The Wild Photographer

The Fundamental "Rules" of Photography

• Episode 64

Share episode

In this episode, Court lays out a practical foundation of photography “rules” — not as rigid constraints, but as dependable starting points. These principles show up again and again because they work: they help you handle light, composition, focus, and technical settings with more confidence. Once you understand them, you can follow them when they serve the image, and break them deliberately when the scene calls for something different. The goal is simple: more intentionality, and better photographs in the field.

The 14 Fundamental Rules of Photography

  1. Focus on the eyes.
  2. Use the rule of thirds.
  3. Follow the inverse focal length rule for handholding.
  4. Prioritize side lighting.
  5. Shoot during golden hour.
  6. Compose with odd numbers of subjects.
  7. Keep horizons straight.
  8. Include foreground, mid-ground, and background.
  9. Expose for the highlights.
  10. Leave space in the direction your subject is looking (eye-line rule).
  11. Avoid lines cutting through faces/heads (face-and-line rule).
  12. Use the 500 rule for astrophotography.
  13. Create subject/background separation.
  14. Simplify the frame

Court's Websites

Sponsors and Promo Codes:


Court Whelan (00:00)
I really am having fun with this one. The fundamental rules of photography. This is a power packed episode and I've got 14 different quote unquote rules that I'm gonna go over. And for those where applicable, I'm going to talk about when the opportunity arises to break those rules. I know what you're thinking, my gosh, court's starting off with rules of photography, isn't photography supposed to be more of an art form?

Why are you gonna put me into this sort of narrow window of opportunity and strategy and artistic vision? Well, the reality is you need to have some sort of starting foundation so that when and if you do break the

you have intentionality behind it. Nine times out of 10 following the rules of photography,

things like the 500 rule, the inverse focal length rule, the rule of thirds, the golden hour rule, all these different things, nine times out of 10, they are going to be the right choice for your photography. so again, the fundamental rules of photography. And big shout out to my niece who actually gave me the idea for this episode, a budding photographer she is.

and we were just talking over the sort of Thanksgiving week and I asked her for some input and she came up with this idea and yeah, shout out to Julia. Thanks. All right, but before we get into the episode today, I want to give a shout out to our sponsors as well. First up, we've got Bay Photo. Bay Photo is an online photo printing company.

It's one that I use personally. have my own website linked to it. I print directly from it. It also does direct fulfillment. If you're looking to start your own photo website, buy photos for yourself, they're absolutely extraordinary. Printing photos, I mean, simply put, it's one of the most powerful, inspirational ways you get to showcase and appreciate your own work. you know, to make a really good impression, to be totally honest, you have to have really high quality.

Materials you have to have high quality printing and canvases and metal prints if that's your thing So Bay Photo is an incredible company. That's just doing really remarkable stuff I just printed off a beautiful photo I think it was like 48 by 72 on one of their metal prints and I'm just stunned by how gorgeous it is It's sitting in my living room right now. So Bay Photo really really fantastic company highly recommend you give them a look

They are what I view as my go-to photo printing company going forward, and they print on all sorts of different media. Again, it's everything from metal to canvas to various types of paper. They will frame your stuff. It's just a one-stop shop. It's pretty amazing.

For my listeners, they have a really special deal here to save 25 % off your order. If you use promo code TWP25, so that's just TWP like the wild photographer 25, this includes metal prints and acrylic prints, frame prints, epic prints, canvas wraps, you know, so much more. You can also go to my website with Bayphoto at bayphoto.com slash the wild photographer, and that will link you to the account as well. So.

Yeah, happy saving money, happy printing, and check out Bay Photo. They're really a great organization and very welcome to have them as a new sponsor. Now, next up we have Art Storefronts. And the really cool thing here is Art Storefronts, they're the folks that make my photo website. And I actually link via Art Storefronts to Bay Photo. So anybody that is shopping for photos, anybody that is buying a photo from my website, it actually gets automatically fulfilled by Bay Photo. Art Storefronts,

They're the main engine behind the programming of the website, the design, the aesthetics, the promotion of the website as well. This is a huge, huge thing. Not only do they plan the whole website, but they also do the promo. They link with my social media accounts. They send email campaigns. actually give me every month on the month, they give me an entire marketing calendar that they've come out with. So it really takes the worry and the stress out of not just the website build and maintenance,

not just the photo orders, it takes the stress out of that, but it also takes the legwork out of all the promo, which, let's be honest, is one of the biggest lifts in selling artwork, especially photos online, is how do you promote it? Well, Art Storefronts does all that for me. If you mention that you heard about this on Wild Photographer, when you talk to the folks there, you will get a free website build. That's almost a $2,000 value, so they're giving a really, really big incentive.

