The Importance of Simplification in Photography

Busy scenes are common in many genres of photography, and while that business can often be a nice feature, knowing how to cut through it in order to prioritize your subject is an important skill. This excellent video tutorial discusses a range of ways to simplify images to make them more direct and impactful. 

Coming to you from James Popsys, this great video tutorial discusses various ways to simplify busy scenes. The classic and perhaps most obvious approach to this is using a longer focal length to exclude elements from the frame. This is certainly effective, but it is far from the only method, and it is worthwhile knowing the many different ways to accomplish this simply to widen your creative palette. Perhaps one of the trickiest but most compelling ways of doing this is through the use of light. This is something that street photography is excellent practice for. If you look at the work of many of the best street photographers, you will notice that not only do they capture interesting moments of life, they often play with light in ways that add a lot of visual interest to the frame and spotlight the subject. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Popsys.