It is a great pleasure to be wandering in a garden looking for pictures, and a privilege when she offers fruit.
These two Chinese quince (Pseudocydonia sinensis) seemed to be a team, companions on a leaden tree in Western Hills Garden during a recent visit. They presented themselves at eye level glistening with morning dew; and I stood transfixed with their fulsome curves. There must be a picture here.
I first tried to shoot a picture with the bright sun shining off shrubbery in the distance, but it was just too bright, pulling the eye away from the fruit.
The background in any close-up photograph must not be a distraction, and often moving just a bit one way or another completely changes the relationship of the foreground to the background.
I moved my tripod just a few inches to the left so that I could look into the shade and found just enough dark background to position the two Quince so that they were now the brightest objects in the frame.
This also made them seem to be even more cozy as they nearly touched.
The narrow gap between them allowed me to see a super close-up, a yin-yang of shapes that is revealed with very careful cropping.
The crop needs to include just a bit of each fruit into the opposite edge of the frame; not into the corner exactly, but connecting the parallel lines of the opposite sides with the fruit’s rounded shape.
As I say in, Think Like a Camera “Whether you have a big megapixel SLR camera or just a smart phone, your pictures will improve as soon as you think about what the camera is seeing—versus what you are seeing. Use the camera frame to fill your photograph with only those elements that tell your story”
Think Like a Camera e-book available for $9.95
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