Again, just mention the Wild Photographer when you talk to someone on the phone or an email. When you do go to artstorefronts.com, they will link you, they will get you that free website build, it's just paid for itself over and over again in terms of the investment I made to get a really pro-quality website build that is a one-stop shop and hands-off solution to selling photos online.

If you wanna check out an example page, I do think mine is a great example. If you just go to shop.courtwhelan.com you'll see what the whole engine looks like. You'll see what the website build is, how you can go in and choose the frames and the mats and the sizes of the photos and you can see mockups on walls. It's pretty amazing. So once again, artstorefronts.com. So yeah, big thanks to those two sponsors. Let's get into today's episode, the fundamental rules of photography.

And I should also say at this point, you know, this is of course a nature photo podcast, but these rules apply to any photography out there. It of course could be wildlife. could be nature and landscapes and travel photography. The things that we talk about in depth on this podcast, but it applies to any photography. could be kids soccer games. could be holiday festivities. So these rules are again, there's 14 of them here. I'm to go through them one by one.

We're gonna talk about the rule, we're gonna talk about why it works and how it works. And then when appropriate, not all 14 have clear times and reasons to break them, but when appropriate, I'm gonna talk about how it might be good to think about breaking the rules. Rules are meant to be broken, right? Isn't that what they say? So anyway, let's dive in. We're starting with rule number one. It is focus on the eyes. So this is gonna go for any wildlife photography, any people photography.

And this is one where I have very, very, very few exceptions. This is like the tried and true. This is why I'm starting out with this rule is it's tried and true. It's the one that you should do almost each and every time when your subject has eyes. So we're not talking about potatoes here. We're talking about people. We're talking about wildlife. We're talking about anything that has eyes. When you focus on that thing, you got to focus somewhere. Do you focus on the nose? Do you focus on the ears? Do you focus on the body? No, you got to make sure the eyes are in focus.

The rule here is really simple. The reasoning is really simple and you could just do some experiments on your own. You could take a photo of your pet at home. You could take a photo of someone in your household and experiment by getting the eyes intact sharp focus at the expense of the rest of the face, meaning you have a let's say a shallow depth of field and you're photographing. Eyes are in focus and other stuff is blurred.

Or you focus, let's say, on the cheek or the nose and the eyes are just slightly blurred, just a touch blurred so they are not intact sharp focus. I will promise you that that photo is going to look botched. You're not going to be able to connect to the subject. The viewers of your photos will not connect with your subject anywhere near as much as if you get those eyes in focus. Now you can get everything in focus.

you I'm not totally talking about portraiture here where you do have that shallow depth of field. So you can, you can get everything in focus, but if you do not get the eyes in focus, the photo is going to be botched. So that's really a very tried and true rule. That's, that's the number one. Number two, it's hard for me to go too long in a photo presentation or podcast or anything without talking about ye old rule of thirds. I'm kidding about the ye old, it's just called the rule of thirds. But the gist is, that this has been around really since the dawn of time.

We've understood the rules of aesthetics in this third increment, this third breakdown, really ever since some early mathematicians figured out that there are legit mathematical rules to aesthetics. The rule is very simple. As you essentially just break your scene down into what kind of looks like a tic-tac-toe board. In fact, a lot of cameras and phones will have that grid overlay by

And it's essentially breaking your scene into thirds from left to right and top to bottom. And there is no perfect way to use the rule thirds in every single scenario, but the gist is you want to break your scene down into thirds versus halves. So the reason for this goes back again, centuries into early mathematics to figure out that the world is kind of broken into this ratio of 1.61 to one.

everything from the venation of leaves to the whirls of DNA to the way that ice crystallizes, there's this really unique pattern that roughly is in thirds. If you wanna get really, really specific, we're talking about 1.61 to one ratio that's actually a little bit tighter in than the actual classic evenly spaced rule of thirds, but you don't have to get too granular here. The idea is that you wanna break your scene, whether it's a sky with...

with a beautiful landscape in the foreground, or even if it's macro photography, you wanna break it so that the dominant parts, it could be the foreground, middle ground, background, it could be just different elements of the scene, different components of the scene. You wanna break that down so it's not in halves, it's not in quarters, it's not in tenths, it is in thirds. Now you get extra credit in your photography if you align key parts of the scene at those intersecting points. So if you're...

either looking at or imagining a tic-tac-toe board right now, you notice that not only do you have three linear segments from left to right and then lateral segments top to bottom, but you also have four intersecting points where those lines intersect. Oftentimes, we find that if you are photographing wildlife or photographing people, or you have a crowd of people and you have one dominant subject but then everybody else in the background, if you place that subject, whatever it might be, you could be photographing pottery in a museum.

