Sketching before taking the photo

I had made up of couple of small plastic trays for a selection of my pastel  to use in the field on my trip through the Kimberleys. I only used them a couple of times, and not so successfully. The little plastics trays where fine, a great size for portability. As well as the pastels I made up a “soft” sketching kit with charcoal, compressed graphite, woodless pencil and conte. These are traditional sketching media but somewhat fragile, so not exactly field friendly.

However because the kit is nice and small, I’ve been trying it out as a way to prepare composition/notan sketches for my pathway project. My intention is to make quick composition sketches and possibly a few alternatives that incorporate the tonal balance BEFORE I take any photos. So I am thinking/seeing more like a “plein air” painter preparing a new canvas. The charcoal is quick and gives a strong contrast but it smudges easily, the compressed graphite is good but delivers a very pencil draw tonal range (its hard to get the deep darks). The woodless pencils seemed ideal, I have two hardnesses HB and 4B. They gave me the fast loose sketching of the main shapes and a decent spread from light to dark.

The composition was fine and I wanted to emphasise the lead in of the pathway in the lightest tonesand the contrast of the intersecting but hidden path and bush behind it. The strong dark blocks of the bush on the right hand side blocks this in a balanced sort of way. The lacy effect if the overhanging tree had some potential so I went to a wider angle and took a series of vertical (portrait orientation) bracketed images going from –2.0 EV to +2.0 EV. I have just recently purchase Aurora HDR 2018 and wanted to test it out. The default result was pleasing but having a notan sketch beside me when I did the post processing guided me to set the tonal balance to better match with what I saw. It also prompted to do a crop closer to the original framing of my sketches.

Seeing inside the frame

I’ve happened upon on a couple of simple tools to really help you see the important aspects of tonal balance and composition. This approach is specifically for the analysis your existing photos, but the insight gained from using them to prepare some composition sketches is very enlightening and of majour benefit for your future photography. There may be some one click filters that undertake similar methods, but it is the act of doing these steps yourself that will not only improve your observational skills but with make looking for tonal balance an automatic habit.

The first step is too find a software tool, a simple photo editor, that will allow you to do the basic editing like lightening, darkening, [cropping]. It should also let you make a black and white version and possibly posterized versions. It is important that it can display the photo full screen (or as close to full screen as possible). In this case I am using Paint.net, which is a great little user supported editor. Once you understand what’s going on the process, I suggest you migrate to a non-destructive editor. I  played around in Luminar & Polarr , they are also easy to use and do the job required beautifully. Picasa, if you still have a copy, is also perfect and with the added advantage of scrolling through your collection and also rating the photos you like. Lightroom or AfterShot pro could even be used here, if you are already familiar with them (don’t get them just to do these steps, eperiment with something free to start).

Load up a photo you the are interested in analysing, I’m using the Day 5 photo from last week a Foggy Afternoon in Olinda. The next step is to make it black and white. I prefer to just remove all saturation, but any convert to black and white approach is fine. The next step is to have close your eyes and look for the shapes in just 5 tones. You can lighten or darken the image to get the balance better. Only use the contrast if you must. Controls that let you adjust the highlights or shadows independently are preferable to just altering overall contrast. Now display that image full screen. Only save this version if you want to and be careful to give it a different name if you are not using a non-destructive editor.

The second tool is a neat little sketching program, called mischief, which allows you to draw over the photo, as if on a light table. There are several expensive graphics programs that allow you do something similar to this via layers but they are complex to use and set up. Mischief by comparison is really intuitive to use,  infinitely scalable and is no more complex than putting a piece of tracing paper over your photo and grabbing a pencil.   So I strongly recommend you try these steps with it. Looking on the mischief web site you will see a free and a paid version, you only need the free version to follow my method. Mischief starts full screen and there are a few controls you need to become familiar with so I have already made an Anatomy of Mischief post back a bit in the blog. Next change the window background opacity (you can use the Ctrl+W keyboard shortcut or the toolbar). I find it helpful to make a little Notan legend of 4 greyscales tones somewhere on the edge. You can later use the eye dropper to pick these shades later as you work on your “tracing”. Using the marker brush (its the bottom brush in the free version brush palette) and make it fairly thick and 100% on the opacity slider. Now start colouring over all parts of you photo that have the same tone. This is a lot easier than you might think. If you paint over something and you can not really see where you painted you have got it right. If you can clearly see where you have made brush marks, its time to back off, erase those marks, or use the undo tool (CrtlZ)  Think of yourself as doodling in the shades. It doesn’t have to be perfect it is about training your hand eye coordination to almost do it in autopilot. Turning off and on the background transparency now and again lets you check your progress. You should avoid getting too detail but you need to cover the main tonal regions (and arrive at something like the sketch on the right.

