photo can have any subject matter, but it’s my experience that the snapshot photo tends to be familiar scenes, and people that you know – the purpose of the snapshot is usually to celebrate and remind you of these scenes or people. For example, a photo of children during a birthday party, or a group of friends at the top of a mountain peak after a long hike. In both cases, the photo’s purpose is mainly ‘remember this? This was a special event that we shared.’ We assume that such snapshots are mostly accurate representations of the scene, event, or people. We don’t make the same assumption about the fine art photo, where we expect the artist to manipulate the imagery to create meaning.

Extra Credit Project: Create two photos of the same scene, but make one of the photos look like a casual snapshot or snapshot sketch, and make the other appear to be a fine art photo. One should be casual and unplanned, where the other should seem planned, purposeful, and thoughtful. Place the two images together in one digital file, and submit it to our shared Picasa album. NOTE: This project is optional. Extra credit will be provided to those who complete this project.

Example:

Mini-Portfolio: Staged Scene with Narrative

Here's the full description of your next big homework project... 


Mini-Portfolio: Staged Image Narrative

due date: Monday March 29^th

Description: in contrast to the 10x100 series of found images where you semi-randomly found an image and then adapted your camera settings to it, in this series you will create a set of staged images, where you arrange, set-up, organize and light all qualities of the photo according to your artistic vision.  In other words, you’ll adapt the world to your artistry. Furthermore, across the entire staged series, your photos should reveal a narrative. This series requires a set of at least ten photos, staged, that together tell a story. The most successful series will work well together as a group, even though each photo will also work well on its own. This project is not a technical exercise... it will be graded on originality, artistry, and good use of technique to meet the needs of your artistry.

What’s a narrative? A narrative is a sequence of images that reveal a story. It could be a complex plot with many variables, or, a simple progression of an abstract design idea.

How do you stage the photo? Some considerations and questions...  


Main subject matter. What or who is your single most important character in the scenes that you’re creating? Is it the same character in each of the ten images that you create, or does the main character change from image to image? 

Supporting cast members. A prop is a symbol. Everything in your image helps create the meanings and communications of the picture. How do the supporting cast members contribute to the scene? Do any detract from the scene (if so, remove them).   

Background imagery. How complex or how simple should you make the background? Should it be in focus, or outside the depth of field and out of focus? Should it be many, a few, or only one single pattern? Should it be a block of one color, a gradation of one color, or mixtures of many colors? 

The space.  Should the scene's space be tight and claustrophic, or wide and open?

The Lighting. Where is the lighting? What kind of light sources are present? Can you alter the light sources? Can you or should you add or remove any light sources? Should you use direct light, or a combination of direct and reflected light? Adding light: there’s many options, from lighting a candle to bouncing light off a ceiling using a desk lamp, to using a flashlight, to flooding a room with theatre spot lights or specialty photo lights. Additionally, each light could be a gentle or specific color – why not add a piece of blue mylar between the light and your subject? Removing light: you can block a window with a dark piece of fabric, shade, or shutters. You could have a friend hold a piece of cardboard in the way of a light, to set its direction to a new angle. Reflected light: you can soften a lot of shadows by bouncing some light into the scene using a piece of white poster board, a colored piece of fabric, or a mirror

Special Effects. Will you need multiple exposures, color manipulations, or significant retouching? Use your recipe list to keep track of the operations you perform on each image.

The Overall Style. Each of the ten images should look similar enough that they can work together as a series, but different enough that each image stands well on its own. 


Here are some examples of narrative series from professional photographers: 

Exactitudes: composite portraits by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek


The Veil Project: staged portraits of women with veils, by Erin Mulvehill


Exploded. composites by Adam Voorhes

 
Works by Matthew Albanese. Talk about creating complex staged scenes!!!!! Click on the gallery on the right of the screen. 


Gregory Crewdson. click on the pics on the right for more images. 



Time to start brainstorming! You have this week and the week after Spring Break plus a few more days to create your project.

