The First Photo You Take Is Almost Always a Mistake

YOU CAN READ OR WATCH

Prefer to watch? Here is the video version. Below it, the same thing in writing.

DO YOU ACTUALLY MOVE?

I want to start with a question.

When you are standing in front of a scene, how much time do you spend making sure you are getting exactly what you want?

Are you exploring angles? Are you actively searching for a better composition?

If the answer to these questions is that you don't, here also lies the answer to why you need to work on the composition of every photo when you get back home.

The first photo you take when you see a scene is almost always a mistake.

Because that first frame is not a composition.
It is just your physical reaction to noticing the subject.

The default spot where your feet naturally stopped is rarely the best place for your camera.

So ask yourself.
When was the last time you moved while shooting?

Not by zooming in and out. Not cropping at home later.
Actually moved.
Walked around the subject.
Actively examined what happens there?

Be honest with yourself.

It might surprise you but this is something that a lot of photographers don't do.

And this is also the reason why they stay stuck at the same level for many years.

Someone who doesn't move can buy all the lenses in the world and get the best cameras that are out there. But that will not change the images this person produces.

To close the gap between your current work and where you want to be is not the path of improving your tools, but improving the way you photograph.

And a big part of that is composition.
And composition starts with movement.

I know all that because I was that guy with a kit of the latest gear and very average photographs.

THE PATTERN THAT KEEPS PHOTOGRAPHERS STUCK

The destructive pattern is simple:

You see something.
You raise the camera.
You press the shutter.
And then you move on.

You might not like the image straight away, but instead of working towards a better one you just carry on.
And be like… Ah, I'll fix it later.

A beginner will walk on the street and have 400 photos of 400 different situations.

An experienced photographer will also have 400 photographs, sometimes even more, but he will work 10 to 20 potential situations.

The first one is luck. The second is a deliberate approach.

So today, let's talk about what happens in that moment.
The moment before the shutter is pressed.

A SMALL STORY FROM HOI AN

But first, a small story. With a few images.

I was in Hoi An. A small city in the center of Vietnam.

The yellow walls are one of the city's signature looks, and naturally a lot of people take photos there. But I wanted something more than just someone standing next to a yellow wall.

So I found an area where people come to take photos of themselves and hung out there for some time. The place was really fruitful and I got plenty of different images that I liked, but I will focus on a small part from that day.

There was this couple.

They were wearing matching outfits. Believe it or not, but this is a big thing in Asia and it is always an opportunity for the photographer. So I recognized a scene with potential and took a few photographs.

The first photograph was about them, a very simple approach. I was even waiting for other people to pass, so they don't accidentally pollute my frame with their presence.

But then the idea changed.

I said, well, why only them? They are good looking with their matching outfits, but why not do something else.

So I decided that instead of waiting for the passing people to pass, I would actually try and integrate them in the frame as contrasting elements.

So what I had now was the strong visual anchor, the matching clothes couple, but also some different images that introduce unrelated people getting into the scene.

Now I had different variations and some interesting photographs.

Now the photos were not only about the couple, but about what else is happening there. If I would just come and take a photo and go, I would miss this wonderful opportunity.

The decision to give the scene the opportunity to develop led to a richer photograph.
And in the end I remained with this image.

SO WHAT IS WORKING THE SCENE?

And why do we need to do it?

Some photographers call it working the scene. I usually call it recomposing. It is the same thing.

You see something worth photographing. And instead of just pressing the shutter from where you're standing, you move.

The default position from where you noticed your subject is in most cases not the best one. You need to change something physical in your relation to it.

So you move around and you explore.
You circle.
You wait.
You observe.

And then, when through exploration you stumble into an angle and moment where everything connects together, you press.

Sometimes you might stumble. Sometimes you might have a clear idea and just search for the best possible way to execute it.

Now, what that movement, that dancing around, does to the image is where it gets really interesting.

A lot of photographers would think that when they recompose, they simply change the framing. Where the subject sits in the frame. Basically the rearrangement of things.

And that's true.

But it's only the beginning.
When you move, everything changes.
And I mean everything.

So why recompose? We recompose to find a better way to tell our visual story and communicate our visual idea.

Here are the eight things that change the moment you move.

1. LIGHT

Let's start with the one that has the strongest impact on how your image reads. And it's light.

Light has a direction.
Light has an angle.

When you are standing in one place, the light hits your subject in one specific way. Shadows fall one way. The light either shapes your subject, or it flattens it.

The moment you take a step to the side, that relationship completely changes.

What was flat can suddenly have depth.
What was harsh can become soft and beautiful.

