Whether you take one picture every few years or take dozens a day, you may be wondering how you can make your pictures more impressive. Here, we’ll give you a handful of suggestions to make your pictures stand out more, be more clear and capture exactly what you’re seeing and want to capture on film.
Be mindful of the framing of your subject. What this means will vary by subject. For instance, if you are taking a picture of one person, getting a close shot where the subject fills the frame is your best bet, since details are important. On the other hand, a landscape shot might benefit from being further away, as you get the entire scene this way.
Play with the aperture settings. Take a number of photos of the same subject with different settings to see how it affects the look of the final photo. Bigger f-stops allow you to get an entire landscape in focus, while a smaller f-stop will draw attention only to the center of your frame.
Make sure you taking lighting into account when you’re taking your photos. Will there be shadows cast upon your subject? Is your subject squinting into the sun or other bright light? Try moving around to find the best angle in the lighting to get the best photo. Try taking your photos at different vantage points so that you can see what works best.
Keep the process you use for taking pictures as simple as you can. You can often create a gorgeous picture without playing around with the different motion and color settings.
Learn how to play with the shutter speed. You can choose to snap a quick picture or choose a slower exposure to capture a flow or movement in its entirety. You will need to experiment with this and find what kind of speed matches certain situations. This is a matter of personal style rather than a general guideline to follow.
Be sure your photo has a solid focal point. Without a good focal point your photographs will end up looking empty, leaving the eye with nowhere to rest. Your viewers will be more appreciative of a photo that has a clear focus, even if you are shooting a landscape or other wide setting.
Once you have spotted the subject of your picture, make sure to take your shot right away. This is especially true if your subject is a living being, such as a child or animal. Since staying in one position for a long time is hard for animals and children, you want to make sure you get the pose you want.
With these suggestions in hand, start looking at your most recent photographs and see if these tips would have made the pictures even better. If you start noticing that there is a suggestion or two that would greatly improve a few of the photographs you’ve already taken, try finding a way to incorporate that suggestion into every photograph you take from now on.