Tag Archives: eye-lines

Why You Should Never Use Spot Color

Ok, so I’m going to get some bad feedback for this post, but please, bear with me. I only thought to write this post when I found that it’s a bigger problem than I thought, after posting my 10 commandments of photography, one of which was ‘thou shalt never use spot color’, and I got a lot of feedback that people liked using it. Hopefully this post should help to clear up why you shouldn’t use it. Basically ever.

Here is my belief system when it comes to any artform that requires interpretation: If you have to explain it, it doesn’t work. I could tell you my favourite joke, but if I have to explain the punchline for you, then it’s not funny. You could take what you deem to be a good photo, but if you have to use spot color to draw the readers attention where you want it, then it’s clearly not doing the job it’s supposed to.

The main thing that spot color does in photography is to draw your attention towards certain parts of a photo, without asking the question, why? It’s a simple question, which is all too often ignored. What makes that part of the photo so important.

How many of you have seen spot color used in something like prom photos? I know I have. It’s usually on something stupid like a flower, or a handkerchief. This draws us towards the handkerchief, but raises a very important question at the same time, what’s so important about the handkerchief? Nothing, that’s what. It was just a nice bit of color in the photo, that the photographer thought would stand out nicely. The problem is though, it’s drawing us away from the important part of the photo, which is the subject’s themselves.

Ok, so we have two problems so far, by using spot color, we’re explaining where the viewer should be looking, and then we’re often sending them in the wrong direction. Just one of these problems is bad enough, but what else is wrong with spot color? Well, this takes me back to my original point; you’re explaining the photo. Either to a person who doesn’t understand it enough to get it, or because you’re worried that people won’t get the photo, because it’s not a very good point. I’ll get to all of this in the next section.

Finally, part of the reason that people do it is because they think it just looks nice. I do not, but I’m not here to argue about personal taste. All I suggest is that you look at the work of the photographers you admire the most, and see how much they use it.

Spot Color in Use

Here’s a photo that I took the other day, where I’ve used a little photoshop to hide the camera, you can check out the article here. There is no use of spot color, because this works well as a photo. You look exactly where I want you to look. Firstly by looking at the face (eyes contain a large amount of visual weight), and then the hands, and then at the arms, working your way in and our of the photos down the diagonal lines.

Now lets start playing with spot color. Lets say for some reason that you want to focus the attention on the face, it might make sene to spot color the face and have everything else black and white. I see no justification for this photo to be in black and white, but alas, lets do it anyway. Doesn’t it look pretty #sarcasm?

You’re basically telling the viewer that you want them to look at the face. The problem is that they were already going to look at the face, now you’re telling them not to look anywhere else as much. I could do it for anything in the photo, the picture frames perhaps? (ps. points for noticing my grandma swearing at the camera in one of the photos). The point is that a lot of time this is used, it sends people looking in the wrong direction.

I’ve seen some bad spot color in my time, thanks to sites like YANAP, but lets not get too carried away. A much more reasonable use of spot color that you would see with a photo like this would be to have one side of the mirror color, and the other side black and white, like in the photo below. But what is this telling us? Have a look and then scroll down for my thoughts below.

I can imagine a photo like this having a caption not too dissimilar to ‘reaching into the past’. That’s the gist of the feel of the photo with the black and white. But think about it, what do you think when it’s in color? What if I were to change my facial expression to express a certain emotion, such as regret? Would you not feel the same without the use of spot color? Is spot color necessary? Or is it just an excuse to make something out of nothing, in post?

Lets say you’re worried about someone seeing a poing you’re trying to make, so you want to make it clearer. Take my photo below for example, there’s a pretty clear juxtaposition going on. It’s actually two men sitting in the heat in Croatia, putting crimpers on wristbands for a festival, while watching ‘The Wire’, but that’s not what it looks like. It’s two potentially naked men sitting under a giant heart to most viewers.

Theres a chance that you may not see the juxtaposition in your own photos right away, so to make it obvious for readers, you slap on a bit of spot color to really make it stand out. The photo has gone from subtle and understated, to downright obvious. By explaining how the photo works, it no longer works, as all the charm is removed from the photo.

Whether you’re using spot color for ‘artistic’ purposes, or to help direct your viewers, you always have to ask yourself why?

