What goes through my brain when I am shooting?

I wish I could see the way you do. That is one comment I hear fairly regularly. You can! I know that everyone is not a pro photographer and it takes time and a great deal of practice to become one, but there are a few fundamental ways you can improve your photos. 


1. Determine your subject and reduce clutter. In the example below, There is no clear idea of what the main subject is in the photo on the left. We assume it is me, but there is a dog house, the blade of a windmill, a swing, a back wall, and other distractions. Our goal should be to simplify our photos, so we need to ask ourselves what is important to the photograph and what should be left out. In the example below, the swing is necessary. However, we cannot say the same for the dog house, that back wall, the blade of the windmill creeping in. Look at the cropped "after" image. By eliminating all that clutter, the photo improved dramatically! Practice eliminating clutter when you are shooting!. That said, when you have no choice in the matter and you must include clutter to get any shot at all...always take the shot!

Coming up: Rule of thirds.

Cereals

Just some cheerios :-). I shot these with a mid aperture opening to cast some of the photo out of focus. The clear focused shot was fired with a narrow aperture to capture all the details. All of these shots were fired at ISO 100, thus requiring a tripod because the shutter speed is too slow to shoot in your hand.

Coinage

Thanks for the ideas everyone! This is a coin shot. The bottom coin is an Eisenhower dollar coin, four quarters, and one dime on top. This was tripod shot and I fired with a narrow aperture to capture all the details.

Hershey's Kisses

This is a series I shot with my dedicated macro lens. This type of photography should ideally be shot with a tripod and slow shutter speed, a low ISO of 100, and a mid-sized aperture opening. The benefits of mid to upper range cameras is they allow you to have this type of flexibility to get the shot you want. 


This shot is a Hershey's Kiss peanut butter cookie. Yummy. 

This is obvious! you may notice I did not center the Hershey's Kiss in either of these photos. Perfectly centered objects can be boring. Placing them off center suddenly adds interest. On the bottom photo, I even ran the candy out of the pic a little. That can add interest too because you don't need to see the entire piece of candy to know what it is, thus causing your viewer to use their imagination. Try these pointers out! You will start bringing your pics to life.

The Lightning Bug

This was achieved by setting my shutter speed fairly high, about 1/320 of a second which would usually underexpose the shot. However, my flash was off the camera and lit him up from the side, thus blackening the background and lighting up the insect. See him climbing the blade of grass? How cool is that?

Raindrops on Red Lily Leaves

These shots were a bit difficult because I did not enjoy the benefit of autofocus. I had to manually focus these shots which is difficult in macro photography. Nevertheless they turned out great.

Macro Insect Photography

Put the fly swatters down! I love looking into the eyes of insects with my lens. They fascinate me. Here are some shots from a few friendly bugs that allowed me to snap. Depth of field (DoF) is limited with up-close photography and blur results. Sometimes you just have to take what they give you too and don't have time to mess with settings. A lot of macro photography is shot manually too which makes it difficult at times. 


These were all shot on a yellow lily flower I purchased back in the summer. I hoped it would bring the bugs out and it worked. The first photo is a yellow jacket, the second two may be baby grasshoppers, and the fourth is your common house fly. He just kept watching me. Hope you enjoy these!

The two photos below are a dragonfly that got comfortable and allowed me to get about 6 inches from his face. Pretty cool!

This Ladybug was fun to shoot. She just sat and posed the whole time I was shooting.

This is a wasp we managed to catch a photo of. They are very quick movers and don't sit still for very long at all. Manual macro photography of wasps that are alive is difficult because you literally have to follow him around with your lens and you have to be careful not to disturb their leaves because you don't want them to move on you and sting!