Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joseph Bautsch" data-source="post: 2905" data-attributes="member: 654">My recommendations for "improving" your shot of the candle alcoves is solely theoretical and not very practical for casual shooting in a club. You would have to have a tall ladder and a mounting bracket for the camera to get the "improved" shot. One of the things many people have difficulty working with is the cameras rectangular format. When do you shoot in portrait and when do you shoot in landscape? An example of that is the shot of the girl holding the Vodka bottle. This shot just begs to be shot in portrait. It will frame the subject and eliminate the cluttered up space on the left and right of the subject. Other things you can do to improve the shot is to put the background out of focus. All those bottles with the sharp vertical lines are very distracting. Narrow down the depth of field so that only the subject is in focus. You can do that with a f/3.5 and/or (with flash) more distance between the subject and the background. What is the subject? the girl or the bottle of Vodka? The attention is divided between the two. If it's the girl then I would have turned the bottle so the bright label is not emphasized as much. The back of it would have been better or use a bottle with no printing on it. If the subject is the bottle then more needs to be done to bring attention to it. Bring the bottle to the forefront so it appears to be larger than the girl. Have the girl turn her head and eyes to the bottle. This is where you can violate one of photography's rules, "don't cut off heads". Now you can frame the shot down, in portrait format, to the bottle even to the extent of cutting off parts of the girls head. Doing this de-emphasizes the girl as the subject and draws attention to the bottle. There are other variations to make this shot work. The point to be made is to have one subject and either de-emphasize or get the other parts of the photo to draw attention to the subject. Can you break the rules? Yes - but first learn to shoot using the rules of composition and then see when and how to break the rules to create your own style. Hope this helps.</blockquote>

Verification