About framing shots and picking interesting points.
Originally posted by zoomzoomfan I just don't understand what to place in a pic, or what to subtract. To me everything looks good, so I try to capture it all.
We all know the feeling. The problem really lies in that you, while being there in person, can see behind the shot, so to speak. Others look at one static frame, but at the time of shooting you see not only what's left out of the frame but you have seen what happened before and how the scene turned interesting. For example, when you show me a picture of a dog wagging its tail, it's just that for me - a dog in the grass. But for you it is your trusty old friend on beautiful meadow, who just performed an amazing trick you've been teaching him for past six months. Of course you want to share it with us, but we don't have the surroundings and the history of that shot for help. We can only form our opinion from what we see in the photo.
The trick is to compose the shot so that it contains that "something" which will convey the emotion. Since we can't see outside the borders, you have bring something in the picture to our attention and tell the story with the help of perspective, focus, lighting...
To illustrate the point, look at these two shots. These are not mine, these are random pics from Flickr. I link to their respective pages as well.
First, here is the dog and the grass. This is how most of us would shoot. Few moments before the dog was wading through grass, it must have been nice sight.
But, here's another dog in the grass. Same subject but very different photo.
Can you guess, which one speaks to me more? Which one makes me smile and say "I wish I would've taken that!"?
Of course, it is not always possible to spend time planning and framing, sometimes you just have to take the snap before the situation passes. But with enough practice you start automatically placing yourself to get not only clean shot but also an interesting one. But the time you pick up the camera and turn it on, your brain has already calculated the best line of shooting, possible framing and your other hand has already turned zoom ring for approximate distance.
But you can't acquire all that just in one afternoon. Just start taking buckload of pics in various conditions and see what works best for you. Don't do just one snap of your dog, do six snaps. Stand, crouch, lie down on the ground with him. Do a wide angle, do a tele. Do landspace, do portrait. Try until you find that particular angle that works for that particular subject. To me majority of the boring photos I've ever seen have been taken from the eye level of a standing adult...