JULIAN TSE Photography

An insight into the steps involved to produce professional photographs of moments, that tell strong stories.

How can you take more engaging images next time you use your camera? Read on!

A challenge for you now: can you tell at a glance, which frame was chosen and how it was post-processed to get the best out of it? TIP: the frames not chosen below were not colour-corrected or edited.

Dynamic range: A digital camera does not have as much dynamic range as a human eye. In the original image on the left, the sky is too bright, and the dark areas are too dark. To make the image look like a human saw it, we increase the shadows and reduce the highlights in post (-processing):

Capturing human movement: means you should shoot many frames to catch the perfect expression, feeling and story in one image.

With two people interacting and moving quickly onstage

• the right expressive body language
• facial expression
• a moment when the above elements work together, for both people

make for the one image to keep and process. Which frame would you have chosen to continue work on?

Similarly for more than two people – actions of every person and directions of every face ideally work together to support a single narrative. As you cannot always predict what people will do, where they will look, how they will move – take multiple shots, try to improve with each frame, and choose from the reel later:

Equally, for multiple people interacting with an object to strengthen the story’s context (a laptop here):

Sometimes choosing more faces (image 3) to show more energy doesn’t pay off as you have to wait for more faces to align, and here you lose the rope (from image 2), which brought context. (Notice the sky (highlights) is totally blown out before processing, in raw image 3, while cloud textures are now visible in edited image 2):

Standard group photos are worth taking for the human connections at a moment you can never return to. But working harder, by

• rapidly side-stepping and/or dropping your body to include background and border elements that tell a story (like this university name, and removing meaningless black border elements)
• waiting for, or engaging with subjects to induce a stronger expression from each face shown

produces a more captivating final image:

With very rapid movement, some frames will be better than others taken due to:

• mouths not being caught in quite the right positions
• moving elements not producing an interesting overall composition:

In dance scenarios, the same applies, especially to bodies – look how Ken’s body position tells quite different stories – in under a second. To capture a good image, shoot on burst-mode and select after:

In the case of a live portrait,

• hands
• mouths
• eyelids
• facial expressions
• the position of humans relative to objects (e.g microphones)

all move constantly. If you were choosing one image from each line below, which combination of the above elements would give your audience the strongest impression of the moment? (Notice that catching a mouth or smile at certain stages looks awkward):

The above thought processes happen throughout the editing stage when you pick from through 100’s or 1000’s of frames for the ones and edit (sadly, unlike the shooting, it is lone work on a computer). Once chosen, continue to refine:

• exposure adjustment (brightness)
• composition/cropping – remove distracting elements, especially from the edges of the frame
• dodging & burning – bring out or reduce specific areas by lightening or darkening them
• vignetting – highlight the subject in the middle of the image by making the outer edges darker (in a suitably subtle way, that the impact is felt, without it appearing “obviously retouched”
• colour temperature
• simple cloning – to remove obvious distracting objects like wires, light switches, sockets

Complete all of the above on every image selected to share, and your work is complete 👏

PS. We recommend Adobe Lightroom Classic or Adobe Lightroom software for editing.

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