In short, I’ll reiterate something my photo professors told me over and over again in graduate school: Control your background. Even a slight step left or right in any of these situations with an appropriate re-framing of the picture would have countered this problem. So what do you do when you’re shooting and you encounter a foreign object growing out of someone’s head? Simple – change the angle you are shooting at. I took home three lessons from Chuck’s words of wisdom: Always make sure you have all the relevant body parts in the frame, watch for polehead, and never trust your friends and family on Facebook when it comes to critiquing your photos. I took the photo out of my portfolio, and now when I look at it, those are the only two things I see. He said it looked great … except that I had chopped off her feet and a pole was growing out of her head. Then I showed it to Chuck Haupt, a 30-year veteran photographer of the Press & Sun-Bulletin in upstate New York. I took that one in San Antonio just a couple of months after I bought my first DSLR and started really shooting still photos.
The picture on the bottom right of the montage above, with the girl in the fountain, was one of my favorite photos when I started shooting. Watch for things growing out of people's heads when you shoot. Here’s an example where your only real option is to move:
In many cases, you have to maneuver yourself out of the way of these light sources to make a picture. In the cases above, it’s very easy to crop the lights out of the picture and still have a usable photo.īut there are times where that’s simply not enough. It means that when you’re shooting, you have to be keenly aware of your surroundings. This isn’t only the case for bright lights, but brightly-colored objects in your photos as well (how many times have you taken what you thought was the perfect photo of you and your friend, only to see the tourist with the hot pink shirt in the background?). You think you have the perfect image and there’s this bright hotspot in the photo, taking your viewers’ eyes away from the subject of your photo and directly to the light. Shooting around multiple light sources can be maddening. What’s the first thing your eyes are drawn to in the above images? Those bright lights, right? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:īright lights or lightsources in a photo can distract the viewer. You can crop the image to meet the rule of thirds, and with the high resolution images produced by today’s cameras, you won’t take a huge hit in quality.
That’s where the “crop” tool in Photoshop comes in handy (it looks like the graphic below). Of course, in the heat of the moment, you may not always be able to get that perfect rule-of-thirds composition going. There eyes should have what is called “look room” so they aren’t looking right at the edge of the picture. When placing that subject’s head – make sure you give them some room to look off at. You’ll have a much more dynamic image than if the subject was sitting in the center of the frame. Place your subject’s head at one of the “thirds points” – the parts of the 3×3 grid where the lines intersect. Instead, imagine a 3×3 grid laid over your image (or if you have certain cameras, you can actually turn on the grid in the viewfinder and turn off your imagination). Natural inclination for the beginning photographer is to put the subject smack in the center of the frame – but resist that urge.
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