Strengthen Your Spring Break Pictures By Changing Your Perspective

Many of us are getting ready to travel for spring break. With that will come activities and moments we want to capture with pictures.  I encourage you to take some time and experiment with changing your perspective and composition. This can add more variety to your images and help strengthen your storytelling. The added variety and storytelling will lead to more interesting spreads in your family albums or vacation books. Make sure you check out my blog from earlier this year on CHOOSING AN ONLINE PRINT LAB for your family albums!

CHANGING PERSPECTIVE
1. MOVE: when photographing, especially family and children, do not remain stationary, move around.  

2. LANDSCAPE OR PORTRAIT: The easiest way to change your perspective is to take a picture in landscape (horizontal) and a second image of the scene in portrait (vertical).

3. DISTANCE FROM SUBJECTS: Try and shoot a scene from 3 different distances

1. Move back to get the entire scene

2. Create a shot that is a whole body

3. A close up to include shoulders and face

4.  VARY YOUR HEIGHT:

1. Shoot the scene straight on from your standing position

2. Kneel down, sit down or lay down to change your point of view

3. Climb on top of something - rocks, ladder, fence, table and shoot down on the scene

5. SHOOT AROUND YOUR SUBJECT - walk 360 degrees around your subject to capture the scene from all angles

1. Straight on, face to face

2. Shoot from the side of your subject

3. Shoot your subject from behind

6. FRAMING and COMPOSITION:

1. Pay attention to what is included in your frame through your viewfinder.  Are you accidentally cutting something in half that should a whole item in your image - a leg, arm, foot, hand.

2. RULE of THIRDS: This is one of many compositional guidelines, but one that is easy to use.  To apply the Rule of Thirds, notice your screen is divided into 9 sections by two horizontal lines and two vertical lines.  You use these lines and their intersection points to set up or compose your shot. For example, use the horizontal lines and line up your horizon with either the top or bottom line (I have lined up the horizon in the image below with the top horizontal line). Next time you take a picture of your child, try putting him/her at one of the intersection points. Check out this example below: