Frame yourself

Photography is impression: it is a moment, recorded on a media.  Sometimes you want to show something specific, sometimes you just want somehow to register a feeling you had at a certain moment but depending on how you snap the moment, the viewer can identify what have you meant or he can have his own ideas, or he can just turn to the next picture without identifying anything.

There are some techniques that can help to show an idea, or to drag the eyes of the viewer into what you want to show. This must happen very quickly: this "grab of attention" must be instantaneous otherwise the viewer gets bored.

In this case framing can help a lot.

To frame, you need to put something around your subject, and it doesn't need to be always something solid: it can be a uniform color or you can even use a "vignette" feature available on Flickr or Picasa.

The frame can also be a blue sky, or a something else with a solid color where the subject is standing (or laying down ;) Looking for frame opportunities is a nice challenge.

When we grab the camera, we need to decide upon many things in a fraction of a second before shooting. If you have a more complex camera, add to this many things another 20 other settings to decide. The cool thing is to automate the decisions and make them so quickly that you won't lose the moment.