Know Your Lighting

Now there's a nice rainbow! (As seen last June, from Williamstown, looking towards Mt. Greylock.) As a landscape painter and when doing nature photography, my teachers often said you’ll get a great image if the sun is at your back – in other words, when light spreads out and illuminates the landscape in front of you. This tactic works for many scenes, but of course, not for every landscape – if you did a sunset image, probably the sun is in front of you. At sunset did you turn around and look behind you to see the orange-pink glow on the world? That glow is often referred to by artists as ‘Magic Hour’ since it only occurs for a short time during dusk, and dawn. And what about rainbows, when the light must be far in front of you? Really the point of this kind of advice is this: it always helps to be aware of when, where, and what kind of lighting you are using. Know your lighting.

Some things to know about your lighting...

Color Temperature: this you already know, via our white balance exercise.

Location: Where are the Light Sources? Light can come from any direction. In art we tend to group it simply as scenes that are front lit, side lit, silhouette, rim lit, flash (direct), flash (bounced).

What kind of light: Light can also be direct, meaning from an obvious light source. Sometimes a light source is bounced from one place to another, such as beamed into a mirror and then onto your subject matter, and sometimes light is bent through a material like water. These situations are called Direct Light (common), Reflected Light (uncommon), Refracted Light (rare, like rainbows)

Today’s exercise: create a still-life scene with one direct light source, and some simple subject matter. Then take a series of ten photos of the scene where you systematically move the lighting and add reflections, thus demonstrating and experiencing each main type of lighting. Put the photos together to create one composite image wherein you can easily compare the differences of one lighting scenario to the next.
        Hints: You’ll need to set this up so that you can easily adjust the lighting. You will need a light, such as a desklamp or clip lamp. Use only that light. Turn off all other lights. You'll also need a reflector such as a mirror or piece of white posterboard or paper. To create reflections, hold or place the reflector opposite the light source and angled towards the still life... experiment to see if you can soften the shadows. It helps to put the camera on a tripod, if you have one. Use the same scene throughout, but alter the lighting for each photo. You may need to adjust the exposure to avoid blinkies and crunges. Make sure of course that you’ve set your white balance for the best result for your scene.
      Create the following directions of light: silhouette (the light is behind the subject matter, pointing towards your camera), silhouette with an additional reflected light (I used a mirror for the examples above), side lit right, side lit right w/reflection added, side lit left, side lit left + reflected light, 3/4 lit (light is in front, somewhat above and somewhat to the side), 3/4 lit + reflection, bottom lit (lit comes from below, the 'spooky campfire' look), and bottom-lit + reflected light. It's not required but if you'd like to do light from above (Top Lit), you could add it in and it's top lit + reflection version too. Be sure you note what kind of light you use, and then label each direction of light source that you use.
      Your final result should be similar in format to this image (although you might choose to use color)...

               

 

Understanding Color: Part 3, Color Space and Color Profiles

So by now you know that you can adjust the color with some basic software controls such as Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance. Hopefully you also played around and found Photo Filter, Curves, and Channel Mixer. And you also saw that you could adjust the color depending on your camera’s White Balance settings related to your light source, matching the light source to get as close as possible to what you see, versus mixing the WB and the light source up on purpose for artistic effect.

I urge you to use any of these controls with artistry, with some subtlety related to the intent of your image-making. It's frighteningly easy to overdo with such powerful camera and software color controls, making an image that appears incredibly unnatural.

Meanwhile, we want color to be consistent across our entire photography process – in other words, it’s great when the colors in your photograph look excellent on the computer screen, and look like the same excellence when you print the photo or submit it to a website. Unfortunately often the photo looks different from camera, to screen, to printer. If this happens to you a lot, then you are probably experiencing a color management problem.