Now is the time for the most interesting steps. First look for the main positive and/or negative shapes (pick a colour to outline them and outline simple geometric shapes). In this case the subjects (the positive shapes, my dotted light blue outlines) are the dark shadowy trees and the negative space is the central column of light. The four dark positive shapes are a little asymmetrically balanced either side of that. This is a great start.

Next look for the high contrast edges (and lines). A viewers eyes will involuntarily flow along these high contrast paths paths, because that's what our vision does and our brains use this information to make sense of the image. The direction of the eye will usually be from less contrast towards more contrast along these edges/lines. Also the eye & brain love to play the lost and found found game (lost and found lines and edges is one of a painters secret tools). It is best if these paths can converge on a “sweat spot” or lead onto another path. It is very important that they don’t lead the viewer off the edge of the photo, particular at the corners of the image. If that happens you risk the viewer moving on, scrolling down or turning the page.

Study your tonal doodles and compositional squiggles with squinted eyes. Then close your eye for about 30 seconds and half open them again but follow a different path or focus on an alternate center of interest. Close and half open your eyes a few times until you are following the same paths to the same sweat spots.

Are these what you wanted to show when you took your photo?

You really don’t have to save any of this activity. Its more important that you do it, Doing it as if sketching develops your skill to accurately observe tone and understand composition at an innate level as opposed to following sets of rules. You will be starting to see with an artists eye.

If you have been using a non destructive editor, bring up the colour saturation again (close to the normal mid slider setting) leaving your tonal adjustments. You will probably be amazed, the photo is likely to look less washed out and the colours look more natural (closer to what you remembered when you took the photo).

Getting up to some Mischief

My disdain for workshop or trainers that just teach their “work flow” as the ultimate (perhaps only) way to use software and carry out various photographic or artistic tasks is continuing to grow. Such attitudes are a guarantee to remove originality, innovation and individual expression. Those that religiously follow the “work flow” rules end up producing much the same work over and over again and whilst it can be good, even excellent it is soon an avalanche of sameness, blunting our interest. If you don’t believe take a look at someone scanning their social media. they thumbs or fingers are barely allow more that 2 second to view any image. Swipe. swipe, swipe….

I favour a lightly slow more honest evaluation of the tools, workspace and characteristics of the material. You still need some instruction in the basics but ability comes more quickly if you just play with the media and tools. Its not unlike many of the early craft guilds (which included painters, or newspapers in the old days when they had staff photographers). Here you where probably apprenticed to a master and they expected you to grind the pigments, mix the inks, wash the brushes and even sweep out the work shop. You got to handle all the media and saw how it was used and eventually you where guided into doing it yourself. Some apprentices adhered to the methods of their master but fortunately for us enough students experiments and expanded on what they had learnt and their masters where wise enough to encourage them. I believe the same approach needs to apply in using the modern tools or art and photography. The masters, can be those guru photographers and the You Tube Stars, you no longer need to be in their workshop but the familiarity with the workspace and the tools is still down to us, the “modern apprentices”.

I’ve told you all this because I want to resume short blog posts about the work space in software and the key tools to use, so that you can understand the steps in the work flows you are taught but also have enough confidence to experiment and try something of your own. I happened upon the Mischief sketching software whilst looking at ways to prepare some composition/notan sketches. It was a it was a real relaxation, simple to use and powerful at the same time, no work flow required. There is a free version which is perfect to get started with, and is what I am using here, If you an make a mark with a pencil on paper you good to go.

