The Expanse

I was yesterday years old when I learned a new trick on my mobile photo-editing app, Snapseed.

Anybody who uses Instagram to post a portrait-oriented photo knows that Instagram crops an image to no larger than 5 x 4, and that can sometimes be rather limiting. It has no problem with a landscape ratio of 9:16, but turn that image on its side and you're screwed.

Luckily, Snapseed has helped me get around that issue with a editing feature called Expand. You can take your image and add a border to it—the border can be either black or white, or you can use the Smart mode, which uses AI (I'm assuming) to determine which colour of border works best with your image.

Because I use the dark viewing style of Instagram (heck, I use the dark setting on any app that offers it), I tend to pick the black border. When I import that expanded image into Instagram and maximize the size of the image, the top and bottom borders are cut off and the vertical image appears the way I want it to.

Occasionally, I'll use the white border but to me it just doesn't always have the same outcome that I want for my IG posts.

On Wednesday, I attended an event with my Ottawa Photography Meetup group. We rented studio space and hired a gorgeous Ukrainian model, Ira Balan, who amazed us with high-key and low-key images, utilizing various fabrics, a rope, jewelry, and sometimes, little else.

So, as a warning, there are some images in this post that are NSFW.

As much as I like the studio that we use, and as much as Ira paid attention to her available space and kept within the backdrop area, the studio can sometimes be just a bit too small to fulfill a vision for a photograph. Most of the photos that I shot during our session were limited to vertical orientation and Ira filled most of the frame within the backdrop.

One of my biggest faults, after a photo shoot, be it of a person, nature, or whatever, is that I want to look at the images right away and start editing them. And lately, I haven't waited to get home or download my photos from the camera onto a hard drive, that I can use to edit on my computer, but I've instead uploaded the photos straight from my camera, via WiFi, onto my smartphone. The RAW file is converted to JPEG before I even start editing.

Instead of using my robust editing software on my computer, I've been editing the images with Snapseed, on my phone. I find that Snapseed is fine for editing images that I intend for Instagram or on other social-media sites but if I want to make the image useful on a larger screen, to print, or to give to the model, these lower-res files just don't do it.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit, but I want to give enough warning that some shots, coming up, aren't safe for office viewing.

As soon as I got home from the shoot, I started looking quickly at the images I had captured of Ira, instantly deleting files where the flash didn't fire, where there was a bit of camera shake, where Ira's beautiful face was a bit blurry, or when I fired before a pose was fully constructed or otherwise just didn't turn out.

I then uploaded a few that I really liked onto my smartphone and started editing, before I added them to my Instagram account. And it was while editing these photos that I discovered this trick on Snapseed.

Instead of expanding the portrait-oriented photos with the black border (and the white border made it painfully obvious that the high-key images didn't have a pure-white background), I decided to try the Smart mode.

Snapseed literally grabbed the edges of the image and cloned them into the space, making the backdrop appear larger that it actually was.

The image on the left is uncropped and shows the extent of space that the backdrop provides; the image on the right, which uses the Expand–Smart feature, gives just a bit more room. For fun, I used the Expand mode four times on this image to make it appear that Ira was in a huge space.

An expanse, if you will.

When we were capturing low-key images (black background and minimal lighting), one of the other photographers introduced a smoke dispenser to play with. When the smoke hit the lights, it provided a great effect.

Of course, we had only so much width to the backdrop and I didn't want to pick up the light boxes in the frame, but we still got some neat shots. Here is my favourite of the smoke shots, and this is the image that's NSFW.

After having success at expanding the white space around Ira for the high-key shots, I wondered what would happen if I expanded the smoke shot in Smart mode.

Now, I have to admit that using this mode had its problems. It cloned the smoke and repeated the pattern a couple of times to either side of the image. And, unfortunately, it also cloned Ira's right hand, which is in front of the smoke on the left side of the image.

I used the Healing feature in Snapseed to make the pattern not repeated and to remove the floating hand. And as you can see, I was able to crop the image to make it a horizontal orientation.

I hadn't paid much attention to the Smart mode on the Expand feature because, of course, you can't use it with most photos. You can only do it when there are no defined objects on the edges of your photo. But for plain backdrops, it's a game-changer.

Thanks to Ira for being such a wonderful model. She brought fun and professionalism to the studio and I'd be happy to work with her again.

I'll post more photos from this shoot, next week.

Happy Friday!