Photography Tip of the Month!

Thought I’d start a monthly ‘Tips of the Month’ blog to help people take lovely photographs!

So here goes …


Oh ... and any of the shots below can be taken on a disposable camera ... the gear you use is irrelevant for this - it's all about knowledge.

I’m going to start these tips with ‘How to photograph the Sea’ (for two reasons):

·         The sea is a wonderful subject to photograph as it never fails to impress and create beautiful images for you.

·         What you learn here can be applied to photographing any landscape but it gives you a good foundation with which to start.

To begin with, imagine you are stood on a cliff-top looking out across the ocean. All you can see is the water stretching for as far as the eye can see and up ahead the horizon where the sea meets the sky.

Now raise a camera to your eye and look at that horizon, you are now looking at it in two dimensions because the camera's viewfinder flattens the world down: you have the sea, the horizon and the sky … just three elements to worry about … (possibly the sun too - but we can ignore that here.) We don’t want that horizon in the middle (because that would be boring), so how about placing it here:

Or here:

Like this:

© Peter Creighton

If you look at the image above you can begin to see how and why I composed it the way I did (It was shot on my £50 pocket camera.)


You basically imagine the viewfinder is divided into three equal parts and place the sea or sky in one of the three horizontal pieces.

Other things to consider when photographing the sea are boats and their location in the frame, birds, planes, the sun, the moon, the way the water reflects the light, waves, stillness. (If you’re lucky enough to have access to a polarising filter you can use this to reduce flare and bring back the colour saturation of the sea and/ or sky too.)

Here are a few more examples to give you an idea of how you can place elements in your ‘sea’ shots whilst keeping the horizon to one of the 'thirds' that I just mentioned.

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

"Simples!"

Now go and have some fun ... and let me know if this helped?

Peter x