Joe Baraban’s Digital Photography Blog

Keeping it clean.

In my online class with the BPSOP and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, we work on ways to take my students photos what I refer to as “up a notch”. So many of my students try to put way tooooooooooo information into one photograph.For some reason they think that the more elements they can stuff into their composition, it stands to reason that the better the photograph will turn out.

They believe in the old adage that “if more’s better, then too much is just right”. While that’s one of my favorite (unspoken) personal pearls of wisdom and I’m a firm believer in it, I have to draw the line when it comes to photography.

In my younger days when my medium of choice was a paintbrush, I would start out with a blank canvas on an easel and proceed to fill it in until I had the desired painting. Now, I start out with a camera on a tripod and everything is in the viewfinder. I have to keep subtracting elements until I have what I think is a finished photo.  That’s why they call photography “The art of Subtraction”.

You don’t want to clutter up your frame with elements that the viewer would have a hard time understanding; especially when they’re completely un-related. Just because you know what it is does not mean that everyone else will. You won’t be around to explain what you were thinking to people looking at your photos, so they need to stand on their own…unless it was meant to be an abstract and you wanted the viewer to decide for himself what exactly  it is that he’s looking at.

Strive for balance and simplicity. Use the Negative Space along with the Positive Space. The Negative Space being anything that doesn’t have mass. The space around your subject that defines it can be as important as putting in another elements for the sake of adding just one more thing that (you think) will improve your photo.

What you don’t put into a photo can be a lot more revealing than what you do put in.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoc. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

I teach my fellow photographers how to incorporate the elements of Visual Design into their imagery both in my classes with the BPSOP, but also in my  workshops I conducts around the planet…the round planet!!

I also show photographers how to use visual tension. One of the ways is to place your subject close to the edge of the frame. I see no better way than to show you how through a diagram.

Visual Tension

Visit my website  at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram, www.instagram.com/barabanjoe Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

In my online class with the BPSOP, and also with my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, we work on the elements of visual design and composition, and how to use these elements to take our imagery what I call “Up a notch”. Instead of pigment placed on an artist palette, these elements replace the reds, and blues, and greens.

Joan, a student of mine had told me that she had been to this marina lots of times, but when she went back with her ‘Artist Palette’, she saw the marina like she never had before. Now with the help all the elements firmly on her palette, she was “making picture” instead of “taking pictures”.

In this one photo, there’s:

Tension (by framing within a frame), the use of Negative Space defining the Positive Space, Pattern, Leading or Directional Lines taking the viewer’s eyes to the boats, Perspective, by creating layers of interest, and Shape (those wonderful circles). Joan has given the viewer lots to discover, and the more he discovers, the longer he’ll stick around…just what we want!!!

Really nice photo Joan!!!

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com and ollow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/barabanjoe and check out my 2023 workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime and we’ll work on your ‘Artist Palette’.

JoeB

Tension leads to more attention.

Unless you’re shooting strictly for yourself, the goal, at least for me, is to keep the viewer around for as long as possible.

There’s several ways to achieve that, and I work the ways with my students both in my online classes with the BPSOP, and in my workshops I conduct all over the planet.

I’m not talking about the tension caused by mental or emotional strain,  I’m talking about one of the most important ways to keep the viewers attention, and it’s called Visual Tension…more tension leads to more attention.

Although there’s several ways to accomplish it, one of the more lesser known ways is ‘body language’. When you mix it with contrast, you create a conflict between the person’s body language, and the environment surrounding the person.

In the above photo, I saw this woman talking on her cell phone. Hoping that she would stay long enough for me to arrange my composition, I clicked off some shots to get the exposure the way I wanted. Then I kept my camera very close to my eye and waited.

I waited ten minutes and all that time she was still talking. Then, with hope against hope, she gestured for a split second. Fortunately, it was long enough to capture her.

In that moment, her body language created visual tension as well as visual interest. The conflict between her body language, her silhouette, the contrast between her and the lighter gray space all around her is what generates the visual tension.

