Category: Photography

Photo tip: turn your flash off

Photo tip: turn your flash off
One of the first things that you can do to improve your images is to turn your flash off. This is especially true if you take pictures of people. The flash which is built into your camera is quite powerful — in fact, it’s too powerful. What’s worse is that all that power is focused right in the middle of your picture.

Try this exercise. Either find a large window (if you’re shooting indoors) or a shade tree (for outdoor shots) and position your subject so that they are facing the source of light. Now, take some pictures — some with the flash on and some with the flash off. Take those pictures, download them to your computer (assuming you’re using digital), and take a look at them. I’m going to guess that the overall color quality is better with the flash off than it is with the flash on.

I’ll get into more details on this topic in a later post, but for now, play around with your camera’s flash turned off. It’s not always possible to take the pictures you want without a flash, but there are a lot of times when using the the flash is entirely unnecessary and lowers the color quality of an otherwise great image.

The images that I’m showing here were all taken indoors without any flash or strobe equipment, just a big window on an overcast, yet bright day.

Critique: Red flower

Critique: red flower
This is my first critique, it will be short and sweet. I haven’t done a formal critique of an image since college, so this will be a good exercise for me. I can only imagine that I will get better at these as I do more of them and it will also force me to really “see” an image as I talk about it.

Background of the image. The flower pictured here was a Christmas gift from my mom to my dad. She bought the bulb for him and he planted it — two months later it was a fully blossomed flower. A while back I offered to take some flower pictures for my parents so that they could hang some pictures on the wall in there living room. This flower presented the perfect opportunity for that.

Critique. I find the distorted perspective to be quite interesting. The focus is obviously on the blossom, but the stem draws the viewer’s attention down to the pot. The viewer’s gaze then drifts to the left as it follows the mantle. Because I plan on using this in a series, it would be best to use it to the right of another image so that as the viewer’s gaze moves left there is another image there for the viewer to look at.