1. Seven Tips to Getting Background “Right” How to make your background SILENT (as in, letting your subject STAND OUT)!

2. Tip #1: CHECK YOUR BACKGROUND!!  Look at how much “noise” is in the background!! It takes away from my three beautiful subjects!!

3. I thought about my background! I’m using it to tell a story (school name is back there!!)… Although it still is kind of noisy!

4. Tip #2: Move your subject!!  What IS my subject? Can you even tell with all of the different objects in my picture?

5. How about now? What is my subject? All I did was consider my background and, because it was simple, MOVE my subject!!

6. Tip #3: Create your own background! What is the subject of this picture? Which background lets the subject SHINE?!?

7. Tip #4: Put your subject in front of an OPEN SPACE! This requires that your subject has NOTHING behind it. You have to be careful that, in the distance, there isn’t anything that would detract from your subject.

8. There IS open space behind the subject… But does it WORK like the apple picture?

9. Tip #5: Filling the Frame A fairly SIMPLE way to cut out the “noise” from the background is by zooming in and filling the frame WITH your subject.

10. Filling the Frame Before…After…

11. Or how about…

12. Filling the Frame… How many “distractions” can you see? How about now?

13. Tip #6: Change the shooting angle Sometimes all is takes is to simply change the angle. This works well for objects that you can’t really MOVE!! Here’s the “noisy” background again where there is confusion as to what my subject actually IS!!!

14. All I did was simply CHANGE THE ANGLE… from which I took the picture… if I went underneath, the natural background was FAR “quieter”!

15. #7 Post-Processing Software Sometimes you get the PERFECT shot and THEN realize that the background is really distracting!! There is photo editing software out there that lets you blur the background or do super fun things with the colors or other things that allow you to HIGHLIGHT your subject by MUTING the background!

16. Quiz Time: On Edmodo! Picture #1:Picture #2