If you photograph and place this subject at one of those intersecting points, it's going to make your photo much more aesthetic. And don't take my word for it, give it a go, try it out. I always start with the rule of thirds, but this is one of those rules that I don't hesitate to break. Oftentimes people will not use the rule of thirds per se, but instead try to achieve balance in their photo. And this balance really has to do with the size of your subjects,

whether you have a big open landscape, whether you have a more of a minimalist look, but sometimes what I'll do is I'll actually exaggerate the rule of thirds and I'll put the horizon at the very, bottom of the scene, like the bottom fifth or the bottom 10th of my scene. Sometimes with wildlife, I'll make them look very, very small so that they're not on one of those intersecting points, like I just said is, you know, a good place to start, but instead I'll place them way far in the very, very distant corner of the scene.

to just create an artistic vibe. I'm breaking the rules with intentionality and I'm making this big open scene, this big vista look even bigger because I'm exaggerating composition here. And there really are many other times to break the rule of thirds. I don't advocate that you stick to this third concept for 100 % of your photos, but I do advocate that you know the rule. Congratulations, you now know it. You use the rule and then when appropriate, you think, well, this scene...

does lend itself to something a little bit different. That's great. As long as you start with some sort of intentionality and idea that maybe breaking into thirds is the best way, again, left to right and or top to bottom, that's going to be your best friend. So rule of thirds, very, very classic rule of photography.

The next one is a little bit more technical, but it is equally important as any of the rules I'm going to talk about today and perhaps maybe one of the most important, especially for budding photographers out there that are starting to learn the effects and needs for certain shutter speeds. This one is called the inverse focal length rule. Now, what this rule is, basically in order to stabilize hand movement. Okay, so if you think about when you're holding a camera,

you can't be perfectly still like a tripod. There's some sort of movement. In order to freeze the motion of your hand and the scene so the whole thing doesn't have this slight blur to it, think back if you've ever taken indoor photos and you wonder why in the world is everything just kind of blurry? Well, it's because your shutter speed is too slow. What the inverse focal length rule says is that your shutter speed, in order to completely nix out the effects of hand shake or hand movement,

you should be shooting at least one over the focal length of your lens in shutter speed. Okay, so let's just give an example. If you have a 100 millimeter lens, you should be shooting at least one over one hundredth of a second for your shutter speed. Okay, it's really just that simple. Now, obviously this changes if we're shooting with a very wide angle lens, like a 24 millimeter or 28. We're looking at something like a minimum of one over 24, one over 28. If we're shooting in a 300 millimeter for wildlife, a very common range,

we're shooting at one over 300. So the inverse focal length rule is a really good way to gauge what your shutter speeds should be in order to not have the whole thing blurred, like can happen if you're shooting at very slow shutter speeds without a tripod. Now this is another one that definitely gets broken. There's all sorts of applications when you want intentionally slow shutters, and I have entire episodes on this.

Sometimes we're forced to use slow shutters and we just have to be super duper still with our hand movement. We have to brace our elbows on our knees or brace the camera on a table because the light is so low. We have to have a longer shutter speed. In fact, in a recent conversation, recent podcasts I had with Will Patino, he's shooting at 1 fourth and 1 eighth of a second shutter speed, even though he's on a 24 millimeter lens. So it is possible to break those rules.

thanks to something called internal body image stabilization, or IBIS, or image stabilization in your lens. The gist is, that newer cameras, and when I say newer, I'm really talking like in the last 10, 15 years, this is not brand new.

but cameras and lenses have stabilization devices in them to basically do exactly what I'm talking about, not have you be so limited by the movement of your hand in whether a photo is going to turn out. So you have two different types of image stabilization. One is called IBIS or in-body image stabilization. That means the camera body itself, the sensors on like a little floating doohickey that buffers for a little bit of movement. So it adjusts left or right, like kind of all axes actually.

