Hello Monday Lesson friends!

This week I am giving you guys an assignment! Ah, but I am jumping ahead...first we need to talk about what our topic is for the day.

I personally think one of the main problems when shooting casual photos of your kids is the sheer amount of visual clutter in the frame. It takes away the focus from our subject. If you are at a soccer game you have people, coolers, folding chairs, etc. At home you have scattered toys and laundry piles. The lists go on. When you are trying to catch the moment you don't have time to remove all of the distractors and that's ok. However, when you do have the time and things are moving slower, it always helps to take the time to craft a better shot by cleaning it up.

One way to de-clutter your shot is to minimize the color clutter. What color clutter? Yes. When you go to a professional photographer for a portrait they will likely coach you on what to wear. We do this because when everyone in the shot is wearing a different color it makes it so much harder to look at. A simple way to clean up your compositions and make your images more striking is to limit your color palette. Here is an example:

This trick won't work for your everyday shots that you have .2 seconds to catch, this concept is for the times when you can take a few extra minutes and prepare. For example, If you are taking the kids to the park to shoot a holiday card photo, you can take a little bit of time and coordinate their outfits. In group shots, everyone doesn't need to match. How many times do you all leave the house wearing the same outfit? Never! I like to tell people to coordinate instead. Imagine that everyone's outfits are one outfit. Pick one color palette and stay there. I believe, in a portrait, your clothes should either say something about who you are (funky, trendy, crazy, conservative, dressy, etc.) OR take a backseat (simple, classic, not distracting). It's the middle ground, where it looks without purpose, that can make an image suffer.

When you look at the shot above, it has a very limited color palette. If her scarf was red and her pants were another color, it would distract you from her belly. In this example, her clothing is not the subject but merely a frame. For an image like this, you want the picture to have a feeling of color harmony. The skin, the background, the wrap and her pants all go together.

This brings me to your assignment. Take a photograph (of anything or anyone) that has a limited color palette or shows color harmony. That's it! Post your Flickr links in the comments section here or post images to The Monday Lesson Flickr group. Don't be shy!

Objective: Learn some guiding principles that will help you to arrange multiple images into collage type frames in a way that flows and is easy on the eye.

At the studio we create a lot of framed pieces using multiple images. We call them storyboard frames because they do just that, they tell a story. Many of the retail frame shops and home decor places sell ready made frames with mats that have multiple openings. This can be a great way to show off some of your shots of your family. The keys to pulling off a great looking storyboard frame are using coordinating images and arranging them so that they flow and keep the viewers eye inside the frame.

To illustrate this, I grabbed my four favorite images from a session last week with Mia. In selecting my 4, I knew that I needed all 4 to coordinate so I chose them all with the same dress and I chose 2 standing and 2 leaning in on a little pink ottoman. This would not have worked as well with 3 standing and 1 ottoman or vice versa. They needed to all be one thing or 2 and 2. Here is the layout arranged in a way that I think works best.

* When laying out an arrangement like the one in this post (2 pink ottomans and 2 without), I like the matching images to be diagonal from each other if at all possible. If you do them side by side it splits the composition in half visually. This can be seen in the next grouping below.

* I also like all of the eyes to be looking IN to the center of the arrangement and not out to the sides. In the group below, she is looking OUT of the frame in the lower left.

In this next group, we have repositioned the similar images diagonal from each other, which helps a lot, BUT we we still have her looking out to the upper left. The way my eye travels here is that I start at the top left and have to really push my eye to move to the top right and then easily down to the bottom right and then to the bottom left and back up to the top left where my eye wants to follow her glance off to the left and out instead of back around, which would be preferable. I like to keep the viewers eye moving in an easy circle through a 4-up like this. In triptychs (a 3 image layout), I like the center to feel nestled in between two images that keep the viewer's eye inside. I always imagine the 1st and 3rd image in a triptych to be like a pair of parenthesis.

Another thing to consider is the size of the faces in relation to each other. As I was cropping the images for this arrangement, I tried to get her head to be the approximately the same size in all of them. It can work if the heads are not all the same size but it goes along with what I said in the beginning, if only one is bigger it will look out of place or kind of like "one of these things is not like the other" (you have to sing that when you read it). If two heads were slightly bigger or smaller but matched that could work (like the pink ottomans). Here is the same grouping as above but with one head bigger.

Okay, now it's your turn...gather up three or four like images and see how they work together. I'd love to see some of your experiments. Please post links to them here in the comments section.

Yes, I know...it's tuesday. I had trouble with the video in this post but I finally got it uploaded today, yippeeee!

Objective: the experiment with selective focus, your auto focus point selector and depth of field.

Over the last year or so we have talked about composition and how to control your depth of field using your f-stop or aperture. If you have not been reading these all along, it may be a good idea to review the lesson on depth of field, composition and rule of thirds before you go on. The links that I just gave go to my old blog (I am still working on moving all of the older content over to this newer blog). Today I am showing you an example of choosing a selective focus point and combining that with shallow depth of field.

Here is our example shot for today:

(tech info for the above shot: shot in manual using studio lights, F 3.5, shutter speed 1/160, lens: 50 mm, ISO: 125)

The shot above would not be possible if your camera only focuses on the center point in an image because the area of sharp focus is in the lower right corner. The other thing that adds emphasis in this shot is the very shallow depth of field. You can see in the tech specs that I used f 3.5. The fact that I am close to my subject helps make the background even softer. Remember, the closer you are to your subject, the more dramatic the depth of field will be. The lens that I was using is the Canon 50 mm compact macro, which allows you to be very close to an object and get nice sharp focus.

Setting your selective focus: Many of the digital cameras out today have the option to set a specific focus point. The default setting of most cameras usually takes information from multiple places in your frame and tries to track or determine what you are photographing and how far away it is.  Often, the default works fine. Every once in a while though, when you are trying to frame something up off center or something else that is tricky, it gets confused and won't focus where you want it to. There are two ways to try and solve this problem and I made a little video talking about it.

This week Julie (my studio manager) and I also tried out my Canon 5D mark II video feature for the first time. Go easy on us...we have a lot to figure out in that department. If we spent any more time on it trying to make it perfect it would never have gotten posted. I'm excited about the prospect of doing more video stuff for you guys though and I promise to do some homework between now and then to make it a little easier on the eyes.

Hello Monday Lesson fans! I know the lessons have been slow and sporatic these days. Blame Santa Barbara and the summer craziness! I am ready to get back into it though and have a schedule for the next four weeks. Before I get back on track, I have some questions for you guys...

What do you guys think about the idea of me podcasting?
Or posting video?
What do you guys think about having a photography contest?
What do you really want to know? Where are you stuck?

I really want to hear what you have to say so please leave some comments and give me some direction.

So, what are we doing over the next four weeks? We'll be talking about my favorite lens, using creative cropping and camera angles, shooting with selective focus and dramatic depth of field and we'll see a few more examples of photography in my client's homes. l'll also be having a new class at the studio AND hosting a baby and Mom playdate! Stay tuned for more on that in the next couple of weeks. Until then, I am waiting anxiously for your feedback and comments!

One last thing before I leave you, Are you on Facebook?