Lets talk about artistic purposes for a bit. I get that some people don’t use it because they want to help direct the viewer’s attention, but rather because they think it looks nice. I’m not going to argue about personal taste, but I will talk about the side effects. By using spot color, you’re not only changing the color of the photo, but you’re directing the viewer without even realising it (most of the time), and usually without reason.

Perhaps you’re familiar with how you’re directing the viewer, and you like the spot color, and you like how it makes the photo stand out. I’m not going to tell you that you should never do it, because my opinion isn’t more important than yours, but I feel that it’s important that you understand composition first, by researching eye-lines, balance, visual weight, single point (very important for spot color users), and depth. If after all of that, you think that spot color is still necessary, then I have nothing else to say to you. Use it and enjoy it.

Now, I’m aware, that I’m probably upsetting a lot of photographers who have read this post, and likely not made it this far before commenting. If you do have something to say, positive or negative, I want to make sure you’ve read the whole thing first. If you leave a comment here, or on the fan page, include the word beer in the comment, so I know whether to take you seriously or not.

How Learning Composition Will Dramatically Improve Your Photography

This is a post that I’ve had in me for almost the entire life of my website, which is nearing a year now, but I’ve never been able to put it into words before now. I always try to bring you varied content on this website, so I will look at what I haven’t written about in a while, and write about that to make the site more interesting. The problem is though, no matter how much I write about composition, people are just never as interested.

I can track how many people have been on my website, and where they’ve come from, where in the world they live, how long they stay on the site, how many pages they visit, and which are the most popular pages (this sounds a little creepy, but I can’t tell who you are, and this is common practice through Google software). Time after time, I’ve found that my articles on composition have been the least popular content, even though I regard it as some of the most important content to learn.

I’d like to change how you view composition.

It sort of feels like you’re in school when you’re learning about composition, because there’s a lot to learn, and a lot of theory to go with it. Along with this theory, you need a fair about of practice to start seeing results too.

People seem to be afraid of hard work, and to be honest, I’m not surprised. It’s just the world we live in these days. If we want something, then we will Google it, and find out the answer in a matter of moments. We’re so used to having this wealth of knowledge on demand that sitting down and studying something seems like so much more of a chore. Even when there is so much to be gained from studying something, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort. For most at least.

But what if you were different? What if you went the extra mile?

There’s a video that I would like to quote; it’s the last lecture of Randy Pausch. I hope you’ve seen it before, because it really opened my eyes (which is rare), but if not, then here is the video.

The quote I would like to reference, or at least paraphrase is:

“The brick walls aren’t there to stop you, they’re there to stop the people that don’t want it bad enough.”

Now I’m not here to get all deep and meaningful on you, but I would like to pose a question to you: What if you went the extra mile and put in the work and practice that other people seem to think is so hard (it’s not)? If they got stopped by the brick walls (studying composition), but you powered through, then what does that leave you? Well, it leaves you with a less crowded market of better photographers, which you can be a part of.

Studying composition is not hard, but it does take extra effort that most people don’t seem to be willing to put in, so you’re already at an advantage if you do decide to pursue it.

Portfolio Export Print 471 How Learning Composition Will Dramatically Improve Your Photography

“There are no rules to composition”

Technically, no, you’re right, there are no rules to composition. There are no rules to any artform, but there are guides, and we call these guides, rules, just to make things easier for us. So when I say that you should follow the rules of composition, what I really mean is that you should study the rules so that you have them in your knowledge and use them to your advantage.

Mixed Messages

If you’ve just bought your camera, then it’s pretty standard practice (at least I hope it is) for people to start learning about exposure when they buy their first camera, and them move onto slightly more complicated aspects of their camera, such as metering modes and white balance. This is good and it’s all in my beginner’s guide to photography. If you want to make the most out of your camera, you need to do this. This is what I teach with my beginner’s guide to photography, and I would suggest you look at it if you haven’t already.

Now that’s out of the way, lets have a look at what people seem to be doing next…

Well, mostly, it would seem that the answer is not a lot. I’m usually pretty happy if people make it this far, because learning from the internet is hard enough as it is, and if I can get my reach to go just that far, then it’s happy days around here. I want to reach further though, because the content is here, and that’s why I do it, so that people will learn. If you take on the full package, and start learning composition, then you’ll really start to see the big changes.