Visit my website at www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagam: www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my upcoming workshops at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

16  I teach a four week online class with the BPSOP, and I also  conduct my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops around the planet. What’s the single thread that connects all my fellow photographers to one another? It’s the fact that the vast majority began their love for this creative institution after the advent of the digital camera. Virtually every month , I  try to educate these students of mine that you don’t need Lightroom or Photoshop to make good photos. I’m not saying there not great tools, just that you don’t need them to make a good photo.

I recently had a student ask me if I bracketed my photos and combined them in HDR to get the “correct exposure”. This is a clear sign that validates my thinking…she had been told that there was a correct exposure….What????? First of all there’s no such thing as a correct exposure. every picture I’ve ever taken had a different “correct exposure”. How can there be a universal correct exposure? Beat’s the hell out of me. I guess it’s just another one of those things that lie just above my pay grade.

My exposures are based on what I’m feeling at the point of creation. It has solely to do with the message I want to send to the viewer. Bright and sunny, or dark and dramatic…it just all depends…doesn’t it????

Second, I’ve been shooting for forty-four years and most of that was when you bracketed and choose the best exposure. There was no other way to do it; at least when I was shooting color. HDR was the initials of a girl I went out with!!!

Ok, read my lips…YOU DON’T NEED HDR TO CREATE A CORRECT EXPOSURE. IN FACT, YOU DON’T NEED HDR AT ALL!!!

In the above photo, I was shooting a project for United Airlines. One of the toughest assignments I’ve ever had. Five weeks in Hawaii shooting pretty much whatever I wanted..oh the horror!!!

We were invited to take some photos of a popular Luau at the hotel we were staying at. My assistant was standing right next to me giving me readings from my Minolta One-Degree spot meter. Yes, it actually reads just one degree of reflected light at a time. I want to know everything about the light and when it changes. It’s why I never use the meter in my Mark III after crossing over to the digital world. It’s just not as accurate as I want it.

A new reading every few seconds.

I wanted to maintain the aperture, so my assistant kept yelling out the changes in shutter speeds., until it was too dark to show the fire-eater and the environment around him, and too slow to stop the action. I was able to achieve this on one piece of film, and one exposure.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog.  Come shoot me sometime.

JoeB

right smack dab in the middle

Since I started my photography career right after the dinosaurs disappeared, there was no information highway to get information from. I shot the way I felt when a photo op came my way without thinking about anything but what I had (subconsciously) learned studying painting and design practically my entire life.

There weren’t any rules for photographers to follow back then, or if there were I didn’t know about them; and wouldn’t have paid attention to them anyway. After teaching an online class with the BPSOP for the past seven years and conducting my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops for the last thirty-three years, I’ve been a promoter of the idea that rules are a hindrance to creativity and the shackles of originality. There are countless rules one can read about simply by Googling up rules for Photography, but I won’t help you on that.

Who writes these rules anyway? When I click on some they’re all the same insipid articles with some changes in grammar and vocabulary. My guess is that there are photographers out there trying to become immortal and trying to stretch their fifteen minutes of fame into an eternity. I can tell you that this is one photographer’s name that you’ll never see among the others.

I’m thinking about writing an article for the internet and calling it the Anti-Rules for Proper Photography. It will contain everything you ever wanted to know about taking your own path and just letting your imagination be your guide; not some silly rules that can only lead you down a one way path to photo boredom. Or perhaps you won’t ever make it all the way to the end but wind up in some strange creative photography purgatory…YIKES that’s a sobering thought.

Here’s an example of one of my Anti-Rules: Put your subject right smack dab in the middle. How’s that for an Anti-Rule?

The first thing you’ll have to shake off is this dumb rule that’s called The Rule of Thirds, and for those of you that just can’t get it out of your mind and you need help to de-program, there’s photo therapy out there and it’s called a workshop; specifically my workshops…where you’ll see no rules attached. Actually, Ansel Adams said it best, “There are no rules for good pictures, there’s just good pictures”.

