Tag Archives: frame within a frame

30 Day Photography Challenge Project

This is my brand new 30 day photography challenge, and I want YOU to take part too. For my next 30 posts, I’m going to be providing you with tips on how to take the photos that I’ve listed here, and sharing my own results (and I encourage you to share yours too).

Starting today, I will be posting 5 posts a week on here, as well as over on my Facebook page, Twitter and Pinterest.

As I complete the project, I will be posting links to the different photos and tips as I complete them, and the days below will turn from black to blue (links). Follow through the links for tips on how to take part yourself.

Take Part

If you want to take part yourself, then just come over to my Facebook page, Twitter and/or Pinterest, and share your photos with me and the rest of the community. The best photos will be added to the posts, and shared with tens of thousands of people.

That’s all you need to know really, hope you enjoy these different ideas; they will certainly help you to improve your photography.

The Challenge

Day 1: Self Portrait - Complete! – Your photos added.

Day 2: Rule of Thirds - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 3: Black & White - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 4: Texture - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 5: High Angle – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 6: Low Angle - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 7: Silhouette - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 8: Sunset - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 9: Bokeh - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 10: Lens Flare – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 11: Landscape - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 12: Portrait - Complete!

Day 13: Dynamic Tension - Complete!

Day 14: Light Painting - Complete!

Day 15: Colorful Water Drops - Complete!

Day 16: Balanced - Complete!

Day 17: Unbalanced - Complete!

Day 18: Frame within a Frame - Complete!

Day 19: Panorama - Complete!

Day 20: Depth - Complete!

Day 21: Water Splash - Complete!

Day 22: Slow Sync Flash - Complete!

Day 23: Panning - Complete!

Day 24: Harris Shutter - Complete!

Day 25: Shallow DoF - Complete!

Day 26: Light Graffiti - Complete!

Day 27: Street Photography - Complete!

Day 28: Architecture

Day 29: Night - Complete!

Day 30: Hidden Camera Mirror Photo - Complete!

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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.

Use a Frame Within a Frame to Add Depth and Context to a Photo

Why you Should use a Frame within a Frame

Using a frame within a frame is a great way to lead the viewers eyes into a photo, adding depth and context, and drawing their attention to a certain point. 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.

Foreground Frames

The technique of framing within a frame is often underused as a method of drawing attention to a particular part of an image, even though it's remarkably effective. The idea is that you choose the part of your scene that you want to be the subject and then find a shape within the photo (usually in the foreground) that will hold it. Here's the simplest way of demonstrating this below.

Background Frames

Foreground frames are the simplest way of using a frame within the frame of the photo, but there are less obvious and more imaginative ways to do this. The most important thing to do, is what I always sugest, and that's to think before you shoot. Have a good look around what can and can't be used and decide how you want to compose your shot. The more you do this, the faster you'll be and the better your shots will come out. Below is an example of using multiple frames in a shot and having them in the background. The frames being in the background reinforce the subject and lead the eyes in an obvious order and the empty frames balance the rest of the photo.

Leading The Eye

Frames are great at leading the eye into a particular direction or subject and can be achieved just as effectively by using half frames like in the photo below. The lines along the left and bottom encourage your eyes towards the center of the image and the vertical line converging with the diagonal give you direction. The eye is drawn towards the center of image below before working its way outwards.

Depth

One of the best reasons to use a frame is because it provides a sense of depth in the photo, and this is encouraged by use of a shallow depth of field accentuating it like in the photo above. Another way to reinforce a sense of depth is by repetition and this is clearly demonstrated in the photo below. It’s easy to create a sense of depth in a photo by using 2 or more objects (like the door frames below) that we know to be the same height and placing one further away from th

e other. As we well know, this makes the object appear smaller, but in doing so provides us with a sense of depth.

Paths

Once you know how to lead the eye using frames and understand a frames effect on depth, it's easy to create a path for your eye to go down, like in the photo below. The repeating frames start to diminish the further away they get and this is a great way of drawing your eye to a single point.
Union Station Use a Frame Within a Frame to Add Depth and Context to a Photo

Exposure

Now, if you've read my post on metering modes, you'll understand how the camera looks at a scene, and if it sees the single bright point in the center, it's likely to try and expose for that and underexpose the frame as a result. This can of course be used creatively, but be careful if it's not the look you're trying to achieve, like in the photo below. There's a distinct difference between the overexposed and underexposed parts of the photo, and there's very little that you can do about it without going into complicated photoshop techniques, so put your camera into manual mode and find an exposure that you're comfortable with.

Making the Frame an Equal Part of The Photo

If the frame is particularly interesting then don't neglect it; use it. I found this run down old building in Greece and the window frame was so knackered and full of character that I considered it as important as the view I had walked up the hill to take. This provides the photo with a sense of location and interest, rather then just a view, and leads the viewer through the window, which it is typically used to doing.