10.14.2011

31 Days: Day 14

We're into the fun stuff now and pictures are looking pretty!

I wanted to talk about a choice you have to make when taking pictures of things in your home: When to shoot wide and when to shoot vignette?

Essentially wide v. vignette is a particular extension of composition in photographs, but it's so relevant to home photos that I thought it was worth giving a little special attention. If you're doing a room reveal or showing off your DIY, it's likely that you'll have both types of pictures to share!

Well first off, what the heck is a vignette? My favorite definition (from the Collins English Dictionary) is "any small endearing scene, view, picture,  etc." So in home photos it's a little snapshot of small bits of treasure in your house. A wide shot would show a larger portion of your room.

Wide

Vignette
The wide view gives you a sense of my whole couch and the layout of that area of the room, while the vignette lets you see my lamp and side table better. It also looks a little more "artsy" :)

Wide
In the middle
Vignette
The wide shot shows you my whole entertainment center so you can see how things are laid out. In the middle picture you can see some of my treasures and more detail on the shelves. The little vignette gives you a peek into my smallest treasures and shows you how I've related them to each other in detail. You could never have seen my awesome brass ant in those big pictures!

Choosing between wide and vignette also lets you cut out some of the more boring parts of your room. A Beautiful Mess has a GREAT example (love that blog!!)....

The doors aren't the interesting part of this picture, so Rachel has cropped the picture down to the best stuff - so smart!

Now I'd like to make a confession... it's MUCH harder for me to take wide shots that I'm happy with. The light is trickier and you don't have as much flexibility with your angles. I'm still learning and if you're learning too I would highly recommend starting off with vignettes. A little success and gratification with a vignette goes a long way when you're trying to tackle those wide shots :)

One more thing... It's Friday so we're only two days away from Snapshot Sunday, yay!! Since we're working on the fun stuff, you should totally send in pictures of your experiments. Sharing is fun! Don't worry if your picture is "good enough" - we're all learning here and we can learn together!

Can't wait... :)

2 comments:

  1. I'm going to experiment with that with my "Noel" outfit and send you pics for Sunday. I already do it with the shoes, but I'll do something else too.

    Xo

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  2. This is SO helpful to me. Sometimes I read your posts and I'm just like "oh, duh, that's why my picture looks so bad." Thanks for the help!

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