Here it goes…

The Rules of Composition

In my tutorial archive, you will see plenty of tutorials on composition, which I’ve written over the past year. I count around 20 different articles to get you started with the basics, moving onto more complicated aspects. If you’re just getting started, then I would suggest looking at my beginner’s guide to composition.

You will cover the basics such as the rule of thirds, and visual weight, and move onto dynamic tension and juxtaposition. You will start to understand more than just how to take a photo, but how to think about your photos, and what to do before you take them. This will change where you stand, how you crop, how to balance the photo, and how you view the scene, and so on.

How will it change my photography?

Well, I made a pretty bold claim with the title of this post, saying that it will dramatically improve the quality of your photos, and I stand by that. I can’t say exactly what it will do to your photography, but here’s what it’s done for mine, and if this isn’t enough to convince you, then I dont know what is:

I think MUCH more about a photo before I take it.
I think MUCH faster about the potential photo.
I see with the eyes of a photographer, rather than those of a bystander.
I look for depth in a photo.
I see dynamic tension with ease, where as the viewer just feel it, which is exactly how it should be.
I frame my photos so that they stay interesting, and so that they’re 3D, rather than 2D.
I’ve stopped trying to make a boring scene interesting, and easily see potential in scenes that I would have missed before.
My progression from a bad photo to a good photo is a lot faster.
I’ve learned how to focus the attention of the viewer to where I want them to look.
I’ve started to fix my mistakes while I’m taking the photos, instead of getting back to the computer and seeing what I should have done.
I know how to balance a photo to evoke a certain feeling.
I can make much more from a single point.
I can create invisible lines with eye-lines.
I can use a variety of lines to change how the viewer sees and feels about a photo.
The list goes on and on… I could be here for hours.

I really hope that this has helped to convince you to focus your learning onto the right aspects of photography.

Separate yourself from the competition by learning composition today.

A Beginner’s Guide to Composition

Composition is a funny old thing, because it’s common knowledge that learning composition will help your photography, but it’s also something you should never really pay too much consideration too. I always feel that it’s best to teach people composition under the guidance that it’s training a person’s eyes to look at a potential photo in a different way. You should never just blindly follow the ‘rules’, but you can use your new knowledge to shape your photos into something which is much more pleasing to the eye.

Rule of Thirds

This is probably the first compositional rule that any photographer comes across, and that’s for a very good reason – it’s simple and it works. The basic premise is that you divide your camera’s frame up into thirds and plant key objects in these lines, and the composition will work better. This often works really well and if you’ve not learnt much about photography yet – it’s a great way of dramatically improving your photos and make them more interesting. The idea is that the viewer gets to see more than just the subject and is free to, and encouraged, to explore the photo themselves. There are more basic elements of composition to study, but this is great for trying out and getting to grips with compostion.

Here is the full tutorial on the Rule of Thirds.

Visual Weight

Visual weight is different to size or weight as we know it, and it’s largely down to different elements, such as human eyes and writing. When you can understand visual weight a lot more, you’ll start to understand how people look at photos, and how you can position certain elements in a frame to direct the viewers attention. It’s not so much a tool, or a rule, as it is an understanding.

Here is the full tutorial on Visual Weight.

Balance

Balance in a photo has a big affect on how we feel when we look at the photo, as an unbalanced photo can make us feel uneasy, where as a balanced photo, will make us feel more relaxed. It really doesn’t matter whether you choose to make the photo balanced or unbalanced, but you should understand why you’ve chosen one or the other, and have reasons to justify this choice. Again, it’s one of those situations where the more you know, the easier it will be to produce the desired effect.

Here is the full tutorial on Balance.

Eye-Lines

If you take photos of people, then you take photos with eye lines, so it’s important to understand the affect that they have over how we view photos. Seeing as you’re definitely following every tutorial I’ve provided in this guide, you will have a good understanding of visual weight already, so you should understand the power that having a face (and eyes) in a photo has on it. But there’s much more to it than that. Eye-lines have the ability to focus our attention on another part of the photo, as well as producing tension and other photographic elements. Although they’re not physical lines, they can be used as such to produce different elements, such as triangles and vertical lines.

Here is the full tutorial on Looking & Interest.

