Tag Archives: Interesting Background

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.

Shooting People – What Makes A Photo Great?

I recently went back to a festival I worked at last year and I saw a friend of mine that I took a photo of last year, and I mentioned to him that I’d used that photo many time on my website, but he didn’t seem to understand why. I started listing off all the different elements that the photo has and how I can use it for different tutorials, and then it dawned on me that it’s easy to spot a good photo of people, but it’s not so easy to understand what makes them great.

Example 1

I often go through phases of which photos I like, sometimes I look at my portfolio and hate it all, and other times I love the lot of them. At the moment, I’m particularly pleased with this photo. It was shot on 800 speed film in my EOS 10 with my 35mm f/1.4. I’ve mentioned my love of shooting on film many times and this is a pretty good example as to why, the quality of grain and light is just not something you can get with a digital camera. Have a good look at the photo below and then we’ll have a good look at what I think is so good about it.

The first thing you can’t really ignore about the photo is the colour. The brown walls appear to be almost green in the photo, and the same is also true for the blue toilet stall doors. The colours merge together to create an almost bizarre, but realistic scene which contrasts with the fairly accurate colour of the subject. The light reflecting off the surfaces in the toilet add some interesting colour shading on the subjects face, but nothing looks unnatural about it. Colour often has this sort of effect in low lighting situations when you’re shooting on film, and had this photo been taken using a digital camera, it would have looked photoshopped if it came out like this.

Because the film I used has a speed of 800, the grain in the photo is fairly visable, and unlike nasty off coloured grain that we’re used to with digital, the grain in this photo actually looks good. It adds an element of warmth to the photo as it softens the lines in the background. So from just the colour and the grain we have a warm and interesting photo, but that’s not enough to make this photo good, you need an interesting subject and background.

As I’m shooing on film and I’ve not included any particularly bright light sources such as the sun, the dynamic range of the photo is very good. It allows me to include a part of the light on the ceiling while still being able to capture the detail of the subject’s face, preventing it from becoming a silhouette. The grain helps to stop their jumper from appearing as a complete black, as a small amount of light is reflecting back off it. There are bright parts and dark parts to the photo, but only a very small amount of the photo is overexposed. This helps greatly to produce an interesting subject and background as we’re able to see both parts very well.

For me, the background is my favourite part of this photo, which is interesting as that is often the most overlooked part of a photo. Because of the good dynamic range, strong, but natural lighting, and grain, you can make out a lot of interesting details. I used this photo in my tutorial on using triangles as a composition technique and it’s easy to see why. The many lines in the background go off in seeminly random directions which eventually produce multiple triangles, and these contrast in shape and size with the air-freshener on the wall. There’s added visual weight with the sign on the door, but that is reduced somewhat by the writing being in a mirror and out of focus. The lighting, lines, contrast, shapes, colour and dynamic range is what makes the background so interesting.

When you get down into the details of what makes this photo great, you start to ignore the reason for taking the photo in the first place, the subject. Without the subject, it’s unlikely this photo would have ever existed, I just saw him in the mirror and brought up the camera as he was looking up, and I took the photo. The focus is on him and the lighting creates some very natural shadows across his face and neck, which adds depth and texture and makes him stand out from the rest of the photo.

I’ve said it time and time again, but it’s important so I’ll repeat myself one more time: no part of your photo is more important than any other part, so make sure your background is interesting.

Example 2

This is the photo that I mentioned in my introduction, of my friend in Croatia. Again, this is shot on film, but other than the obvious grain, that’s not what makes this a great photo. This was shot on an old film camera, a Minolta SRT101, from 1964, probably at f/1.7 on 200 speed film. Have a good look at the photo below and see what you think makes it a good photo and then I’ll show you what I think.The first thing that I notice about the photo is the balance and symmetry in the subject. Of course, it’s never going to be perfect, but as a shape, it works very well with the head acting as the fulcrum and the two signs acting as the weights. When we look at this photo in terms of visual weight, the left side of the photo carries more weight as the whole of that sign is in English and we can read it properly, whereas the right draws our attention for a shorter amount of time. The photo is well balanced because the visual weight of the table, printer and the sign on the left balances out the subject leaning their weight towards the right part of the frame.

The selective focus and shallow depth of field draws our attention to the signs before we look at anything, and again, to the left as that’s the way that our eyes look at a photo – from left to right. The quality of the film makes the signs appear as if they were almost photoshopped into the photo, rather then printed and held up to the camera. This crystal clear clarity helps to focus your eyes on that part of the photo first and for longer.

