Soave Photography

Sometimes it's cool to mix up your photography by experimenting with different angles. Rather than taking your pictures straight on, try moving yourself to a different position until you find a different perspective on the scene. Instead of taking a frontal picture of a group of people, maybe find a balcony above that you can take the picture from. Sometimes you'll end up with some pretty good looking pictures. In the above picture of some stairs in the Vatican Museum, I wanted to capture both the height of the stairs and the geometric pattern. By taking this picture from straight above, you can see the spiral design of the stairs while getting a feel for its height. This next picture (of a church tower in Rome) was taken from a lower angle. Sometimes you need to get low to the ground to get a more extreme angle to give a better perspective (or to make an exaggeration). Often times, that's necessary just to get the whole subject in the shot (the Washington Monument co

This is just a quick post to show you the opposite of my previous post. In the last post ( Working with Slow Shutter Speeds ), you learned how to leave the shutter open longer to expose the camera to more light and create photographs that show the passing of time. High speed photography can be used to capture very fast motion, while still giving a clear picture (see the example at the end of the post). This time, instead of increasing the amount of time you leave the shutter open, decrease it (something like 1/1000th of a second). Again, the camera will adjust the other settings for you, if possible. You can use this to take pictures like this: I used a 1/2500th of a second exposure time for this one, and I barely got it in time (it's near impossible to photograph a humming bird; they zip around too much).