In my first photographic technique tip, I shared with you the handy exposure elements chart that had helped me bring together my understanding of how the basic variables of exposure work together to effect your picture: f-stop (and its effect on depth of field), shutter speed (and its effect on motion), and ISO (with its effect on quality).

Subject number two is considering the entirety of your frame. It is most people’s instinct to look at their main subject and press the shutter button. To improve the quality and effect of your images, I suggest working to train your brain to be more able to perceive the whole of the frame. There are very many exercises to do this, I found one in a training by photographer and Photoshop leader Seth Resnick particularly effective.

I had been urged to join the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) early in my career by photographer Michael Bailey of Charlottesville, VA. I definitely suggest finding a photographers group that will help support your learning about all subjects photographic: technical skills, creative approaches, business, and promotion. It was through the Portland, OR chapter that I attended most of the training I have found of greatest value in my career, and that is where I enjoyed learning from Seth Resnick.

He told several tales about learning over many years from the august Jay Maisel. While I enjoyed hearing about the sudden demands to take an image immediately within a five foot radius of where you stand (an exercise that I understood as learning to look in new ways at what seems at first glance unremarkable), the one that sticks with me to this day was one of Jay’s tools for evaluating images. On appraising the day’s shooting, he repeatedly pointed out lost little triangles in the corners of Seth’s images.

With the corners of our frames naturally serving as two sides of a triangle, it is very common for a piece of subject matter to transition not far from a corner, causing the triangle effect. Now, there are no hard and fast rules about composition, but very often, these triangles only serve to weaken an image. And, they tend to come from not considering the entirety of our composition.

Sometimes a triangle might be very much part of a conscious decision, but it is only in looking into those far corners of our frame that we can consider our entire composition. It is not so much that corner triangles are de facto wrong, but that they are often weak and often the result of not looking at your entire frame, your entire composition. Thinking, “Do I have triangles?” forces us to look in ways we do not look just off the cuff or when absorbed in a subject.

I was looking at a book on improving your image making the other day. I already knew I’d likely write about this, but I’m a researcher. As I flipped through, I looked for triangles in the corner of all the example images. Only one had them, and it was image all about geometry and curves and lines.

Of course, we can crop our images after the fact. But, learning to look and see while you are photographing is an important facet of improving your image making. So, go look through your existing images and think about those corners. Go look through your viewfinders and at your screens, and shoot the entire image, corner to corner. Let me know what you see and what you get.