Good Friday morning! Are you ready to go out there and shoot some photos? well good, because I have some assignments for you. Just over a year ago I wrote this post about shooting from varying angles, and today I am challenging you to do just that.
1. Capture the details
I talked about this in my post from yesterday. I really love zooming in on the details of an activity or my surroundings. These are the photos that make for great introspective journaling, because you can use the photo as a symbol of something bigger. Here is one that I took this summer
When I scrap this photo I can talk about not only this specific cheesecake, but also my love for cheesecake in general. Or maybe about how making cheesecakes used to be my specialty, but lately my husband has been the one making them and wowing everyone!
Here is a layout that Deb made using a close up shot of her favorite summer treat.
2. Shooting from above
Taking a portrait from above gives such a different perspective of your little one. In this case it showed just how little he still was just one year ago.
This is the layout I made using it (you might remember seeing it here)
If your little one isn't that little anymore, you can always achieve this by standing on a chair. Or how about the window upstairs like I did in this shot of my guys having breakfast outside?
3. Shooting from below
Steps are great for getting this kind of shot.
Here's one that Christa took of her daughter
4. Quirky Family/Group shot.
What do you do when you want to take a family shot but don't have a remote or a friend to help out? Find a mirror of course! This is still one of my favourites from last year
You can see how I used it in a layout here in our gallery from August.
Here are two more
So go crazy and look for reflective surfaces everywhere!
5. Wide Angle Landscape
Have you heard about the Rule of Thirds?
The guideline proposes that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.[2] Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would
Say what? Basically you imagine your viewfinder to be divided up like a tic tac toe game, and use the lines or the intersection of those lines, to position the focal point of your photo.
For landscapes this means not placing your horizon line in the middle of the photos, as we are naturally inclined to do, but along one of the lines as above.
Before I say good bye, I want to link to two of my favourite photography resources. The first is a standard photography book: Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. This is the book that really helped me understand shooting in manual. If you want to learn more you should definitely check it out. The author does a much better job of explaining it than I did!
The other is more scrapbooking related: Real.Life. Photography by Rebecca Cooper, available from Ella Publishing.
One last thing: I didn't touch on photo editing at all because it is such a large topic. But if this is something you would like to learn more about, let us know so that we can address it separately in a future photography week!
Thanks for hanging out with me. And Go.Shoot.Now!
