How to Capture a Story & Subject through Photography!

We have officially come to the end of Week Two of the Strange & Charmed Digital Styling Light Room FREE 30 Day Photo Challenge & Mini Course! This week the prompts got a little tougher as we learned day by day how to capture the visual subject of an image. Have you ever looked at a photo and asked yourself “what am I looking at?” When the subject of a photo isn’t obvious, its hard to understand and relate to a photo. This week was all about learning to find and capture subjects and make them stand out in through visual cues. Let’s see what my students came up with this week!

Day 8: Point of View

Point of view is a very important concept when it comes to photography and understanding your subject because there are so many points of view that you can take on one single scene. Today was all about challenging your standard view and getting yourself to look at the world from a different view point. Some people got clever and showed life through the eyes of their pets, others got way up high or way down low to show us something we wouldn’t normally see from our standard eye level! The results were spectacular!

Day 9: Perspective

There is no better way to highlight a subject than through perspective, and making your subject stand out by framing it just so in your image can really help the viewer to understand what they are looking at. It was great to see my students embracing that and capturing subjects from a perspective that we don’t often get. Often times this means getting up close and personal with a smaller subject or getting yourself to a specific vantage point to provide a good view of a large scene. These pictures really embody the effort that is often required on the part of a photographer to capture their subject.

Day 10: Single Focus Point

Sometimes we take pictures and we want to capture too much in one image and we end up loosing the subject or focus on the image. In todays prompt the challenge was to find a single focus point to draw the eye to one single subject in a larger scene. My students were very resourceful with this prompt and used color, blur and composition to put the attention of the viewer on one single subject.

Day 11: Visual Balance

But what about when we really want to capture multiple subjects in one image? Well, that takes a lesson in visual balance. With this prompt, my digital styling students were asked to capture an image with multiple focus points. The challenge here was to balance subjects in such a way that the image didn’t become overwhelming and still retained a visual flow. I was very impressed with these compositions and how obvious it is to me that my students were now able to build upon earlier lessons to compose a single shot.

Day 12: Cropping

Nothing draws the eye into an image quite the way that cropping does. Often times it is our first reaction as photographers to want to capture the whole subject or scene so that people get the big picture, however, the story and subject is often lost in that scenario. Instead, focus on cropping into the main point of interest or action! These images really have done an excellent job balancing the subject in the image with a crop that really shows just enough to the audience while also retaining a sense of artistic license.

Day 13: Contrast

As we progress through this concept of capturing the subject, another key element of photography, contrast, comes into play as a means to add drama to an image. I love using light and dark to contrast a subject and this can be accomplished through actual light and shadow, color, or even pulling out the subtle details of the sky or a building as shown in the images above. Again, a wonderful selection of images that all play with the concept of contrast in different ways.

Day 14: Details

The final prompt for week two was details, because again, I wanted to teach the students in  #CharmedDSLR that capturing your subject is more than just looking at the big picture. These images aren’t just great detail shots, but also excellent examples of cropping as well because in order to get the details into focus, one must crop into the scene. Yet another example of the lessons of this course building upon each other to create some wonderful images!

Thank you so much to those students who participated in the second week of the course! Day by day I can see you are each learning at your own pace and building upon the lessons of skills of the day before to make each of your images better than the last! If you are not yet signed up for #CharmedDSLR and want to participate, I invite you to head on over to this blog post to sign up because you can start this course at any time- it’s never too late to improve upon a skill like photography!

xoxo,