The Mischief work space is a single screen and it normally starts in full screen mode. There is the normal windows style menus bar with drop down menu items that run all the programs function. The more commonly used are also shown in a vertical tool bar (normally over on the right). One very unique aspect of this work surface is the “canvas” you work on is that it is truly infinitely. You can scroll off the edge of the screen or zoom out to reveal more canvas. This an incredibly liberating feature. Start by drawing something that runs off the page, pan across a bit and keep drawing. The last two icons are for the the undo (another feature without a limit) and redo. All the tools and functions have keyboard short cuts, if you prefer those (look under help).

The next important set of tools are found in the brush panel (normally down on the lower left). The free version only has three brushes (aka pens) and they only have simple controls on size and opacity but this has been cleverly used to create a faint lines (pencil) for rough sketching a solid line (ink pen) and a thicker chisel style semi transparent line (Marker pen) These three pen will give you a decent sketching experience. probably the thing you will want to change most is the pen size, which uses the [ and ] brackets (for thinner & thinker) r the little slider pull out by clicking on the second bottom tab. the opacity can also be controlled by the number keys (again see the shortcut keys under the help menu.

The final on screen panel is the colour picker, normally on the upper left. Compared with many other packages this is a very simple format, but it does allow select for Colour (the slider under the colour square, Tone, the vertical position and Intensity, the horizontal position on the colour square. Unlike the paid version, the free version doesn’t have the ability to save your own swatch of colour, but size the canvas can be of infinite size you can place a small swtach of colours directly on just visible edge of the canvas, then return to that with the eyedropper to pick one of the few colours you have selected. So for simple composition sketch with 5 grey tone I have just used an approx 25% grey 50% grey, 75% grey & Black, using the white of the canvas as my 5th tone. You can either erase this later or just pan so that it is not displayed on the screen when you export a picture.

A really unique feature of this program (I haven’t seen another implement such a simple idea) is the ability to change the canvas opacity. This basically changes the canvas into tracing paper. By putting a suitable photo full screen and loading mischief over the top of it and either using the Window> Activate Window Opacity function from the menu or just use the slider on the side of the vertical tool bar. Moving the slider closer to 0% makes the canvas more translucent. You can trace lines of colour in the basic tonal shapes.

You really either need a Wacom style tablet of a touch screen with a pen, to get the natural feel of drawing. I have used it with the touch screen on my HP spectre and the touch mode on my old Bamboo tablet, but It is definitely wasn’t as good and trying to use the mouse is a little too fiddly. If you haven’t ever draw3 on a computer screen before the free version of the program is worth a trial. I’m already moving onto the Pro version (mainly to get layers & pins, more about those later hopefully. In the meantime never be afraid to experiment with your own “working methods” and occasionally just have a good “play”.

Collecting Photographic Reference Material

Most artist have their very own way of collecting reference material for a later studio painting. Some might just take one snapshot style photo (or perhaps a few) then essentially just copy that.

I must be from a more plein-air background, I much prefer to do a sketch or two (or three) on location. There is more time to breath in the atmosphere, listen to the sounds and get a real sense of the place, than just pressing a shutter button and moving on. More significant you still generally have only limited time so you have to gloss over the less important details, ones you might be tempted to copy from a photo. Instead you have to concentrate on what will be your subject/centre of interest, getting the relative tonality right and pulling together the colour palette. This requires keen direct observation, but with a little practise it come easy. In my initial pencil sketches I could see I needed to include the distant people to consolidate the vastness of the beach (Seven Mile Beach near Gerroa, South Coast of NSW )
Where a photograph will just reproduce the colours (and detail in a scene) within the technical limits of a camera, an artist will usually refine the colour palette to enhance or subdue the atmospherics. Possibly tweak the relative tonality to emphasize the subject. I always feel even rough sketches capture the essence of a place and are fresher than just a photo.

Take 5

However it doesn’t hurt to have some extra detail and this is where photography can be a great assets for any artist. My advice is always Take 5 

1. The snapshot (first impression of the scene)
2. Wider perspective (wide angle, panorama, or just adjacent overlapping shoots)
3. Zoom in on your subject
4. Take some atmosphere (eg the sky, the surf)
5. Look behind you (ok not literally but do look around and get a context photo or two of the place).

