Monday, May 26, 2008

Photography: Questions to ask yourself before taking a picture

There are several questions most of the time that travel through my head before i press the shutter on my camera. Questions that have tend to help me alot get a better picture.

1. What is the story i am trying to tell?
Or in other words why are you/me taking this picture, is it because the landscaping is nice. Is it because this is a event that i want to freeze or is just one of those special moments, or is it a feeling i want to try to capture? These are questions will make you think twice before taking your image and it will help you in understand those "special moments"

2. Whats the focal point of my picture?
What the tittle states is pretty obvious, but what your looking for here is what were do you want the viewers eye's to fall on the image. Below i placed a flower on a black background to make the subject, the flower pop out alot, and thus leading the viewer to only look at the flower nothing else.

lemon gras flower

3. Are there any competing focal points?
What this means is that if your image has any distractions from what you really wanted to capture. And if there are how do i use them to my advantage and how will they work against me, can i work around these competing focal points? or should i change my aperture to blur the rest? These questions will make you really isolate the subject of your image, thus making it alot easier on the eye's of the view. Below is an example were i failed doing this. I wanted my main subject to be the girl sitting on the stairs, but as i brought back the picture home i realized that the light post was taking up all my attention, and this is an example were the competing focal points took over the image. So dont do this unless that is your intention.

lonley girl black and white

4. Whats doe the background look like?
I have covered this before, specially when i m landscaping. The background has to look nice, it if not it can ruin your photo. It can either become a competing focal point or become your focal point without you even knowing about it. So before shooting if you realized that the angle you want to capture your subject from is giving you a bad background move about and change the angle and see how that goes. Or if not blur it if you can. Below is an example of a panning picture i took. The background was really busy so i used a longer shutter speed then i normally would and followed my target with the camera, thus blurring the background and making the main subject the car pop out of the image.

Panning CL 500

5. How am i framing this?
What i mean here is how are you using up the image, am i filling up the entire image with my subject or am i wasting image space with something that i don't want to capture or something that doesn't add to my image? This is sometimes really hard to do from scratch. Thats why the cropping tool is so helpful, where you suddenly can cut out parts of the image that you want and thus creating a much more dynamic photograph.

6.How would this look from a different angle?
Something that i have repeated several times over and over, this will change the look of your image alot. Don't stand put move about when trying to capture your subject!

7. How would this look vertically?
Try placing your camera vertically and see how that turns out, once again an issue that i have covered before but its of great importance. Just make yourself go out one day and only shoot vertical images see how that looks?!

Thats all i can think of now, feels as if i m going to update this! Sorry for taking those two days of there and not posting anything i hope you all can understand!

2 comments:

Badur Babu said...

Excellent post...is there anyway I can enrol to your posts so that I can be informed about them when posted ? It's very informative for newcomers like me. Thanks a lot and pls continue the great job.

Alexander Blacker said...

There is something called RSS feed or something, which "informs" the subscribers when i do a new post. I m working on how to get this for my blog but i havent gotten it yeat. But check about 18 00:ish at night because i often tend to post my post in the morning time here. But i will inform about the RSS thing!

Thanks alot, thanks for reading!