Kris D'Amico Photography

January 15th, 2009 by Kris

Main ingredient . . . SIMPLICITY

I think that most people agree that one of the more difficult parts of photography is how compose an image.

I’ll let you in on a little industry secret . . . keep it simple. Yeah, that’s the first thing.

Let me explain it this way, one of the first things they teach you when you start to paint is to paint what you see. The same is true with photography, there is usually one “thing” that you want to be the subject of your image, now you’ve got that all you have to do is isolate them from the back ground . . .

One way is to pull this off is to select an uncomplicated background that will not rob your subject of their spotlight.

If you’ve got a manual setting try shooting with a low depth of field (smaller numbers ) so the background gets all blurred out and “artsy.” Like this big fellow …

This is a natural light portrait on a mostly cloudy day. Notice, the low depth of field allows for him to stand off the background, despite all of the trees in the background!

Try and change the subject’s angle or better yet, your angle to the subject to get the background as simple as you can.

The simple background of the counter top makes this delicoius treat pop!

One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen in most imagery that a client hands to us, the subject is just to far away from the camera and there is too much else going on in the image. People have a tendency to want to capture everything in one image and then the picture tends to capture nothing.

This is a photograph that is trying to show case the large hanger door on the left side of the frame. What do you see when you look at this?

How can you combat this? Try and avoid unrelated “stuff” in the image. If you’re shooting that new $500k piece of equipment that puts your company into the elite category of your industry, try getting a little lower than your subject and shooting up to crop out the other “stuff” around your subject.

Getting lower than the machine allows us to crop out all the "stuff" around the machine, so we can focus on the big orange arm as the subject.

I know there’s a lot of advice here to put it a list:

1. Shoot Against Uncomplicated Backgrounds
2. Avoid Unrelated “Stuff” in the Frame
3. Moving in Close

Now go shoot something!