You may as well get the obvious snapshot out of the way. However next spend a bit of time looking for a wider view. Camera phones are already slightly wide angle but unlike a DLSR you can’t change lenses but there are lots of panorama apps that will allow to get a wider view. Alternatively you can take several overlapping photos and use a stitching program to join them. The next option is to zoom in close (most phones can do digital zooming) and a DSLR with a good zoom lens will save you leg work. Otherwise just walk in to get a closer view. It is also wise to take a couple of atmospheric photos, if it is a cloudy sky, take a photo just of some of the clouds. If the light is intense take some photos showing deep shadows, A blue sky is a lot of blue but it will give you a good reference for tonal changes, particularly towards the horizon, Make sure you can record the direction of light (shadows in photos will help here). Don’t forget to look around, sometimes what's behind you can make a stronger picture.

Make that 10

That set of five type of references should give you a big start back in the studio, but why stop there. Here are a further set of optional photos you should consider as well. You don't have to follow my suggestions here exactly these steps they should just be an excuse to do something different, perhaps more create.

Take a photo of the sketch in place

Try a range of different framing options

Try a range of exposure options (eg EV bracketing)

Look for Abstract shapes (or lines) and focus on them

Get in really close, record interesting texture (this could be very close up or plants, rocks, ripples in the sand or a stream)

The photo of your sketch in position will give a great reference of understand any difference in the colours captured by your camera versus what your sketch recorded. If nothing else any white background of your sketch book will be perfect to do a white balance on the photo later (which decent software should let you can carry to your other reference photos). Next is the idea of trying different framing options (its a little like steps 2 & 3 but instead of focusing on the subject you should move the frame around shifting the subject up and down or to right and left).  You might like to change your position so you are looking up or looking down (eg standing or sitting on a beach makes a big difference to perspective). Perhaps you can find a track, fence line that leads you nicely to the subject. Walk around. Perhaps a portrait orientation (vertical) may be better than a landscape (horizontal) orientation. Your camera viewfinder or phone screen are fixed aspects but you might like an image with a slightly different aspect. For example I am finding many sunny vistas lend themselves to a super wide format and I even sketch across two pages (3:1 aspect), so why not take two or more photos and join them later.
A lot of folk don’t like the default HDR style of photos (chunky detail and over vivid colours) but taking a set of images at different exposures can give you details in the shadows right through to delicate highlights. A single photo even when perfectly exposed can not provide these in a very contrasty situtaion. Learning to use HDR methods/software in a constrained manner can deliver photos that are much closer to what you remembered of the light & colour. Most DSLR have bracketing options and now many phone camera apps do as well or can do HDR multi-exposures directly on the phone. You don’t have to put up with bleach out skies and blown out highlights anymore.
The second last task is slightly obscure but it relates to balancing the tonal areas in your final painting. You can use your camera to help find the dominant shapes of dark and light. It requires looking at the scene in a more abstract manner. Its a lot like the advice to half blur your eyes in order to better see tone. If you have a DSLR put it in manual focus mode and then blur the image until you just see abstract shapes. Strong diagonals, curved lines and edges or sharp shapes can lead the eyes of the viewer. Try framing those shapes such that the lightest light against the darkest tone become the centre of interest (such contrast is generally what involuntarily draws a viewer’s eye first). Then refocus the camera and take that view. Mobile phone cameras generally don’t have a manual focus but you can resort to any of those camera/filter apps that change what is displayed on the screen as you take your photo. Changing the camera display to black & white or using a posterizing filter with only a few steps will help make it easier to see the tonal shapes. If you don’t have a phone with such apps find a some software that can help you perform these steps (I have used Paint.net on my computer and Snapseed on my phone) This is much the same step as doing a small tonal composition/notan sketch. As with the framing step it pays to move your view around, even a little. It can also help you zero in on what contributes  to an interesting composition and what can become just a broad area of tone, and perhaps a little texture.
Finally a few really close ups that record pattern & texture and/or some of the details you particular want included in your painting, a few quick detail sketches of such items might be useful as well. After realising I needed some people to give me scale I took a few difference photos of people both near and far walking on the beach.

