Focus

FOCUS, the center of interest, which, in this case, is not in the center mathematically speaking, but is the center of your attention because that is where you are looking.  Wow, that was illuminating.  Let's talk about a simple exercise that can make a big difference in the quality of your picture-taking.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in their photos has to do with composition.  Usually putting too much in the picture.  Think of your images as literature.  One doesn't see the entire story on one page, it is broken down into pieces; chapters, paragraphs, sentences and words.

I took a creative writing class in college thinking that I was going to learn about writing stories, but noooooooooo, we were going to write poetry.  What an experience!  Not only did I learn a lot about effective creative writing, but I took those lessons on into life and they worked there too.  We would have to write a poem and then read it in class and let everyone and the professor critique it for us.  What a pleasant experience for a shy person such as myself. The Dog Whisperer seems to have the same cure for all of clients.....take the dog for walks.  My professor seemed to be cut from the same mold only instead of going for walks it was always, "Say it with fewer words".

Every time I'd write something I would reread it and ask myself, "What can I take out and have it still mean something?"  Now, do the same thing in your pictures.  What can you take out and still have the image say something?  In other words, get closer, move in, shift around, crop out that telephone pole.  This way the viewer's attention won't be jumping all over the place.  Let's refine it a bit more.

Look at the picture in this post.  Mentally draw a long tic-tac-toe game on top of it.  Look at the intersections.  Aha, there's a duck!  Guess what, that is where I wanted you to look.  From there your eye will naturally follow the intersections to the other points of interest.  Through this very simple process you can control what your viewers look at and what things you draw their attention away from.

Shift your position, direction of view, and other like things and you'll have new parts to your story.  After doing this long enough you'll begin to look at the world this way.  You'll see compositions all around you.  The world will be funner to look at.  Yes, I said funner.  This column will not always be politically or grammatically correct.