You’ve stopped to photograph something that attracted you. You bring the camera up, and…
Let’s leave all the camera setting aspects aside for a moment. You know how to set exposure and it's second nature now. You know all about maintaining image quality and the settings that involves. You’ve customized your controls and know how to use them. No, what I want to discuss today is how you compose your photo, and that involves what you’re looking at.
One thing I’ve noticed in the long transition from film SLR to DSLR to mirrorless, with some other things thrown into the mix, is that what I’m looking at impacts how I compose. I bring this up now because we’ve just had two Nikon Z System cameras, the ZR and Z5IIC, where what you look at while you compose is the Rear LCD.
First we have two key changes to discuss: (1) liveness; and (2) dimensionality.
Liveness refers to whether what you’re seeing is not delayed in any way shape or form. The optical viewfinders of the film SLRs and DSLRs imposed no delay on what you were seeing (though they imposed a slight fuzziness and dimness due to the way light passed to your eye at the viewfinder). However, while the viewfinder was “live while composing,” the actual image to be produced was not. The photo tagged along only after mechanical mechanisms managed to clear the light path to the focal plane, and then the great live view laid dead for awhile. With top-end cameras, the amount of viewfinder blackout time before you could compose again was small, but on lower end cameras it was significantly larger. However, today I’m talking about composing, and so what’s significant is that you were seeing real time with lapses between composing due to the mirror mechanism being flipped.
Meanwhile, mirrorless started out as having significant lag between what was happening in front of the camera and what appeared in the viewfinder or on the Rear LCD. Initially that lag was high enough that it was very difficult to photograph action of any kind, as by the time you reacted and composed, that moment was long gone. Fortunately, even entry mirrorless has today gotten down to what I call one cycle lag, basically a worst case of about 1/60 second behind reality (the display is running at 60Hz, or 60 frames a second). Some do better. And more good news, the higher end mirrorless cameras now basically have no blackout at all, so you’re basically 1/60 or perhaps 1/120 second behind reality, and that’s close enough to still capture moments spontaneously, and you never lose your compositional view.
Dimensionality is more subtle. Optical viewfinders, despite the fact you’re only using one eye, give a bit more sense of depth to the scene being viewed in a way that seems natural to the eye. If you move your eye from side-to-side, you still get the usual parallax effect to the view, so it feels visually very natural.
Mirrorless cameras have you looking at a flat screen. The depth cues, if any, come from the aperture used, and there’s no feeling of shift as you move your eye at the viewfinder. Moreover, you have a choice: near (basically a small EVF display that looks big because it’s so close to your eye and magnified) or far (the Rear LCD is an arm’s length away from your eye, so you’re more in a view-from-afar situation).
We have another aspect to consider as well: settingness.
Settingness refers to the fact that you’re looking an exposed, colored, tonalized, saturated (or not) finished product on mirrorless cameras. Film SLRs and DSLRs don’t have any real settingness (other than the dimmer and duller bit I described above, mostly due to the fact you’re not seeing all the light and it is being observed through frosted glass). In real life, because our eyes looking directly at a scene are doing saccading, pupil adjustments, focusing, and more, or brain has developed into building that into some virtual visual interpretation. All kinds of things come into play, including color blindness, and what you think you see isn’t exactly reality, but how your brain interprets it.
However, with a mirrorless camera, whether you use a viewfinder or Rear LCD, you’re seeing the camera brain’s interpretation using the current camera settings. I caught myself on this difference in settingness accidentally while I was using the Z5IIC in NYC recently: my eyes were adjusting and building a virtual scene where I was seeing into the shadows and holding back the highlights. But the camera? Not so much. It blocked the shadows and was pushed to the very limits by the highlights. Here’s a somewhat adjusted version of the image so you can see what I’m talking about:
Because I was trusting my eyes more than the back of the camera at that moment, I thought I was fine. But had I been truly composing via the Rear LCD, I should have noticed how hot the highlights were and how dark the deep shadows had gone.
