The Photography Tip of the Week #065

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Photography Tip Rewind – Get in Closer

065 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Every now and then I feel it’s important to rewind the clock to reiterate, re-stress and remind you of some of the more important tips.  These tips are often so important you will hear instructors say them over and over.  The rewind for today is “get in closer.”  When you compose your photo you need to get in as close as possible.  Here are several reasons why getting in close is so important.

1. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  It’s hard to mistake the subject when it’s the only thing visible in the frame.  Now if you have to have something in the background that you want to focus on as well, that’s fine.  That’s a different type of photo where location of the subject is as important as the subject itself.  But when that’s not the case I’ve seen so many photos that have too much going on around the edges and this is distracting and sometimes confusing to the viewer.

2. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  There is a sense of becoming when you get in really close.  In a digital sense, I believe that this becoming is related to how many pixels are used to create the image.  This is why cropping in tight around your subject is not the same as getting in close with your subject.  The closer you get the more pixels you have and the less of a distraction any one out of place pixel will be to the whole.  So getting in close changes the image from a bunch of pixels creating the image to a bunch of pixels that have become a photo.

3. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  For most photos the background will naturally go out of focus when you get in close and the only thing that remains clear in the photo is your subject.  You can of course tweak this with setting your aperture as low as possible to change the depth of field.  This isn’t the only way to change the depth of field, but it is by for one of the simplest.

And one more thing: The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  This is your photo, and you need to stress your artistic sense.  If you can’t interact and get in close to your subject while you are photographing it, it really isn’t your subject, is it?  If you can’t interact with your subject and end up photographing from a distance, how do you expect anyone else to do the same when you show them your photo.

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