Once upon an evening, I ventured out of my room and out into the twilight with objective of taking some darn good pictures. Following the advice of David duChemin in his eBook on 20 Ways to Make Better Photographs, here are three of his tips that I used in my quest for better pictures.
Change my perspective by changing yours
The idea behind this tip is to play around with the perspective in which your picture is taken. For my picture, I decided to lay my phone down under a tree next to my dorm building, putting the camera setting to 0.5. This resulted in a very layered piece, with bits of the roof stretching out into the foreground, and the tree reaching up into the sky. The 0.5 setting gave this picture a sort of 360-degree look, which I think turned out pretty well!
Create Depth
For this next tip, the aim is to play around with things such as converging lines, angles, and other ways to add dimension to your picture. I used the bright light in the background as my point where the top and bottom diagonals of the building’s side meet, which was my way of utilizing converging lines. Furthermore, the contrast between the light and dark in this picture added to the depth of this picture, as it worked to indicate the distance of the light relative to the building. I would say this is probably my favorite picture from that night.
Look to the light
For my last picture, I wanted to capture the light of the moon. The aim of this tip is to pay attention to various light sources when taking a good picture. Besides the obvious light from the moon, you can see light reflecting off of the building from the sidewalk lights, even though they don’t seem featured in the picture. This allows for the building to show up as well-lit while not taking away from the sight of the moon. And with this last picture, I ended my photography endeavor and returned upstairs to my room.