How to Make an Interesting Photograph (Or: How to Make Photographs at Which You Don’t Cringe Every Time you See Them)

This may be a part in a longer series. My rage at poorly-taken pictures has abated, but that's not to say it won't flare up at a later date.


Whenever my family goes on trips and we only have one camera, I automatically make myself in charge of the camera (unless J-Chan is with me – then we can switch if we don’t have two cameras. Come to think of it, not having two cameras is a situation we will rarely encounter because it’s so important for all of us kiddio-sies to have them. Katie-Po might also be an exception). I have a compulsive need to be in control and take good pictures. If anyone else takes the photographs, I get annoyed and frustrated because they are done in a curmudgeonly fashion. No one has enough sensitivity to frame and composition.

To take a picture, it first helps to have something to take a picture of. I’m feeling lazy, so these pictures will be old ones from my albums.

Pictures with people and famous things - Pictures of a person standing in front of a famous thing are a great way to personalize your pictures and make your trip more memorable, and to all those non-believers back home you can point to the picture and say “Proof!” until they refute you with “Photoshop!” Once that accusation has been made, you can't really refute it, though. However, you know you were there, and that’s what matters. 

And I am here so you can take better pictures of that person standing next to that famous thing.

First thing you should know: take as few pictures of the person in the dead center of the picture as you can. In an interesting picture, your eye will move around (namely, from that person to famous thing and back). You need a really good reason to take a picture of the person in the middle – for example, imagine someone sitting along a wall with their feet up. If you’re near their feet, take a picture of them. This will mean that your camera will catch the depth as your friend’s feet go away from you, and their feet become their body, and their body becomes their face.

In the picture above are Teddy and me. Yes, we are important, but what we’re sitting behind is also important – a Cubist statue of Christ being scourged. Note that the angle of the picture has cropped out most all of Christ's body and that there is a lot of empty space at the bottom of our feet. Due to the vertical nature of the statue, I am okay with having Teddy and me be in the center of the picture, and even though I don't want a picture of a tourist in front of the Sagrada Familia (such as is there on the right), it actually balances out the picture. Also, this is not a good picture because it is blurry.

It is not necessary to take a full-body picture unless you want to expressly include that person’s clothes or to show how big/small the famous thing is. Besides, your head is smaller than your body. (Unless you are a baby, in which case your parent should have taken loads of pictures of you, some of them are bound to be good, and hey, most of these rules don’t apply to you anyway because you’re a baby.) Any picture taken of that person from the bust up is acceptable, because it means you as the photographer are close enough to get the details of his/her beautiful, radiant face, while still getting that famous thing in the background. Like so:

Depth! Bust! I wish there weren't a crane in this photo!

Okay, I somewhat liked the sultry look of the full-body shot. But note: I am not in the center, and my body is balanced by the Holy Family on the left and the strong diagonal of the column.

The Metro Train Law of Lizzle

I have discovered a new law today: the Law of Lizzle. Whenever I take the metro, it is a law irrevocably decreed that I just miss the latest train. Had I been a few seconds earlier, I would’ve caught it. As such, I have to wait for at least another seven minutes until the next train comes. If it’s after 7 pm, I have to wait eleven minutes.

Regardless of the hour, the train will always be busier going in my direction. However, I am allowed a seat  once every three journeys.

No matter the circumstances, a train going in the other direction must always come before my train comes, and it must be less full than my train. I can be standing in my train, but the other train must come before the doors of mine come. Whenever possible, the universe will make it so that two trains arrive going the other direction before my train comes.

The result, every single time: exasperation and a very long commute.

Mmm, delicious.

Spain in 10 Days

I leave for Spain in ten days. Instead of running around like a chicken with my head cut off gathering all the things I may or may not need, and instead of attempting to teach myself Spanish, I picked up my notebook and started writing again. I started a story when I was a senior in high school, and I have been working at it on and off for two years. Two years with the same ideal of working on this special project has begun to wear on me. To remedy the situation, I took my notebook out and wrote for the entire hour-and-a-half plane ride home for Winter Break. An hour and a half isn’t much, but that amount of time can serve as a wonderful catalyst. When I arrived at home, I spent at least one day of break typing up what I had written, and then I went beyond what I had written, making stuff up without letting it flow out of my brain, through my hand, and into the ink. I was producing sentences and pages which seemed to make sense, and I added a good ten pages over break without help from my manuscript. Overall I added about eighteen pages, the equivalent of another third of the manuscript, which is more than I had done for many months. As Winter Break progressed and the holidays ensued, my project slowly fell off the edge of my to-do list. Then I got my wisdom teeth out and didn’t feel like doing anything whatsoever for a week.

All too soon, it was time to go back to college, and the semester started off at breakneck speed. Halfway through the semester, my computer crashed. Despite a techie friend’s attempt and a recovery professional’s assessment, recovering the data from the old computer’s hard drive would cost a pretty penny. The price climbed too quickly for my tastes just as my disappointment spiraled downward. Needless to say, I did not take the loss of my hard drive well; it had three years’ worth of photographs, music, and Word documents. Luckily, though, I had sent an e-mail of my typescript to my brother, so I was able to recover almost everything of that story – I’ll call it the N document. However, I did not recover the parts that I had put in spontaneously without writing them in my notebook first. For two months, even the prospect of writing was depressing. Now with unstructured time yet a lot of things to do in that time, I turn back to this creative writing project.

Triskele

At the beginning of the process of recapturing what I had written, I was not too thrilled. Trying to write what I had lost was like trying to make my baby teeth grow in again: painful, impossible, felt wholly unnecessary. I took out my R.S.V.P. Fine point pen and my Moleskine with the triskele sticker on it and began to write. (Actually, I pulled up the distribution of all the last names from a genealogical survey performed some time ago. At the point of the story I’m working on, there is an influx of characters, and I needed a gallery of ready-made character names from which to draw. They’re not terribly important in the story, and I enjoy making up names like Cylus Killary, Teigen Sivret Dunseith, and Mintaly Ehle. With an arsenal of names, I started writing, and the writing was good.) Instead of thinking that I have to rewrite and recapture perfectly what I had written, I decided to move forward knowing that I had already written it once, and now was an opportunity to remember and expand upon what I wrote the first time, making it better and better. I felt myself to be a creative, generative force, and rewriting has only unlocked that realization.

Rewriting in my notebook the ten pages I lost has been good for me, food and fodder for my imagination. If only I had thought that a few hours ago; my potential, my imaginative creation of the world felt like it had left me, and I probably treated my brother and his problems with indelicacy. A few hours ago, my outlook seemed pretty grim; now it is a bit more rose-colored. And I’m still ignoring the fact that I don’t know how to speak Spanish.

On an unrelated note, I saw one of my old French teachers today. Speaking French is like swimming in a kiddie pool; trying to learn Spanish is like a piece of (spoony) driftwood trying to swim against a riptide.

Rice Spoon

Other credits: "The Long Leg," Edward Hopper