When I’m composing a photograph I try to give it some depth. That means I try to put something in the foreground or use leading lines going away from me to give the picture a sense of depth. In this picture, we have the shops, the subject of the image, in the middle ground and a vehicle just happened along to give me a good foreground.
Leading lines
Sometimes a branch of a tree protruding into the edge of your picture is enough to give it some depth. In the absence of anything in the foreground, then look for leading lines like the road going away from you. Look for comparisons too. If there is a tree in the foreground and a tree in the background the eye will compare them.
Here we see more or less the same scene with the vehicle in an even more prominent position and we have the road going away from us. The eye compares the vehicle in the foreground to the ones in the background and that gives the image depth. You can also see the dotted white line in the middle of the road which although it doesn’t stand out still gives the image some depth.
Aperture priority
Both of today’s images were shot with my Nikon D750 at f/8. As you can clearly see in the images it was a cloudy day but there was plenty of light. I shot the pictures with the white balance set to cloudy. The light was changing a little that day so I did increase the ISO on the camera a little to 160. I was expecting cars to come past so I wanted a fast shutter speed which would be set by the camera using aperture priority. In fact, I did get fast shutter speeds of around 1/400 of a second which was fast enough to freeze all movement in the shots including that passing vehicle. Shooting fast also takes care of any camera shake.
Time of year
In the UK, the weather tends to change with the time of year. These shots were taken last June and so despite the cloudy sky, there was quite good light. I tend to shoot street scenes, pictures of pubs and shops and occasionally people. I had a 28 – 300mm lens on the camera to take these shots so the setup was quite versatile. I could shoot landscapes or do street photography. The Nikon D750 is a full-frame camera with a 35mm sensor. My old D3200 has a smaller sensor, about half the size, but I still get good photos with it. The D750 is better in low light and image processing in-camera is better. I find it also captures shadow better too. If you’re starting out in photography, a decent entry-level DLSRcamera or a bridge camera will shoot a good picture. I had photos in the local newspaper when I was shooting with a Fujifilm bridge camera.
A Zillion Ideas 
Leave a Reply