Do This To Instantly Make Your Photos More Interesting

The majority of people take the majority of their photos from eye level. But what if you didn’t?

Last night I went into Birmingham to see a band called Steve Ajao’s, blues giants in a local pub. While I was there I thought about what can I do to make my photos more interesting? When you think about it, most people take the majority of their photos standing up with the camera at eye level. So they’re taking their shots from say five foot high, four foot six, depending on how tall you are. So I thought I would use that as a base point and then take some other photos to make more interesting photos and share the shoot with you. 

This was the pub, it’s a three piece band. You’ve got Steven Ajao, the lead guitarist, a highly renowned guitarist in Birmingham. Mike Hatton is the bass player and he’s just released an album called solo basic or basic variations or something like that. And just in the background there you can see Pete Hammond who is the drummer. But this is a typical shot I think most people will take it square onto the band. It’s a eye level standing up. It doesn’t make a particularly interesting photo and in fact there was another person in the pub taking exactly this shot. So what can you do to improve it?

Well, one thing I often do is get down on one knee. So I’m now shooting up at the band.It creates a different feel to the photo. I also waited until the two guitars moved apart a little bit. So you can see the drummer in the background here. There wasn’t a lot of space for them to work. Ideally, I’d like Mike to move a little bit further over to the right. 

So this is a shot of Mike. I quite like it, but it’s not that interesting. It’s really only interesting because they had a lamp down here that kept changing colour as they played, and it’s got this sort of red glow to it. But it’s the standard sort of shot. It’s the shot that everybody takes. So I thought, well, what can you do to make it more interesting?

Again, that was shot with my 50 minute equivalent lens. I’ll change lenses to a typical portrait Lens. This one is 45 millimetres, so that’s 90 mm real terms. So you’re 85, 90 mm lens. I’ve gone in much closer. You can see it’s tight around Mike there, you’ve got a smile on his face. It’s a much more engaging picture and clearly he’s having fun and they were. They’re having a great time.

Another down on one knee shot, again, this was with my 50 mm equivalent again and the thing I liked about this is the way the shadows being cast on the ceiling of Mike playing the guitar. And that counterpoint makes for a much more interesting fun photo than the front on one here, which is just quite boring.

Another thing you can do to make your photos more interesting is just not photograph the whole scene. Get in tight & photograph a bit of it. And here I’ve gone in really tight. As you can see, he’s got the slide on there he’s playing a bit of slide blues on the guitar there.

So I’ve talked about getting down low, going in tight. Another thing that I do is actually thinking about where I’m taking my photos from. So those first few were taken from in front of the band here. But I also, I wanted to get some shots of Pete the drummer. So I went round the right hand side here and here’s a shot of him playing his drums. And again, it’s an okay shot, but there’s a few things I don’t like about it. It’s messy. We’ve got cables here, we’ve got Mike’s arm in the background, we’ve got a couple of people there. We’ve got a some sort of holdall on the settee

So if I get a shot like that, I’m thinking about what can I do to change that. Obviously you can’t go and rearrange the background, but you can move. So move your feet and I went round the side over where those two guys in the background were and I’ve got this shot. It’s a much cleaner shot, we’ve lost the cables, we’ve lost the messy background. We’ve now just got the pub in the background. And again, going out of focus because I’m using that, wide aperture 1.4 there. I’ve used the slow shutter speed 1/30th of a second. So you can see the movement in the drum stick there. I’m not quite sure why it strobed like that but maybe that’s a function as a sort of led lighting that they were using.

So those are the sorts of things that I think about when I’m taking photos, getting down low, choosing an angle, going in close, moving my feet around the subject, getting up high sometimes I didn’t do it on this occasion, but you know, getting up on a chair, looking down on your scene can also make for a more interesting photo.

You can find out more about this concept and many more tips to help you capture awesome photos in my course How to Capture Great Photos – Made Simple which contains over 2½ hours of video with loads of examples.

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