TRY USING DIFFERENT FRAMING FORMATS
Ensure your composition works well with the shapes in the scene, and remember that there are two ways to hold a camera!
When framing up, we tend to automatically lift the camera and shoot with it held horizontally. It’s the most natural and comfortable way, but is it always the best? Some scenes lend themselves to shooting this way, but ignore composing in vertical orientation at your peril! Even landscapes, for which you might think the horizontal format would always be best, can benefit from shooting vertically.
When using a heavy telephoto lens, loosening the lens collar will allow you to spin the camera body easily from horizontal to vertical, so there’s no excuse not to compose a scene upright, even with a bulky zoom.
It’s also worth remembering that with some cameras, the standard aspect ratio of your image can be changed in-camera, as well as cropped afterwards in post-processing.
For example, the square frame has been used in medium-format cameras for years and is very powerful, so you might want to experiment with it. If you want a visual reference of how your composition looks at the time of shooting, rather than guessing and cropping it square afterwards, then select a square format in-camera. Other aspect ratios can also be selected in this way, so you can see the new crop on the LCD screen in a DSLR’s Live View mode, or both via a mirrorless camera’s Live
View and through its EVF. Remember that if you’re shooting JPEG-only, the camera will save the square cropped file exactly as you’ve set it, so you can’t change your mind about it later. If you’re shooting raw, then while you still see the new ratio you’ve set on the camera, when you take the shot the raw file will remain at its native aspect ratio when downloaded, so you can then crop it afterwards. If you want to have both the square JPEG as a reference and the full raw file, then make sure you save both to your memory card.