Photography Tips No. 1

Ok, so... Im going off on a tangent today for some tips on photography for beginners. The reason for this post was because far too often I've had to sit through the "photo journals" of my family members trips around the U.S. My grandmother in particular loves to show an "anotated" photo guide of their travels. Lets just say after the first few photos they all begin to look the same.

Since I'm sure most of you have had your own similar experiences I'd thought I'd start by explaining a few basic photographic "rules" or "guidelines" for beginners when taking photos (in this case, travel photography).


The first thing I want to explain is context. The reason why a lot of travel photos fail to really entertain or catch the viewers attention is due to context. If you have no way of putting people into an environment or a location to mind, then what is the photo really showing? To the photographer (and photographees), the memory of their trip will suffice. But what about everyone else that you show your photos to? We have no idea where you were or what the location looked like. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when the photographer places the people in the dead center of the frame. While this is fine if you are doing certain types of portrait work or simply want to take a phootgraph of your friends or whatever, it doesnt work for entertaining people about your travels. Most of the time we want to see photos of your travel to see what it was like. How was the environment? What kind of people and things did you see?

So the first thing you can do, is to give us context. Show us the surroundings. By using scale such as the photo below, you are able to give us a much broader and in many ways "grander" scale of your travels.

Here is an example (albeit not the greatest but it's all I could find in my library of photos).


Bad:



Better:




Ok, so while these are not the best examples they still illustrate a point. Most would be photographing themselves or their family. But the general idea of placement of subject, etc should still remain the same.


So we're going to use this image for our next example. It's very simple yet also very eye catching:




One of the general "guidelines" to learn when taking photographs is the "Rule of Thirds". This rule states when taking a photo, you want to position important visual objects in one of four locations. The way we get these "locations" is by 'virtually' splitting up what we see in to thirds.



We see that by dividing the image up into thirds both horizontally and vertically, we are given with four points of intersection. You can see that the girls face is placed practically in the lower right intersecting point.

The reason for this is that more often than not, by composing your photos this way it gives the eye room to move around the image. In most cases, by placing your subject directly in the center of the frame you are more likely to create a very stagnant image. That isn't to say that you will always get boring or stagnant images by putting your subject in the center of the frame (as in some cases you can create breathtaking imagery), but in general its a good idea to stay away from it as a beginner.

In any case, these are just guidelines for your photography. They are used as a starting point for beginners in order to help move you onwards in terms of creating more visually appealing photographs (and imagery). Just like with any rules of "art". The rules are simply foundations to build upon. Once you know the rules, you will know when and how you can break and bend them to your own will.