The Photography Tip of the Week #010

Posted by Philip in Podcast

Photography Tip of the Week 010 (audio)
Time for a little KISS
Have you ever gone a photo scavenger hunt? I remember these gatherings with fond memories. You are on a team of 4 or 5 people and you can only take 6 pictures. You are given a list of a hundred or so items you can have in your pictures. Each item has a point value and the more items you have in your photo from the list, the more points you get. There was one photo our team did that included (among many other things) a submarine, a trophy, a toilet seat, a hawaiian shirt and a fishbowl. The setting for this photo was a cemetery. Sure wish I had copies of these photos. I wonder if there was a funeral going on in the background.

So what does this have to do with taking good, well composed photos worthy of hanging on your wall? Absolutely nothing. In fact this is a perfect example of what not to do. I’m sure you have heard of the KISS principal. This goes equally as well for photography. But in this case KISS stands for Keep It Simple Shooter. Photos need an obvious easily identified subject. Everything else needs to fade away in the background. How that fades away is entirely up to you. You can blur it out, crop it out, zoom in or best yet, remove it before you take the image.

Here are some images and what I removed to make the image better. Both images were taken recently at an event we had in town for the teens. It started with a concert and finished with an all-nighter. During the concert there was a very interesting sunset.

This was the initial image taken. There are several obvious problems. I caught too many people watching the concert. My subject for this image is the sunset and the concert is a secondary subject. I had to enhance the sunset and balance light and shadow. So after a bit of work and cropping out the extra people I ended up with a photo instead of a snapshot.

The second image is from the talent show we had at 4 a.m. This teen did an amazing job of gymnastics in room that wasn’t designed for gymnastics. The things I wish weren’t in this image are the coolers and the food and condiments that were on the bar behind her. Since she is in motion and I have a nice motion blur on her there is no way to clone out the background elements easily. I cloned out the background elements that I could, cropped the image and created a halo effect. Now this is a simple image without a lot of clutter.