Joanne Maly

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

How The Beauty of Geometry and Symmetry Can Enhance Your Compositions

Geometry and symmetry do not sound like photographic techniques, more the sort of thing you would learn from a maths book.

Mathematical they might be, but they are also beautiful, powerful compositional tools that can make images really stand out from the crowd. Symmetry and geometry are two techniques that work well on their own and perhaps even better when combined.

Today we are going to take a look at these two powerhouse compositional tools.

What Are Geometry and Symmetry?

Let's start with symmetry in photography. Symmetry is created when either the top and bottom, left, right or diagonals are mirror images of each other. Symmetry by its very definition requires you to think outside of the “rule of thirds”. Even to a seasoned photographer, it can feel unnatural to use a center-point to define your composition. Although symmetry occurs in nature, it is much more visible in the man-made world.

Symmetry is all around us in the man mad word. By Bill Morrow

Geometry is the science of shapes. Square, triangles lines, and circles are all geometrical elements that we can use in photography. We can use hard edged geometrical shapes to create bold imagery or more subtle “soft edged” geometry to define or aid a composition.

Both symmetry and geometry do not have to be confined to the physical. Light and shade can also contain geometrical shapes and display symmetry.

Learning To See And Use Geometry And Symmetry.

Starting off with symmetry. Great symmetrical composition often occurs when we have a subject that is placed dead centre of two identical objects. This might be a person walking up a straight flight of steps or even just the infinity point of a long straight tunnel.

If our symmetry is based on objects to the left and right of frame, the composition very often works better if we place our subject on either the upper or lower third of the frame. This works as a counterbalance as pure symmetry can make an image look very sterile.

Symmetry working with the rule of thirds. By Thomas Leuthard (2008-2017)

Natural symmetry might be the reflection of a beautiful landscape in the stillness of a deep water lake. Again while this might look great at first glance, you will often start to feel there is something not quite right. We can counter the symmetry by positioning a subject somewhere on the left or right third. This might be a rowing boat or even an interesting boulder, so long as we have a balance to our mirror image.

Light plays a very important factor in great geometrical composition. Hard-edged geometrical shapes are best defined by the light falling on them and the shadows that light creates. Very often hard geometry is defined by repeating identical shapes such as windows in a modern office building or multiple containers stacked in a port.

Alone these shots look visually striking but often lack a focal point with which to lead the eye. We can counter the repetitiveness by looking for an element that breaks it, such as a person leaning out of one of the office windows. By placing that person on one of the thirds we create a visual balance to the repeating pattern.

Geometry is not confined to straight lines. By josef.stuefer

The other type of geometry is soft geometry. This occurs more in natural environments and is where we use loosely defined shapes such as triangles or circles as compositional elements to our shots. It could be the natural curve of a shoreline drawing our eye to our subject or a triangular cliff face used to frame an imposing landscape.

Soft geometry can be hard to find at first. The reason for this is that our minds are hard-wired to look for hard, well-defined shapes. However, if you start to look carefully at scenes you will soon start to see soft geometry as in the case of this scene where the soft geometrical lines of shadows lead our eyes towards the boat.

Soft geometry in the form of leading lines. By Jason Row Photography

Often geometry will work hand in hand with symmetry and there is no more obvious example of this than leading lines. Leading lines are a geometric shape that in many cases split a scene into two distinct mirror images. By adding a subject on the upper third we can create a very striking image.

Symmetry and geometry are both very powerful compositional tools in their own rights. Both occur in nature and in the man-made world and when combined in one shot can lead to some fantastic imagery.

Even if you are not carrying a camera, the next time you are out, take a look at the world around you and look for examples of both

For More On These Great Compositional Elements

21 Clever Uses of Geometric Patterns in Photography – for inspiration, see these great examples of geometry

7 Tips to Spice up Your Photography Using Geometry – a great post from Marco De Groot over at Passion Passport

Advanced Composition Guide – for more on Advanced Composition, check out the guide at Photzy

I Named These Puppies Click, Bokeh, Nikon, Sensor, Skrim, and Gobo

Steven Soderbergh shot his latest movie entirely on the iPhone, calls it a 'gamechanger'

We've seen plenty of film makers shooting movies on an Apple iPhone in the past. However, director Steven Soderbergh—whose filmography includes movies such as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven—is arguably the highest-profile iPhone movie makers yet.

His latest project, the psychological horror-thriller Unsane, was shot entirely on the iPhone, and Soderbergh wasn't afraid to admit (and embrace) that fact when speaking to IndieWire.

“I think this is the future,” Soderbergh said. “Anybody going to see this movie who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone. That’s not part of the conceit."

In fact, the director was so impressed by the iPhone's movie capabilities and the recorded levels of detail, that he is likely to also use the Apple smartphone for future projects. “People forget, this is a 4k capture. I’ve seen it 40 feet tall. It looks like velvet," he told IndieWire. "This is a gamechanger to me.”

