MegaPixel 101

Want to make your photographs look better? Here is part one in the series "Seeing Photographs".

One of your first choices is how much of a scene to show

Whether the subject is a person, a building, or a tree, beginners often are reluctant to show anything less than the whole thing. People often photograph a subject in its entirety. Grandpa is shown from head to toe even if that makes his head so small that you can't see his face clearly. In many cases, it was a particular area of the subject that got the photographers attention in the first place. Things like the expression of a face, the peeling paint of a building, or a bent branch of a tree might have been the original attention grabbers. Try to focus on the thing that made you want to take the picture in the first place.

Get closer to the subject

A famous war photographer said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough". This simple piece of advice can help most beginners improve their work. Getting closer eliminates distracting objects and simplifies the contents of the picture. It reduces the confusion of busy backgrounds, and focuses the attention on the main subject.

What is your photograph about?

Instead of shooting right away, stop for a moment to decide which part of the scene you really want to show. You might want to take a picture of an entire scene and some of the details. Sometimes you won't want to move closer. Photographs of landscapes for example capture the spacious area around you.

Try to visualize what you want to photograph to look like

As you look through the viewfinder, examine the edges of the image frame. do they enclose or cut into the subject the way you want?

Once you have all the technical basics down, where do you go from there? Every time you make an exposure you make choices, either on purpose or by accident. Do you show the whole scene or just a detail? Do you make everything sharp, or just focus on one area? Do you use a fast shutter speed to freeze motion, or a longer shutter speed to blur it.

Your First Step

Your first step is to see the potential of the photograph in front of your camera. Before you take a picture, try to visualize the way the scene will look as a print. Looking through the viewfinder helps because the scene is reduced to a smaller size and confined by what the lens will see. As you look through the viewfinder, imagine you are looking at a print, but it is still a print that you can change. You can eliminate a distracting background by making it out of focus, by changing the position to a better angle and so on.

Try to See the Communication

Try to see how a picture communicates its visual content. Photography transforms a three-dimensional event into a frozen instant reduced in size on a flat piece of paper, which is sometimes in black & white instead of color. The event is abstracted, and even if you were there and can remember how it "really" was, the image in front of you is the tangible remaining object. This concentration on the actual image will help you visualize scenes as the photographs that they will soon become while you are shooting.

With that said, those are the basics of taking a better picture. Over the next few posts I plan on diving in deeper in order for you to see your photographs.