Which brings me to the first of three points I want to make about composing with a Rear LCD camera (Z30, Z5IIC, ZR): make sure you really look at the screen and evaluate it. Indeed, the Rear LCD helps you a bit in that it blocks up a little faster in the shadows and blows out the highlights faster, too: the dynamic range of the displays being used typically is lower than the dynamic range the camera can capture. That’s the thing that saved me on the above image. I can still pull the shadows up more, and I have just enough information in the highlights to pull that detail in, too. However, for illustration purposes, I’ve left it near what the camera’s JPEG actually showed (I pulled the shadows up a bit because I don’t know how bad a monitor you’re looking at them with).
I can’t emphasize this first point enough. It’s very easy to get myopic. That’s true for any viewfinder. Indeed, it’s really easy to do with a viewfinder at your eye, because you can get into the “tunnel effect,” where you peer just through the center. If you wear eyeglasses, too much relief can make that doubly problematic, as you might not even be able to see the edges of the frame without moving your eye in relation to the viewfinder.
Holding a camera in front of you you’re more likely to see the entire display at once, glasses or not. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get deep ended in just one thing on the screen. That one thing, by the way, tends to be tracking what the focus system is doing, because that’s the thing most people need the most help with. Thus, they’re watching where the focus box goes and whether it turns green. Meanwhile, they miss the fact that the aperture or shutter speed is blinking, or other important clues they should catch.
So there’s a second related point to the first: make sure you’re really looking at the scene, as composed. The first point was more about all the information the screen is sharing with you. This second is about how the screen is displaying your composition. Horizon? Negative space? Leading space/lines? Relationships? Depth? I could probably list several dozen things that are compositional in nature that you should be paying attention to. But the key is really just the generalization itself: did you really pay full attention to your composition?
We’re now at the third aspect I wanted to address in this article: evaluate the resulting photo. It took me a bit of time in the digital world to realize that this was what I was doing and that I couldn’t really do this with a DSLR (at least without chimping, and then possibly losing the moment). It took me a bit longer to realize that I was doing that better on the Rear LCD than in an EVF (that doesn’t keep me from using EVFs, far from it, but the realization made me aware that there was something I needed to pay more attention to in the viewfinder).
The crux of the third part is simple: you’re looking at a three dimensional world (XYZ depth), but you’ll capture it in two (XY flat). The thing we were never doing with DSLRs—short of a lot of chimping—was evaluating the flatland that we were about to create. My mentor Galen Rowell spend years drilling how to get depth into photos, and that became almost second nature, but sometimes you need to evaluate that as you work. I’ll state flat out that I can do that better at arm’s length on a good LCD than I can with my eye poked up against something and looking at that miniature screen. Looking at an image on the Rear LCD is the closest we get to the way a photo is going to be viewed on a wall, or even on a mobile device held at arm’s length. If it doesn’t have depth, snap, story as you’re composing on the Rear LCD, it certainly isn’t going to have that when you get back to your computer to tweak it.
Sure Photoshop Geniuses can add back some depth and snap, just as we did in the darkroom years ago, but that’s not very immediate. As you’ll soon see, I need to deliver images quickly, and I want them to be everything I can make them in the camera. To do that, I need to evaluate what the photo actually looks like in the 2D world.
So...
Screen, scene, photo.
What the camera is doing (screen info), what you’re doing (scene composition), and what the result is like (photo impact). You should be using that 1-2-3 with your Z System camera, no matter what model, but the Rear LCD models—again Z30, Z5IIC, and ZR—are ones where it should be easy to do that, because you’re always staring at that 2D flatness. If it’s not properly exposed (Screen test), off kilter or including things it shouldn’t (scene test), and it doesn’t have the look and feel you were reaching for (photo test), you’re not done composing.
And with those Rear LCD only cameras, it’s easy for your eyes to also take in the scene in front of the camera, then look down at that little framed 2D window and see if you’ve actually captured it the way you want the world to see it. Screen, scene, photo. Start your chanting today...