Taking a Great Photograph

One of the first things to learn in photography is shot composition. It's really easy to understand as you compose shots in your mind thousands of times a day, so it's just a matter of transmitting that to the camera and making it capture what you want it to.
Shot composition is simple; It's taking a picture you want with everything you want to show included in it. It is one of the vital things you need to pay attention to when you are taking a picture. The others include exposure, framing, and communication. So, basically, when you take a picture you have to know what you want the image to project to your audience (communication), use the correct camera settings to best project that message (exposure), include the right amount of information in your image (composition), and build the best set for your subject in its environment (framing). These things go together to build a memorable, impressive image. If you look at all the famous photographers and their work, you will see that they take careful attention to each of these components of taking great shots, and it's what makes their work stand out.
So, today we will focus on composing the shot that you want. To show you an example, I will use the picture that I currently have set up as my page header (the one with two benches overlooking a frozen lake with the setting sun illuminating the city in the distance). Here's what the view looked like.

 Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) EF-S 55-250mm IS @ 96mm 1/50s F/22 ISO 400

Now, the picture is hazy and the white balance is off because on this particular day I was experimenting taking pictures in RAW without bothering to set the white balance either customized or any of the other settings. Here's what it looked like after I touched it up a little in Camera Raw.

As you can see, I was really fascinated by the sun beaming off the city in the distance and I wanted to capture that scene. I did use the Targeted Adjustment Tool to darken the black areas (such as the benches and trees in the foreground) but other than that I didn't do too much to alter the image.
The scene itself is beautiful, and there I didn't cram much into the picture besides what I want to project- two benches looking off into the distance at the city partially illuminated by the setting sun.
However, there is a lot of ground at the bottom and sky at the top that add nothing to the image...if anything, they dilute its effectiveness. So, the next step for me was to crop it and show just that which I wanted to.

 

The result was a simple image above. In this final image, you can see how I used the four components of taking a great shot I previously listed. I wanted to project an image of two benches in a dimming light looking off at the last rays of the setting sun bathe the distant city. There is a feeling of two retirees out of the chaos pace of everyday life and watching the day go by in solemn calm. They are anonymous, in the shadows, and their focus is on something greater than them. This is the communication part.

The second thing is exposure. As I previously stated, I took the image when I was experimenting with RAW, so the original image lacks the precise settings I would have otherwise used had I been shooting just JPEG. In that light, I would have left the ISO at 400, reduced the shutter to 1/30s, left the aperture at f/22, and used a stead tripod with a self-time. Then I would have adjusted as needed based on what the image turned out like. 

The third thing is composition. The main things I wanted in the image was the benches, the frozen lake, and the city and hills in the distance. I didn't want too much of the ground or sky in there as they were not essential to the message I wanted to project. This is why I cropped them out.

The last this is framing, and this is where the tree on the left comes in. You can see it telling you that your eye is to stay to the subjects on its right. The right side is where the light of the sun is coming from, so it's left bare. The left is dark, the right is light, so the purpose of the tree is to guide your eye to the subjects I, as the photographer, want you to focus on. This is how framing can help enhance your image. 

I hope I helped with your understanding of the four components of a great photo and please share your tips in this area if you can. Remember: Communication, Composition, Exposure, and Framing are what's needed to take a CCEF (sounds like "Safe") picture.

Tweet

Share