Take care of the background in your photographs guide, Best photo taking tips, Contemporary building advice

The Importance Of Taking Care Of The Background In Your Photographs

13 May 2022

Whenever we take a photo, most of the attention is likely to go to the subject in the foreground.

We have to pay attention and place it correctly in the frame, avoiding cutting off the important parts. If you are doing a portrait try to find a good pose. After you have taken all these precautions with the main subject of your photo, a good way to ruin your photography is to forget to control the background.

Take care of the background in your photographs help guide

Sometimes the locations we are going to work in do not offer ideal backgrounds for portrait photography. When you see that these backgrounds just don’t work for you, try one of these tips so you don’t go home without taking that photo you wanted. Reading some photography books and blogs written by professionals, you can often come across the statement… “an excellent subject requires an excellent background”

As human beings we have the ability to focus exclusively on the elements that interest us most among all those that our eyes observe.

That is why when we photograph, if we do not make an effort to also consider all the other elements that make up a scene, we run the risk of including things that could ruin the final result.

Elements can ruin a photo in many ways, to give you a few examples:

– Taking portrait photos, the branches of a tree in the background could come out of the head of the person being photographed and that is not a pretty thing. You might need to remove background partially.

– When photographing a flower in a garden, you might not realize that there are rusty tools or pipes behind it and that also ruins the image

– In any photo taken outdoors, you could include a very large area of dull, gray sky that ruins the composition.

– A group of objects, colors, shapes in a background could steal the attention of the observer

Perhaps the simplest way to nullify an ugly background is to use the principles of Depth of Field. Situate your subject so that it is a good distance from the element closest to the background, approach your model, open the diaphragm and take your portrait, When working with more than one subject, such as a family, it is essential to place each member of the family in the same focal plane, otherwise some subjects may be in focus and others not.

For best results use a lens with a longer focal length, an 85mm lens for example. Much better would be a 70-200mm, since longer focal lengths also serve to blur the background. These long focal lengths compress the scene, giving a nice effect to your portraits.

How to avoid taking photos with an ugly background

To avoid problems of this type, it is important, before each photo, to scan the entire framed scene with your eyes and verify that nothing in the background could have a negative impact on the photograph.

The important thing is to keep in mind everything that you want to communicate with the photo, what elements you want to highlight, what tones it should have and how the background influences these aspects.

Comments on this guide to Take care of the background in your photographs article are welcome.