Michelle K Wood Photography

Great photos take great planning. Not necessarily elaborate or complicated, but definitely great attention to detail. Here are some tips for planning three popular styles of photography, closeups, landscapes, and portraits. Closeups – bokeh. The whole point behind a closeup is the attention to the detail of your subject. You can emphasize that by creating a nice background blur so the background does not draw attention away from your subject. Be close to your subject and use a low f-stop (wide-open aperture) to create nice bokeh/blur. The other thing you can do with a closeup is to fill the frame with the subject so you don't have to worry about background at all. Landscape – leading lines. Landscapes are an opportunity to take the viewer on an adventure, to explore all the nooks and crannies laid out before them. Try for an anchoring detail in the foreground and leading lines to extend through the adventure. Landscapes typically don't want bokeh/blur, so use a high f-stop...

  It’s called the Exposure Triangle….and seems to be one of the most confusing things in photography although it shouldn’t be! So, what is it anyway? The exposure triangle is three settings that go hand-in-hand that let you create amazing photos: ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture. Today, I’ll cover Aperture. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I shoot in Aperture Mode on my Nikon D3200 because my general area of interest is floral closeups and landscapes – talk about being on opposite ends of the spectrum! – so I do a lot with Depth of Field. Aperture is the size of the opening of your lens. I’ll not go into what all the stops mean, but aperture is measured in f-stops  It seems counter-intuitive, but low number = wide open lens, high number = very small opening in lens. Depending on your lens, it can be a very low number (wide-open) f1.4 or very high number (barely open) f32. Think of it like a cat’s eye: When the pupils of a cats eyes are wide open, they let in a lot of ...