Sketching Kit One (Canon Camera Bag)

I’m experimenting with what is the minimum amount of sketching gear I need. Specifically what can fit in my camera bag along with mu normal camera gear, The first kit consists of an A7 sketch book and the very compact little Cotman’s Sketchers’ Pocket Box produced by Windsor & Newton, a water brush, a soft pencil, a dagger brush and a jell ink pen. I also hand carry an A5 general purpose sketch book (shown below)which slots nicely into a pocket on my new beach chair.
The original benefit of the water brush is it has its own reservoir for water, so I don’t need to carry a wash jar and water. However the water brush is really cool you can easily control how much water is required by squeezing on the barrel. I did find a need somewhere to blot off the pigment when I want to change colours, the back of my wrist was fine at first but I think I’ll start putting a little folder kitchen paper in the sketch box in future. The little A7 sketch book is really only good for simple sketches particularly a quick composition or notan sketch.
The watercolour is in half pan size and the colours really intense but the dilute down to wonderful translucent washes. I have already added a turquoise, in place of Chinese white, but I find the two greens (viridian and hookers green in the set a bit intense, and might swap one out for a mauve, indigo or even payne’s grey. Time will tell. This is a really wonderful little set and fits snuggly in the front of the standard canon camera bag.
Final I also have my camera, may canon camera is my designated beach camera at the moment, so I can always take a few photos as reference.

I Like my watercolour wash sketch a lot even though I didn’t get time to let it dry enough to finish off on the beach. I then remembered having some good results using my compositional sketch as the training style with google deep dream generator and dreamscope app so I put a few other photo/sketches through the style filter. The results are pretty amazing.

The Notan Strip on my Hat

So why would I paint a set of Notan inspired grey shades onto my hat?

I’ve noticed that when I use a polarizing filter in the strong harsh light, The filter is definitely adding a warming effect into the colours and infact acting a little like a 2 or 3 stop neural density, My experience over the last couple of weeks and particularly a sunburnt nose saw me purchase a basic white floppy hat. Not a high fashion item but very useful on a hot sunny day. Then I realised that if a drop the hat to the ground and included it in at least one exposure I had a perfect reference tool to fiddle with the white balance in post processing, Adding a series of Notan reference tones hopefully will mean I don’t have to keep using my reference card, they are there on my hat.

The acrylic paints I used have, as usual darken once the dried so I may have to repaint the tones again a little lighter

Taking Notan into the Field

It would seem I am being unreasonable to ask photographers to carry a sketchbook, even a small one, when they go out to photograph. Yet just a simple notan sketch can be a great aid to seeing better composition and understanding of tones.

So here is a simple example. I’m looking at a simple path I have walk along many times, with no obvious subject. So first I prepared a little sketch in 5 tones or a composition noting a couple of points of interest. The tree trunk on the right and the shadows on the path. How to I know this? They are the only places with a full sharp contrast between dark and light. I also consider the balance between lights and darks within the mass of mid-tone. The horizon line / apparent vanishing point is close to the centre (not at the rule of thirds intersections!) but the tones are informally balanced. Not a masterpiece but has potential.

Looking at the lightest values there are actually only two place that could be considered almost white, the tree trunk on the left and the distant section of path. The sky is a deeper blue because I am using a polarizing filter.

The shadows in the foreground are darker tan a mid-grey but lighter than blank. Perhaps even a bit darker than the fourth grey tone, which roughly correspond with the range of the shadow slider in lightroom.

I’m now ready to take my photo (see  my next blog post)

Biggest Notan Sketch to date

It was a very pleasant afternoon and I was waiting for a new contact lens so I took the time to make a quick notan sketch before I took a three panel panorama on my phone.

Notan Versus Zone System

Edsel Adam’s Zone System is a lot like a multi-tonal notan system, It has 11 steps  that correspond to how he could capture light to dark on a negative. Ansel choose to use just 11 there were some variant before his that use 7 or 12, because that gave him a 5 stop range, which he was confident a black and white film negative could capture at the time. Each zone covering half a stop. One F-stop corresponds with a doubling of the quantity of light (luminosity). Using and odd number does mean the average grey tone is centered in the scale. This is magic tonal your camera is trying to average the exposure of the image. Thus this will be one of the intervals rather than fall between them. There are lots of Zone System Charts on the web (like the one below). However few are design as field references, and further most discussion of the Zone system on the web related to post processing.

