Isolating the subject in Nature Photography!

Hello fellow photographers,

I've been really appreciating all the good feedback from the previous posts and I love writing blogs here, so here is another one.

Today I want to talk about ways to isolate the subject in nature photography. I was struggling with this a lot and I'm still not as good as I want to be, but I thought I would share some tips that I learned along the way.

Let's start with explaining what it actually is. Isolation of the subject is the separation between your subject and your background or the rest of your image in some way. This way if somebody looks at the image their eyes get immediately drawn to the subject and are not looking at something that you, the photographer, didn't want them to see at first. It's all about putting your thoughts and mindset into the image so that the observer can "pick up what you wanted to put down".

There are several different ways of doing this, maybe the most popular is different focal planes, that means the subject is in focus and your background is not. Especially in wooded areas, I try to incorporate shallow depth of field in some way. I find that small sticks and other things in the background really distracting and when you look at the image it becomes really cluttered and you don't know where to look.

As I said there are many ways of achieving this separation, like leading lines, sub-framing, rule-of-thirds and so many more. Here are some examples that I took:

(sorry for the low quality)

Photography is all about trying out stuff and mixing different things, you are NOT limited in any way, be original. Remember there are no rules in photography. It's an art form, do whatever you think is good.

Be creative and think outside the box. For instance, maybe try to put the subject in the mid- or background of the image like I did here:

I used some shallow depth-field, in this case, to blur out the foreground in order to pull attention to the mushroom.

I hope you liked this post, be sure to leave some feedback!

Check out my post about gear in photography here: https://steemit.com/photography/@prored/does-gear-matter-in-photography-a-nature-photographers-opinion
Check out my Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/proredgraphy/

Every image in this post is my original content.

See you in my next post,
-ProRed