or it's in your lens. Now the best combination is if you have both and you are then able to shoot much much slower than what this inverse focal length rule will tell you to do. However, I do think it's always good to start with the inverse focal length rule just to give yourself an idea of the rough amount of speed that you're going to need to freeze that hand movement. In general, when I talk about breaking this rule, I think about usually no more than two stops

slower than what that one over the focal length is, and I'll give you an example. So if you're shooting with a 100 millimeter lens and you're shooting at one hundredth of a second to adhere to the rule, if you go two stops of light more than that or two stops in the slower shutter speed direction, same thing, you would go one stop by halving your shutter speed. So all of sudden, one over 50th of a second is OK. If you go one more half,

1 25th of a second is okay. so that's two sort of deviations away from that one over the focal length and that's about where I think the safe spot is. Technically when you read the reviews of lenses and internal body stabilization, they're gonna rate them based on how many stops of light they stabilize and they boast pretty high numbers like three to five stops. That would be having it, having that shutter speed three to five times.

I find that that's a little ambitious to be totally honest. think two, maybe three stops, even with lens stabilization and body stabilization is about the most risky I want to be. I'll give you another example. Let's say you're shooting at a 400 millimeter length. You're photographing wildlife. The rule would tell you to go one over 400th of a second, right? Now any wildlife photographer knows that that is not always achievable, especially if we're photographing in the early morning or late evening. That's just not a lot of light.

So oftentimes we have to go several stops away from that using the stabilization in order to get the shot. So one stop from one over 400 would be one over 200. The second stop would be one over 100. That's usually where I limit myself. I don't go slower than that. But if you go to third stop, that'd be one over 50. A fourth stop, one over 25. A fifth stop, one over 12. So you can see like,

The math doesn't really math. If you're thinking you can shoot at 400 millimeters handheld at 1 12th of a second, you know, following the suggestions of the bodies and the lenses that you can actually go five stops. It's just, it's ambitious. So again, I quarter the shutter speed away from that one refocal length rule when I want to break that rule. But let's be honest, if you really want to freeze movement and motion,

following the rule to a T is your safest bet. so that was the inverse focal length

Okay, the next is having to do with light. Actually the next couple rules are having to do with light. And this one is, it's a pretty short one, but it's the side lighting rule. And this is a great rule for like group photos or people shots, portraiture.

With wildlife it definitely applies as well, but we just usually don't get to position wildlife like we do with people and group photos. But the idea is that if you're outside and you have natural light, which I think of course as a nature photographer always looks best, you're going to want to avoid head-on light. You're going to want to angle that group. You're going to want to angle the sun. You're going to want to manage the situation so that light is at an angle.

And it could be at a 45 degree angle, such as hitting sort of the side of someone's face. It could be in some cases all the way at 90 degrees. But what we find generally with people photography, really any photography is side lighting is a really, really beautiful way to light your subjects. That head on light, like dead on, this is why on camera flashes just tend to make people look very flat, very un-intriguing. It makes...

landscape scenes and wildlife scenes just not look all that eye-popping and not all that mysterious and enigmatic. The head-on lighting, like if the sun is behind you, yeah, it's going to get you the most light, but it oftentimes isn't the highest quality light. So if you can position yourself or your group or your people or the wildlife, usually you have to position yourself if you're going to change the lighting for wildlife. You can't tell the wildlife what to do. But if you can make it such that side lighting is what you're getting, it's going to be a better shot each and every time.

Now this is another one where I will definitely break the rule and I mean gosh you can break it in any which way. You are the artist. You are the photographer. You might find that head on light with the sun at your back as the photographer directly lighting your subject just looks better for some reason. It might have to do with the background. It might have to do with the quality of light. Maybe the time of day which we'll get to next. But also oftentimes I break this rule by the exact opposite doing a 180 of that. I have the light coming from behind my subject.

So that very much flies in the face of this side lighting rule, But if you have that back lighting, you can get some really, really beautiful shots. You can get that nice haloed sort of fringe lighting around your subject. This is especially good for wildlife that, know, mammals that have fuzzy hair, you know, when that back lighting really shines through the fringe of the hair of the animal such that.

The animal is kind of silhouetted, but this golden light is around just its fuzziness. I'm thinking of bears, polar bears, grizzly bears, ⁓ know, coyotes, you name it, deer. I'm looking at deer out my window right now, trotting through the street. you know, backlighting is something to really behold. It's a beautiful way of photographing. So the side lighting rule is really just to say that in general, you want to kind of think about prioritizing side lighting as your default.

but do not hesitate to break that rule because lighting is photography. It is the art behind photography. So trying different angles, especially as you practice finding light, capturing light, looking at and learning and understanding how the different angles of light turn into different types of photos is a really, really big part in your photographic journey.

