Image quality encompasses a myriad of physical and esoteric qualities; in fact, a merging of both the arts and sciences. We can readily understand the science, such as shutter speed, aperture, focal length and so forth, but how do you explain the feelings when observing a painting or photograph?
Initially, you may be confused about determining whether an image is good. Learning what makes a quality image takes time and experience. Once gained, however, the ability to put your discerning nature to the test is both a curse and a boon; a curse because of being overly critical about your work and a boon as a tool to categorize your image collection.
There are many tools to help you and most work like a light-box where you can see a number of images all at once. Adobe's Bridge and Lightroom, ACDSee's Photo Manager, and Apple's Aperture programs are all capable applications allowing you to catalog your images. With any of these, you compare one image with another and mark them with colors, numbers or icons to determine their value to you. But, what do you look for?
The most obvious mistakes are the first to go--too far over/under exposed, out of focus, subject movement, and so forth. Remove these from your view. Now comes the difficult part, judging the differences between the keepers.
Look for slight exposure differences, composition, color, contrast and any other physical attribute which would make one image better than another. Okay, that's all well and good, but there is an unidentifiable property, a qualitative difference which can make an image jump to the top of your list.
This can be capturing a model or portrait where the subject shows their personality; a sparkle, a smile coming from within, a connection. The connection is what we're looking for and it's this quality which unites the subject and the viewer.
While initially the connection may be between the photographer and subject, it's often transferred to the viewer. With a portrait, this connection can be more pronounced than with a landscape image, but without a connection, it becomes just another photograph.
In non-animate subjects, it's usually composition, color, a different point of view, lighting or combination of factors which connect with the viewer. After a while, with experience and after looking at hundreds, if not thousands of images, you'll be able to recognize which images have this quality of connection without thinking about it.
--------
Dennis Hays' articles and reviews delivered directly to your
Amazon Kindle:
Subscription page:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002X78EMO
-----
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment