What I like, but don't often actually do, is to follow advice from an interview of Sam Abell I read: "Find a good background, then wait for something interesting to happen."
Rick http://photo.net/photos/RickW --- On Mon, 9/5/11, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- 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.