Triangles

Speaking of triangles, lets have a look at them next. Triangles are in almost everything we see, in one way or another, it’s just a case of distinguishing them and knowing what to do with them. They make great compositional tools as they’re easy to make, manipulate, and are remarkably common. Triangles are a great way of combining different compositional techniques such as lines and paths and using them to create a more interesting part of a photograph, but the best part about using a triangle is their ability to make a photo feel stable or unstable.

The majority of your photos will have three distinguishable points of interest, so it’s just a case of identifying these, and linking them together in a way that makes sense.

Click here for the full tutorial.

A Beginners Guide to Composition

Single Point

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we should really look at what a single point does to a photo, because there’s actually much more to it than meets the eye. When you’re working with a single point of interest in a photo, it’s one of the most basic forms of composition available, so quite a common occurrence and it pays to know what to do with it. A single point can provide interest to an otherwise plain photo, and they’re usually fairly small and contrasting to the rest of the photo. A photo doesn’t need to have any points of interest to be successful though, just have a look at the most expensive photo in the world as an example.

Here’s the full article.

Horizons

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame. Exactly where you place the horizon in a frame can have a huge affect on the image; it’s all about which part of the photo is the most interesting, and how you want to make your viewer feel with the divide.

Frame Within a Frame

Frames are a great way of using a photographic element to lead the viewers eyes into the frame to focus them on a particular point, and the sense of repetition that they can provide, produce depth and a path for the eyes to explore. A photo of a scene with a foreground feature makes for much more interesting build up to the main part of a photo and can, in some cases, carry equal weight to the rest of the photo.

Click here to read the full tutorial.

Dynamic Tension

Dynamic tension is a way of using the energy and movement available in various features of the frame, to draw the eyes out of the picture in contrasting directions. We’ve already looked at a variety of different lines that you can use in a photo to make it more interesting, but dynamic tension takes these lines and adds varying degrees of contrast between them, making them much more interesting. The simplest and most obvious photo that I have that demonstrates dynamic tension is the one below – the lines move out from the center of the photo to edge of the photo.

This is where composition can start to get a little bit more advanced, but tends to lead to more interesting photography, as you take the knowledge that you’ve already learned, and use it to create photos with more depth.

Depth

Speaking of depth, here’s some useful tutorials to produce depth in your photos. It’s another page like this, with links to the relevant articles, but if you’ve got the time, and you want to learn more, then it’s really worth checking out.

When we take a photo with our cameras, we turn a 3D image into just 2D, and that can cause problems when you’re trying to display depth. It has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you’re trying to convey with your photo, but ultimately it holds you back when you’re trying to add depth to a photo.

Click here to check out the full article.

10 Classic Tips For More Interesting Portraits

A lot of people think that they can’t take good portraits because they’ve not got the right lens, or the right lighting, but that’s simply not true at all. Learning how to take great photos takes time, but these 10 tips should make a big difference if you start to follow them all.

Experiment with Focal Lengths

You’ve probably heard the term ‘portrait lens’ before, and that’s because portraits typically look best at slightly longer focal lengths of around 70-115mm, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the only lenses that you should use. I like to shoot with a wide angle quite often, and they can make for some really interesting portrait photos, as you can include more in the frame than you would have been able to at a longer focal length.

In the photo below, I was able to provide context to the shot, along the dark shadows, and details to the large rocks, that would have been cropped out to a simple blue sky if I’d used a longer length.

Experiment with the Background

It always amazes me that someone would shoot with a white background, when with just a little bit more effort, they could have found a much more interesting location. The background is part of the photo too, and it can help to provide the viewer with more information about the photo. I like to take models out to interesting locations that I scout out beforehand, because the results are much more natural, and if I find somewhere outside, the lighting can produce a wider range of results.

Even when you have to have a fairly plain background like in the photo below, It’s easy enough to find a location just slightly more interesting, which will produce a much better photo. When you compare the paleness of the wall, to the texture of the wooden door, there’s no question about which is better.

Break the ‘Rules’ of Composition

I like to go on about how important composition is to taking good photos, and that’s because it is, but equally important is knowing how to use this new knowledge properly, and knowing when to forget it. The ‘rules’ of photography are made to be broken, and often you can produce the best results when you forget about what you’re ‘supposed’ to be doing, and go ahead and shoot whatever feels right. I find this often comes about when I’m experimenting, or taking test shot, and more often than not, when I’m not even looking through the viewfinder.