We don't know which exact iPhone model(s) Soderbergh used in the production of the movie, but it's fair to speculate that the latest iPhone X/iPhone 8 generation was deployed in combination with all sorts of professional lighting, audio and stabilization equipment.

By the way, in case you're curious, the movie's synopsis is the following:

A young woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear – but is it real or is it a product of her delusion?

You can find more information about the movie on its website and view the trailer at the top of this page.

Fujifilm Unveils the X-A5: Lightweight, Phase-Detect AF, and 4K Video

Fujifilm just announced the new X-A5 mirrorless camera. A new kit zoom lens, the Fujinon XC15-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS PZ lens is being announced at the same time, and this camera-and-zoom-lens combo is the lightest so far in the X Series lineup.

At the core of the X-A5 is a 24.2MP APS-C (non-X-Trans) sensor. It’s the first camera in the X-A line to feature phase detection pixels, which provide an intelligent Hybrid AF system that can lock focus onto subjects at twice the speed as previous X-A models. There’s also a new image engine that processes photos 1.5 times faster than before. The maximum ISO is now 12800 (extendable to 51200), up from 6400 (extendable to 25600) in the X-A3.

The X-A5 can shoot 4K video… kinda. It’s limited to 15fps (for up to 5 minutes) and is available in a feature called the Burst Function. Drop down to HD video resolution, and you’ll be able to shoot at frame rates of up to 59.94fps. You can also shoot at quad speed for slow-motion clips and in a Multi Focus Mode that stacks 4K images while automatically adjusting depth of field.

On the back of the camera is a 3-inch, 1.04-million-dot LCD touchscreen that can be tilted to 180 degrees.

Other features and specs of the camera include Fuji’s popular Film Simulation Modes, a pop-up flash, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, in-camera RAW processing, a battery life of 450 frames, and a startup time of up to 0.4s.

FUJINON XC15-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS PZ

The new XC15-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens announced alongside the X-A5 is the first electric-powered zoom lens for X Mount cameras. It features a minimum working distance of just 2 inches, giving photographers a flexible lens that’s also lightweight (4.76oz/135 g) and compact (2.46×1.74″/62.6×44.2mm).

Pricing and Availability

The Fujifilm X-A5 will be available in three synthetic leather colors (silver, brown, and pink) on February 8, 2018, for $600 bundled with the lens. The lens will also be available for purchase separately starting on March 15th, 2018, with a price tag of $300.

Photographing in Daulatdia: The world's largest brothel town

The location

Daulatdia is a brothel town Bangladesh and is considered the biggest in the world. The number of prostitutes there is estimate at 1,600 and the average age of new arrivals is 14. Most women and girls that end up in this shanty town brothel are trafficked from remote parts of Bangladesh and are slaves to the brothel owners that buy them from the traffickers.

Daulatdia is located on the side of the Padma river, the Bangladeshi part of the Ganges, where ferries carrying trucks, buses and people across the river. Lines of trucks queue to cross the river toward Dhaka and the drivers are the target clientele of the brothel.

There is no luxury for the prostitutes. Simple food is cooked on clay stoves fueled by wood in a common area between shacks.

How did I come to be there

After 15 years of photographing in South & South East Asia, I decided that it was time to give back by donating my time and skills and offering two weeks of free photography a year to an aid organization working in a deprived area. I thought it would be fitting, as some of my income is generated from photographing in these “third world” environments.

I am based in New Zealand, so I got in touch with an umbrella organization there (The Council of International Development) and gave member organizations a couple of months deadline to submit proposals for my work. Fast-forward several months, and I found myself in Daulatdia on behalf of Save the Children, to cover the school that they support and the environment it is situated in.

The school is for the children born in the brothel. In the past they had no school to go to because of their association to the brothel. The school offers a way out for many of the children, especially the girls, who are pressured to join the “work force.” An education gives them options to escape that life.


The door way is used to frame the girl (15 years old). I had no choice in the matter, as the shack was so small that the door would not open any farther.	Better looking prostitutes make more money, hence their madam will give them a bit more money to decorate their shack and make it a more pleasant place to live. This image was taken with the camera against my hip with eye focus and silent shutter. The horizon is slightly off due to this technique.

Photographing in Daulatdia

I prepared myself as well as I could for this experience, but the reality on the ground is far sadder then I imagined. I wanted to capture as much as possible but the freedom to photograph, as per a usual documentary assignment, is limited when you work for a child-focused NGO.

A big part of my documentary images are taken while people are not aware that they are being photographed. The reason is that I want to document them without affecting the scene and behavior by waving a big camera in their faces (for technic tips please refer to my previous article).

