Portraits

Simple Composition

Typical snapshot.

It's a pretty picture: the lighting is soft, the focus is correct, the background is neither bland nor distracting. But one little change could make the picture a lot better.

Rotate ninety degrees.

It's easy to forget that cameras take rectangular pictures and that you can orient that rectangle either way. This way is called "portrait" mode. If you ever look through any fine art book, you'll find that most portraits of individual people are painted this way.

(You can rotate your camera either way. Use whichever way is more comfortable for you.)

But there's one more thing you can do to acheieve perfection.

Point your camera down.

That's right: There's no reason that the center of interest of the image has to be in the middle of the frame. (Some might argue that the center of interest in this portrait is Mona's breast, and that the image is centered there, but for me her face is the most interesting thing.)

So rather than placing the subject's head smack dab in the middle of the image, tilt your camera down as far as it will go and still leave a reasonable border along the top. Tadaa. Instant masterpiece.

Painters (and photographers, for that matter) are not constrained to certain proportions of their canvases. I cropped this image along the top and bottom to make it fit a standard 1:1.5 aspect ratio. The actual Mona Lisa image has an aspect ratio of 1:1.534. There's nothing magical about that ratio or any other. The key is to remember that you can always use the rectangle you have to make your image look better.