There’s no easy way to solve color management problems. And to solve them, you’ll need some more detailed technical information. And actually technical information regarding color for computers, software, and equipment like monitors and scanners and printers is a time-consuming task at best, and at worst, a total mess. There’s no simple international standard for color management, and there’s many different ways that software programs and hardware devices define and use color, and literally thousands of different products to negotiate. There’s a lot of kinds of math involved to get your software to reproduce and mimic various kinds of color – an immense amount of engineering between taking the digital photo and printing it. Thus a most important rule is this:

                READ YOUR OUTPUT. READ YOUR PRINT. READ YOUR MONITOR.

See what the photo looks like, i.e., ‘Read’ the photo. If you intend to put the image up on a screen, website, or social network, then test the image by putting it on the website (you can always delete it if it looks crummy). It can be a little costly, but it also can really pay off to make a test print with your printer. But don’t just leave it online or on your desk, look at it. First, is it too grainy or sharp enough? Is the exposure correct? Third, are the colors comparable to what you have on your screen on your computer, when you're looking at the picture in your image-processing software?

If it looks the same and looks great, then leave it alone, change no settings, and move on. But if it doesn’t appear the same in your image-processing software and then online, or onscreen versus in print, then you can be sure that some odd color management translations are happening between the Color Space, and the Color Profiles. What you need to do to resolve the problem color changes is called Color Management and Color Calibration.

To get to Color Management you need to know some basic jargon:  

Color SPACE (often called Working Space, or Reference Space) this is generally independent of your equipment.  Color Spaces can be big or small. The bigger they are, the more color definitions they can include, and thus the bigger the range of colors you get to work with. The smaller they are, then the smaller the range of colors you can use. So, if you have a photo set to a big color space with lots of colors, you may encounter problems when a printer or website has to get rid of data and translate it to their smaller color space. Color space today comes in three main types: sRGB, a smaller color space; Adobe RGB, basically a medium-sized color space;  and PhotoPro RGB, quite large. You won’t see the difference between sRGB and PhotoProRGB if you don’t have a computer monitor that can handle the wide range of colors of the PhotoProRGB definitions.

You can check the color space when you have the photo open, you can check the color Mode (in Photoshop it’s under menu Image – Mode). Simply select RGB. When you save a photo with Photoshop, you can also select the color space of the photo. Here’s what this would look like – look for the checkbox marked sRGB:

See the checkbox that says ICC Profile: sRGB? Just make sure it is checked.

You can also change the color space in Photoshop using the Edit --> Color Settings menu. A dialog menu will come up like this:

The color space here should be the same as when you save the file... make sure it says 'preserve embedded profile' for each of the three color management policies too.  [GIMP users... I'm not sure where this kind of control is in GIMP... have you found it? If yes please specify in your comment.]

Feel free to click on the drop-down menus and see what the choices are. For instance under RGB you'll find sRGB, ProPhoto, etc. My advice to you is this: always use sRGB as your main color space. Anything other than sRGB is way out of range for most compact digital cameras today. Also, sRGB’s by far the most common color space used online and in print today. If you want or need a much bigger color space, then go with ProPhoto RGB… if and only if you have access to a ten-thousand dollar printer, specialty inks, an excellent digital SLR camera, and a fancy computer monitor, and archival printer paper. You might get to that level of investment if you work in print media, or work as a professional art photographer. Otherwise, for color management you really only need to make sure your photos and your software are set to sRGB color space.

Now, to make matters more complex...

Color PROFILE (ICC profiles for each piece of equipment that you’re using) Each piece of equipment that you use, such as your camera, your monitor, and your printer, has its own color profile. The Color Profile tells your computer how each piece of equipment can work in or out of the range of colors defined in your Color Space. If you have a monitor, a printer, a camera, and a scanner, you may be dealing with at least four different color profiles that all relate differently to the color space.

Color Management tells your computer how to negotiate all of the color profiles of your equipment within the color space that you’re using. Color CALIBRATION is when you match the settings of your camera or scanner to your monitor and printer, website, or other output. When they all match as closely as possible, then your system is calibrated, and usually your photo looks the same on screen as it does when printed.  