Okay, so I promised two different topics of light. This next one is the Golden Hour Rule. The Golden Hour is really, roughly speaking, this depends heavily on the latitude and the time of year, but roughly it's the one hour of daylight just after sunrise or just before sunset. Okay, and the rule is that it is the best time to take a photograph, plain and simple. The idea is that

this golden hour sheds more yellow, soft, angled golden light on your subjects or on your landscape or on whatever you're photographing.

try to prioritize a time of day to get the best photos of anything out there, it's going to be the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. Now there's this whole other thing called the blue hour, which is just after sunset, and I have a whole episode on that.

I'll just briefly explain. It's basically like the twilight hour, like 20 minutes or so after the sunset, you get this really nice, dim, rich blue color. But that's not what we're talking about here. What I'm really talking about is the golden hour. So the rule is, again, if you want to get the best light, that's the time of day to prioritize it. Now, if you are a travel photographer or a global photographer, you might realize that this golden hour changes and shifts dramatically if you go towards the poles. If you are...

towards the equator. The angle of the sun as it rises at the equator shifts dramatically. I don't even know if we'd get a full hour of that golden light. It's more like the golden 10 minutes. It does make wildlife photography around equatorial regions quite difficult because that sweet spot of golden soft angled light is only a very brief time of day. But...

That puts a huge feather in the cap of those folks that are able to and fortunate enough to photograph in the polar regions like the Arctic and Antarctic. Really anything, outside of a quote unquote tropic belt, is going to be much slower sunrise, much slower sunset. So as a result, that golden hour truly is an hour and sometimes it's even longer.

Okay, the next rule is, it actually kind of parlays a little bit with the rule of thirds, And this basically states that the eye and the brain likes odd numbers. It likes to see

three flowers in the scene versus two or four. It might like to see nine flowers or five flowers. There's I think our brains are just very tuned to thinking even as organization, even numbers are clean and orderly. And there's something about the slight tension that an odd number yields that makes things more aesthetic.

This is not a rule I'm going to spend a ton of time talking about, but in general,

odd numbers will always look better when you're taking photographs.

The next one, pretty simple rule, just called the Horizon Rule. You probably already know this one. Keep your horizons straight. Get your horizons straight. You don't want to make people seasick and have off-kilter horizons. You don't want all the perfectionists out there to notice that the left side of your scene is slightly lower than the right side of your scene. The thing is you do not have to do this in camera. There are little levels you can put on your screen. can have a level on your tripod or even...

little levels that affix to your camera itself.

It's sometimes hard in the field, especially if you're in a vehicle or if you're hiking around and you're in the flurry of the moment. You can always adjust and straighten this after the fact, but basically the gist is you do want your horizon straight unless you're trying to do something really creative.

So when it comes to breaking the horizon rule, the only real time that you want to break it is when the actual horizon is not real obvious. If you're photographing the ocean or if you're photographing big meadows where that horizon is a perfectly straight line, meaning there's no trees popping up, there's no mountains popping up, it's going to be really hard to make that look good if you're shooting at a 45 degree angle. It's a very, very harsh line. But the times to break it is when the horizon isn't

perfectly straight line. It is a mountain range. You have big conifer trees in the distance. Maybe it's houses or cabins. It might be, you know, any number of things.

But sometimes if you have a foreground element that for some reason speaks to you, that you want to put it on an angle, or maybe sometimes the tree is at an angle and you want to literally straighten it out by turning your camera, those can be some pretty compelling shots. It almost gives the whole thing a bit of a fish eye look because you have this tree that's sort of popping out of the corner of the scene, shooting 45 degrees through your frame. And again, as long as that horizon is not a very clean

crisp line like you would with the ocean, you would with like a big, big, distant flat horizon. If it does somehow break it up, you get a lot more flexibility and leeway to unlevel that horizon.

My final pro tip here for straight horizons is that oftentimes when we can't nail a straight horizon in the field, a good way to adjust for that is to always shoot a little bit wider than you think you want.

Because that way when you're on the computer later and you use a crop and straighten tool, you can adjust that angle and straightness of the horizon just a little bit. It will result in the entire photo being cropped slightly, but that's where it's nice if you can shoot just a little bit wider. I'm talking about a few millimeters of focal length, nothing major, but shoot a little bit wider. That gives you that leeway to straighten if you are photographing straight lines, straight horizon lines in your shots.

