The perfect selfie
THE WORST WAY TO TAKE A SELFIE is, of course, to hold your phone at arm’s length and point it at yourself. You’ll see your friends in the distance looking happy and smiling, with a close-up of yourself in the foreground squinting at the lens and wondering if it’s going to work. The best way […]
Watch the background
THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENCES between professional and amateur photographers. One of the key failings of happy snappers is an inability to look at what’s going on in the background. You’ll often see holiday shots with a telegraph pole growing out of someone’s head, or a plane driving into their ear, or half a printed sign drawing the […]
On the horizon
ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKES many people make when creating a scene is incorrectly placing people at a variety of sizes. Sure, people further away appear smaller, but how do you make them all seem to be in the same scene? This is the sort of situation you frequently see: It’s a clumsy arrangement, and all […]
Walking in, walking out
SHOW SOMEONE WALKING from one side to the other in a photograph and you have the potential to tell a story. But the story you tell depends on their position in the scene. Place the person on the far left (assuming they’re walking from left to right) and we can see how far they’ve got to […]
Left, right and centre
AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHERS will almost always frame their pictures so that the subject is dead centre. is is almost always a bad location, as it’s very static and inactive. Better to place people to one side, which not only makes a scene more dynamic, it also offers a better view of the background. If you photograph […]