On day one we’ll work on my first anti-rule then work on all the others the internet has helped to brainwash all my fellow photographers. We’ll stand side by side in case you start to feel woozy (perfectly normal) and I’ll watch as you put your subject right smack dab in the middle of your frame. It will be hard at first, but once you realize that the difference between doing this and following the Rule of Thirds is the difference between you’re photo being remembered because of the visual interest and tension and it falling through the cracks leaving you in a state of mediocrity.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and be sure to check out my upcoming workshops. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

In the comfort zone.

In my online class with the BPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, I tell my fellow photographers that Westerners were taught to read from left to right. As a result, we look at photographs from the left to right and we usually start in the lower left corner and work our way to the top right.

Now I realize that there are always exceptions, but for the most part, this is how we perceive. It’s our comfort zone and it’s how I usually design my composition. BTW, when we can get the viewer to look at a vertical, he’s going to take more time going from the bottom of the frame to the top.

This additional time will take more energy, and Energy=Tension. That’s why Verticals have more energy than a horizontal.This certainly doesn’t mean to shoot only verticals; just remember to always shoot both ways.

This is part of the Theory of Gestalt where we take control of what the viewer perceives and processes and lead him comfortably around our composition.

In the above photo, I’ve maintained that comfort zone by having the viewer follow the directional lines of the road, and the pipeline from the left to the right. However, when I flip the photo the other way, it feels awkward and has taken the viewer out of his zone. It doesn’t have the same flow as it did when perceived from left to right.

Flipped and out of the comfort zone.

This is not to say that it can’t be a good thing to take the viewer where he’s not comfortable. There are many times where I like to do just that. Remember what Ansel Adams once said, “There are no rules for good pictures, just good pictures. Try it next time you’re out shooting. Try one where the flow is from left to right, then flip it and see the difference.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this Blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

Look ma, no Photoshop.

One of the hardest photos to take without the aid of post processing is that of an automobile. I’m not talking about the new car you bought and is now sitting in your driveway for all to see on Facebook, I’m talking about a photo that will become a two page consumer ad and wind up in all the top national magazines, and possible billboards across the US.

Back in the film days, Photoshop wasn’t going to be invented for another five to ten years when Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990. Even then it was in its infant stage and not all that helpful to make the clients cars look good.

A great deal of pre-production was involved from finding the right location using my Sunpath readings in combination with my Morin 2000 Hand Bearing Compass. Having enough room to maneuver around with either artificial light, or a series of reflectors was critical. Car prep companies were hired to bring the cars to the location, get the looking pretty enough to photograph, and take them away. No one was ever allowed to move or even touch the cars besides these companies.

Small pieces of white board right outside the frame to reflect soft light, or shiny board to reflect a little harder light to small areas on the wheel rims.

Depending on the light, and knowing exactly where it would fall, I would have them move the vehicles into the position I wanted, and on several occasions these cars were prototypes and came without motors; they would be rolled into position. Budgets on these shoots would sometimes be six figures, and that was over thirty years ago. Needless to say that a lot was riding on it and whatever you did you had to create in the camera on one piece of film.

As I tell my online students with the BPSOP, and also in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around our planet, take the challenge and try creating memorable images without the help of post processing. I’m not saying I don’t use Photoshop, because I do…all the time. I like the idea of being a good photographer and not a good computer artist.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram: www.instagrm.com/barabanjoe. Check out my upcoming workshops at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

Once again, Ansel Adams pops into the spotlight. Over the years I have taught online at the BPSOP, and have conducted my workshops all over the world. During these years I have quoted this very famous photographer several times. If you’re interested you can just click on “My Favorite Quotes” and scroll through them.

Well, I have another one that really fits the bill!

Ansel once said to his assistant John Sexton, “The harder you work, the luckier you get”.

First of all, anyone can click the shutter on their camera. It’s just about the easiest thing you can do when taking pictures. The hard part is everything else, and that’s the part that takes work.

Over the years, I have walked the Medieval Streets in Europe, country roads in the US and the Malecon in Havana with students in one of my workshops. I have found that most, but not all, will walk by something interesting stop for a moment and ‘take’ a picture of it.

I can tell you from over fifty years of experience shooting on my and teaching for forty years that unless you’re street shooting and looking to stop some sort of action that’s whizzing by you, or you’re whizzing by it, or it’s stopped for just a moment, the odds of you coming home with a wall hanger are slim to none. Of course that depends on what you consider a wall hanger.

