I’ve talked before in one of my workshops about how tilting the camera is one of my personal favorites when it comes to composition techniques, but I feel I didn’t explain it in enough details. I’ll do that now.
For the most part, this technique works better with portrait (vertical) photos than with landscape or horizontal photos. One of the reasons is because this technique needs to be subtle, and when you tilt a landscape style photo, the tilt is often very obvious (however, I’ve still seen it work).
One of the questions to ask when applying this technique is how much tilt to give to the camera. When I first started out I never really knew how much to tilt my camera and the amount of tilt different quite a bit from picture to picture. But after learning this general guideline, my workflow yielded much more consistent results.
The trick is to line up your subject along an imaginary general line, such as the one that I’ve drawn out on the image. As you can see, the line I’ve drawn cuts across the entire image for the most part, but it doesn’t have to, nor does your subject need to line up against the line exactly. But by drawing an imaginary line that cuts the image in half or into a third and two thirds or something along those lines (like my pun?) and placing your subject somewhere along it, you save yourself the trouble from doing too much “guesswork”.
Posted in Composition
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Tagged Composition
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So I thought off this series by writing about a common thing I’ve seen people doing with their cameras that does not necessarily serve their best interests: using your on-camera flash.
For the most part, using your on-camera flash is something you want to avoid. The main reason being that it usually results in harsh looking secular highlights on your subject’s face. In layman’s terms, this translates into meaning that the human face, which usually is oily to a certain degree (and therefore reflective like a mirror), will reflect the light coming from the camera flash and the end result is that your subject’s face will have white “hot spots” on it, usually these spots are most pronounced on the nose, forehead, and the hair as well.
Now for most people this isn’t the problem. I myself did not even notice those hot spots until I read up on it, and until now you probably have not have noticed it either. But if any of this rings a bell for you, I now challenge you to rely more on ambient light (all the light around you) instead of your on-camera flash. There’s a reason why camera manufacturers like Canon and Nikon sell external camera flashes as high as $500: the on-camera flash produces unattractive lighting. And it’s not just with a person’s face, next time you take a picture with your on-camera flash, notice how much brighter the foreground object (or whatever object that receives the most light from the flash) and compare how bright it is to the background: usually it’s a lot brighter. Now on occasion you might prefer this rather than having an image in which everything is naturally lit, but from my experience, natural light usually looks better.
Of course, I should be fair as well. For users of point & shoot cameras, often we find ourselves in situations in which we’re forced to use the on-camera flash otherwise we end up getting a blurry picture caused by camera shake. You might, however, be able to compensate by bumping up the ISO, which will result in a brighter picture without having to sacrifice to a slower shutter speed. The price, however, is that your image will look more grainy as a high ISO usually results in more “noise”. In my experience, your picture should still look pretty decent if you can keep the ISO level at 400 or less.
In the end it’s up to you to decide what you want, a picture that uses camera flash or a picture lit by natural (or ambient) light but with more noise.