And this is something you cannot replicate at home.
You cannot crop your way into better light.
But you can definitely find your way into better light.

That light is there, the subject is there, all you need to do is find how that light illuminates your subject in the way that best communicates your visual idea.

Let me show you a practical example. These photographs were all taken in the same place within a five-minute interval.

Look how different they look. It is the same lens, same camera. What is different is my angle in relation to the subject and the way the light works from that particular angle.

So the first reason to work the scene is light, and the way light communicates with your subject and the environment.

If you want to go deeper on this, I wrote about working with hard light and about how to use color in photography.

2. SIZE

The next thing that recomposing has an impact on is size.

When you move closer, the subject gets bigger. And more dominant. This is a great way to put emphasis on something.

Quite simple, right?

And you could argue that this is something that is easily done at home with the crop tool.

But here's what's not so simple.

When you move closer with your feet, the relationship between your subject and everything around it changes.
The background compresses differently.
The foreground shifts.
The subject doesn't just get bigger, it becomes more present.
And more connected to where it actually is.

When you step back, the opposite happens. The subject becomes smaller, yes.

The smallness also means something. It can be used as a compositional way to reduce someone's significance, make him smaller in comparison to the rest of the world.

There is no right or wrong about how much a subject should take in your frame. But by getting closer and further away, you explore your subject's meaning in the environment and stop when you feel that it fits your idea.

You can of course explore these choices back home, but you will be losing a lot of the geometric impact of a crop choice versus a distance choice. There is more on that in my piece on shooting wide vs. tight.

3. ANGLE

Now the third one. The angle.

The angle changes everything about how the viewer feels toward your subject. The angle you are shooting from can define many things.

A photo from above, the subject feels small.
Perhaps vulnerable.
You are literally looking down at them.

If your subjects are at your eye level, they feel equal. This is how we naturally perceive the world and this is how we participate in human-to-human conversation.

If you shoot from below, you give your subjects power.
They feel strong.
Larger than life.

So if you photograph the same person.
With the same light.
In the exact same moment.
If you change the angle you will have three completely different stories.

And it doesn't end there.

Shooting angle is a great way to connect things, or align things in the frame. Changing your angle can connect objects together or push them further apart.

A lower or higher angle is also a great way to deal with busy scenes and distractions. Now suddenly your subject has the sky as a background instead of the huge crowd of people.

And you cannot recreate this in post.
The angle is decided the moment you press the shutter.
If you didn't think about it, you got whatever angle your body happened to be in.

And that is almost always a mistake.

4. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELEMENTS

And that brings me to number four, relationships. This is where photography gets really interesting to me.

Every photograph has more than one element.

Yes, there is the subject. But there is also everything else, walls, signs, other people, objects, colors, hands, reflections. Basically everything that ends up inside the frame.

When you stand in one place, these elements have a specific relationship to each other. And if you are not careful, they can overlap and create a visual mass, overpower your subject, or simply feel unrelated to the image you are trying to create.

How many times did it happen to you that you came home and in front of the computer you discovered that there is something in the frame that ruins its readability?

A spot of light.
Someone's plain white back.
A line that cuts through the middle of the frame in an ugly way.

At the moment you move, those relationships change. It's like a magic puzzle, you do a small adjustment, but that has massive impact on all these relationships.

The head of the person is landing on a background with similar tonality and is unreadable?
A step right and your subject is now readable and properly isolated.

And this can be done with anything. Once you develop the habit you will realize how much you can change by simply moving.

When you are dealing with composition you are the maestro of the visual opera. And you manage the visual relationships between all the elements. That is the whole subject of my online photography composition course, and it is also why balance and layers are worth understanding properly.

You can't do that from the couch, you can do it only on the spot.
And you do it by moving yourself.
That's the work.
And it only happens in the field.

5. BACKGROUND

The movement through the scene brings me to number five, the background.

I have ruined a lot of photographs with a bad background. More than I want to admit.

Actually I didn't ruin them, I was simply unaware of its strong impact.

You see the subject.
You focus on the subject.
You press the shutter.
And later, there is a garbage bin, a bright blown out window, right behind them. And that is pulling all the attention.
And weakening our photograph.

When you move, the background also changes. You can drastically change your subject's background by simply exploring the 360 degrees around him.

A background can be the difference between an okay photo and a great one that you can put proudly on your wall.

I do have an extensive video about the background mistakes you should avoid. You should check it out.

6. DISTRACTIONS

Now we are going deeper with number six, distractions.

Apart from the background you can have all kinds of distractions. They don't necessarily sit at the back of your frame, but they can be on the sides and even before the eye reaches your subject.

Something in the foreground the eye keeps returning to.
A tree branch that snuck into your frame.