But that’s another story.

Wall Hangers rarely come from ‘taking’ pictures. They come from ‘making pictures’. Bob Marley once said, “Some people feel the rain while others just get wet” http://joebaraban.com/blog/my-favorite-quotes-bob-marley/

It takes work, and a lot of it to “feel the rain”. But once you do, you’ll be ready, and as Eddie Adams once said, “When you get lucky, be ready”.

Visit my website at  www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my upcoming workshops at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime,

JoeB

Front and center.

I don’t remember when I first fell in love with my 20mm F/2.8 lens. I’m sure it had to do with the fact that I was shooting Kodachrome 25 (the ISO), and when I wanted a high speed film, I switched to Kodachrome 64. That was in the film days and that was the film of choice. Being that slow made me use a tripod, and it was the best thing I ever did, because now I’m as fast with it as most people are when thy hand hold.

I digress.

The 20mm lens became my all purpose lens and I shot everything with it from portraits to landscapes.  Because it was so fast, I didn’t have to stop down very much to usually get what I wanted in focus. I could also get my subjects “up close and personal” and if I kept them in the middle, or if I kept my camera level when I did put them close to the edge they wouldn’t be distorted. That also included not having their arms and legs too close to the lens or they would be weird and too large for the rest of their body.

I loved to put my subjects what I always referred to as “front and center”. In my online class with the BPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, I’m constantly getting my fellow photographers to get “up close and personal” to their subject. For one thing it generates Visual Tension and interest. For another, It anchors them in the foreground and creates layers of interest and depth. Since the camera just has one eye (the lens) it can only see in two dimensions…height and width. You can trick the camera into creating the third dimension…depth by placing your subject front and center.

Btw, I also like to put them smack dab in the middle and to hell with that silly “Rule of Thirds” thing that everyone thinks you have to follow to create good photos.

So try it next time and see if you like it. Put your subject front and center and close to the lens. Once you see how it works and you get over the hump, give it a try, you’ll see that it’s not such a bad idea after all.

Here’s some examples, and all of them were shot with a 20mm lens. Some were shot during the film days and some in the more recent digital age:

PausePlayPlayPrev|Next

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

What rule says you can’t center the horizon line?

Once again I want to start off by saying that there’s no set rule as to where to put that pesky horizon line; run from anyone that tells you any different.

There’s three basic choices:

Putting the horizon high in the frame will accentuate whatever you put in the foreground while at the same time intensifying the feeling of distance. When I talk about this to my online class with the BPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet,   I always warn my fellow photographers that when they tilt the camera up or down the vertical lines close to the edge of the frame will bend either in or out.

One way that sometimes corrects that distortion is to switch to a wider lens so the tilting up or down is at a minimum. Switching to a wider lens will also help keep everything in focus from the foreground to the background. Another way to help with the focus is to shoot from a higher POV and then when you tilt the camera down it will extend the DOF.

Breaking through the centered horizon line.

Putting the horizon line low in the frame will do two things. It will bring attention to a dramatic sky, and it will create a feeling of being small in the scheme of things…as in the vastness of the world around us. I will often put my subject in the bottom right corner of my frame to give the feeling of being alone and small in relation to the infinite reaches of the sky above. Putting my subject in that right corner will also generate Visual Tension. Btw, if the sky is not dramatic and just blue, the viewer will quite possibly tire of it and move along.

Putting the horizon line in the middle of the frame is to many, breaking a cardinal rule. These are the people you want to stay away from. There are times when it will work, and it just all depends. One never knows until it’s tried, and I’m the first one to encourage trying. As I always told my kids…”Color outside the lines”.

Putting the horizon line in the middle is often used when you’re reflecting the image in some body of water. It will change the dynamics of your composition by becoming more of a graphic/symmetrical statement; showing the subject in a mirrored reflection. It will also generate Visual Tension. In my classes we work a lot of ways to create Visual Tension, and showing a subject and it’s reflection is one of the ways.

