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.

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

I captured this vista during my hike on Sunday at Afton. It’s amazing what a wide-angle and some clever processing can do to a cold Minnesota plain.

The ultra-wide-angle lens that I have been using for a while now has some interesting characteristics when it comes to distortion. It’s an aspherical lens that has almost no fish-eye effect, but it tends to stretch lines that go to the corners. Also, if you point it anywhere that is not the horizon, it tilts everything causing “falling lines.” This means that I have to shoot landscapes straight on, placing the horizon boringly dead-center. So now I look for compositions that can handle these conditions an here is one of my favorites. I was able to through some great diagonals across the image with the path and the clouds. Turn up the post processing to emphasize the lines and I think it works.

Also, the way I processed it is close to a lightroom preset called “direct positive” that I have used before. It made the image look like a photo my dad of my grandparents standing in a wheat field taken in 1966. The direct-positive look mimics the way that color photos were processed in the 1960s. It’s pretty rough on the image, but when the right opportunity comes along, I love to use it.

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

Took the big lens out last night and shot the moon! It’s a film lens, not a digital one, so there’s a little chromatic aberration going on. But you gotta love a 2000mm lens. The red is real, the reason to try to photograph a lunar eclipse is the color and the darkness of the moon.

How to Photograph the Moon

You need a big lens, the bigger, the better. Except during a lunar eclipse, the moon is really bright. Mixing it with other elements like the skyline is difficult. You either take two pictures to expose the moon and the earth-bound objects separately or let the moon burn out, like I did with this picture of the full moon over Minneapolis. To get the exposure right for the moon, check out this chart I found or just wing it and look at the LCD. The moon isn’t going anywhere, so experimenting isn’t difficult. If your camera has a histogram, make sure you use it with night photography, it’s easy to underexpose the image since the LCD looks brighter to your dilated pupils at night.

Make sure you chose a clear night, in February in Minneapolis it gets pretty cold at night. Last night it was below zero and the nice thing about that is that it’s too cold for clouds to form, so it’s pretty clear (snow pants rock). Back to the list: big lens, a good tripod, cable release or camera on timer mode and flashlight (cell phone works as a light too, a pretty good one in fact). The moon is on the move, so keep the shutter time down. That’s not an issue with the moon normally, but it is with an eclipse. This one is at f8 (crappy lens) and 4 seconds. You can see the moon is blurred slightly in today’s picture because it moved noticeably in those 4 seconds.

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

What could be more romantic than an evening on the Lake of the Isles skating rink? How about a star? Many of you have asked about the star effect that I have in a few of my shots and frankly, I wasn’t sure how I was getting it. After a little experimenting I have the answer.

Star Effect

You could use a star filter, but then you would have to carry it with you. This image was created without one. How? Crank down the aperture (bigger number, it’s an inverse ratio, i.e. 1/22). When the aperture opening is very small, the points where the blades intersect become more pronounced and this causes the star effect. By the way, you can find out how many blades are on the aperture by counting the points on the star. Arcane knowledge for sure, but each lens may be different and it’s fun to know. This shot was taken with my Nikon 70-300mm at f/32. This is possible at night with a good stable tripod — you’ll have a longer exposure. Also, note that you need a point of bright light, not an illuminated surface for this to work.

Once you are set up, put your camera on aperture priority and try different settings to see how big of a star you can get. I shot this in manual mode so that I could set the shutter speed as well to determine the exposure. Another problem with night photography is that your LCD is relatively bright, so you may accidentally underexpose your images because they seem bright on the LCD to you (and your highly dilated eyes) at night. Check you histogram after each shot and make sure that the exposure is right.

If you get a chance to try this and like the result, please leave a comment with a link to your picture, I’d love to see it and share it with my readers.

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

Minnesota is known as the “Land of Lakes” claiming to have 10,000 lakes. This is an old marketing ploy, Minnesota doesn’t have that many lakes, that’s just a nice round number — the real number of lakes over 10 acres in size is actually 11,842. We also have 69,000 miles of rivers, including the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi. In the summer, Minneapolis is amazing, there’s so many parks in the city with lakes or rivers in them. I live in Uptown, which is on the “Chain of Lakes” on the western side of the city. Today’s photo is of Lake of the Isles, my favorite Lake. Not many know this, but the namesake islands are Mike’s Island and Raspberry Island — both bird sanctuaries.