This is a lot more difficult than it seems like it should be… Windows is a bit different than Mac OSX, for how to set the color space of your monitor. Fortunately you can use an automatic device to calibrate and test your monitor. For example, here’s my "XRite EyeOne" color calibrator on my laptop’s computer screen:

It’s basically automatic, and makes sure that your monitor is all in order. It plugs in with a USB cable, and syncs up with it's own software, and then sets the ICC Color Profile. A calibrator like this is really the only way to make sure that what you see on screen is true to what other people using their own calibrated screens would see. Besides EyeOne, other affordable brands are Pantone Huey, and ColorVision Spyder. Both are mouse-sized doodads with a tiny visual sensor in them that responds to the light emitted by your monitor. If you're serious about making sure that graphic designers, publishers, and printers get the colors in your images just right, then it is a wise idea to spend $100 on a decent color calibrator.

Another Pro Tip: If you’re sending your images away for someone else to print – then ask them what color settings you should use to get the most consistent results. A good printer will tell you what settings are best for their printing equipment. Same with a good website that needs photos. Ask them what color space or color profiles they need, and then DO WHAT THEY SAY. Color is a complicated set of balances, and when any printer has a specific series of settings that make pictures look their best, then just follow their directions. Even if you have your images set to sRGB, if they say they need ProPhoto or they send you their own ICC profile, then use their method, not your own personal favorite.  

Understanding Color: Part 2, Light Sources and White Balance

We photographers depend on the presence and absence of light to create our images.

But all light is not the same.Every light source has an average color range. Moonlight is a different color than sunlight. Incandescent light bulbs are warmer than most fluorescent light bulbs. Light from a candle is significantly yellower than light from most LED flashlights, which are often kind of bluish.

You can respond to and control your relationship with the light by adjusting the White Balance of your camera. Selecting a correct White Balance will leave the neutrals neutral. In other words, the photo will look a lot like what you see with your own two eyes. This is usually our goal: match the white balance settings of our cameras to the color temperature that we really see in the world. To say that what you’ve photographed looks like what you see with your eyes, that the white balance is matched, is to say that the photo is ‘color accurate’ or 'color correct.'

If you haven’t set your White Balance controls for the lighting you’re using for your photo, then you may end up with neutral areas of a photo appearing too vivid or unusually colorful. This is often an accident, but you could adjust the White Balance for artistic effects… if the colors are more vivid than what you can see, then you must be being an expressive artist – same if they are highly desaturated, or mainly grayscale (which isn’t like what we see in the world but can be very beautiful). Selecting the right White Balance for your artistic needs is the first step towards being more artistic with your use of Light, and being able to select the kind of artistry that you’d like to be rather than making images by default of whatever automatic settings are used by your camera.

How light is defined: Light is defined by it’s Color Temperature. For example, bright daylight is defined as 5500k, whereas the flash of your camera may have a temperature of 5400k, an incandescent light bulb 3,000k, a Fluorescent light bulb at 4200k, a cloudy day might be 6,000k and in shade, perhaps 7,000k or even 8,000k if it’s foggy. The ‘k’ stands for the Kelvin Temperature Range (if you want to read all about using the Kelvin to measure color temperatures, black-body radiators, etc., then click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature). It used to be that you had to select a particular kind of film to match the color temperature, for example, using a Tungsten film if you had hot halogen lighting in the studio, or Fujichrome film if you wanted vivid outdoor action photos. Instead of having to swap out the film to match the lighting, today’s digital cameras have a button. The button alters a series of settings that you can use to match your White Balance with the lighting in the world around you.

In a Nikon digital SLR, there’s just a little button on the top of the camera, marked WB, and you can scroll through some settings easily.With many non-SLR cameras, you may find a menu screen full of 'scenes' such as Snow, Candle, Sunlight, Landscape, Portrait, Cloudy, etc. Each of these is likely changing the white balance to compensate for the typical color temperatures found in each kind of scene.

