Today, a few more recent shots from The Distillery in Toronto.

This time, showing the interaction between people and The Distillery. But in a way where the people have only a “sideline” kind of importance. They are almost peripheral to the streets and buildings, and rather than masters, they seem to be merely tolerated by the eternal.

When shooting, it pays to think “what am I shooting”. If you can answer that, you will be able to produce photos that depict what you are trying to say.

As Yogi Berra said” if you don’t know where you;re going you sure won’t get there” (everything witty and true in America was said by either Yogi Berra or Mark Twain).

So decide where you are going, and get there.

Namely: keep it simple. One of the easiest ways to improve your photos is to take stuff out.

You can do that in many ways. Zoom in. Get closer. Rotate. Blur the background. Move things. Change your position. Use obstacles in between. Use light, or rather darkness. Even for simple shots, always think “what can I take away?”.

Like in this snap of one of my bedside lamps, just now:

Just a Fuji X100 snap while testing a setting. But even for a simple snap: what is the alarm sensor at the top doing in the picture? A simple change of viewpoint and rotation gives me this:

Now what would you do in addition?

Personally, I would crop off the bottom. That joint between the two rods has no place in a picture. Since the x100 is a fixed lens camera, it is best done in post-production here.

Simplifying your pictures is easy, as long as you remember to do it. My rule: everything in a picture has to be in it for a reason – or it shouldn’t be in it. If you start doing this even for snaps, it will become second nature, and your photos will look more “professional”.

Today, the picture of the day is a simple picture of a girl on a kitchen table:

That is Kim, my favourite model. I shoot her a lot: see my Fine Art Nudes site, mvwphoto.tumblr.com, as well as this blog. I shoot her all the time because she is a great model, very talented, and especially because we consistently create art together.

And that is a special gift for anyone in arts – someone to make art with (and no, get your minds out of the gutter, it’s nothing more than that). An artistic muse. She features heavily also in my upcoming Fine Art Nudes exhibit, www.michaelsmuse.com – I hope to see some of you there for the official opening on Saturday.

And today, I also wanted to show a picture like this to re-emphasize what makes a picture interesting. Worth seeing. And I think there are several.

• Of course an image has to be technically good. Namely well exposed, in focus where it needs to be, and well lit.
• Most importantly – it should involve some sort of storytelling, or perhaps rather, evoking questions. An image has to have some connection with something happening. It has to have the ability to make the viewer wonder what it is that is happening; perhaps to make sense of it, to make the viewer work in out in his or her mind.
• This picture is black and white. That often adds to the storytelling. It also stops distractions – the subject and the story are important, not the colours of the kitchen implements.
• The setting needs to be relevant to the story.
• The close crop adds extra tension. This is sometimes allowed – ask Degas.
• For extra mood, I even added some film grain.

So a picture like this can actually have a had fair amount of thought put into it.