 

Ansel numbers his zones starting at the Darkest Black, whereas I see many US based artists tend to start there numbering from the White. The numbers don’t matter really it is understanding where the tones lie in the image. More importantly where they might sit compared with an average exposure, and where you might want them in your final photo. I have put together another little field Chart/Guide this time with the 11 tonal steps. It is more useful as a guide on how you might arrange the tonal mapping for your final photo/print than an aid to composition.

When I was putting together these notan guides I was using the RGB scale to select by neutral grays. Any colour with the same value for R (red) G (Green) and B (Blue) becomes a neutral grey colour. Since White R,G,B is 0,0,0 and Black R,G,B is 255,255,255 I had assumed that the grey midtone would be half way between ie R,G,B 128,128,128 but it just appeared a fraction or two dark to me (and warmer). I have since discovered that both Adobe RGB (& sRGB supposedly) use a gamma encoding to adjusted scaling that is a type of power curve so the steps not linear. The table below gives the RGB values of the 11 tonal zones above. This difference is subtle but could affect and Tonal check cards you would like to make yourself.

Zone	O	I	II	III	IV	V	VI	VII	VIII	IX	X
RGB	0	33	51	72	94	118	143	169	197	225	255

PhotoProject :: Knowing a bit about Notan

Composition is a subject that most artists feel intrinsically, whereas photography themselves often struggle. They may not be to blame as popular photography literature generally only superficially covers a few over simplified aspects of composition, like the rule of thirds and perhaps leading lines. Yet there is a lot more to how and what our eye see and find interest, particularly in terms of light and shade. Artist learn about positive & negative shapes, points and movement of interest. The harmony necessary between light and dark and how this can be designed. There is a “secret” artist principal called notan that deals with using this light and dark, mostly through very quick black and white sketches. The word and concept of Nōtan come from japan, if it were a real word it would have a meaning like the the play and placement of light and dark in harmony next to each other. It is taught in some art circles as as a way to develop a strong design at the preliminary sketching stage, however the notan of an image can easily be “reverse engineered” and is thus very relevant to photographers as a very useful post processing compositional tool.

Picasa, which you can still download for free, has a wonderful little posterizing filter that is ideal for investigating the Notan of an image. This filter is in the second last filter tab on the main tools panel displayed when a single photo is selected. It is design to reduce the number of colours actually being used (the top slider) and this is original of the name posterization because the image begins to look like older style posters which where printed with only a few colours. In the case of investigating notan we are looking for just a black and white image, and all you need to do is move all the sliders to the left (BTW In picasa you never get a pure white using this tool but it is very close), Our eyes are always drawn first to edge of sharper contrast, so it is easy to see that the movement all flows along there strong boundaries of dark and light shapes to the wheel of more particularly the hub cap ( and this puts the main point of interest right on the edge of the frame. Poor design and bad composition. This is so called two value notan, and some artist recommend including a third tone (the mid grey) three value notan. In picasa you can tweak the top slider a fraction to the right an get the three value version (see centre image below). There is also a very useful detail slider which will progressively display more detail (smaller bumps and shapes).
To see how this might be applied to photgraphy I will use  couple of photographs I took for this week’s PhotoFriday’s topic clean. My original idea was to have the foam and green bucket being the focus to covey the story clean(ing). Ok the photo is really bland, so lets look at the notan.
   
Once I saw the black and white shapes I realised that the cleaned section of the car and the soap suds where lost in the composition. Worse still is the light and shapes just break the space in two and the movement and point of focus are on the wheel at the edge of the photo. Even when I consider the mid tone I am not gaining any interest around the cleaning story. Luckily I took more photos including some of me actually cleaning.
   
The balance of light and dark is no longer so symmetric, and thus more interesting also, the dark shape of my arms help draw the flow of interest into the area being cleaned. With this insight I could them focus on this balance when doing my final post processing.

This video nicely covers the concept of using notan in building the underlying strength and composition of a painting, but it does also use notan examples created from photos