We’re then drawn to the eyes of the subject, which are out of focus, and interestingly, not looking towards the camera. Eye lines isn’t something I’ve covered in too much detail yet, but they carry a large amount of visual weight and can direct interest if they’re used properly. Had the eyes been looking straight down the camera lens, then then they wouldn’t have been that interesting but as they’re looking out of frame, it makes the photo more interesting as the viewer wonders where they’re looking, and increases the amount of time spent looking at the photo.

This photo is an excellent example of window light, not just on the subject, but throughout the office that they’re sitting in. The light came from the left of the frame and because the subject is quite far away, they’re illuminated very well, with very few shadows. The same can’t be said about the rest of the office though as the room gets darker closer to the ground as it’s shadowed from the window, by the table. This has produced a very natural graduation in the light and the top of the frame contrasts the bottom very nicely.

As far as composition goes, in my first photo, it was an obvious choice to adhere to the rule of thirds, but for this second example, it’s not quite the same. I typically don’t take photos of subjects with them in the center of the frame as it’s boring and predictable, but because the subject was essentially acting as a fulcrum for two different weights, it made sense in this situation. Whenever you take a photo, you should always pay careful consideration to the composition as it can make a huge difference to the way the viewer looks at a photo.

That’s all for this post, I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learnt something, it’s a new idea that I’m trying out, and I’ll eventually get around to covering many more types of photos. If you enjoy reading my writing, then I would encourage you to come and visit my Facebook fan page where I share more photos and advice with other photographers. Thanks for reading.

How to Take Awesome Twilight Portraits

Introduction to Twilight Portaits

This post is all about showing you how to take great photos during twilight, in very low light. This may not sound particularly difficult, but I assure you that if you try to shoot in auto mode, or even a priority mode then you would massively struggle to produce the same results. It’s not hard when you know what you’re doing, and that’s exactly what I aim to achieve from this post.

Step 1 – Test Shot

When ever I’ve found a location that I want to use, I always take a test shot on a setting I think might work and go from there. A lot of the time when I’m in a lighting situation that’s changing or I’m not familiar with, these photos come out pretty poorly, particularly like below when I’ve not got a flash out yet. This test shot was not to see what the photo would look like if I didn’t use a flash, I knew I was going to have to use one, It was to test the exposure of the ambient light in the background.

When I take photos at night with models, I always want to include some ambient light in the background so that the photo is more interesting. After all, who says a pixel on the face is more important than on the background. The settings used for the photo below are ISO 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second, which is about as short as I can hold the camera steady for at a 24mm focal length.

Step 2 – Flash

For the next step, I added a flash, and after a bit of fiddling around I found a setting I liked. The only problem was that the flash exposure was turned up 1 ev and the aperture was slightly narrower at f/4 with a shutter speed of 1/40, which was allowing less ambient light in. I liked how the light from the flash was looking, but it was clear that I was going to have to change some of the settings with the exposure.

To create this shot, I used a special diffuser, but it can be easily created with a regular flash and a cheap £4 diffuser. Before we go any further, it’s important that you make sure you set your flash to high speed sync, which allows it to work differently and at much higher shutter speeds. Without this setting on, my flash will only work to 1/250 of a second. My flash is also set up wirelessly and will require some sort or transmitter, and you can read all about that here.

Step 3 – Flash Diffusion

The reason I asked a model to come and take photos with me was because I wanted to test out my new beauty dish and grid cover. A beauty dish sends out indirect light which is bounced around the dish before illuminating the subject. The grid that goes in front takes this soft light and forces the light through the holes in the front into a straight line and over my subject. The result is this soft light which still allows the model to have natural shadows on her face and body. The end result in my final photo makes the light look as it it’s come from a long way away, from a much larger, yet soft light source, when all it really is a wireless flash and less than £100 worth of gear.

Step 4 – Exposure

To allow more light in, I kept my ISO on 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second. Clearly, this allowed more light in than before, but because the photo was too dark, this made the grain much more noticeable. The thing about digital grain is that you’re left with uneven colour with an almost grey and red tinge to it. This is no good for the type of photo that I’m trying to achieve, which is supposed to be soft lighting, plenty of ambient light and plenty of clean, soft and sharp features on the model. To try to find a compromise between the flash light and the ambient light in step 2, I reduced the flash exposure down 2 stops to -1ev. This didn’t work quite as well as I had planned, but it’s all part of the process.

Step 5 – Exposure 2 & Background

As you can see, the grain in this photo is a world of difference to the photo above, and that’s because I changed my lens to a f/1.4 prime lens that allows 4 times more light into the lens when it’s set to its maximum aperture. This allowed me to lower my ISO to 640, and on top of that, I slowed my shutter speed down to 1/6. The reason I was able to get away with such a slow shutter speed was because the initial burst of flash was powerful enough to freeze most of the motion and any movement in the darkness struggled to shine through. You will notice however that there is a little bit of movement on the right side or the face, which I fixed by raising the shutter slightly in the next photo.

