It’s time for another episode of Tutorial Tuesday! This time, I’m aiming my comments mostly toward the casual photographers, those who take lots of snapshots but would like to make those pictures just a bit nicer. There are a some basics to composition that are pretty important, and I could spend a post or two on some of them.
But I want to go right to the beginning, to a couple of hints that will make your shots look more planned, more thoughtful, and easier to view. If you consider yourself a pretty good photographer and – more importantly – if other people do, then you might want to skip the rest of this post (and, maybe, go out and take some photos!).
Okay – so what are these basics? Well, first of all, we need to understand what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to capture the view our eyes see and plop it onto a two-dimensional medium. And we’d like the viewer to see at least a little bit of the view we had. Fundamentally, that’s sort of hard to do. So, number 1 is: Recognize our vision is only a little bit our eyes and tons of our brains.
What’s that supposed to mean? It means when we look, we see exactly what we want to see. Our brains filter out all the junk. We put our subjects in the middle of our view – where our eyes are strongest. We focus on our subjects. We ignore other stuff unless our brains decide it’s important – like that bowling ball hurling toward your face!
But plunk that 3D view down on a screen or a piece of paper, and it all changes.
The first, most important step that will help you take better pictures is to look through your viewfinder (or at your view screen) with this awareness in mind. Look at your subject, but look around the rest of the frame. Is the subject where you want? Is there lots of dead space – we don’t need that (unless it’s a plan). Is there junk like a tree growing out of your child’s head? Is your family a tiny speck within the frame?
