Little details matter when you want to set your pictures apart from the masses. You don’t want anything to intrude into the frame that shouldn’t be there. Your viewer’s attention should go to whatever it is you’re photographing, without distracting stuff getting in the way. I call it “cleaning up the frame.” Here are five ways to clean up your photos before you press the shutter button.

What’s that growing out of your head?

Watch for objects like telephone poles, trees, or lampshades growing out of people’s heads. It’s usually pretty easy to move over a little, or ask your subject to move, to fix the problem. I have a snapshot of myself and some climbing buddies commemorating our climb to the top of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming many years ago. I handed my camera to another climber and our party posed around the post marking the summit. I failed to realize that when I sat with my back to the post the spike came out of the top of my head. It would have been a better photo if we’d grouped ourselves with the post between two of us. Continue reading →

As my three-day wildflower photography workshop at North Cascades Institute last summer came to an end one of my students asked a version of the proverbial question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” She didn’t put it quite that way, as she was inquiring about the sequence of steps I follow in going from an idea to a finished photograph. My student was perhaps slightly confused because we’d spent the first part of the workshop discussing technical matters like white balance, aperture, and shutter speed before moving on to what I consider the meat of the course: creative choices. Continue reading →