New England Foliage Blog →
New England Fall Foliage photo tips
Planning photography opportunities
by Jeff "Foliage" Folger
Lot's of yellow and beautiful with nice light coming in for the side but no focus.
Stop and look up to see color. Still the eye flits around the scene, no focus. The trunk of the tree does lead your eye into the scene.
Here the focus is evident, I want you to look at the lady bug and everything beyond the leaves is blurry making you stay with the leaves and lady.
Here the leaf is again the focus because the rest of the scene is out of focus so you force the viewers eye to stay on the maple leaf. You have a hint of what is around the leaf but nothing that takes away from the leaf.
Well how many of you plan to bring your camera's with you this fall?
That's a silly question right? How many would consider not taking dozens if not hundreds of pictures of the impressive fall colors. In most cases you have made lots of plans but when you get out there on the first day you just start shooting all the beautiful colors and when you go home and get the prints back or see them on your computer, you find something is lacking?
It's all about placement!
When you take a picture of a scene you have to focus in on one single object and make it so that no one has a question about what you are taking the picture of. You can do this by filling the frame (or viewfinder) with the subject. Get in real close and use the macro setting (usually a picture of a flower on the dial) and this will cause everything beyond your subject to be blurry. Since our eyes don't like to look at blurry things (another reason to wear glasses) :-) Our eyes naturally seek out whatever in the picture is sharp and clear.
This is one way to ensure the viewer will look at the subject you have chosen. If your eye wanders around the picture not really stopping on one thing then you have failed to achieve a strong subject. You'll often hear me say don't try to capture the forest of color and instead focus in on a single scarlet leaf.
In the first two shots on the right you can see lovely washes of color. (This is a secret so don't tell! shhh!) Sometimes I also will take a picture of scarlet or orange and yellow leaves just because it makes me go wow! What you have to ask yourself is this. Is this a shot that I'll come back and look at again and again, maybe but shooting color for color's sake is only going to take you so far. In reality these are boring shots and if you want to share these with friends and family you want to WOW them and not BORE them, right?
Well, one way to keep people from jumping out the windows when you bring out your pictures is to think before you shoot. I want you to think about subject and placement in the viewfinder. This is called composition and it plays a critical role in creating an interesting picture that someone besides you, may want to see.
In the 3rd and 4th shots (on the right) I used two techniques to make you see what the focus of my pictures is. In "Lady in red" I used "get in close" to the subject to fill the viewfinder with the leaf, branch and ladybug. In the second I took in more of the scene but I made everything other than what I wanted you to look at, blurry.
Questions?
Okay, these are two techniques to improve your photos and don't think this is only for fall these are year round techniques.
Next week framing your subject.
Did you know that Yankee is up on Facebook and Twitter? Well click on the links and you can get your updates all year long!
Yankee on Facebook and Yankee on Twitter.
I hope to hear from you throughout the summer and if you have any questions please feel free to ask them here in the comments section or over in the foliage forum and I and the other forum regulars will do their best to answer them
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