The most common rule for taking photos of people is the rule of thirds, and it works tremendously well, but when it comes to portraits, forgetting about this rule can be much more dramatic. Have a look at the photo below as an example.

Play with Eye Contact

If you’ve read my tutorial on visual weight, or eye-lines, then you’ll know all about the power that eyes have in a photo. They contain some of the strongest visual weight in any photo as we’re naturally used to looking at them, so you should use this knowledge to your advantage. When the eyes are looking straight down the lens, we look at them first, and then look at the rest of the photo in order of interest. When the eyes are looking away from the camera, then they can be much more powerful at times, as we become naturally interested in where the subject is looking.

Have a look at the comparison I’ve set up below, and see which one strikes you as being the most interesting. Portraits typically have the subject looking down the lens, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

Try Candid Photography

I love candid photography so much that I actually wrote a whole post on the topic, because it’s not often that you capture people in their natural state in any other way. As soon as you point a camera at someone, especially if you shout ‘say cheese!’, people become self conscious, tense up and you lose any natural feeling to the photo. There is a way around this, which I cover in my final point, but overall, these photos tend to lose their spark.

When people aren’t aware that you’re looking at them, you can wait patiently for the right moment to capture an image and end up getting much better results. You can also provide much more interesting foreground and background details as where you’re shooting from will also be captured in the shot.

Play with Light

An exposure is really just a capture of light for a certain amount of time, so to make an exposure more interesting, it makes sense that you would want to play with this light. You can mess around with flashes, longer exposures, light painting, slow sync flash, rear curtain flash; the posibilites go on. I personally enjoy slow sync flash because you capture more than just the subject and the light, you capture the movement too. Lighting is a really easy and fun way to blow a load of money, but it’s doesn’t have to be if you don’t want to, you can get some really cool results with just a $3 flashlight. The key is to experiment.

Frame within a Frame

As you can probably tell from this post alone, I’m a big fan of including context in a photo, to give the viewers an idea of the mood of the image, as well as the location. Frames are a great way of using a photographic elements to lead the viewers eyes into the frame to focus them on a particular point, and the sense of repetition that they can provide produce depth and a path for the eyes to explore.

A photo of a scene with a foreground feature makes for much more interesting build up to the main part of a photo, which in this case is a subject. They’re often underused in photography, as they can be hard to find at times, but when you successfully pull it off, it can produce some really good results.

Change Perspective

It’s natural to want to take a photo of someone head on, but that can make for a boring photo because it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Why not try making it more interesting by changing your angle of view and tackling the subject from a new perspective. When you stop thinking about taking the photo on the same plane as the subject, you can start to get much more creative, as you suddenly have way more options.

You can take the photo from above, below, to the side and slightly down; you have 360 degrees of posibilites. Often these photos come about a result of the location that you’re shooting in, such as my photo below. We were on some rocks on the beach, and they were constantly varying in height, so I climbed on top of one and shot down. I was very happy with the result.

Shoot in Black and White

Although I love black and white photography, I don’t shoot in it nearly as much as I probably ought to, but one of the places that black and white photography works really well is in portraits. I always recommend that you shoot in colour and RAW when you’re trying to take black andwhite photos as it leaves you with more possibilites in post.

Black and white photography is more about shape, form and contrast, which comes in very useful for portraits. For black and white post production, you can afford to get a little bit more creative as it’s easier to hide your techniques, such as boosting the contrast like I’ve done below. I also boosted the green channel when I converted the photo to black and white, but other then that, I’ve not really done anything to the photo.

Have Fun

This sounds so soppy, but it really is one of the keys to taking good photos. When someone is naturally smiling or laughing, it makes a really big difference. You can always tell when someone is forcing a smile, whether it’s in a photo or in real life, and it’s such a shame to force a smile when the subject is happy anyway.

I talk a lot to people when I’m taking photos of them, and although this often results in a lot of dud photos where their mouths are moving, I usually get a lot of people laughing at the same time. A natural laugh produces the best type of smile, as it can be in the whole face, head and body, rather than in just the mouth and cheeks. You can clearly tell that the model in the photo below is enjoying herself and laughing away as I was taking this photo.

