14. Elements Of A Picture.

Often, you here people describing what actually was in the scene, or how wonderful the scenery or the object was, instead of you being able to see that in their vacation's pictures for yourself. Thus, photos often fail to convey that by themselves. It happens because they could not show either some important details, or objects close enough. Robert Capa, a war photographer, known for the realistic, intense and live appearance of his photographs, once said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough". Today you do not have to get so close to an alegator that you become a victim of his attack. Powerful telephoto lenses can get you as close to your subjects as you want to be. To photograph this specie I employed a powerful 200-500 telephoto zoom lens by Tamron mounted on Bogen tripod. I used Minolta x-700 camera set at 1/120 shutter speed with an apperture of 5.6. I took this photograph using Fuji film.

Always try to get closer to your photo-subject, and fill up the picture area frame, even if it intails to recompose and shoot again, as it was done when taking these photos.

Having a variety of elements combined together and bound by a single theme in a photo is crucial in
establishing one strong point of interest, which becomes a focus of a picture-viewer's attention. It took me almost 3 hours to set up this still life composition using various menu items, Mardi Gras beads, dry flowers and a mask in order to set up for this photo-session. I used Kodachrome 64 film, Minolta x-700 set at 1/60, 50 mm standard lens set at f.22 at 8 feet away from the table with the items on it, Metz 60CT1 at f.22, Bogen Tripod and a cable release to trigger the shutter while taking this photo.