Some basics of taking a good photo:
One of the best ways to learn to take a good photo is to analyse the photos you are already taking. It takes a little while to learn to look while you are taking the photograph, but once you learn it
Keep in mind that rules are meant to be broken, and that sometimes great photographs don't follow the rules. If you learn the rules first, though, you can learn later how to break them in ways that will create great photos.
These rules change a little bit depending on what you are taking a photo of - a landscape, a portrait, a street scene, an insect. I'll try and go into some basics now, and get into more detail later.
Subject: A photo should have a clear subject that your eye is drawn to. Sometimes a scene can be very beautiful, but make a very boring photo because your eye wanders around the whole picture and nothing draws it and holds it. Human beings look for something to look at, and any photo is made better when it has a subject. A lot of the time, the photo is of a subject - as in the case of a portrait, and most of the rest of the basics of taking a photo is all about how to make that subject clear and interesting.
Get the subject in focus: Make sure the important parts of the picture are in focus. I'll go into this more in another entry.
Keep it simple: some of the best photos are simple ones. Look at photos you have taken, or look at the photo you are about to take. Is there anything distracting you could get rid of by moving it, or moving your subject, or moving yourself? For example, a great portrait photo can be ruined by a tree or branch straight behind the person - in the photo it may look like the tree is growing out of the person's head. This doesn't matter so much in landscapes, but in portraits it is really important.
Sometimes a photo can be made clearer by cropping or post-processing. Here is a shot I did of some geese, as I originally took it:
It's ok. It's hard taking wildlife photos - the geese were all moving around, doing different things. I was taking a photo of another goose that was swimming near me when I saw this goose off to one side stretch up and flap its wings. I turned, refocused and took the shot. The focus was the most important thing in the moment. Luckily the light was still ok, as I didn't have time to change my exposure as well. Snap! - I got the pic, and got the focus right! Success!
This is not a good photo though. It's too busy for one thing. Your eye isn't immediately attracted to that particular goose. Also, it was early morning, and the pond was quiet. There was a great feeling of tranquility with the quiet honking of the geese and the cold of the snow.... that doesn't come through in this picture - at least, not as well as I wanted it to. There are very distracting elements in this shot.
Lines are very important in photos. When you are looking at a photo, the lines lead your eye. Look at the geese at the top of the picture - they are out of focus, the exposure is off, and half of their heads are cut off. Their long necks form lines that lead your eye off the top of the page, away from the goose I want you to look at. The two poles in the snow also lead the eye off of the page. There is also the long dark diagonal line of the bank of the pond. Your eye will naturally want to start at the bottom of it (on the right hand side) and this is great - it leads towards my goose. But it also leads past the goose to the very uninteresting geese in the background.
The solution? Crop the photo in a digital photo editing program. There are a lot of good ones out there and I will talk about them another time, as well as a bit more about cropping. The things I observe about the lines in the photo, as well as the distracting elements, lead me to decide on the crop I want:
I decided on this crop because I want to keep the reflections of the geese in the water, as well as some of the snow. I couldn't keep the snow without also keeping the feet of the geese on the bank, but they were relatively easy to clone out of my picture (yes, yes, more on cloning and other editing tools in another entry). The subject is in a pretty good spot to satisfy the rule of thirds (which I will explain a little bit more later as well). I also sharpened it a little and increased the contrast to make it the geese stand out a little bit more.
My Love suggested this even closer crop, and I think he's right. Even in these small versions of the photo, it draws the attention even better to my subject than having the large goose standing in the right hand side of the pic. I really liked that goose, but it does draw the eye away from my subject a bit too much.
The only thing that I really would like to get rid of in this photo is the goose in the background to the far left of the picture under the wing. Notice it has a green tag on its neck, and as this is the only bright color in the picture, it is a little bit distracting. It would also be rather hard to edit out, though, so I have left it. However, when I was photographing geese on this particular morning, one thing I was trying to pay attention to were the geese with tags, as I didn't want them in my shots.
Ok. See how much more simple this shot is now, and how much more obvious the subject is? Unfortunately I had to achieve most of this in post-processing, but if I was taking photos of an easier subject, I would hopefully be able to do this just by moving myself to take the photo from a different angle, or moving the subject if I could, or removing the distracting element.
I think that is enough for now. More photo composition basics to come in other entries...
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