Today I am going to show you a couple of simple tips. This past weekend we went out to the Houston Arboretum with the kids and some friends. As I was photographing, I could hear my own lessons and see some of them at play. We were at the arboretum right at midday, which is generally not the best time to photograph outdoors because the sun is high and bright. In the arboretum this meant a lot of dappled shade everywhere. Dappled shade can be a real nuisance because it creates a bunch of distracting blotches. In this scenario, you have to be crafty about the way you get your shot and try and guide your subject into a larger patch of shade, like this. It can be as simple as turning someone's head or just scooting them over a little bit.

One of the lessons I have put a lot of focus on is getting close. You can go back and see posts about getting closer here and here and here. In this next series of images I started wide and got closer and closer as I kept shooting. The first image shows the whole scene. The kids get lost in the image. I always talk about how your image should tell a story and this image is telling a story about how the ropes are tied up and what the bridge thing is and does. It's not so much about the kids.

I got a little closer for this next one but there are still a lot of distracting background elements, shadows, etc. I'm also far enough away where we can't really capture a great expression.

Now, as we get even closer it starts to get a lot better! You can see the faces and the background softens up and goes out of focus a little better. By the way, on that note, I did step BACK and zoom IN, which helps the background be less in focus. I was also using a wide open (or low number f-stop).

and even closer...

The last thing I was going to share with you today was a little trick that you can use when trying to include sun flare in your images. Purposely shooting towards the sun can look very cool. You can shoot it in such a way that you get a soft edged sun flare or a defined edge with "rays" and even nice round sun spots. It's just a simple matter of which f-stop you use. Here's an  example:

For the above shots, I just the aperture priority mode on my camera and selected a low number f-stop for the first one and a high number for the second one.

That'a ll for this Monday! As always, I would LOVE to see what you come up with as your work on your own shots. You can include links to your Flickr stream, blog posts or images in the comments section below. It would also make me very happy if you submitted some of your images into the Monday Lesson Flickr Pool.