Babies and toddlers will be put under the bed while the mother is working, while older kids will be sent out of the room. From a technical point of view, I made sure that I had the lit window shutter in the frame to balance the scene.

But on this assignment, all the images of women and girls inside the brothel had to have consent, for two good reasons:

Save the Children staff have an on going relation within the brothel, and I did not want to jeopardize that.
These women and girls have had every thing taken from them, and I did not want to add to this by taking away their power to say no to being photographed. I had to be invited into the small shacks that the women and girls live and work in, and had very limited time to shoot.

I was escorted by Save the Children staff almost like body guards in side the complex but never really felt under threat.

So, whenever possible, I used the Sony a7R II's eye autofocus and silent shutter while holding the the camera off my eye at about chest hight or to the side of my hip. This way, even with the subject well aware of my presence, they did not know when I was shooting. This allowed me to get less guarded moments. Other wise I used very simple portraiture composition. I did not position or direct people. I just captured what in-front of me.

Daulatdia is a hard place, and displays of emotion are not easy to come by. I wanted to ask if I can take a photo, but the moment of tenderness came before I could, so I took the old school "shoot-first-ask-later" approach.

The average age of new arrivals at Daulatdia is 14 years old.

Technically, this is a very simple image. It was shot with my camera against my hip and eye focus, hence the severe angle, which is the price of not looking through the viewfinder or at the camera at all.

The story, however, is in the details. This new arrival is in a bare room with a simple bed. The buckets under her bed are the toilet, bath and food preparation gear. This is the face of a girl looking at a life with no choices or hope. When she has finished paying off “her buying price” one day in the far future, she will have nowhere to go.

The Gear

About a week before I left for Bangladesh, I switched to the Sony a7R II. Not the wisest decision at one level, and a very wise decision on another. The not-wise part is that the camera was completely new to me, which is not the best when going into a technically and mentally challenging assignment.

The wise part? Keep on reading.

I had a bunch of Sony native lenses but mostly used the 16-35mm F4 and the GM 24-70mm F2.8. I really enjoyed using both but would prefer the 24-70mm F4 for its compact size. It makes photographing in this type of environment easier. The reason I chose to stick to zoom lenses, rather then switching primes constantly, is that the time frame I had for each shoot was extremely tight and changing lenses would ‘eat’ into the time given.

The two a7R II's I used were just the right stuff for this type of work. Setting all the custom buttons to do what I needed saved me from getting into the overwhelming menu, the auto focus capabilities were very impressive, and the Eye Autofocus made shooting with a camera away from my eye easy and accurate.

One thing that I am almost too embarrassed to admit is my love for the EVF. Setting the EVF effects on let me focus on composition and timing, and removed the need to look at the bottom or side of the frame for exposure information.

Does it make me a lazy photographer? Maybe, but I will take any technological advantage I can if it'll help me get the job done.

The shacks that the women and girls work in is also their ‘home’. The Pokemon pattern-covered bed will be used later that day for work.

This image was taken with the camera against my chest, using eye focus and silent shutter. This way, I could capture a somewhat unguarded moment while standing in front of them.

Final Thoughts

Daulatdia represents both sides of humanity. It is a place where people are commodities and are traded for money with no self-determination; on the other hand, it has drawn to it very dedicated people that help with free health-care and education, trying to make the best of a place of very little hope.

Giora Dan is an internationally published documentary and commercial photographer based in Christchurch New Zealand. His images have been widely published in geographical magazines in North America, Europe, Africa and the Asia/ Pacific region, including NZ Geographic, the Smithsonian Magazine and British Geographical. You can see more of his work at his website, www.gioradan.com

3 Must-Have Apps For Black-And-White Photography

Black-and-white photography shouldn't be used only for aesthetic reasons, but for utilitarian purposes. By keeping ourselves from the distractions that color creates in our mind we can obtain – as photographers and spectators – images with clearer and more efficient messages.

The early options for transforming light into images were all monochromatic. Black and white was the way light was registered inside the camera after it hit the emulsion. Then color film appeared, and if a photographer wanted to shoot black and white or color, he or she had to choose one or the other before taking the picture.

Thus, monochrome images were still made inside the camera, despite the options. Since the appearance of digital sensors, rendering a photograph in black and white has become a post-production decision, and this is where the vast majority of photographers are nowadays.

Photo by Elisabetta Foco on Unsplash

It isn't wise to shoot using a camera’s monochrome mode unless it offers internal profiles that can render images in specific monochrome styles like the built-in profiles available in some Fujifilm cameras.

There are multiple software options you can use to transform a regular color photograph into a black-and-white image. Today we'll talk about the 3 most powerful tools for making that happen.

Adobe Lightroom

This software is a favorite of many photographers since it has a logical workspace when we think in terms of workflow. From the edition stage (image selection process) to the printing and online publication of the images (final output), it provides a holistic workflow.

The sequence for developing an image in Lightroom is similar to what we can find in any type of native RAW development software. One advantage of using Lightroom for black-and-white photography is the control it offers over 8 color channels (red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple and magenta). Enhancing contrast by brightening or darkening tones via color channels offers richer levels of contrast. By doing this, a photographer can avoid odd results when tweaking contrast, a common phenomenon when you work only with values linked to exposure.

Photo by Erico Marcelino on Unsplash

Lightroom has evolved over time and offers a number of specialized tools for photography development. The spirit of Lightroom lies in its logical similarity with certain tasks done in the darkroom in the days of analog photography.

Currently, Lightroom is available in its latest CC version (Creative Cloud) 7.1.0.1148620, which launched on December 12, 2017.

Lightroom enables you to work with default files (which you can think of as recipes) called presets. Many options exist on the Internet to achieve certain looks thanks to this vast world of presets, and you can also create your own for traceability purposes.

Capture One Pro

This software is engineered by Phase One, a Danish company that specializes in high-end digital photography equipment. Luckily for us, Phase One can be used on photographs taken by almost any camera (which is a good thing if we see the price tag on Phase One cameras).

It is often compared with Lightroom – but honestly, they complement each other. For specific adjustments, Capture One Pro is the solution, due to its color correction mechanics, which surpass by far the ones available in Lightroom. You could work a black-and-white image quickly in Lightroom and export a DNG file for further enhancement in Capture One Pro. But this is just one way to do things.

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

Capture One Pro offers something that may seem irrelevant to some but is important for many professional photographers: C1P allows you to modify the workspace in almost any way, allowing photographers to shape very comfortable working experience. There should be more tutorials on how to use this powerful tool, which may become the future of post-production in photography if Adobe doesn’t do something about Lightroom’s color-correction methods.

The only disadvantage I can see in working with Capture One Pro compared with Lightroom is the way it controls only 6 color channels instead of the 8 offered by Lightroom (I haven't tried the latest release, which is 11, but I hope they have considered this).

Nik Silver Efex

Many photographers were intrigued when Google bought Nik Software and quickly released it for free (its previous price was $500), and then left it unattended. Nik Software works as a plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop, and within its array of options there is Silver Efex Pro, which allows you to “Master the art of black-and-white photography with darkroom-inspired controls”.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

It is said that Nik Silver Efex Pro is inspired in how it mimics working in the darkroom, even more so than Lightroom. Its advanced controls for working in black and white allow photographers to achieve great results quickly. Its Dynamic Brightness, Soft Contrast, Amplify Whites, Amplify Blacks, and the advanced Grain Engine tool are great assets for any photographer that wants to take their black-and-white photography to the next level.

With Silver Efex Pro, you can simulate about 20 films in black and white, and not only at the level of contrast and tone, but even grain, and the effects of color filters like the ones affixed to camera lenses when shooting with black-and-white film. DXO acquired the digital assets of the Nik Software brand that belonged to Google in October 2017, and its new market launch is still to come. Hopefully, DXO will not abandon the project as well.

Photo by Brunel Johnson on Unsplash

Whichever options you choose, always keep in mind that black-and-white photography must happen for a reason, and not simply because “it looks cool”. The great benefit of digital photography is that it gives us the best of both worlds with the same image, which was impossible in the era of film.

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3 Must-Have Apps For Black-And-White Photography was originally posted by proton T2a

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Full-frame showdown: Nikon D850 vs Canon 5D IV vs Sony a7R III

Dan and Sally Watson over at Learning Cameras recently put together a really useful comparison video that pits the Sony, Canon, and Nikon fanboys against each other in a series of real-world tests. Shooting with the Sony a7R III, Canon 5D Mark IV, and Nikon D850, Dan and Sally ran the cameras through a variety of tests that cover everything from skin tones, to low light, to dynamic range, to autofocus tracking and more.

We'll let you dive into the full 20-minute video if you want to see all of the comparisons for yourself, but one that we found particularly interesting—maybe because it confirmed our own tests—was the autofocus tracking comparison.

The Sony and Canon were shot in Auto AF area mode—Sony at 8 fps with live view, Canon and Nikon at 7 fps—and Dan and Sally found pretty much what we did. At 8 fps live view, the a7R III sometimes just goes out-of-focus then snaps back, Canon's iTR can be very jumpy, and Nikon's 3D tracking is more or less perfect. For what it's worth (since Dan and Sally didn't test this) in our tests, the Sony performed more consistently at 10fps without live view.

For the full breakdown, check out the video for yourself above—it gets the DPReview stamp of approval for being both entertaining and informative. And if you want to see more from Learning Cameras, you can follow the channel on YouTube, or catch Dan on Facebook and Instagram.