A couple weeks ago, someone commented that most of my portraits have black backgrounds. I do that because not lighting a black background is the easiest way to get rid of clutter that can ruin a shot. I've also realized that when I'm photographing musicians, I tend to compose in tight, often cropping out portions of their head, in my pursuit of getting rid of anything that might be clutter in the background.
I also find that I tend to shoot from further away, with a longer lens, to narrow the angle of view, and have fewer things cluttering up the background. Even if that means that there is a smaller ratio of distance to the subject to distance to the background, which conflicts with the shallower depth of field of a long lens, to use DoF to blur out the background. There are all sorts of reasons why just making the background, and the clutter in it, go away, is a really great cheat for making good photographs. It's often a lot more effort to make a background work, than to get rid of it. So, it seems to me, that one thing that I need to work on is to learn how to use the backgrounds, rather than just making them go away. Or, at least, learn some new ways of making the background go away. What sorts of techniques do you use to make use of backgrounds in your photos? What do you look for in a background that'll improve the shot, or ruin it? -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
