Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

This is the Heffelfinger Fountain in the Lyndale Park Rose Garden on the Northeast shore of Lake Harriet. It’s the second oldest rose garden in the U.S. and was designed by Theodore Wirth.

Yes, this is infrared. I’ve posted a few of these over time and y’all demanded more of them, so here ya go.

I’ll be bringing you photos of the parks and trails for most of the month; I’d like to prove the beauty of this city’s greenspaces before I begin the State Fair. The State Fair is big deal here, it runs from the 21st thru Sept 1st. There’s tons of fun there, but it’s mainly about things you really shouldn’t be eating — on a stick. Batter-fried cheese curds, Batter-fried candy bars, Batter-fried oreos, some obscenity called a scotch egg and walleye-on-a-stick are a few crowd pleasers of yore. The latter I’ve not seen, but my dad is fascinated by — since he won’t come up here, I gotta go find one. So enjoy the pretty pictures while they last.

Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

Here’s yesterday’s location, only in infrared. I keep forgetting that I can do this. I waited all winter for the bright green foliage of summer so that I could take my infrared camera out.

As you can see from these two photos, the foliage reflects infrared light so they appear as crystal white masses. The sky goes black and the clouds go white. There are special cameras for taking infrared, but a lot of point-and-shoots can do it. I’m using a Sony F828 for this. If your P&S has a “night mode”, then it probably does a decent job of infrared. The easy way to test it is to point your TV remote at the camera lens and push a button. If you see a light coming from the remote on the screen, your camera see IR. Then you need a filter. Light colors are measured in wavelengths and the filters are numbered accordingly, 720nm, 820nm and 1000nm are the common ones. The first two do a good job, the 1000nm is hard to work with, with so little light, you need a tripod.

If y’all like these, I’ll take some more…

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

OK, this is from July 4th in Minneapolis, but I wanted to wish our fellow revolutionary brothers & sisters a bon quatorze juillet! France is, after all, the home of the City Daily Photo Blog, thanks Eric!

Believe it or not, I took this night photo hand-held with a telephoto lens. Yes, it’s the Nikon 70-300mm VR to the rescue. 1/6th of a second at f/4.5 and a focal length of 165mm. If you breath slow enough, you don’t need a tripod!

It’s possible that my former co-worker/mentor Mike Smith was right that if you drink enough caffeine, you jitter fast enough that you appear still. Either way, VR or Image Stabilization rocks!

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Railroads are a great source of abstract photos. This one was caught on the move; you can tell by the blurred grass on the far side.

Everything on a train is there because it’s supposed to be there. There’s very little decoration, it’s all working mechanical parts, which make for great abstracts. For a tutorial on abstract photography, check out my post from Monday. Basically, you are making the compositional elements prominent and reducing the realistic elements. Railroads and other industrial settings are great in the sense that these purpose-built machines are very simple in their design. Large solid parts, little detail or at least consistent repeating details.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Behold, the majesty of the Grand Lighting Tower of the Linden Yard. Ok… so the yard is now a city dump and the lights haven’t been on since we stopped building nuclear reactors, but still, from the right angle, it’s pretty cool. There is a lot going on in this shot, and I had fun at every step:

The Composition

This is a classic pyramid composition, offset to the left to follow the Rule of Thirds. Pyramids are very common compositions in design and painting. they draw the eye in and focus it to a central point, giving depth to the image. One of the great things about photography is that you don’t have to convince the viewer that it is real. This would make a lousy painting because it is abstract to the point of being incoherent — it would be dismissed as abstract. As a photo, you know it has to be something, so you figure it out. Abstract images loose their sense of space because the geometric shapes and strong lines destroy the organic real-world cues. By finding objects with simple lines and shapes, you can compose and image in which they dominate the space.

The Technique

This was shot with my Nikon D200 and the Nikkor 70-300mm VR f/4.5-5.6. Settings: Focal length 70mm, ISO 100, Aperture F/16, Shutter 1/80 sec, no flash. I placed the camera against the tower and worked out the composition. I took several photos at different settings with different compositions.

One of the big mistakes many amateur photographers make is that they don’t look at the entire image. They center the subject and shoot. I really enjoyed how I was able to get the top left light to fill the corner. Digital photos are free: take as many as you can. Keep moving the camera around and see what you can make.

The Processing

I love Adobe Lightroom. I can change an image in so many directions quickly without damaging the file or having oodles of layers to manage. I increased: exposure, recovery, blacks, vibrance, contrast, clarity and… Cranked the tonal curve and increased the luminosity and saturation of some colors. Add in a little Lens Vignetting and it’s done!

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Those in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, but they do cast their fair share of reflections. Perched above the street in one of Minneapolis’ many skyways, my eye was caught by the reflection on the skyway window, but I quickly saw the reflections all down the street and saw the chance to capture myself in the act.

Composition Tips

Here’s a few tips on composing an image: The rule of thirds is a classic and oft debated, but good general rule. Divide the space into thirds in both directions and try to place areas of interest on the intersections or along the lines. For example, you can see that I placed my head at the intersection of the left and bottom thirds, then the horizon on the bottom third and the dark shape of the building above my head is on the left third. Centering subjects is really boring for the eye. Also, if you have a person or critter in the scene, try to leave room in front of them, like the way I turned myself to be facing into the image.

A Scientific Study on Composition

I’ve been running this daily photo blog for almost 6 months now and have been keeping track of it with Google Analytics (one of the benefits of designing your own blog). Google Analytics offers a tremendous amount of information, for example, I could look at a chart of how many visitors came from the City Daily Photo Blog on each day. I was looking at this and saw a large swing the the number of visitors each day. If you aren’t familiar with the CDPB, it shows thumbnails of photos from the participating blogs. The neat thing about this is that each of my daily photos appears there as a thumbnail along with 16 other photos on the page. This gives me a simple way to ‘test’ an image to see if people will pick it out as interesting enough to take a closer look. I looked at the top and bottom traffic-getting images and discovered a number of relationships.

The lowest traffic photos all had one thing in common, the horizon was dead-center. I know that this makes an image boring, but in some cases, it made sense. For example, this image from Feb 20th:

I explain the reason for the composition on that day’s post and my friend Paul says this is his favorite photo of all the ones I have placed on the blog. But that day I only got three visitors from the CDPB; compare that to 13 the day before and 23the day after. The five lowest ranking days all had dead-center horizons. Some were daytime, some were night. One didn’t have a traditional horizon, but there was a prominent horizontal line across the center of the image.

It was an amazing realization to me. One of the most exhausting elements of art school is all the cookie-cutter rebels that bring to class these two-dimensional tragedies and then proceed to explain why they are “breaking the rules.” I was doing the same thing with these images. Like a bad idea in the free market, nobody tells you why it’s bad, they just don’t buy it. So in the same way, nobody clicks on the photos with a centered horizon.

So when you look through the lens, move around a little, recompose and take a few shots. When you place the horizon, move it off center. If you want to rebel against the man, go for it, but save the rebellion for the subject matter. The more well-composed and interesting the composition, the more people will be drawn to the image itself, regardless of the content.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Cranes are great photo subjects, not only do you get a good vertical, but they are usually very colorful. This one serves as the focal point and since it was hemmed in by the barricades, I thought a nice claustrophobic composition would help, so I cut off the horizon and kept the framing close. I’m impressed that they managed to carve out a worksite in the middle of the street like this. The little orange cones add some dynamism as well, they are like little soldiers standing guard around the crane. The thin ones are scouts and the big ones are the bodyguards.