> 3. The photographic "art" is primarily subtractive.
Personally, this is the one thing that made the most difference to my
photos. It's so terribly easy to look at what you want to take the photo of
and not see the telegraph pole/car/person in bright-coloured clothes/etc in
the background that, when you look at the resulting print, will be horribly
distracting. I have _so_ many shots that are spoiled like this it's not even
funny.
What works for me is to set the photo up, then stop looking at the subject
and look at the whole image. If there's things in there that will detract
from what I'm trying to get across, I either wait until they've walked away,
recompose, or, in general, don't take the shot until I've got rid of them
somehow.
(there's a fantastic short movie I saw once about this last one; I forget
the exact details, but the basic premise is that of someone doing fashion
shoots on a city street.
Shot is through the lens, as though we're the photographer; the model moves
back and forth, the camera changes position; lights are adjusted, everything
seems okay. Then the photographer says 'you know, we really need to get rid
of that building in the background'.
Boom.
The entire building falls to the ground in a pile of dust.
At this point we realise that there was a previously scheduled demolition
in progress, and someone did a great job of taking advantage of it..)
-- dan
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