Erin Reilly

Science Photography and Videography is more than just a pretty picture. With this week's assignments to find and take photographs to use in a report and short clips to use in a video, we had a lot to cover. When I started this blog, it seemed like everything was unrelated. I couldn't see how it fit together. But as I sat down to write there was a theme that came through both the photography and the videography discussions, and that was story.

Before you use an image, take a photo or shoot a video, take a moment to think about the story you want your audience to understand. What point are you trying to make? A common mistake is to think about what we want to tell the audience. By thinking about what you want the audience to take away, you determine the intent and can critically examine your images for things that enhance or distract from that intent.

Do you want to use your photo or video to establish a location, study species or a problem? Are you trying to explain your methods? Trying to recognize people involved in the project? Provoke an emotion in your audience? There are a number of simple technical factors and compositional tricks that you can use to help get your point across more succinctly, even without having expensive cameras and editing tools.

Landscapes

Many of us picked landscape shots for our photos and videos, you can see three of them above. There are some basic composition tools for landscape shots to help you make a more interesting photo and tell your story better.

The rule of thirds: This is a common photography technique that divides your frame into 9 boxes and suggests that the most interesting places to put objects (ex: a tree or horizon line) at the lines that form the boxes. Nicole did a very good job or placing her tree and horizon lines the left and bottom third of the frame.

Pick a Winner and Loser: With most landscape shots there is an area of sky and an area below the sky. If you are following the rule of thirds with your horizon line, you end up having a winner and a loser. But are you picking the winner that tells your story or is more interesting? Chelsea picked the sky for the winner in her photo and the sky is arguably the more interesting part of the photo. But when you hear that her story is about the lack of arctic sea ice as a result of global warming, an ocean empty for miles illustrates that point better than the texture of the clouds. Alyssa is researching the impact that farming techniques has on soil carbon.

Stabilization and Panning: Videos of landscape can be a great way to quickly introduce your site and provide context but it is important for there to be movement or you might was well just use a photo. With landscapes, you are likely to be panning because your subject doesn't move. While filming if you pause for a few seconds before your start to move the camera and a few seconds after you stop moving the camera, it will help you in editing the film. If you can't use a tripod or other equipment, you can easily add a stabilizer in editing programs.

Methods and Action Shots

Fill the Frame: For showing a piece of equipment or result, one good technique you can use is to fill the frame. This means getting close to your subject and making the object of interest the focus of your image. I tried this for one of my photos, where I was trying to illustrate what a soil marker horizon looks like in the left image above. However, you should also try to make sure your image is straight!

Check the Background: Along similar lines Filling the Frame, when you do get close to something, make sure you take a second to pause and see what else is in your frame besides your subject. Jessie did a good job filling the frame in her image of an oyster harrow, but to improve the photo, if she had removed the rope hard hats and dolly in the background, it would have been a stronger image.

Leave Space for Action: Sometimes you want to capture your methodology through an action shot like Katie did in the right image above. With an action shot you want to leave space in the direction of the movement. This lets your audience imagine what happens next more easily.

Time-lapse: Often times research takes a long time to complete and is very repetitive. In these cases it would be boring to watch at full speed. This is a great time to use time-lapse to demonstrate your methodology. The nice thing about this is that you can set it and forget it! Many smart phones now have a setting to film time-lapse shots.

After our discussions this week I can already see my own pictures improving and I am excited to see how everyone else develops their skills. Now, whenever I am looking for pictures for a report or trying to take them for future reports, I already ask myself: why am I taking this photo? Hopefully that extra pause is going to result in images that communicate my point more effectively.