The Blog

The inspiration for this blog post came from a conversation I had on twitter. It would seem that there are enough people who love to make pictures and would love to learn, but don’t know how.
So I have good news for those who wish to learn a little bit more about how to make the photos that you want.
In this post I will be sharing a few basics with you, that I learned and that apply to everybody, no matter what camera you have.

Myself, I got a small digital camera and a big digital SLR with both different features, functions and settings but I use both to make pictures for my blog.
The small camera is handy for spontaneous pictures and I can use it with my small tripod anywhere I want to.
The big camera I use a lot with close ups, because that way I don’t have to use the timer and can have more control about what I want to that way.

Background
The background in a picture is very important and can set the mood of your photo. For instance if you want a more mysterious picture, you can use a dark background, like this:

A typical point and hope for the best picture with my SLR

If you look at the picture, you see that the dark background enhances the lightness of the skin. Extra emphasizing is the black and white, what I like to use a lot and it is the only filter I use. Other filters look tempting to experiment with but I only stick to black and white.

Focus

If your you got a better camera you can also set the depth of field, so you got the area what you want to draw attention to is in focus (or not, depending on what you want to do) Here’s an example so you can see the different depths of fields.

Also a point and hope for the best picture with my SLR

You can see the candle in front being fuzzy, the first nipple sharp and behind that the second nipple fuzzy again. Because you can still recognize what’s behind and in front of the focus field, it emphasizes the first nipple.

Composition
The way that you frame whatever you want to capture, is also important. You can also do this afterwards when cropping the image but you can also think ahead and think about how you want it before you make your picture.

The key with making in a picture powerful and interesting is the Golden Ratio. Using this, the key focus of your picture, should be at 2/3rd of the picture. Ideally the most interesting point of your picture would be 2/3rd of 2/3rd. Like in this picture below.

A put the SLR on a chair and hope for the best picture with timer

The orientation of the photograph also helps with showing your best assets 😉 Not to mention the splash of color to draw you in even more. Using composition you can let people look where you want them to look, at what you want to show off.

Shapes

This top tip is thanks to the lovely Mario from Someone Once Told Me who did a session at Eroticon 2013
When he mentioned that he loved shapes and that they are everywhere! Just looking out the window you can spot a lot of different shapes like the rectangular bricks s in this picture. How many shapes do you spot?

Picture made by Urbanvox and his SLR

Shapes can make a picture more interesting to look at or really draw an image together. With this picture it really makes it a whole. To see the rectangles from the bricks with the natural, more flowing round body shapes.

I hope you all liked me sharing some basics and all I can say further is just practice a lot and get to know your camera. I even make the best and funkiest pictures just pointing my camera and not knowing where I’m aiming (yes I do that a lot)
Usually I make pictures on my own but having somebody else to help is not only more handy, but also more fun! So get experimenting and have some fun with it 😉