I made a special request to a good friend I was shooting with to send any photos of my in his frame, and it sparked a good example of how the same moment can indeed be very different when taking photos. I am a huge fan of before-and-after’s, and this kind of fits into that criteria as well. There I am, getting nearly trampled by storming football players in the center of the photo.

Making the Photo

As you probably know, a photo will always be rooted in composition- and by this, I mean the focal length (zoom) you choose, the angle with which you hold the camera, and those together generally determine how the “objects” are placed in the photo.

Along with that, aperture will be next in line, and there are two extremes- keep everything in focus (high aperture), or blur the background (low aperture). That’s not a technical description, but its the basic thought process when setting up for a photo, and of course you can choose anything in between for a “kind of blurry” background.

When taking photos of a “moment”, it is also important to lock in your settings as much as possible. I suggest going into manual mode, and making sure all your settings are correct. Next, if you can, pre-focus on the spot that you want to make the focal point, and turn the lens into manual focus mode. After this, there is no way your shot will be blurry, or over/under-exposed.

Last is the retouching, and this is where a sunny day can turn moody real fast. What I described above is just getting data to me- you captured a moment, with the right amount of light, and right framing for you to take it back to your lab and play with it. For a lighter mood, try increasing vibrance, adjust the temperature just a hair warmer that it should be, and try masking in a layer of a Gaussian blur on the light for a nice glow. For a darker mood, lower the saturation, deepen the shadows, intensify the highlights, sharpen, and vignette.

There is a lot more that might go into a photo, but hey, thats a start. Here is the same “moment”, just different.