Okay, so the next rule is a bit about composition again, and this is called the foreground, mid-ground, background rule. And this one basically is saying that for really, really great photos, you want to have three elements. You kind of notice this repeating theme of three. But the basic gist is that for great photos, you want to have something in the foreground, mid-ground, and background. And when I say something, that is really up to you as a photographer. It could be wildflowers in a meadow as your foreground. It could be...

a beautiful line of spruce trees in the mid-ground and it could be the mountain range in the background. But you can see kind of three distinct elements, one near, one medium, and one far. And similarly, it's very, very subjective what is close, medium, and far as well. So we're not only talking about scenes that are tens of miles away in the distance, but sometimes with closer shots. It might be people shots in a cultural center. It might be a market shot when you're photographing the markets of Kathmandu.

But arranging your scenes so there's a clear foreground, middle ground, and background is a really, really quick way to make a very captivating, compelling, ⁓ storyful kind of shot if you have those three elements. And in general, just to kind of take this a little bit further, the question then becomes, well, do you get it all in focus? Do you just focus on one? In general, I personally like to focus on the foreground at the expense of the mid-ground and the background.

when I have very close shots, thinking like markets and street scenes. The thing that's closest to me I want in focus, if it's not, it just tends to be kind of distracting. However, to the contrary, if I'm photographing really, really big scenes, think of that meadow and mountain example,

gonna focus on there has something to do with what we call hyper focus.

and this is usually photographing about one-third of the way in the scene. So just at the beginning of that mid-ground will allow everything to be in pretty good focus. Whereas for those really big scenes where you have quite a distance between your foreground and background, know, quite a distance between the flower right next to you and the mountain in the distance, if you do photograph the foreground element, your background element is usually going to be pretty blurred. And, you know, to be totally honest, this is a beautiful aesthetic in some cases.

But just want to give that little tidbit that when I'm shooting big scenes to achieve focus across the entire scene, not only am I usually dialing a decent F number like an F8, but I'm choosing to focus roughly in the middle so everything does turn out nice and crisp and focused in the end.

Okay, so the next rule has to do with light once again. This is expose for the highlights. So there's a rule in photography, especially if you are doing editing, particularly if you're doing editing, like processing, Photoshopping, Lightroom, etc., etc., is that it is far easier to lighten a thing that is too dark than to darken a thing that is too light. And I'm being very ambiguous by saying a thing. That might be the sky, it might be a reflection, it might be a person, it might be an animal. But in general,

if you have blown out highlights, these are like the really bright spots. So think of like snowy scenes, think of photographing into the sun. If they're really, really bright, you're losing data and you will never be able to recover the color, the contrast, the texture from those things. And they're going to be completely washed out or blown out. So the rule here is exposed for the highlights. So as a result, when you see a bright scene, I'm usually thinking of like landscape scenes. I'm going to expose for the sky itself, or I'm going to at least

air on the side of slightly exposing for the sky itself. It's hard to capture detailed elements in the foreground like the land, the landscape, if you're only exposing for the sky each and every time. But in general, if your sky looks too bright in your scene, in your viewfinder,

really dial that exposure down and darken things.

So the idea for exposing for highlights is err on the side of underexposing your shot so that the really bright parts of your scene aren't too bright. They are dimmed down a little bit. They may not be at perfectly even exposure if you're thinking about a really bright sky or reflections in a pond. Brightness is a good thing, that is the light. But in general, the rule says if you want to...

air in the sight of caution, be able to rescue some of those colors and textures and light in Photoshop and Lightroom you want to expose for the highlights. Now this rule is rife with breaking potential because you know light is the artistry in photography and if you were to go into every single scene every single time that you're photographing something and stick with a very very prescribed schematic of light you're just not going to get a lot of creative photos.

So while this rule definitely is a good one to think about, it's not one that I really hang my hat on. It's not one that I stick to each and every time. This is one where I'm really going into each and every scene and I'm looking at the light, I'm looking at the shadows, I'm looking at the angle of the light, the color of the light, what it's bouncing off of, what my subjects are, again, my foreground, mid-ground, background, and I'm really just making a judgment of light in the moment.

But in general, the point here is that it's better to be slightly underexposed versus overexposed in your photography.

