Rules for Photographers to Remember

When taking photos, you can have a wide, mid, or close up shot.  This is a mid shot.  You can see most of the subject’s body but there is more detail shown than if it was a wide shot.  This picture was also shot at eye level which is generally the angle at which you want to take a picture.  I took this picture of a Maasai boy while in Kenya.  This was taken during a goat roast in a small community during the summer of 2011.

This picture follows the rule of thirds.  To follow the rule of thirds you divide a photo into 9 boxes and place the center of interest of the picture where the lines meet.  These are called golden points. It is also a close-up shot of my friend Bailey.  A close-up shot means that a certain point of the subject takes up the whole frame.  It is not a picture of her whole body, but just of her face.  This picture has a shorter depth of field, meaning that the background is not in focus, just the main subject of the picture.  This picture was also shot at eye level.  I took this picture of my friend Bailey last summer.

This photo is a wide shot of slums around Lima, Peru.  It follows the diagonal rule which says that a photograph looks more dynamic if the objects fall or follow a diagonal line.  In this picture your eyes follow the diagonal lines of the dirt roads across the photograph.  This picture also has a wide depth of field meaning that most of the photo is in focus.  I took this picture while on a trip to Lima, Peru during spring break 2010.  We spent a couple days walking around the slums, talking to people, and playing with children.  Seeing the way these people lived made me appreciate the life that I have been blessed with.

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