Great Escape Publishing

Posted September 6th, 2019 by Bonnie Caton & filed under Travel Photography.

Distractions turn great photos into snapshots.

I’m talking about little distractions in the form of fences, people, trash cans, litter, brightly-colored signs, branches, power lines, and anything else that distracts your viewer’s eye away from your main subject.  

Often, all it takes is a few seconds to change your angle and get a much better photo.

Here’s what to do:

1. Lift your camera to your eye and frame your photo. Get your subject just right and make sure to look around the edges of the frame. If you see something like these branches poking in the top, you know you need to move.

2. Try moving forward. See how, in this second photo, the branches are gone? Great. Simple elimination of a distraction. But the photo is a bit boring…

3. Try moving backward. When we include the entire tree, the branches now become a frame for our subject:

Nice save!

Here’s another example. See the distraction?

That building at the bottom of the photo is bright and draws our eye away from the main subject. By moving to the right and up just a FEW INCHES, you can eliminate it altogether…

Ahh. That’s better.

Try getting up high, down low, closer to, or farther from your subject. Try zooming in, zooming out, using a different angle.   The difference between a photo that gets passed up by buyers… and one that sells often comes down to taking a few extra seconds to notice what’s going on in the frame.

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