So here’s your mini-assignment: take a set of pictures of the same object or person, but using different white balance settings. It's easiest to see the differences if you use an object that is light in value. Then cut and paste the pictures to make a composition like this one:

Use the text tool so that to label what kind of light source you’re using, and then label each image for how you changed the white balance in your camera. As a result you now have a composite Reference Photo that you can rely on to compare and contrast with while you make images – do you need to make an image feel warmer, when using an indoors fluorescent light source? Then shift the white balance to Daylight or Flash. Do you need it cooler and more mysterious? Then shift the wb to Incandescent... and so on.

Label and submit your composite image to our shared Picasa album. 

Understanding Color: Part 1 Basic Terms and Concepts

Color terms: Hue Saturation Value

Hue: the name of the color (or in digital photo, the numbers) Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet

Saturation: the brightness or chroma of the color, how much grey versus how much pure hue. Especially vivid colors tend to be highly saturated.

Value: the lightness and darkness of the hue. A black-and-white photo uses no hue, and only relies on value.

Warm vs. Cool Colors: a Warm Color is in the red-orange-yellow range, such as fire. a Cool Color is in the blue-green-black range. For example, the right block is said to be cooler than the left warm gray:

RGB and CMYK. Cameras and printers rely mainly on RGB (Red Green Blue) systems to describe color, and sometimes on CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). RGB refers to what happens when you mix Red, Green, and Blue lights together. If you look closely at the pixels on your computer monitor, you’ll see that they are tiny groups of red green and blue dots. CMYK is mainly used as a color model for printing colors, and is increasingly uncommon.   

RGB Color and How to Number the Colors. Each range of Hue in this model is assigned a number, usually from 0-255. So, zero Red and zero Green and zero Blue combined – no color at all – equals black, where 255 Red and 255 Green and 255 Blue is white. All the other colors are a range between these extremes. Check out the numbers within this menu box, which is the 'Color Picker' (the little eyedropper tool), from Photoshop:

               

You can of course move the slider arrows up and down, and see how the numbers move along with you through the spectrum. If you click on 'only web colors' then you'd see a chunky chart showing a more limited range of colors. In GIMP these controls are similar.[if you'd like to learn a lot more about RGB color, then click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model ]

Here is probably the easiest way to change all of the colors in your photo at one time: the Hue/Saturation control (under Photoshop menu Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation)

The image unchanged, from a photo of a sun dog:

The image altered severely with the H/S controls, same photo:

This is now extremely saturated, the Hue was shifted down, and the image was darkened. For almost all photos, I find that I rarely alter the Hue, and tend to use the LEVELS controls for lightness/darkness. Thus this control is used mainly for saturation, about which I find that increasing the saturation above the number 18 is just way too much for naturalism, and becomes expressionistic instead.

Another basic color control is the Color Balance menu. (in Photoshop it's under Image --> Adjustments --> Color Balance). It looks like this:

Here I simply slid the balance far more into the red, making the entire image a lot pinker. If you're curious, here is the photo I was toying with to show you these color controls. I hope you'll agree that it's a pretty picture:

Watch for sun dogs like this in the Berkshires... they happen here all the time thanks to the mountains, the moisture in the air, and the angle of the sun at sunrise and sunset.

As far as thinking about color goes, I think it's good to keep in mind the variables involved. Some basic Color Design Questions can be

-          (Value) Should this image, or part of it, be Lighter or Darker?

-          (Hue) Should this image or part of it be Warmer or Cooler?

-          (Saturation) Should this image or part of it be More Vivid or More Grey?

Some Simple Ways to Alter Color Relationships:

-          Levels (you already know about this... and maybe you also found the Color Histogram)

-          Hue/Saturation control (the best!!)

-       Color Balance control
-       Apply Color Photo Filter (easy)

-          Create a new Layer, Paint it with a color, and then set the Layer to mainly transparent (fun)

HDR and Layering updates

For those of you looking for more information about creating Layers to make an HDR image, I came across this tutorial and thought it was pretty clear -- w/a little effort you can translate the main ideas (layer masks) to GIMP if needed.


http://digital-photography-school.com/hdr-style-results-using-layers-in-photoshop

Enjoy!