Day 288 - Odd Numbers in Photography

I had quite a photography disaster this evening!

After not having the energy to leave home to do my shot of the day, I decided that I should keep up the snow theme for the rest of the week.  So, I could take a few shots from the balcony in an effort to keep that up.  The skies looked pink, with the snow clouds and the impending snow showers, and I thought an evening sky on a long exposure would make a great shot.

I was proved wrong, when I couldn't get a single shot to look the way I wanted because of the high winds that kept moving the trees causing a lot of blurred motion.  I thought I could use the blur as the subject, since I couldn't control the elements, but it just didn't work, and the wind kept shaking the camera, besides chilling me to my bones, of course.  So, I gave up and came back indoors.

This leads me to post one of a few images I took a couple of days ago, and to explain what I mean by odd numbers in photography, which you might already know about, but which doesn't stop me from revisiting - the rule of including odd numbers in our images.

We often inadvertently incorporate this rule into our photography.  An odd number always creates a better image than an even number of objects that lead the brain to look for symmetry, which in most cases looks boring.  Additionally, it is said that the more time it takes the brain to process something, the better it is appreciated.

Sometimes three or five don't make a crowd.  However, we need to be careful of not introducing too many numbers as this will ultimately lead to clutter.  Keep it simple and clutter-free, but it's nice to create a little bit of interest and help the eyes travel all over an asymmetrical image, especially if you create a group/cluster of three or five, instead of putting them in a straight line.  Although, mind you, straight lines work better in cases where you want to create leading lines or patterns.  The artistic choice finally lies with you!

When I shot these images, I hadn't realized that I took only a couple of images with the two starlings in the tree, but most of my images had three of them in it.  There was a large flock of these feathered guys, but I was somehow able to isolate and shoot the three close together.  Maybe this was totally accidental, or maybe it was subconsciously executed.  Who's to tell!

To illustrate the case in point, here are three shots.  Do let me know which one(s) you find most interesting.

And while this is a rule in composition to use odd numbers, there are always exceptions to this rule and it's always nice to be able to break them creatively.

Day 287 - Getting Sporty

Umm.. not me.. as an athlete, but officiating as photographer for a badminton game.  I got called upon to shoot a game yesterday, and although these images were shot yesterday, I am going to post them today as I'd already done my shot for the day before the evening.

I hadn't had the chance to do any sports photography before this, although I did mention that I shot some pictures of a couple of little girls sledding, but I'll talk about that in a bit.  So, when I got called to do this, my first thought was that I would have to battle with artificial light, which means the flash.  I had planned on going for a preliminary round of test shots before doing the actual game.  But I had too many things that kept me from doing that.  Therefore, I had to wing it!  I had just one chance of getting this right.

I had already enquired about the available lighting and I'd especially asked about the colour scheme of the gym.  To my dismay it turned out to be the almost-fluorescent green gym that my son played soccer in last summer.  I knew I had to bring my grey card with me to do a custom white balance.  Although, in the end the grey card did come to my rescue, I can't say it did a fabulous job, maybe because this grey card was a cheap one that came with my PSE8 book, and therefore not that accurate.  I still saw some tinges of green (no, not from envy) in the images.

I shot in JPEG as I had to shoot really fast to keep up with the action.  Shooting in RAW could potentially slow me down as it would stop from time to time to write the images to the memory.  However, this fear didn't hold good when I realized that my recycle time on the flash was slowing me down anyway.

However, I kept shooting, on continuous mode in JPEG, in the hopes that any action I didn't catch with the flash, I might be able to fix in LR3 later on.  And I was right.  A couple of shots needed to be fixed, but I got away with turning them to B&W, so the light wouldn't look quite that ugly.  And as for the green colour cast, most of it was fortunately taken care of by the CWB, and I could fix a little bit more in LR.  I'm glad I chose to carry it with me.

I had initially started to shoot on Shutter Priority while the players were warming up, but when I couldn't help but use the flash, I pretty much had to dial down the shutter from 1/500s to 1/250s to match the sync speed.

The next three shots are from last Sunday.  Since I couldn't shoot anything with snow today, I thought I would post these shots instead.  This little girl and her sister were playing in the snow, and I went up to the dad and begged permission to snap them.  He was really kind and let me take as many shots as I pleased, and I later emailed them to him of course.  Such beautiful little girls!