Creative Exercising

Greetings, volks. Welcome to Hohenfels Volks, THE place for our place! Today, starting out gray and rainy, leaves Hohenfels in the clutches of a very pleasant evening!

Running into one of our friends in the grocery yesterday, I was asked about some exercises for creativity, and photographing some beautiful scenery. I thought a great subject for a post was seeded in that great question, so today, we’ll outline a couple simple ways to get the shot that has others wondering how you did it.

We’ve been posting about exercises to improve your composition, exposure, and creativity, so this is more of a review. It also reinforces how simple photographic techniques can create some winning shots.

The first thing to mention is never take the first shot. Most folks will see something, maybe a statue or other landmark, and take the easy shot. If you have to, take it just to get it out of your system, but then look for some other way to create your unique image. Walk around, check it out from every available and possible angle, view it through your lens, and try moving through a range of focal lengths. Once you’ve settled on the shot, make your image a reality. Remember, part of the creative shooting process is visualization! Edit- Take the first shot, if you pass it up, you may never get the same feeling you had at first. Thanks to Bodensee Bob for that cool tip!

Another simple exercise is to either shoot a prime lens, or use only 1 focal length on a zoom. Remember, doing this forces you to look for other ways to get the shot. You may have to move in closer to tighten up the scene, or move away to add some context. It’s a great way to change how you view the world around you!

The last 2 things are color and scale. First, on color, see how you can use it to create mood. Use your color to balance the mood and feeling, remember complimentary colors? Perhaps shooting a scene with a large red subject, shoot the subject at about 1/3 the frame and use green to fill out the other 2/3. You’ve given importance to the subject through size, and emphasized it by making the color stand out. This is also nice if you use 3 colors in a split complimentary scheme.

Using size and scale to emphasize a subject or restrain non-subject elements is a proven method of increasing interest in an image. It not only adds context, but also can be used creatively. Everyone shoots the trick photos of someone holding up the Leaning Tower, or holding someone in their hand. Moving beyond that, the ability to trick the eyes through scale can make for magic images. Using our first tip combined with this to make an image of a local landmark will stand out. Make the scale of the subject the subject. Instead of taking the Eiffel Tower, take a piece of it, and use the size as part of a composition to reference the actual tower. The same can be done with buildings, statues, and just about anything. Your photo will stand out as more than just another shot of the local scenery. Edit- Another tip from Bodensee Bob is to take the shot of the bigger piece and crop to your liking during editing. Great tip, thanks for sharing!


ISO 125, f/8, 1/125, 56mm, 125 C/ft2 metered at the wheat.
A field of grain in Hohenfels. Using f/8 and 56mm gave me a reasonably shallow DOF, allowing the hills to blur out, and only the foreground section to remain in focus. This combined with the color of the wheat against the color of the sky brings out the wheat as the subject. By shooting from below, I was able to fill the majority of the image with the front wheat, and allude to the size of the field with the shallow DOF. Taking a higher angle allowed more of the field to be seen, yet seemed to lack scale and impact in the final image.

Of course, your best tool for creative and magic images is your mind. A really great photo can convey your reaction and feelings to the scene. It doesn’t have to be a literal rendering; the values you decide to place in each area of exposure are part of your creative process. Making the clouds a little darker than reality or the trees a little brighter is part of spreading your reaction.

I hope this post has helped get your creative regions revving. I can’t wait to see you’re your shots. Tomorrow’s post will hopefully be ready tomorrow. I’m hoping to show a method for converting color images to monochrome in a way that recalls the images of the past. Be sure to check it out.

Do you have an image to share? We’d love to see it! Is there anything you’d like to see here? Do you have a question? Share your thoughts here or at the Hohenfels Volks Facebook page. Of course, commenting on both Facebook and here is always appreciated, too! Don't forget, we're on Google+, too!

Color and Perception

Greetings, volks. Welcome to Hohenfels Volks, THE place for our place! How’s everyone faring with this week’s exercise? I trust you’re seeing things take shape.

