Photo Critique 1 – The Abandoned Car

A couple of months ago, I asked for submissions for a new critique feature I wanted to start. A lot of people expressed interest but it was only in the past week that someone actually sent a photo to be critiqued. So that’s what we’re going to do today. When I was getting started, I was fortunate enough to receive some good, honest criticism that spent more time pointing out problems in my images than it did praising them. Which is good. It’s hard to improve if people simply tell you the photo is great, or don’t say anything for fear of offending you. That’s not what I’m going to do. My aim is to give some honest, practical advice so that people can take their personal photography to a higher level. So if I sound overly harsh, it’s only because I’m focusing on the areas that need improvement and because of that, I’m not going to give the name of the photographer nor any links to their site. These critiques that I’ll be doing will remain anonymous. With that said, let’s take a look at the photo and see what’s what.

The photo above is the unedited jpg that was sent to me, resized for screen. Nothing else has been done to it. We have an old, abandoned and fairly broken car. It seems that the sun is coming in at a low angle from the right and there are already some deep shadows, suggesting this shot was taken late in the day. Composition-wise, things like okay. The car fills the frame, although the headlight being dead center is a bit distracting. I’d have liked to see it off-center somehow, but that’s largely subjective. All in all, we’re off to a good start. Now, lets take a look at some details.

When editing photos, it’s good practice to view them at 100% on the screen. This particular image is a little over 4200 pixels wide, so it’ll obviously be too big for a computer screen. What we can do is select the hand tool (keyboard shortcut – H) to move around the image a bit at a time. Above, there is a 100% crop of part of the image. We can easily see that the photo isn’t sharp.

Now, if this were my photo, that’s as far as I’d go. Unless it was a photograph of some important breaking news event that no one else had, I’d be passing over the image and moving onto the next one. But we work with what we have, so lets look at some reasons why it might not be sharp and how to overcome them next time.

Looking at the metadata (File > File Info or Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + I), we can see the following.

For now we’re most concerned with the shutter speed and the focal length, plus, to a lesser extent, the camera model. This was shot on a Canon 450D which has an APS-C sized sensor. This introduces a crop factor of 1.6, so when we look at the focal length, 18mm, we need to multiply by 1.6 to get the equivalent focal length for 35mm (full frame). In this case, that’s 28mm (28.8mm exactly but 28mm is a common focal length so we’ll use that). A common rule of thumb for handholding is to use a shutter speed no slower than 1/focal length. Here, we’d be looking at 1/30s or faster. However, the shutter speed used was 0.6s which, if my math is right, is about 4 1/3 stops too slow. This is the most likely reason why the image is a bit blurry.

So how can this be avoided? The obvious solution is to use a tripod or monopod, but that’s not always a practical solution. Often, there’ll be something we can use to rest the camera on nearby – a wall, a box etc. If so, then we can make use of this. A fast lens which opens up to f1.4 or f2.8 would give us some extra shutter speed, but the metadata above shows that this lens is f3.5 wide open. Using an IS lens (VR in Nikon-speak) will give us an extra couple of stops of leeway when handholding which might bring us closer. All of these require something that the photographer may not have at hand at the time though. If we assume assume this to be the case, then the best bet is to adjust the ISO. The photo was shot at ISO 800. Bumping that up to ISO 1600 (3200 is also usable on the most recent generation of cameras), would give us an extra stop, and if we set the camera to hi-speed continuous shooting, we could take 4-5 photos immediately after the other. Doing this would increase our chances that one would be sharp enough to use.

So let’s put aside these concerns for now and treat it like a keeper. The photographer who took this asked for ideas on post-processing and including the following image.

That’s a pretty good black and white image. There’s a good range of tones from blacks through to whites giving a pleasing contrast. There are a few hot spots but on the screen they don’t matter so much. For web use, the post-processing used here look quite good. Adding a little bit of a color tint might be good.

The gritty, pseudo HDR look that’s popular at the moment would be another option. Some people love this look, others hate it. I prefer it when it’s not too OTT but you can definitely take it more into the realm of cartoon if you desire. There a plenty of tutorials online that lay out the steps – the key is raising the blacks and fill light to 100 and desaturating slightly.

Other than playing around with different tints and effects, there’s not too much more I can suggest. The tight framing limits the ability to do much in the way of cropping and I’ve already mentioned the centered headlight. The black and white conversion submitted was a good choice and that’s probably the version I’d go with.

I hope that was interesting. As it’s my first formal critique in this series, feedback is especially important. And if you’d like one of your photographs up here in the future, send me a jpg that is at least 1600 pixels on its longest edge, although original size is best.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 06:00. It is filed under Learn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.