Working at a photograph “Skyline Market”
If you can just pick up a camera and take a great picture you can stop reading now. If you are like the rest of us and have to work at creating images by all means read on. Sometimes something will catch your eye and present a good opportunity to create an image, but the first click of the shutter may not meet your expectations. It can be a good idea to look at what you want to take a picture of and consider how moving around and changing angles will effect the scene. If you find it difficult to envisage how something will look then take a picture and look at it on your LCD. I am assuming your using a digital camera, I mean who still uses film, right?
You can effect a photograph a great deal in post processing and even by cropping but by getting a composition that works to start it will ultimately yeild a better image. On the technical side consider; is what you intended to be in focus truly in focus, is there unwanted motion blur, are there other settings that are wrong such as ISO? If your pleased with the technical then it’s time to consider composition. Did you have a point of interest and is it in the best location within the frame? Are there elements in the image that you don’t want and can they be eliminated by changing your view point? There are many more questions that you can put to your self , but by engaging in the evaluation of your image you are on the path to creating better ones. What you don’t want is to do this thinking later at the computer when there is nothing you can do to improve things, or that requires editing that would not have been otherwise necessary.
For this image I started with a horizontal composition that didn’t really work. The sign took up to much of the frame and the sky wasn’t really a factor. The next image was another horizontal capture but this time I put the sign in the bottom left corner, still not as good as it could be and wires cut across the bottom corner. This is when I realized that by pointing the camera up and vertically I could include more of the cloud, making a more dramatic sky. The final decisions I made where during processing the file into an in camera jpg. I applied correction for the slight barrel distortion and increased the contrast and saturation to make the sky stand out. The final thing was to add a black border which I liked as it mirrored the frame of the sign.
Here is the photographic sequence I described, on the path to this image.
