I am a firm believer that there is ALWAYS something we can be doing better when it comes to photography, but trying to focus on too much can be overwhelming.

I like to choose ONE thing, every few weeks, that I want to spend my time working on.  One of the things I periodically find myself needing to refresh myself on is paying attention to the backgrounds.  A little attention to this detail can easily transform your shot.

For this particular post, I’d like to focus on photos where the main subject is a person.  Usually these kinds of shots are more striking when the background is not distracting.

Here I’d like to demonstrate how you can quickly change the outcome of shot by moving around your subject to find the best background available.

In this first shot, we have my daughter playing in our yard.  I took a quick snap, and realized how distracting the back ground was.  My eye was easily drawn to the wooden ladder, and the white blotch behind her.

So, I moved my feet to the right and composed the shot without the ladder, and with her body hiding the white bucket.  This shot is better, but I still found the dead Christmas tree, and stray colored objects to be not ideal, so I again….moved my feet to the right.

This shot might be a tad better, but the tree growing out of the top of her head is NOT attractive. Again there are some stray objects in view that draw my eye.  I could clone those out, but the tree… that is more work in post processing than I’m willing to do, especially when I could fix it by again moving my feet.  I’m not a fan of using post processing to do things I should have done in camera.

This last shot is the most ideal of this bunch.  There is nothing distracting in the background to compete with the subject.

Usually, this would only take me seconds to find the best angle, as I would NOT actually take the shots with the distracting objects.  I would do a quick survey of the environment, choose the best angle and go for it.

After purposefully keeping an eye on the background for a few weeks, it becomes a habit, and I find myself doing it more consistently. Give it a try, you might be surprised at the results.