Taking good photos in Media Studies

In this guide to taking photos, there are several techniques on how to carefully master shots. Here are a few tips to capturing the intended photographs that you really want:

• The compose and expose rule.

COMPOSE: As a photographer of your own accord, you can be really ambitious and do whatever you want in your own shots as you are responsible for them. Elements of the picture can be arranged and edited within the viewfinder frame to create a really effective image.

EXPOSE: Different to the COMPOSE rule, in which you have to become scientific and mechanical and expose your film to additional light. The amount of light captured and how long a film is exposed depends on how you set up the camera, producing different effects (or filters, for those who use Instagram) on the image.

By using the element of creativity, you can be ambitious and have control over your photos.
To be ambitious, you can:

• Move or rotate people in the shot. You can stretch and change their shape and size, or even apply additional people or objects into the edited photo using Adobe Photoshop!
• Move yourself. Good ambitious photos are often taken from an unusual angle despite their brightness, giving them a sense of flair.
• Close ups of people, places and animals are a decent idea as well.
• Crop everything that is irrelevant in the shot and only include points of interest, that is, to say, siblings, best friends, interesting buildings and landmarks, et cetera.

Other methods of photo editing include:

• Turning a close up shot into a colourless shot by stripping all colour from the original image and editing it to show only the colours of black and white.

However, you don't want any blurry shots. They will be badly composed and will disorientate the viewer if you do so! The main focus of the photo will be terribly obscured when it comes to photography. Even if it is a bad photo, you can still enhance it by photoshopping the shot and making it non-blurry just to make it a definitive photographic shot.

• Fill the frame, move closer.
• If you keep on forgetting to do it at the time, you can manually crop selected photos on your computer or when you put filters during editing.

How you automate a camera is up to you. You can...

• Automate the camera manually, where you have to set up all of its controls

Or...

• Make the camera fully automated so it can speak for itself instead of the photographer having to adjust all the controls.