Today we’re going to take another look at metering. From previous posts, we know that we can control our exposure by increasing or decreasing our exposure time or aperture to achieve the levels we want. For instance, making a white cloud white, while retaining its texture, we’d meter the cloud and add 2 to 3 stops of exposure. If we add 2 stops, we can further close the distance between our vision and what we shot.

Today, we’re going to look at how color and saturation work with exposure to give us a better rendering of our vision. Generally, we perceive saturation different than reality. In the most general of terms, saturation appears more thorough in an image when we darken it by some small amount and increase our contrast.

The reality reason for the apparent change in saturation is the actual change in chrominance. Chrominance relates to the levels of luminance present in each particular color. For instance, taking an RGB value of r=100 and increasing it to r=200 increases the chrominance, without changing the saturation. We perceive a difference only because of the resulting change in luminance. This is an extremely basic and simplified explanation, but helps to understand what we’re discussing next.

By knowing what we just discussed, we can change the viewer’s perception of the saturation in our scene, and therefore the mood we’re trying to convey. Without knowing the above and the basics of color theory, it becomes difficult to use color in our compositions as a tool of our message or mood.

By increasing or decreasing our exposure for a certain color’s luminance to create the color we visualized, we can change our message, theme, or mood some. We also change our perception of a color’s saturation, giving either a rich look or a washed out appearance. Try taking some shots of a strong color in a scene at various exposures and comparing the results. For a more noticeable impact, you can try a brighter color in a darker environment or vice versa. As you range through several exposures, you begin to see how our key and our brightness change. You’ll also notice a change in feeling as you view your images.

By throwing a bit of the color and saturation into your metering, you’ll be better equipped for this week’s exercise. Changing your vantage will change the luminance available to you, and require ways to get around the change in feeling that comes with it. Keeping your vision in your mind as you change vantage points, and knowing that exposing for a particular color or set of colors, you can put your original intent across.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this week from everyone, and hope the rest of this week treats you well!

Don’t forget to post any of your images you’d like to see here at the Hohenfels Volks Facebook page. Of course, commenting on both Facebook and here is always appreciated, too! Don't forget, we're on Google+, too!

Color Contrast in Monochrome

Greetings, volks. Welcome to Hohenfels Volks, THE place for our place!

Today we’re going to talk about using digital filters for black and white, and color contrast to bring our vision to our images. We’re going to walk through a few different colored filters in our RAW conversion software.

Referring to Canon’s Digital Photo Pro for our software portion, we see that the first thing is to set our picture style to monochrome. After doing that, you’ll notice that color tone and saturation sliders change to filter effects and toning effects.

Once we’re into monochrome picture style, set your white balance to color temperature and play with the slider a little. This will give you some idea of your sensor’s spectral response to color. For instance, raising your temperature from 5200 to 10000 may give a giant boost to your brightness, showing a larger response to red. Lowering it to 3000, seeing a boost would indicate a greater sensitivity to blue and green.

Now that you have some idea of its response to colors and temperature, we can understand how to work our monochrome images for maximum effect. Select the first filter choice as we drag our slider, yellow, and adjust your color temperature. Going either way with your temperature shows a slight shift in brightness throughout the range. As we get lower in temperature, we have less lightness, and more as we raise the temperature.

Selecting an orange filter shows a more pronounce version of the yellow filter’s response, due to an increased presence of red in the light being allowed through the filter, or in our case, allowed to impact the image by software. Moving on to red, we see great swings throughout the temperature range. At 2500, we see our greatest darkening and at 10000, we probably see something washed out and so high in contrast to be unusable.

Going to our last filter, green, we see almost no change as we shift through the temperature range. Since light is composed of all the colors, but most of the time less of the green, we see less impact. Green has a more pronounced effect in film photography than digital, though.

