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Photo Tips
By Lyndon Goveas
 Function and form: A building can establish location and offer an interesting backdrop. |
Admit it. You take bad pictures. If you’ve ever held a camera and you’re not a professional, then odds are your portfolio contains such greats as “Headless grandma, blowing out birthday cake” (how could you mess up such an important shot?). Even professional photographers work with the expectation of getting only one good picture per roll of film. Which goes to show that EVERYONE takes bad pictures… a LOT of bad pictures. Of course, technology has changed. As digital photography eliminates the largest cost in photography – film – shooting twenty pictures now costs the same as shooting two. And so we enter into a new era, one where images are in focus, well composed and interesting.
For the next event that you’re asked to cover, take 10 times more pictures than you would normally. Move around and try shooting from different angles. Delete any images that are not technically or otherwise properly ‘exposed’. Keep other pictures that look good but don’t represent your best work in a separate folder that you can easily delete once the needs for the picture you have submitted have been met.
Below are more tips that address other common problems.
- Photography is a subtractive art. Your viewfinder contains a canvas packed with activity. Your challenge is to creatively and judicially eliminate anything that isn’t necessary to your image.
- Scan the top, sides and bottom of your viewfinder. Your main subject should nearly touch these boundaries. If it doesn’t, move closer to the subject.
- Always use a flash when taking pictures of people outdoors, especially when it’s sunny. The sun casts harsh shadows and the face is a veritable landscape of hills and valleys.
- When shooting indoors, move your subject away from walls to avoid your flash casting heavy shadows. It is also good to avoid reflective surfaces (the mirrors in all of the gyms and windows), as they capture the flashes reflection as a sharp overblown light that, aside from looking bad, pulls picture viewers’ eyes away from your subject.
After you’ve mastered the above, make sure at least one of your shots in every series breaks at least half of these rules.
