When taking pictures, there are different aspects to what makes your photographs appeal to your viewer. Is it the angle? The fluorescent colors? Or is it just pleasing to look at?
For many years, I have experimented with cameras (both on phones and professional) to try and capture what I believe will appease my viewers. By practicing with your device and understanding the techniques that make your images enjoyable to look at, the quality just gets better as you go.
For this tutorial, I will tell you my personal techniques on how to form your own appeasing picture for you and your audience.
Playing Around with Angles
There are a variety of ways to take angled photographs. Dutch angles are a type of camera shot where the camera is set at an angle on its roll axis so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame. Taking a straightforward photo is great, and I definitely encourage people to use the technique, but sometimes, there are situations where you do need to angle your camera or phone to take in everything that you can.
For example, taking pictures of trees, people, buildings, or anything that looks awkward when taking a more scenic picture, will need to have an angle to it to capture the right perception. By angling, you have a better chance to let your audience get the bigger concept of the object that you are focusing on. It also gives a different appreciation to the object as well. To take an angled picture, you tilt your camera or device to where you can get the full desire of what you’re going for.
Do you want to capture some of the sky behind the tall tree? Do you want the person that’s modeling to look taller or smaller than they appear in real life? Ask these questions while you experiment with this technique.
Deceiving Your Viewer
The general idea is to persuade your viewer that someone is holding or standing on an object. I see plenty of examples of this on the web in which people use this illusive technique with monuments such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa- where people will act like they’re leaning on it or struggling to hold it up. Another example would be when people seem like they’re dangling the Eiffel Tower between their fingers.
There are two factors to take into thought when using the general idea of illusion. The first is using communication. You have a better chance at helping the person know where to stand, sit, hold up their hands, whatever they need to do you must tell them or else it just looks awkward. For the photographer, you must be flexible to withstand having to be on the ground or being at an awkward angle when taking these pictures. The second factor is timing. It’s easier to do it with things that are not in movement like monuments. It gets more complex when you’re dealing with things in movement like the moon or the person themselves. Catching the right moment before the person loses balance or before the object moves in general is the best feeling for a photographer when mastering this tricky technique.
Making the Object Look Bigger Than It Appears
Being able to look at something so close up is appealing because of the feeling of having something jump out at you. When in reality, it’s small and harmless in real life. I see this a lot in media where people will take pictures of presumably tiny flowers, rocks, bugs, or eyes (like the pupils or retinas) to see the tiny details of the object.
For most cameras, you may use auto or manual settings. For manual, it depends on the timing and the aperture of the object’s environment. People enjoy when the object is being focused on with a softer background, especially with flowers. You must be generous as to not zoom in too much with your device.
Professional cameras tend to do a better job when you’re focusing and zooming onto an object, and you can control how grainy you want it to be. I prefer to have a soft background in which you lower the ISO to bring in less light. This way, it helps not make it so pixelated and blurry to the viewer.
On a phone, try to not zoom in at all, because it causes the picture to become too grainy. Instead, go as close as you can and press your screen to focus on the object and take the picture. You can also turn your flash on as an optional route where you might want a more dramatic, darker background.
Landscapes
When tackling landscapes, it’s important to take in the rule-of-thirds, which creates an interesting and balanced picture for the viewer. The rule-of-thirds can also be used for important compositional elements that should be placed along these lines or their intersections.
For landscapes, you must be able to take in as much as you can to make it interesting to your onlookers and to let them feel the sunlight or to be in that position. Using the pano (panoramic) setting in your phone can let you take a wider and elaborate picture. If you do not have the panoramic setting, you can just as well take a wide angle picture that can turn out just as beautiful.