The price of living here is the winter. If you are a regular reader, you know my stance on it. But we make the best of it including a big cross-country skiing event this weekend that I plan on taking pictures of and sharing with you, so check back.

That’s my friend Lynne in the picture above, she’s an oil painter. The day I took this, she was painting and I was experimenting with my IR camera. She’s one of a rare breed of landscape painters who practice “plein aire” style — painting outside and capturing the quality of the light and the landscape in a few hours. I painted for a few years, but I’m on a break from it, the camera is more my medium right now.

Infrared photography creates some amazing images and it’s one of the instances where point-and-shoot cameras out perform DSLRs. To learn more, read my article about Infrared.

Other City Photo Blogs participating in the Monthly Theme Day

The theme for February is “When People Think of My City They Think of…” Today is the day to go see the world, the DCPBers are showing off their cities! Portland (OR), USA - Menton, France - Monte Carlo, Monaco - Memphis (Tennessee), USA - Manila, Philippines - San Diego (CA), USA - Anderson (SC), USA - New York City (NY), USA - San Diego (CA), USA - Mexico City, Mexico - San Francisco (CA), USA - Mumbai (Maharashtra), India - Mainz, Germany - Weston (FL), USA - Minneapolis (MN), USA - Turin, Italy - Las Vegas (NV), USA - Hobart (Tasmania), Australia - Bicheno, Australia - Durban, South Africa - Joplin (MO), USA - Nashville (TN), USA - Stockholm, Sweden - Kyoto, Japan - Tokyo, Japan - Brussels, Belgium - Chicago (IL), USA - Montpellier, France - Seattle (WA), USA - Mazatlan, Mexico - Saint Paul (MN), USA - Sharon (CT), USA - Sesimbra, Portugal - Toulouse, France - Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Susanville (CA), USA - Maple Ridge (BC), Canada - Saint Louis (MO), USA - Prague, Czech Republic - Helsinki, Finland - Pilisvörösvár, Hungary - Lisbon, Portugal - Mexico (DF), Mexico - Trujillo, Peru - Dunedin (FL), USA - Albuquerque (NM), USA - Port Angeles (WA), USA - Cottage Grove (MN), USA - Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - London, UK - Baziège, France - Jefferson City (MO), USA - Greenville (SC), USA - Selma (AL), USA - Mumbai, India - Naples (FL), USA - Norwich (Norfolk), UK - Silver Spring (MD), USA - Setúbal, Portugal - Stayton (OR), USA - Bellefonte (PA), USA - Sofia, Bulgaria - Arradon, France - Montego Bay, Jamaica - Athens, Greece - Austin (TX), USA - Singapore, Singapore - West Sacramento (CA), USA - Jackson (MS), USA - Wassenaar (ZH), Netherlands - Budapest, Hungary - Rotterdam, Netherlands - St Malo, France - Chandler (AZ), USA - Melbourne, Australia - Port Vila, Vanuatu - Cleveland (OH), USA - Nottingham, UK - Kansas City (MO), USA - The Hague, Netherlands - Crystal Lake (IL), USA - Wrocław, Poland - Chateaubriant, France - Cheltenham, UK - Moscow, Russia - Monrovia (CA), USA - Saigon, Vietnam - Toruń, Poland - Grenoble, France - Lisbon, Portugal - New Orleans (LA), USA - Sydney, Australia - Boston (MA), USA - American Fork (UT), USA - Boston (MA), USA - Montréal (QC), Canada - Wichita (KS), USA - Radonvilliers, France - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Christchurch, New Zealand - Rabaul, Papua New Guinea - Wailea (HI), USA - Aliso Viejo (CA), USA - St Francis, South Africa - Port Elizabeth, South Africa - Seattle (WA), USA - Pasadena (CA), USA - Vienna, Austria - Orlando (FL), USA - Torun, Poland - Delta (CO), USA - Santa Fe (NM), USA - Minneapolis (MN), USA - Haninge, Sweden - Paris, France - Stavanger, Norway - Niamey, Niger - Le Guilvinec, France - Bogor, Indonesia - Saarbrücken, Germany - Auckland, New Zealand - Wellington, New Zealand - Budapest, Hungary - Juneau (AK), USA - Bucaramanga (Santander), Colombia - Glasgow, Scotland - Chicago (IL), USA - Jakarta, Indonesia - Adelaide (SA), Australia - Sydney, Australia - Riga, Latvia - Subang Jaya (Selangor), Malaysia - Terrell (TX), USA - Terrell (TX), USA - Inverness (IL), USA