Step 6 – Positioning & Background

From examining my photo above, I decided that I wasn’t entirely happy with the lighting the background because the light all seemed to blur into one, so I rotated my model and my positioning to capture the lights that went along the pier. The same settings as before were applied, except I raised my ISO to 800 to account for my slightly higher shutter speed of 1/6 of a second. Even though this photo was shot at f/1.4, I was able to keep the photo looking sharp because I very carefully focused on the model eyes, which is where your eyes are drawn. The rest of the photo, particularly the skin looks very soft, because it is soft. This combination works really well at night as it produces a great effect, while allowing me all the light that I need to work with.

The final settings for this photo were ISO800, f/1.4 at 1/6 of a second with the flash power boosted to +1ev. If you would like to learn more about how I processed this exact photo, then I go into detail about it in this post here.

How to use Triangles to Improve Your Composition

Introduction to Triangles

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.

Why use Triangles

It’s not really a case of why you should be using triangles in your composition, because you’ll come to realise that the inclusion of triangles is inevitable, it’s more about why you should be using them properly.

Triangles are a great way of grouping together three points of a photograph and organising them so they portray a certain feeling such as stability, agression, instability, etc. When you understand this, you can use them as invisible features of a photo which evokes a strong feeling to the viewer.

How to Create a Triangle

So long as you have 3 points of vague interest in a photo that aren’t on the same line, then you can easily create a triangle. It’s not about having 3 clear lines that join up in a photo, that would be too obvious, it’s about grouping points of interest.

If you take a look back through some of your photos, you’ll probably realise that a lot of the photos you’ve taken contain triangles, but whether you’ve used them to their maximum potential is another thing.

Implied Triangles

One of the most common types of triangles that you’ll come across is the implied triangle. As you’ll rarely see physical triangles in photography, the shape is almost always implied, and it’s done so usually without the viewer even noticing it. The more you know about composition, the easier it is for you to start deconstructing what makes a photo good and using that to make your own photos better.

The photo below for example, has only 1 physical line, but the shape of the roof and the angle of the buildings sides and stairs make us see a full triangle.

Having the base of the triangle at the bottom and apex at the top of the photo make the triangle appear very stable, much like a pyramid, and it’s often found in architecture photography. When you start to change the angles inside the triangle and change the rotation of the triangle, the photo starts to appear less stable, with the extreme having the apex at the bottom of the photo, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Have a look at the photo below as a less stable triangle – notice I used the submerged breakwater as one of the edges of the triangle.

Converging Triangles

Whether they’re straight or diagonal lines, when they go far enough into the distance, you start to see the lines converge and that is where you’ll start to see a lot of triangles. These triangles can appear in the frame or outside the frame, it’s just a matter of the distance you have to work with. The winder the angle of the lens, the more likely you’ll be to have the lines converge inside the frame.

Often photos converge outside the frame when you’re shooting photos of buildings and their height make the lines converge towards the top, but it wouldn’t make sense to include the space that the lines may have converged if they had carried on.

When the lines converge within the frame it’s much easier to see and often you’ll find that it happens more than once. Notice how we’re only really working with 2 actual lines in the photo? That’s because you can also use the frame of the photo as one of the sides of the triangle, like I’ve done below.

Unstable Triangles

If you want to create an unstable feeling in a photograph then a quick and easy way to do this is to include an upside down triangle, or at least a triangle with a weird rotation. Not only have I used a triangle with its apex at the bottom of the photo, the ground of my photo isn’t level either, which adds to the feeling and also makes new triangles appear where they wouldn’t have been, had there been a square bottom half to the photo. Triangles like this are excellent at drawing the attention to something seemingly insignificant or bland and making the photo more interesting.

3 Figure Shots

You’ll commonly see triangles without even realising in in 3 figure shots where there’s multiple subjects. Take the photo below for example, there’s 3 subjects, each with the same visual weight which initially leads you to look at each subject for the same amount of time, before going back to whatever drew you in the most. This sort of shot works well, but be careful about trying to force this, or when you’ve got 3 subjects which are at the same height and heads appear in a line, it won’t work as well.

Focus Attention

Triangles act in a similar way to arrows when the apex converges at a certain point as your eyes are drawn down their edges and onto the subject in question. This is arguably quite similar to what diagonal lines do, only this involves 2 or more physical lines and 1 implied line. Have a look a the photo below and notice that your attention is drawn to the subject’s sunglasses as that is where the apex of the triangle converges.