How to use Eye-Lines to Influence Your Viewers – Composition

Introduction

Eye-Lines

When we say eye-lines, we’re talking about the implied lines that are produced when we follow a persons line of sight. These lines are similar to horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines and can be used to make up other elements such as dynamic tension and triangles. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the face, and the eye in particular, because that’s what we’ve done our whole lives when we interact with people. A face is about as strong of a visual weight that you can include in a photo, so our eyes are naturally drawn there first, and then the eye-lines direct our attention next.

It’s natural curiosity to want to follow the eyes, because as a viewer, we want to know if we share the same interest in whatever has taken their attention, and we want to be able to relate to the subject to understand the photo, or piece of art better. This makes the eye-lines an important part of the structure of the image because you can use them to great affect, but if they’re used poorly, or left unused, then the affect can be detrimental to photo.

The affects vary depending on where the eyes are looking, with one of the strongest being when the eyes are looking straight into the camera. When an image like this is viewed, we’re forced to focus on the eyes, and we’re not directed to explore the photo as much. Have a look at the photo below where the model is looking straight into the lens of the camera; her eyes look quite dramatic, and carry a great deal of emotion. Human faces are very expressive and the eyes are one of the strongest ways of showing emotion – this is one of the reasons that we’re so attracted to them.

When the subject is looking elsewhere in the frame, you’ll notice that you spend less time looking at them because they tell you less about the subject. What’s more important here, is where exactly the subject is looking as we may want to explore that area too. It’s up to you to decide whether you want the model to be the subject, or where they’re looking as the true point of interest. The photo below doesn’t use the eye-line to make up a photographic element, nor does it point you towards anything particularly interesting, so this results in a feeling of unresolved tension and ambiguity, which is another great technique at your disposal.

I’ve mentioned it a couple times so far, but not actually shown you how to do it, and that’s using the eye-lines as a photographic element. In my photo below, I’ve used the eye-line of the model to reach the end of the breakwater, which then went back down to the end of her arm, and back up to her face. This has created a triangle and focused your direction onto the model’s body because of the order you followed the lines. The great thing about using an eye-line as one of the lines, is that you can choose where you want to triangle to start, and in the same vain, you’re choosing where you want it to end too.

When there’s conflicting eye-lines in a photo, you can use selective focus to choose the true subject in the photo. This works in two ways; you’re making it clear who you want to attention to be on, and you’re encouraging to viewer to explore the areas which they think are less important. I wanted to use the eye-line and look of disapproval of the girl on the left to focus the viewers attention onto the girl on the right.

When you have more than one set of eyes in a photo, and they’re looking at each other, then you create a linear back and forth motion between the two subjects. The more interesting the facial expression is on each subject, the better this works, as you can see by the photo below. The creates an equal balance of importance between the two subjects, and you can then use other elements to focus the viewers attention. The lighting and facial expression on the right, leads me to spend more time looking at that subject.

When the eyes are covered in a photo, like with a pair of sunglasses, then it’s up to us to decide where we think the eyes are looking. The affect of the eye-lines is lessened, but still present as we can take a lot of information from the body language of the subject. In my photo below, you can tell still tell the direction that the subject is looking in, but it’s less important because it’s out of the frame and covered up by the glasses.

When there’s multiple eye-lines in a photo, and they’re looking all over frame, then we tend to look at these photos for longer as we’re trying to decide what everyone is finding so important. No one in the photo below is looking in the same place, which is unusual for a group of people who aren’t moving, so your eyes move around the frame, starting with the eyes that you can see best, on the girl on the right. All of these lines have a different direction to them, and introduce an element of dynamic tension at the same time, as it starts to appear unresolved.

When it comes to taking good photos of people, a lot of it comes down to anticipation and knowing how you want the photo to come out. When I took the photo below, I wanted the subject to be the main focus because I as shooting at a very wide aperture, and I knew this would blur the background. I didn’t want the photo to be posed though, as my style is much more candid, so I simply raised the camera and focused, which made my subject notice and turn towards me. The end result was a very natural looking photo with the visual weight in all the right places. It’s just a case of being prepared and having a rough idea of the end result you’re looking for, in your head.