Varroproduction Photography

Nowadays almost everybody has one, a ‘vacation camera’. The fact is that the technique in these small cameras are getting better and better, and it is a miracle that everything fits in them.

I’m going to give you some fundamental basic advice of how to make better pictures with your compact camera. Most of the advise is about composing, but I will also give you some hints on what mode to set your camera to.

A picture is divided into different values:

Content

Content value is something that might have a personal meaning to you. It could be a picture of your country house. It doesn’t have to mean something to your friend, but the content have some value for you personally. I would say that an amateur photographer that uses his compact camera just to document ‘his daughter’s birthday’ almost always use content in his pictures. The purpose is just to capture his daughter in a picture on her birthday.

Form

Form value is the content’s shape and how the photographer chooses to illustrate the content in the picture. It could be a picture with a unique composure of a modern architect building. Professional photographers that photographs landscapes, buildings, fashion and just about everything works with shapes, and try to convey something to the beholder by making a unique composure with its shape.

Message

Message value is the value of what the picture has to say to the beholder. It could be a picture in the newspaper of starving kids. Photojournalism is working with this most of the time, they try to send a message with their pictures and the content.

It is hard to create a picture that have all 3 of these values. With this in mind you know that in order to make your vacation pictures stand out, you need to move out from just doing content, and adding form or message. In this part of the guide I am going to write about form because you probably have a message most of the time when photographing your friends on a party, or your kids at the vacation.

What effect does form have on people?

Subconsciously different shapes have different effect and meaning to us. For example a triangle symbolizes stability just like the pyramids, but if the triangle is turned upside down it symbolizes instability.

Your pictures have the same impact on a beholder. If you choose to place a person in different parts of the image, then the image will have different impacts.

For example, here you can see what impact different compositions have when photographing.

1. This composure is probably how everyone first starts composing when photographing. You place the subject in the middle of the picture. Not very flattering, but if done right it can also be interesting. Among professionals I would say that sometimes it’s more odd to place something in the middle because everybody is placing the main subject somewhere else in the picture.

2. This might be the most classic composure of all time, The golden mean. You can see this in many classic paintings, it’s widely used in television, movies, advertising etc. The golden mean have a more simple variant and that’s the rule of thirds. You should not mix them together, they’re not exactly the same but they almost look the same.

3. This composition is sometimes used among photo journalists. Just Google ‘worried man‘ and you’ll see they often cut the head of in the composure and place the head in the corner or at the edge of the photo.

4. Another composition, widely combined with the third composition. It feels intimidating and pushy.

This is some of the very first basic steps of how to make a more flattering composure than just placing the main subject somewhere else then just in the middle. I would recommend that you experiment with the rule of thirds. Most cameras have built in grids so it’s easy to see where the rule of thirds is. In this link you can see that the bird have been placed in the rule of thirds.

How to recompose?

To recompose the picture you first have to lock the focus on the main subject. To do this press the shutter release button half way down to focus and lock (the button you take the picture with), the camera then gives away a sound and after it’s locked you can just recompose the picture and place the main subject wherever you want in the picture. This way the camera won’t refocus if you point the camera away from the subject (if you don’t have some kind of continuous auto focus selected).

Patterns

Abstract and repeating patterns can make a picture really interesting. If you have something in your surrounding that’s abstract, try to add it to your picture together with placing the main subject in the rule of thirds, for example.

I won’t go into more detail because it will only be confusing. Hope that some of these tricks will help you get better pictures.

Tomorrow I’m going to continue with how to create a message in your picture. Stay tuned!

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Posted In: Photography techniques