Project 1: Practice framing your scene

The first project is to put your fingers together in a rectangle and practice seeing only an area of a scene, and then to try both vertical and horizontal, "to see if the shot will work or not before taking a picture."

Here is Shia Labeouf helping to illustrate the point...and looking fabulous doing it!




Okay, at first this seems rather mundane and silly. But the reality is that we too often forget to consider ONLY an area of what we see with our eyes. This is the one thing that annoys me most when I see people taking pictures with their cell phones WAAAAAYYYY out in front of their faces, more focused on working the phone than the scene (my friend Christopher being the exception of course).

Or worse yet, those people you see sticking their heads out of cars or while riding bikes snapping away randomly. I'm sure they eventually get a good picture...but why am I forced to see all of them on FaceBook?

Now you don't REALLY need to put your fingers out in front of you to get the point. The point is, simply look at areas of your total scene and consider cropping to that area before snapping the photograph.

If anything, this project illustrates one good point: try to get the right photo from the camera FIRST, without having to edit, crop, photoshop later.