The world of Guidelines

The world of Guidelines

How to use guidelines at your favour in a photo session.

When it comes to shooting for me its the most important part, it's really imporant that you teach your eyes to look beyond at what its used to, so today we will be speaking about guidelines and how imporant they are if they are in a photo and used the correct way and how bad they can be if used the bad way.

First of all we need to understand why guidelines are imporant

When i do a photo my goal is not only to create a beautiful looking photo, but to create a photo that has an impact on the viewer, a photo that when you open it up you are forced to see exactly what i want you to see and i do this using guidelines, but don't get me wrong, these have to be used in a correct way, if used in a bad way the viewer will not concentrate on the subject but they will get distracted by something else.

These are some examples of what i see when i go out shooting.

As you can see all the guidelines take to the model, but what i want the viewer to see is the models face so all the guidelines take to her face and not to her body.

 

I will show other examples below:

 

I searched the web to see if i could find any other photos that had guidelines.

Now let's read the photo below,

what is the main subject in the photo?, the moon.

Potive: The moon is the brighest subject of the photo

Negative: the guidelines distract your eye.

But where do the eyes take you?

Let's analize it here:

The eyes follow the guidelines, but let me make this clear, the photo is beautiful, it is NOT wrong, but the viewer gets distracted on the finishing point of where the guidelines will take his eye.

Guidelines don't have to be ''lines'' they can be naturally made by a line of trees, or by a horizon, a road, a shadow, anything! The photo below is a perfect example of what i saw the moment i was doing the shooting:

It takes time and effort in learning your eye to see the guidelines but slowly slowly you will start to see any place with a different eye, it took me a lot of months, patience and most of times i thought i was taking the photo is correct way but when i went home and i wanted to edit the photo i realized that i shot it wrong, so don't get angry if you don't see them right away or if you use them in a bad way, its all part of the learning process.

If you shoot models and don't want to do mistakes during the photo session then get one of your friends and start to practice, learn how to read the locations in a correct way.