For instance, this picture is our plum tree in the back yard. As you notice, its spring time, and its blooming. The blooms are beautiful, and there is a wonderful aroma about the tree (Although its rather difficult to bring aroma across in a photograph).
Mechanically nothing is wrong with this picture. Its in focus. Lighting is nice. Its exposed nicely.But the problem is no one looks at this picture and sees a pretty blooming plum tree. It gets lost in the jumble of everything in the picture.
Sometimes your brain sees more than what your eyes see. That is because your brain puts more pieces to the puzzle than just what your eyes see at the moment. Like, I have seen this tree bloom before. I have seen these blooms up close and far away. Therefore, I see much more in my head than what is in this picture. This needs to be taken into account when taking the picture.
In fact, your brain at the time even filters things out. I was concentrating on the blooming of the tree when this picture was taken. I mentally blocked our the two houses behind the fence, the fence, the stuff on the bench. But its all in the picture. Thats where concentrating on what is in the frame of the camera becomes important to really capture what I want to capture.
I really want to capture the blooms in the plum tree and how pretty the blooms are on the tree. So first thing, is tighten the frame up a little. Get some of the extra stuff out of the picture, and make the tree more of a focus in the picture.
Alright, this shot of the picture is a little better. But, there is still a lot of things in the picture that don't say "blooming plum tree"
On top of that, even though the picture does capture the tree, its nothing I want to frame on the wall. It doesn't provide any drama, or any real beauty of the tree in bloom.
To provide some drama to the same picture, take the picture from a different angle. Anyone walking into the backyard sees the plum tree as it is. Therefore taking a picture from a normal height and a normal distance doesn't always provide a nice suprising picture. In the next picture, I got much closer, walked around the tree a bit and shot the tree from a little different angle.
This shot is much better. You no longer see the houses, One is still there but it really blends into the background, and the blooms are much more prominent in the picture.
But have you looked at the plum tree from the base of the tree up? The picture below, I got the camera as low as I could with it looking up at the tree.
This provides a new perspective of the tree, and more definition to the blooms of the tree. I didn't add the humming bird to the picture. It was in the first picture, but it adds more interest to the picture that it didn't add in the beginning. And this framing of the tree gives the picture direction. Your initial focus in the picture starts at the bottom part of the picture, and your eyes follow the branches up. But I don't like the fence.
Now you see the tree, or more the sense of its branches. Its framed with a clean background of the sky. And the humming bird adds some dimension and dynamic to the picture. If you closely notice, the blooms are in focus, and the bird isn't This is to focus your attention on the blooms of the tree.
This last picture is much nicer than the first picture. And although I see this last picture in my mind when I originally took the first picture, it wasn't conveyed to others. And a little time, and making sure the picture contains what I want others to see, I now have a nice picture.
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