WORK A LOCATION

With your camera set to shoot black and white you can focus on being creative and bag some great images

When you arrive at a location for the first time, don’t expect to pinpoint the most effective viewpoint and camera angle straight away. Be prepared to spend time exploring and observing, so you get a better feel for the place and what it has to offer. Don’t ignore your first impressions – usually they’re pretty good – but consider the first shots you take as warm-ups, to get your creative ‘eye-in’, and don’t be surprised if the final images are noticeably better as you begin to fine-tune the composition to make the best of what’s before you.

Initially, it’s a good idea to put your backpack and tripod down and spend a few minutes looking around to see exactly what there is to work with. There are no hard and fast rules, it’s simply a case of exploring different angles and viewpoints until you find one that works.

Lens choice can make a big difference, because it allows you to alter perspective and the way that features in a scene relate to each other. Wide-angle zooms are particularly handy in cramped and cluttered locations, because they ‘stretch’ perspective so that things in the scene appear more widely spaced, and it’s surprising how even a slight change of camera angle can dramatically change a wide-angle composition.

The preview screen of your DSLR is also a great ally because it allows you to analyse the composition more effectively than when looking through the camera’s viewfinder. So use it, and don’t be afraid to shoot a whole series of images as you explore the locations. Eventually, an image will appear on the screen that does the trick, and your effort will have paid off.

4CHECK YOUR HANDIWORK When you shoot with the crop ratio set to 1:1, the images are cropped in-camera so you can see exactly how the image looks. The JPEGs also crop to a square with most cameras when you open them in Photoshop or Lightroom.

5WORK IN PROGRESS This is the first shot as it came out of the camera – cropped to a square and in black and white. The composition is okay, but there’s too much going on in the frame and it lacks a focal point.

2TAKE AN INITIAL SHOT Spend a minute or two assessing the scene/subject, then take an initial shot so you can see how it’s recording in black and white. Change some of the settings in monochrome mode – contrast, sharpness etc – if necessary.

1SET MONOCHROME MODE By setting your camera to monochrome mode and JPEG or JPEG + RAW capture, you’ll be able to see the preview images in black and white, which makes it much easier to assess how they look as you’re taking them.

3CHANGE THE ASPECT RATIO In this case it was decided that the staircase would work better in square format, so the crop/ aspect ratio of the camera was changed to 1:1. This means you see a square image in the viewfinder, which aids composition.