fig 24.1 Stone Mountain © Marcia Conyers

Isolating the subject

Marcia is currently a Basic Photography student who lives in Kentucky. She was fortunate enough to visit Disney world Florida this year on her vacation, where she took this image.

Disney world is in fact a very difficult place to get good quality images. There is so much happening and it is such a busy place that it is hard to isolate specific photogenic features (which there are many with plenty of potential). The typical type of photography taken there is the family snaps, which are fine for the family album but would not be suitable for any other usage.

Marcia has isolated a subject of interest quite well. If she didn't tell us where the photo was taken, we probably never would have guessed. It could have been taken in the Grand Canyon! Not that identifying the location is important but if this had been a natural rock formation, it would be quite impressive. Marcia has been very successful in isolating it without the usual distractions associated with the theme park.

Sharpening the Image

The image as it appears here (fig 24.1) doesn't seem to be that sharp. The original was taken on film so the image was scanned. The original image probably was sharp. The softness of this image is probably due to the scan and down sizing the image.

Whenever an image is scanned and/or resized digitally it should be 'sharpened' using a sharpening filter. Most good image programs have a facility called 'Unsharp Mask'. This allows the user to adjust the sharpening effect.

fig 24.4 Cropping the Image

The two images fig 24.2 and 24.3 show how the image can be improved using a sharpening filter. The one on the right is a cropped portion of Marcia's image without sharpening, the one on the left was sharpened using the Unsharp Mask.

Improving the composition

Although we have said that Marcia isolated her subject well, it could have been improved further by composing the image in the vertical format. There is a lot of foliage in the image that doesn't really add anything to it. Here we have cropped the image in the vertical format. The rock formation becomes more prominent in the image. Compare with fig 24.1.

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