Okay, so the next rule is the eye line rule of looking into space. That's a long title for that one, but the gist is going back to some of these compositional rules we talked about, like rule of thirds, if you're placing your subject on the left or the right of your scene, so again, going back to this like tic-tac-toe board, if they're on that left vertical line or that right vertical line,

they should be looking into the open space of the scene. So picture this again, tic-tac-toe board, you're photographing a person standing in the forest and they're looking to their left. Where you should place that subject should be on the right part of the scene. So they're looking into the two thirds of space. The basic gist is that you want people looking into space versus looking off the side of the frame.

So what this rule is basically saying is that if you have a person looking to the left, you don't want to put them on the left side of the frame because it's very distracting. It's not very aesthetic because really the viewer is wondering what are they looking at? It's not even in the frame. Like what are they looking at? So looking into space is really what that rule talks about.

So this is a rule that you can certainly break. ⁓ I think in general, it's gonna create a little bit too much tension and too much awkwardness for that person to be looking off the frame. But there are definitely times that I've done this or seen it or just been opportunistic and it does turn out kind of nice. But in general, yeah, this is one of those rules I don't break very often.

one is the face and line rule. And this is definitely a good one for all those people photographers out there, the group photographers, photographing travel and their friends and vacations is when we are in front of that big vista, that big view, and the horizon is out there, just do your absolute best not to have that horizon line going right through the middle of someone's head.

Obviously it's behind them, but that line that's going right through the head is really distracting. And so you might need to hold your camera up a little bit. You might need to hold it down a little bit. Place that horizon line either below their head and face or just above it. This is something I've been very guilty of over the years because I'm just oftentimes too fixated on the person and their expression and making them smile and what the light is doing.

that I forget that there's a tree right behind them that just, you know, a branch is just going laterally right behind their head. And in hindsight, when you start looking at this, you say, gosh, that is really distracting. Same thing goes with really any objects behind someone's head and face. If you're photographing a group or a person doing portraiture,

have the area behind that person's face and head relatively clear distractions. Anything that's going...

through the side of their head, through the side of their face, is really just not something that you wanna do. Of course, there are probably times to break this rule. I think it's probably more out of necessity. If you're in a really busy rainforest environment, you can't help but having branches behind the person. But in general, especially at big vistas in front of sunsets and beaches and mountain scenes.

is try not to have any sort of horizon line, or really any line in the environment for that matter, going behind the person, more or less going through the person's head. And you all know what I mean. It's not going in front of their face, but it's it's laterally going behind them. Just too distracting, stay away from it.

The next one is a little bit more niche. This has to do with astrophotography, but it is the 500 rule. And this basic rule is that if you are doing astrophotography or really any sort of night photography, low light photography, is that the maximum shutter speed you should use is equivalent to 500 divided by your focal length. So we have another focal length law here. so let's just, before I even give you the reasoning for this, I'm to give you an example.

So let's say you're shooting with a 24 millimeter lens.

If you were to use that rule, 500 divided by 24 is about 20 to 21 seconds. So that means you should not shoot anything longer than 20 or 21 seconds. Now for those folks that don't do night photography or astrophotography, you may be thinking 20 to 21 seconds. What numbers is he talking about here? 20 second exposure? Yes, that is what we have to do for astrophotography.

But the real point here is that because we're shooting in such dark scenes and we're trying to illuminate the landscape, we're trying to get those stars and the Milky Way to show up and pop with light in the photo, is that we're usually tempted to go even longer than that. We're usually tempted to go 25, 30 seconds, maybe setting on what's known as a bulb setting. So you can go to 60 seconds or two minute exposure.

And so if you break this rule, you're going to figure out pretty quickly why. Essentially, as you go longer and longer, there are going to be little star trails because the Earth is actually rotating that fast, believe it or not. so a good way to figure out really a very accurate way of how long you can take a photograph without getting movement of the stars, without essentially blurring the stars. That's definitely not what you're trying to do with astrophotography.

is 500 over the focal length. And so of course this changes if you're shooting on a 24 millimeter versus a 16 millimeter versus a 28 millimeter or a 35. the wider the lens, the longer your shutter speed can be open. And so that is a big advantage of shooting on 16 millimeters, 14 millimeters, 12 millimeters for astrophotography.

is you can get away with a longer shutter speed without noticing that blur. The Earth is of course rotating at the same speed, it's really just an optics thing, but it's also a reason why we don't tend to shoot with like 35 millimeters and 50 millimeters for night photography because you just don't have as much leeway to let in as much light because of the shutter speed.

