Photo Tip Friday~ Get Closer

When you browse through your favorite layouts and magazines... have you noticed that the close-up photos are the ones that are the most intriguing and the most eye-catching?

Fill the entire frame with Grandpa's weathered face, your niece's chubby baby rolls, or your little boy's dirty hands (as below) to capture every gorgeous detail.

By getting closer you are focusing on your subject, and drawing all of your attention to the details. It's OK to crop the top of the head a bit! The only thing that I personally don't like cropped are hands and feet (in whole body photos).

Other tips are to squat down and get on their eye level. Or stand over them and shoot down... this helps emphasize their smallness and focuses on their face (as below).

Another very important detail, is that with my camera I tend to shoot with an open Aperture (also known as F-Stop). This helps keeps some details crisp and clean, and then it blurs everything else. Notice in the first and third of these pictures there are crisp details (the hands, and then Seth's face) and the rest is "bokeh."

Bokeh is an Asian term for watercolor effect.... all of this is also known as a short depth of field. (You would not want any bokeh for a landscape shot... you would want a deep depth of field.)

Now, my camera does this, it is a DSLR. If you have a point and shoot, I recommend getting our your manual to check to see if you can change the Aperture or F-Stop. The lower the number, the better.

If you can't change it, don't despair, LOL! In photoshop you could easily use the Blur sponge tool and carefully lightly blur areas that you want out of focus.

The best rule of thumb when you are focusing on a face and taking a short depth of field photo, is to focus on the eyes. You always want the eyes crisp and sharp.