Cropping can help when the distraction is at the edge. You can cut it out.

But some distractions are inside the frame.
And cropping doesn't touch those.
Moving does.

When you develop the habit of looking through the viewfinder from different positions, you start to see the distractions and eliminate them before they become a problem.

You find the place where the frame is clean.
Where everything in it belongs there.

7. THE IDEA

Now number seven took me the longest to understand. And it might be the most important one here.

When you start photographing something, you have an idea.
A reason you raised the camera.
Something you want to say.

But that first idea, it's not always the right one.
It's just the first one.
The most obvious one.

Through exploration, when you keep moving, when you recompose again and again, something starts to happen.

You see things you didn't expect.
A relationship between two elements that was invisible from where you were standing.
An angle that changes what the image is actually about.

And sometimes the photograph you end up taking is completely different from the one you started with.
Not just in terms of composition.
But also in meaning.

Let me give you a practical example of what that looks like.

This photo was taken in Vietnam. There is this tradition to gain merit. You buy a fish and release it into the pond or river.

On the first photograph you can't really see what is happening. There is a girl near the water, a man is standing behind her and there is another girl looking at them. The photo was taken from the first angle I saw them.

If you look at it carefully it does tell the story, but it's just okay.

Now here is another photo several moments later.

Everything changed here.
The background changed, the framing changed, there is one participant less.

But also the idea changed.

Now it is about family, about connection, about tradition, not a documentation of what happens.
The idea penetrates deeper.

And I only found it because I moved.

That's what recomposing does to the idea.
It develops it.
It takes it further than you could get standing still.

Many of my better photographs were born that way. If you want to go further into how an idea becomes a photograph, I wrote a whole piece on storytelling in photography.

That's how it often happens, you start working in one way and you arrive at something else.

This image is one of the more popular ones I took. But this was not the first image.
It was actually the ninth one.
And I took 6 more after getting it.

I tried several compositions and timed myself to different variations of the scene once I liked the composition. So it wasn't born like this, it was a process of discovering it.

8. THE MOMENT

And that brings me to number eight, the holy grail. The moment.

When you explore the scene, something else happens. You are not exploring only the visual part of things.

Yes, your angles and the relationships change, but as you are doing it, time gets into the equation.
The moment changes.

That moment is not sitting still and waiting for you to come up with the perfect composition. It moves and jumps around.

So what you do is: at the same time you are exploring the scene from different angles, you are also trying to time yourself to the events that are happening in the scene at that time.

You change your position, you take a shot, you change it again and you take another.

Recomposing is fine but we also need to be sure that we are not missing the moment.

WHAT CROPPING CANNOT DO

And look, cropping is fine. Sometimes it's exactly the right call.

You were responsive, you were chasing the moment, and you couldn't compose it exactly right. We are not perfect and this happens.

But now you already know what a crop cannot do.

• It cannot change your angle.
• It cannot change how the light was falling on your subject.
• It cannot change the relationship between your subject and the background.
• It cannot remove a distraction from inside the frame.
• It cannot change the moment.

Everything is fixed the moment you pressed the shutter.
Locked.

So cropping comes after that part, after the photo was taken.

Recomposing means you are still there.
The moment is still there.
And you have a chance to make a different photograph, not a trimmed version of the first one.

A different one.

• With better light.
• With a better angle.
• Better relationships.
• Better meaning.
• And a better moment.

The biggest difference that you need to take from this is that the crop happens after.
Recomposing happens now.

THIS IS A HABIT, NOT A TECHNIQUE

And this is why experienced photographers work the scene.

It's not because they follow a rule.
It's because they understand something fundamental.
A photograph is not just a subject.

They understand that all of it is connected.
And all of it changes the moment you move.

Experienced photographers don't see only the subject.
They see the whole frame.
They feel when something is off.
And they fix it now.
They keep recomposing until everything in the frame belongs there.

That's not a technique.
It's a habit.
One that takes time to build, but it will make you a better photographer.

And it starts with one decision, to not be satisfied by that first shot from the first spot.

SO NEXT TIME YOU RAISE YOUR CAMERA, ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS

• Is this the only place I can stand?
• Is this a good angle?
• Is the composition okay?
• Are the relationships working?

And maybe the answer is yes.

But still take the opportunity and explore some more options. That will allow the story and the vision to develop, and perhaps something will happen there and you will end up with a truly great image.

If you want to build the habit properly, you could try and take the 30 Day Composition Challenge.
These are 30 sessions, where you follow and learn to see one idea each day.
One of the days asks you to work a single scene for twenty frames, which is exactly what this article is about.

Happy shooting.