Trying to take better photos
Posted: March 13th, 2022, 9:06 am
Lately I've been trying to take better photos of my trees, particularly my newly-potted ficus which I've always struggled with - it's not an amazing tree but in person the branches look okay, whereas in a photo they tend to look like a tangled mess. Since I wanted to proudly show off the tree in its new pot something had to change. I thought I'd put a few notes here just in case they're at all useful to someone else.
There's an awesome thread pinned to the top of this forum that has a huge amount of useful info. I had a read through this to get me started.
I've always put plants in front of a beige wall to take photos, and try to avoid direct sunlight. At my place the blank walls are along both sides of the house, which doesn't allow me to move back very far with the camera (there's a 1m path, and then a .7m garden bed, and then a fence, so I'm often wedged in a hedge trying to get all the branches in frame). I moved a few things around on the back deck which gives me a blank area to take photos and space to move back. I need to put the Weber and pot plants back after I'm done to avoid a cranky wife.
From the above-mentioned thread, I learned that I wasn't getting the camera low enough - photos are best taken with the camera level with the lower branch, so that the surface of the soil is just barely visible. This made a big difference when taking photos of my fig.
Also from the above-mentioned thread I learned that I was taking photos way too close, which resulted in a distorted perspective. Having the camera further from the tree and increasing the focal length results in parallel lines coming out looking more parallel in the photo - again this was a huge help with my fig as it made the branches appear less like a tangled mess. This is where a proper camera wins over a phone: phone lenses are generally wide angle so as to capture as much of the scene as possible, but this introduces distortion which isn't ideal when taking photos of a bonsai. I used a focal length of 70mm for my ficus.
So now I can move back further, and know to have the camera level with the lower branches. The last thing I added was a tripod. I ended up grabbing one from Kmart for $25. For $25 this thing is great - it's sturdy, holds up my DSLR no worries, and lets you make plenty of adjustments. It can also hold a phone and has a bluetooth remote. My camera (a Nikon D5100) is a bit too old for bluetooth, so for a remote shutter I plugged my phone into the camera and used an app, which let me take photos without touching the camera. Perfect.
A quick Google also led me to turning off VR (vibration reduction) mode on my camera. This is great when holding the camera, but when the camera is on a tripod there isn't any movement/vibration, so this mode actually introduces some blurriness as the camera tries to compensate for non-existent vibration. Or something like that.
After taking a photo, then there's post-production. As with my DSLR, I know just enough Photoshop to be dangerous. I kept things simple and just corrected the white balance ("auto" ftw), bumped up the contrast slightly, rotated a bit to level things, and then cropped. I have Photoshop for work so don't need to worry about the cost, but there are cheaper/free alternatives like Affinity Photo and GIMP.
These forums throw up a challenge with the low filesize limit - 2MB is pretty tiny these days and most of the photos I save out from Photoshop end up at around 4-5MB. TinyJPG is a great tool that uses some smarts to optimise image file size without sacrificing much in the way of quality. Results vary but the below "before" photo was reduced from 4.4MB to 1.1MB, and when clicking between the two versions I can't see any difference.
Another trick when optimising JPEGs for display on the web is to reduce the quality rather than the resolution. A larger-res image at 50% quality is, in general, going to be better than a smaller-res image at 100% quality since the larger-res version will be scaled down to fit on the screen, so you actually end up with more detail on screens with a high pixel density (most phones, Apple's "Retina" displays, etc).
Here are my two photo attempts: the "before" was with my phone, close up and with the camera pointing down on the tree' and the "after" with the DSLR on a tripod. An improvement, but still a way to go.
Hopefully this is somewhat useful to someone, or if anyone has tips for me please share!
There's an awesome thread pinned to the top of this forum that has a huge amount of useful info. I had a read through this to get me started.
I've always put plants in front of a beige wall to take photos, and try to avoid direct sunlight. At my place the blank walls are along both sides of the house, which doesn't allow me to move back very far with the camera (there's a 1m path, and then a .7m garden bed, and then a fence, so I'm often wedged in a hedge trying to get all the branches in frame). I moved a few things around on the back deck which gives me a blank area to take photos and space to move back. I need to put the Weber and pot plants back after I'm done to avoid a cranky wife.
From the above-mentioned thread, I learned that I wasn't getting the camera low enough - photos are best taken with the camera level with the lower branch, so that the surface of the soil is just barely visible. This made a big difference when taking photos of my fig.
Also from the above-mentioned thread I learned that I was taking photos way too close, which resulted in a distorted perspective. Having the camera further from the tree and increasing the focal length results in parallel lines coming out looking more parallel in the photo - again this was a huge help with my fig as it made the branches appear less like a tangled mess. This is where a proper camera wins over a phone: phone lenses are generally wide angle so as to capture as much of the scene as possible, but this introduces distortion which isn't ideal when taking photos of a bonsai. I used a focal length of 70mm for my ficus.
So now I can move back further, and know to have the camera level with the lower branches. The last thing I added was a tripod. I ended up grabbing one from Kmart for $25. For $25 this thing is great - it's sturdy, holds up my DSLR no worries, and lets you make plenty of adjustments. It can also hold a phone and has a bluetooth remote. My camera (a Nikon D5100) is a bit too old for bluetooth, so for a remote shutter I plugged my phone into the camera and used an app, which let me take photos without touching the camera. Perfect.
A quick Google also led me to turning off VR (vibration reduction) mode on my camera. This is great when holding the camera, but when the camera is on a tripod there isn't any movement/vibration, so this mode actually introduces some blurriness as the camera tries to compensate for non-existent vibration. Or something like that.
After taking a photo, then there's post-production. As with my DSLR, I know just enough Photoshop to be dangerous. I kept things simple and just corrected the white balance ("auto" ftw), bumped up the contrast slightly, rotated a bit to level things, and then cropped. I have Photoshop for work so don't need to worry about the cost, but there are cheaper/free alternatives like Affinity Photo and GIMP.
These forums throw up a challenge with the low filesize limit - 2MB is pretty tiny these days and most of the photos I save out from Photoshop end up at around 4-5MB. TinyJPG is a great tool that uses some smarts to optimise image file size without sacrificing much in the way of quality. Results vary but the below "before" photo was reduced from 4.4MB to 1.1MB, and when clicking between the two versions I can't see any difference.
Another trick when optimising JPEGs for display on the web is to reduce the quality rather than the resolution. A larger-res image at 50% quality is, in general, going to be better than a smaller-res image at 100% quality since the larger-res version will be scaled down to fit on the screen, so you actually end up with more detail on screens with a high pixel density (most phones, Apple's "Retina" displays, etc).
Here are my two photo attempts: the "before" was with my phone, close up and with the camera pointing down on the tree' and the "after" with the DSLR on a tripod. An improvement, but still a way to go.
Hopefully this is somewhat useful to someone, or if anyone has tips for me please share!