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Essential Rules to Basic F

Essential Rules to Basic F

Photography is less about what you’re shooting and more about how you’re shooting. Whether you use a camera phone, a point and shoot, or a DSLR, a good photographer knows the basic rules of composition and when to use them. Today we break down 7 basic photography rules.

Rule of Thirds
One of the most common mistakes for new photographers is to place your subject in the dead center of the frame. The best way to overcome this mistake is to apply the Rule of Thirds. Imagine that your shot is divided into nine equal rectangles. Or simply use the grid lines on the viewfinder of  your  Sony RX100 Cyber-Shot Digital Camera from Beachcamera.com. Place your subject at any of the four points where the rectangles join. By applying this rule, you’ll almost immediately add balance and interest to your photos.

Simplify
Before shooting, declutter your background to capture simple and beautiful images allowing the focus to stay on your subject. While you can always remove tree limbs, toys and other distractions from your photos in post-processing, it’s much easier to remove them before ever taking a photo.

Foreground and Background
For some, the greatest difficulty of photography is capturing the beauty and essence of a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional photo. Often, the result is a flat, static image that has none of the life that made the scene so awesome in the first place. One of the easiest methods is to make sure that the photo has a foreground and a background that both complement the intended subject. This is done by manipulating depth of field. Using a wider aperture results in a shallower depth of field, which blurs things that are closer to the camera than the subject and farther from the camera than the subject. This blur helps establish visual depth.

Essential Rules to Basic Photography


Fill the Frame
Sometimes, leaving too much empty space within a photo can make your main character appear smaller than you’d like. Don’t be afraid to zoom in close on your subject or “fill the frame.”

Framing
As you’re shooting, look for natural ways to frame your main subject. Tree branches, buildings and fences all make wonderful frames. Get creative and even use frames within frames to add visual interest to your photos.

Leading Lines
One of the most important concepts in photography is that you want the photo to “draw” the viewer’s eyes somewhere. Ideally on a particular path through the photo. You can use lines in your photos to draw people’s eye towards the main subject of your photo. You can find lines among walls, mountain ranges, windows, fences, buildings, telephone wires, and roads.

Essential Rules to Basic Photography

Keep Your Horizons Level
If there is a horizontal line in your shot, be sure to keep that line straight.  A tilted shot taken with your new Sony Camera from Beachcamera.com does not make for a more creative image. 

While we covered seven basic photography rules that can be applied to almost any situation, you do not have to use all of these rules in every single photo you take. If you have a photo that doesn’t look good, applying one or more of these rules will probably improve it.
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