You can also use multiple triangles to create this effect, you just need to be careful where you’re pointing them. I used the triangular shape of the rock edges to direct the attention onto my models legs below, but I feel that that ultimately took away from her face.

Interesting Background

I wanted to include this extra little section at the bottom to try and analyze what I like about the photo below. I took this a few weeks ago and it’s one of my favourite photos to date, but it’s hard to know exactly why unless you delve a little deeper. The lighting is good, the colour and grain is spectacular, but most importantly, I feel it was the inclusion of so many diagonal lines that created a large number of triangles in the frame (in the background in particular) that made it so good. I count at least seven triangles which kept my staring at the photo for ages. Subtle differences in angle and viewpoint can make a huge difference to your photos. Triangles 10221 How to use Triangles to Improve Your Composition

9 Ways to Create an Interesting Background in Your Photos

Why is it Important to have an Interesting Background?

You may have noticed by now that I've not put any photos of a model on a white background on this site, and there's a good reason for this – I find these photos boring and unimaginative and the shooting environment unconducive to interesting photography. You see, the way I see it, is that every pixel in a photo have an equal amount of importance and it's your job, as the photographer, to ensure that each part of the photo looks good.

When you start to make your backgrounds more interesting, you'll find that people spend more time looking at them, often without them realising the appeal of the photo. There are plenty of ways to do this, and we're gonna have a little look at some of them now.

Bokeh

This is a term that I've used a few times on this website and spoke in detail about in this post, but essentially, it’s the aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of a photograph. If you have a close subject, a distant background and a wide aperture, then you magnify the bokeh effect. Check out the photo below, and you'll the soft circular blur in the background which is an example of good bokeh. In this photo, the background has as much appeal to the viewer as the subject – the BBQ. I really like using a strong bokeh as the softness of it all is very appealing and easy to look at.

Lights

When light shines directly into the camera's lens and the aperture isn't too wide then it produces some really cool 'star' effects on the light source. As well as lighting up the background and providing interesting detail, it also lights the subject in a way in which you don't typically see. Use the lighting to illuminate your background and provide a point of interest by arranging your lights so that they provide details to the most important parts of your background.

High ISO

If you're shooting at night, you're going to need to raise your ISO if you want to reveal any detail in your background. Even in the photo above, I used an ISO of 1200 as it allowed me to see all the finer details that attracted the viewer to the photo. The photo below was shot with an on-camera, external flash unit at ISO 1600 and an aperture of f/2.8. As you can see, this has produced a very shallow DoF, but turned a photo of a man on a street into much more than that, by providing much more detail.

Rule of Thirds

As you can probably see from the photos I've use so far, I like to adhere roughly to the rule of thirds when trying to include an interesting background. The rule basically dictates that photos should be split into 9 equal parts; 2 equally-spaced horizontal lines and 2 equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important features within the frame should intersect with these lines at some point. This allows me to actually include a background that people can actually see.

Background Subjects

There's no reason why your background can't also be another subject, like I've done in the photo below. This, believe it or not was a candid photo and the foreground subject was looking in the same direction as the background subject, and it was at the exact point that he looked towards my camera that I took the photo. This contrast in subject's interest makes you wonder where to look and stops becoming a simple photo of a person. Contrast in background and foreground is key here.

Lines

I'm written in depth about horizontal, vertical, diagonal and converging lines in photography and the power that they have to direct the viewers eyes in a certain direction and I recommend that you read about that in further detail. The great part about using lines in your background is that they're remarkable subtle – you may like the background in my photo, but without mentioning lines, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that interests you. Once again, there's contrast present in the photography, but this time it's also present in the background – the lines are sharp and soft.

Paths

The great thing about paths in photography is that if you include a subject as well, they can provide dynamic tension. By this I mean that your eyes don't know whether to go up and down the subject of down the path which causes a tension in your eyes. This is a superb trick to convince your viewer to look at the photo for longer without them even realising why. The added sense of wonder is what keeps the viewer entertained.

Background Focus

Sometime, I like to use a frame within a frame to focus the attention towards the background. In the photo below, I've used two parts of a banister to act as a sort of tunnel, directing the attention towards the subject. Frames do an excellent job of providing context to a photo while adding a soft border by providing an out-of-focus blur around the edge of the primary subject.

Colour

This is at the end of the list because it's probably one the easiest techniques to implement, especially if the colours you're using in the background contrast with the colours in the foreground like mine does below. The contrast is the most important point to make here because if your foreground and background are too similar, they merge into one, and cease to be two effective and different points of interest. I love using colour in my photography when possible as it really helps to make the photos stand out from the rest of an album.