When you’re reading all the rules to becoming a good photographer, and I say this lightly, placing the horizon smack dab in the middle is high up on the list. Btw, who was the first person to tell us that was a real “no-no”????? I think he or she has dressed up in their parent’s clothes and are playing hide-in-seek!!!

A low horizon line.

I say it does have merit. Placing your horizon line in the middle can have two effects. first, it can look like someone has spliced two photos together. Second, it can leave your photo non-moving and static. Non-moving in the sense that its important to move the viewer around the frame giving him lots of things to discover. That way he’ll stick around longer.

One way to work around centering the horizon line is to use elements to break the horizon. In effect, it can tie the two parts together.

In any event, what’s important to think about is one of my favorite “personal pearls of wisdom”…consider the scene and its outcome. What message are you trying to get across? Simply put, are you emphasizing the sky or the foreground…or neither one?

There is another way to solve this dilemma, and this will resolve any nightmares you might endure from worrying about where you put that last horizon line. Don’t show the horizon at all. If the centers of interest, or the main subject is below the horizon line, then it makes life so much easier.   This is really a good idea when the sky is overcast.

Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

my new 100mm macro

I teach an online class with the BPSOP, and I conduct workshops all over the world. I have also written a blog since 2011, and one comes out every five or six days.

I look for and find and see ideas from every corner of the globe, and under every rock…if necessary.

I happened to walk through the power tools at my local Loews and suddenly an idea hit me smack dab in the face. It was an analogy I drew from incidents that occurred along the way in my workshops.

So, my fellow photographers, imagine a carpenter with all his tools next to him or at least very close. For a specific job, he had purchased some new power tools and is about to start working. Here’s the problem, he hasn’t read the manual and doesn’t know all the functions of said tool.

Now, imagine me in my workshop I did in Prague many years ago. We were at a famous church , famous for the amazing Flying Buttress…”a buttress that stands apart from the structure that it  supports. and is connected to it by an arch.”

In any event, it was sunrise and a student came up to me with a Leica body and an assortment of lens that totaled $60,000. She had no idea how to use it and asked me if I could help. All I could do was to look at her as if she had just landed in an extraterritorial spacecraft of some kind.

In other words, I had no idea!!

It wasn’t the last time someone came to me for help with a new piece of equipment they had bought just for the workshop….which includes tripods of various sizes and shapes.

Know your gear, read the manual and practice with it BEFORE you go out in the real world to shoot those elusive ‘Wall Hangers’.

Visit my website www.joebaraban.com and follow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB

If I had a dollar for every time a student of mine opened Photoshop and unnecessarily worked on one of their photos…that didn’t really need anything, I would be writing this from poolside at my summer home with a blue and frothy drink sitting on a table by my side.

It’s sad that although their are some great things about Photoshop, there are just as many unfortunate things as well. But that’s our world today.

In my online classes with the BPSOP, and in my workshops I conduct all over the place, so many of my fellow photographers started shooting while the digital age was beginning to boom.

They though and are still thinking that you need Photoshop to complete your ‘wall hanger’, as well as all those ill-considered things your camera either tells you do do, or they’re on the back of your camera beckoning you to take the one way path to mediocrity i.e., the Histogram, or those obnoxious blinking lights that are telling you that you’re about to ‘clip a highlight’…sidetracking your thought process while you’re trying to “color outside the lines” and create something worth a damn.

For those of you that sit in a camera club meting eating goldfish and washing them down with diet drinks, while looking at someone’s image that he or she worked on…and damn proud of it, do not, and I repeat, do not think you have to go down that road.

Photographers that use Photoshop or Lightroom to enhance their photos, more than likely (and I’ve seen it for years) will over process a good image. It will become garish, glitzy, and generally in bad taste, and the sad part is that there are those out there (and you know who you are), that will simply love it.

If that’s what you want, then ‘Lay on McDuff'”…(Shakespeare’s Macbeth)!!!!

If you would rather not, then study what makes a good photo as far as the composition, balance, the light, and ways to keep the viewer around longer. I can tell you that it’s a fifty-fifty proposition that you can find that in a camera club.

Visit my website at www.joebaraban.com, and follow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of my blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB