a1 Photo Tips

A famous photographer once said, when asked how to make a great picture: “If it ain’t good enough - you’re not CLOSE enough!” This, in a nutshell, is often what makes the difference between a ho-hum boring picture and a stunning masterpiece.

Sure, there is more to it than that but the simple act of actually filling the frame with your main subject of interest usually makes a huge difference. So, I think this photo tip is an important one indeed.

OK, and how do you get close? There are really two ways: either you bring the camera closer to the subject, OR you use the zoom function to zoom in closer. (All digicams have zoom lenses nowadays, the only exception is if you have a very advanced digital SLR camera with interchangeable lenses, then you may choose to put a fixed focal length lens on the camera.)

Why do wildlife photographers typically use those huge telephoto lenses? Well, it is because wild animals usually don’t want to get too close to humans! Therefore, if you want to get close to a wild animal you in most cases need to “zoom in”, that is: use a long focal lenght lens.

Same thing if you are into sports photography and want to get nice closeups of the action. You don’t walk in to a tennis court to snap pictures of the players, right? No, you have to stand somewhere outside the court and try your best from there.

Now, there are some problems with “zooming in”. On the technical side of things, using a telephoto setting means you need more light; while at the same time the picture is more vulnerable to blurriness. This blurriness happens in two ways: 1) camera movement, and 2) incorrect focus.

If you use the other method for getting close, (as in the picture of the girl above) you have much less problems with these kinds of blurriness. So, my general advice for filling the frame is: just bring yourself and the camera closer to the subject!

Here is an example of the difference: making a portrait of a giraffe!

My son, who is a great photographer, made this picture of a giraffe when he was 6 years old and went to the Zoo. He sure had liked to get closer to the animal, but that wasn’t possible. Also he had a simple digicam with very limited “zoom in” capacity.

Here below is another giraffe picture, made by a professional photographer (not me!)

The photographer was able to get very close to the animal and could therefore fill the frame with the animal’s head and make an interesting giraffe-portrait.

(You can see from the perspective that a short focal length setting was used for this image.)

Here I feel inspired to make a short comment on the perspective effect of different focal lenghts. In the giraffe portrait above, you clearly see that the animal’s head actually looks as if it is larger than the neck! And yet we know it is actually the other way around - which we can see in my son’s picture.

This is a simple perspective effect: what is closer to the camera appears larger than what is farther away. In my son’s giraffe picture, he was so far away from his subject that all parts of the animal are at about the same distance from the camera. The other picture was made by a photographer who was able to get close access to the subject - therefore the nose of the giraffe is way closer to the camera than the neck.

In most cases, this perspective effect is a desirable one, in my opinion. We feel how close we are to the giraffe in the second picture! And part of this feeling is conveyed by the perspective effect. If the picture had been taken at a distance, as if my son had been using an advanced SLR digicam with a long telephoto lens, and thereby been able to fill the frame with the giraffe’s head and neck, the resulting image had been very different from the closeup above. It would have been much more flat, almost like a cardboard cutout, and would not have conveyed the same sense of presence.

The reason is, again, the great distance between my son and the giraffe at the Zoo. Due to this distance, as said above, every part of the giraffe is at about the same distance from the camera - and even the longest telephoto lens in the world won’t change this fact.

Yes, it is easy to think you can take fantastic pictures if only you have this or that advanced telephoto lens - but the reality is it is much more difficult to make good pictures with a lens like that; both for technical reasons, as mentioned above, and for more aestetic ones.

Sure, in some cases you don’t really want the kind of effect seen in the giraffe closeup above. Like if you make a portrait of a person rather than a giraffe…

Note how exaggerated the size of the nose appears here! This is because of the short focal length, wide-angle setting, used.

To make a more flattering portrait, use a little bit of a telephoto setting instead - not an extreme one but just enough to avoid exaggerating the features of the face.

If the face is not filling the whole frame but only a minor part of it, as in the picture of the young woman above, then you can use a wide-angle setting width good results. It seems we much easier accept a distorted appearance with other parts of the body such as arms and legs, than with the face.