10 Questions to Ask When Taking a Digital Photo

Telling story with photographs: It is really important to know the story behind a picture. A photograph has the ability to convey emotions, mood, story, ideas and messages. These are the elements that make a story of the image. The purpose of the shot should be clear.

Visual focal point of shot: Bring out the idea of the image through visual elements in your composition. It's really important to create a visual focal point to isolate your subject. Effective composition can be pleasant or disturbing and it depends on your intension. The viewer's eye should be drawn to the image naturally.

Competing focal points: Scan your eyes over the shot and find all the competing focal points and then ask yourself whether you should insert or remove them from the image. If you want the viewer to focus on one focal point then you can adjust the other focal points but be aware of bright or contrasting colors which can draw the viewer's eyes away from the focal point. We can enhance the focal points in an image by adjusting position, size, shape and color.

Background and foreground: Background of the image is the most important fact to distract. Although subject of the image should be fixed/focused but just look around to see what is going on around the subject (back ground) then think whether you want the background in focus or blurry.

It is good practice to make the background and foreground work together; you can always rearrange the subject with the background or the background with the subject to get your best picture.

Fill your frame: Depending on the feature, distance between the photographer and the subject completely changes the image. To get better effects, you can move closer, can move your subject closer or can use a longer focal length to give the effect of closeness.

Source of light: Lighting is the key to creating images that stands out. Proper use of lighting can enhance your photo. Without light you'll lose detail and clarity in the image. Knowing about the different qualities of the light can help to organize the photograph. Too little light will make your photo too dark and too much light will over expose and distort the picture.

Framing straight: Sometimes good photos are spoiled by framing that is slightly offline. The picture and frame should complement each other.

Other perspectives: One of the most effective ways to make your digital images more interesting to the eye is to change the angle that you are shooting from. Make your image stand out from the crowd by challenging yourself to not only take the standard shots that everyone else will get but to find creative and fresh angles and perspectives to shoot them.

Holding the camera: One of the common problems that many new photographers have is "camera shake' where images seem blurry - usually because the camera was not held still enough while the shutter was depressed.