The subject separation rule is another simple one, but very, very effective. And I often talk about background separation, subject separation in a lot of my podcasts, a lot of my photo lessons and tutorials. And it's this idea that you want to have some sort of blur in the background when you're photographing subjects, single subjects or multiple subjects. We're talking about people and wildlife and it's that effective portraiture. And we're all now versed in this with iPhones and smartphones with the portrait effect.

essentially what we're trying to do, is we're trying to remove the distraction of that background, even if it's a very simple background. That blur is going be so pleasing because not only does it, draw the attention away from the background, the part of the scene you're not trying to showcase, but it makes your subject look even sharper. Because of that contrast, that juxtaposition of the blurred background, sharp subject, the subject looks even more vibrant, more alive, more sharp.

So how do we do this? Well, the basic gist is shooting on a very low F number or a big aperture. So something like F 2.8, sometimes even F4 will work. Oftentimes, if you can get closer to the subject or have the subject move further away from the background, that really helps with background separation. It's kind of this ratio of you to the subject to the background. If you can make yourself close to the subject and subject far away from the background, you're going to get a really nice background separation with that beautiful blur.

and that's something I think works extremely well for photographing people and wildlife. Now, this is definitely a time to break the rules. mean, there's no, there's no hard and fast rule that says every single photo you take should have some blur and some sharpness. That's certainly not what I'm talking about here. There definitely are cases where you have a beautiful mountain scene in the background and you want that mountain to be sharp and you want that person to be sharp.

So in contrast, a really good way to push the edge there and to get everything in focus is to shoot on a big F number or a small aperture, something like F8, even F11 if your camera will get to that. And another way you can do so

is just to distance yourself a little bit away from the thing you're photographing, the subject you're photographing. So imagine there's a person standing on a beautiful vista with a grand canyon in the background. If you were photographing five feet, 10 feet away from that person, and then the edge of that canyon, the real colors and textures of the canyon, they're like...

miles away, it's gonna be really hard to get everything in focus even if you're shooting at f11. But you'd be surprised if you step back just 20 or 30 feet, use a little bit of zoom to zoom in on your subject just to frame them once again as if you were standing close, you'll find that just putting yourself a little bit further distance away gets that background and better focus.

okay, and the final fundamental rule of photography today is simplification. we've talked about a lot today, so I feel like I'm being a little bit judgmental and saying simplification when I get into all these semi-complicated things, but simplification in photography is such an important part, it's such an important thing to consider. The basic gist is that if something in the scene doesn't add to the shot, it is taking away from the shot. It is subtracting from the shot.

And I like to explain this rule as if you're a painter. And think about painters. I they have to choose every single thing they put in their frame. If you have this landscape painter and they're doing a big river and trees and mountains, they're choosing how many trees are in the scene. They're choosing where that river begins and ends and where it begins and ends in the scene. They're choosing how many parts of that mountain are in the scene when they paint it on that canvas. And we don't get

quite the same flexibility when it comes to nature photography or photography in general, but it does give a good lesson that if you can zoom in, if you can move around, if you can crop things out such that you remove that branch that's just kind of erroneously sticking into the frame, if you can crop out so that crowd of people isn't in the scene with the person, if the things in the scene are not adding to it, meaning it's part of the story, it's part of the aesthetics,

I do recommend considering how do you remove them from the scene? How do you make your scene more simple? It's really a golden rule of photography.

Okay, so there you have it

fundamental rules of photography. I hope you enjoyed, I hope you learned something. I hope you really take to heart the fact that these rules are not things that I mandate myself to follow each and every time. They are starting points, they are foundations. They really allow me to have more intentionality in my photography to know, well, here's where I should be thinking and starting, but this scene just does not lend itself to XYZ.

Do not hesitate to break these rules and hopefully I've given enough examples throughout the course of this presentation of the times when I do consider breaking them

And a few of these really have very few times that I break the rules. Like I always focus on the eyes. can't even think of the last time I photographed a person or an animal

and didn't have the eyes and focus.

So folks, if you enjoyed this podcast, I would be delighted if you would subscribe. I would be delighted if you'd write a review. And of course, consider sharing with a friend that also likes photography.

I also want to point you to my YouTube channel. can just go on YouTube and search Court Whelan or just youtube.com slash Court Whelan, all one word. And you're going to find a lot of other supplementary materials, things like editing tutorials, gear tutorials, Things that I think add a lot to my overall goal of photo education. And with that, once again, thank you so much for joining and talk to you next time.


Head Shot

Court Whelan

Host