with Lorelle and Brent VanFossen

Tag Archives: composition

Lavender Festival: Photographing People and Hats

When I photograph people and I don’t have time for signing model releases, I take care to hide their faces. This beautiful woman, an artist selling her wares at the Lavender Festival, Washington County, Oregon, turned her head away to reveal the lovely hat she was wearing, which was what I really wanted to capture […]

Panoramio – Photographic View of the Planet

A lot of creative things are being done with Google Maps, and a new fun thing is Panoramio. Panoramio offers up photographs showcasing various points on the globe using Google Maps so you can see the lovely scenery. Photographic images are uploaded by users and can be seen by anyone, or set to be private […]

Background Magic Part Two

Specific Crimes of Ignoring the Background In part one of Background Magic, we looked at what makes a perfect background and what questions to ask yourself as you compose a photograph, and some of the typical techniques used to change, clean, or manipulate the background to improve it. In this section, we cover the specific […]

Background Magic

We are often so caught up in the excitement of photographing the subject, we often forget the single most important element that can make or break our photograph: the background. The background, and in its own way the foreground, can accentuate or completely distract from your subject. How many times have you gotten back vacation […]

Bull’s Eye Syndrome

Which image do you prefer? We have a lot of choices about where to place a subject in our viewfinder or frame. Which image below do you prefer? Is there one that you like better than the rest? The one with the subject in the middle or the others? Look at all the compositional choices […]