OK, now we’ve seen some pretty cool ways to improve on our vanilla black and white conversions. Let’s move to some interesting ways to use those filters. Select standard for your picture style. Selecting your RGB tab, you can choose between luminance, red, green, or blue. As we cycle through the colors and make adjustments, we end up with a pretty scary image. The color is ugly and unnatural. No that you’re someplace you think might work well with a colored filter, select saturation in the RGB tab and drag the slider to 0. Without saturation, there will be changes in lightness and brightness, but no real change.

Going back to your RAW tab, select monochrome, and choose your filter. Select color temperature. Once your color temperature is about where you want it, go back to the RGB tab and start playing with your color and lightness sliders. Notice how things change as you drag them around? Well, once you have your image about where you want it, you can either save it or finish it here. The reason for going into the color sliders goes back to our discussion on color theory. By adjusting our color curves, levels, and contrast, we can make some very nice black and white images with our initial RAW conversion.

Once you have your image about where you want it, you can save it and open in another editing program, like Paintshop Pro and split the image into CMYK or RGB layers and adjust it even further, or just play with your curves or layers creating a combination that suits your vision, message, and intent. Another nice option is to create a hand painted look or feel. We’ll talk about that in a future post.

I hope everyone is on the road to a great week and has plenty of opportunities to concretize your vision. Happy shooting and have a wonderful week, Hohenfels.

Don’t forget to post any of your images you’d like to see here at the Hohenfels Volks Facebook page. Of course, commenting on both Facebook and here is always appreciated, too! Don't forget, we're on Google+, too!

Composition- Seeing in Color

Hello, Volks, welcome to Hohenfels Volks. Another week is almost over here in Hohenfels, and we’re onto another post!

Following up on yesterday’s post about color, today we’re going to talk about how color theory can work for you. Using complimentary and adjacent, or analogous, colors can really improve your compositions. The masters, including the painters and old time photographers knew how to get the most from the colors available to them.

Color theory is an extensive subject, and involves a lot more than we’re going to discuss. If you remember back in grade school, you learned there are 3 primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. They are primary because they cannot be made from combinations of other colors. Here’s a basic primary color wheel.


The 3 primary colors

The secondary colors, made from equal parts of 2 primary colors are orange, green, and purple. Here’s another chart showing the relationship between primaries.


The 3 primaries with the secondary colors

Colors opposite each other on the wheel are called complimentary colors. If you stare at one of the colors for some time, and then shift your view to solid white, the compliment, or opposite, of the stared at color will appear.

Beyond that, you have tertiary colors and other more complex blends and hues. Here is a 12-color wheel showing some of the basic ones.


12 colors, including primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Just as colors opposite each other are complimentary, colors next to each other are analogous, which means they are analogs of or for each other.

In normal human color vision, red focus beyond the focal plane, green directly on it, and blue focuses short of it. This is why red appears to advance and blue seems to recede. Another effect of normal human color vision is that the same color appears brighter and larger against a dark background than against a lighter one. Another interesting fact along that same line is that Da Vinci observed, "Colors appear what they are not, according to the ground that surrounds them." Handy stuff for the photographer!

With all that information, feeling overwhelmed can be a problem. So, to make this subject easier, we’re going to show a couple example of how to combine colors into a harmonious composition, and have them add to your image rather than distract from it.


Analogous color scheme. Using this scheme can create calm scenes and photos. Make sure you have enough color contrast, though, to keep your image interesting.


Complementary. Very vibrant and exciting images. Don't overdo it and you can get something really appealing.


This is called a split complementary scheme. This has a strong visual appeal like complementary colors, but with less risk of overdoing it.

Remember, there are other schemes as well. You could do a three color scheme using colors equally spaced through the wheel, which can create a dynamic image, especially when one is given a greater weight in the composition. A great way to get more information is to use Google "color theory." Another great source is Tiger Color. They also have some nifty software and such that will help you understand color.

Look for an assignment related to this post on Facebook in the next couple days. Hopefully we can get everyone posting a couple photos, and get more assignments going. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think of the idea.

Remember to share your pics and post your questions at the Hohenfels Volks Facebook page, and or by commenting here!