My photos sucked until I learned this trick. Yours may too.

0:00 This video is brought to you by Squarespace. If you need a website or domain, check out squarespace.com. Hey everyone, and welcome to this week's video. Are you struggling to get your photos to stand out of the crowd? You take good photos, but there's something missing. Have you considered that it may not be your settings or even your subject? In this video, I'll explain why getting better backgrounds is what took my photography to a new level. taking my wildlife photos from this to this. And I'm going to prove it works as I recently photographed a music concert for fun using these tips to go from this to this. Even if this was the very first time I'd ever photographed this genre of photography. Stay for my bonus tip and I'll explain why this is a better photo

0:47 than this. My name is Simon Dontram and I'm a professional nature and wildlife photographer living in Eastern Canada. I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for wildlife and nature photography. Subscribe if you want to see more. Fighter try to open up your minds. So it seems there are huge number of photographers out there who are taking wonderful photos, but that there's something just missing. Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on it. The subject is in focus. The settings were right. The photos well exposed. But people aren't wowed. What's missing? You may be surprised to hear me say this,

1:32 but often it's the wrong background, not the subject. If Sports Illustrated sent out two photographers to photograph Bob Slutters during the Olympics, which photo do you think they would pick? This one or this one? I think the one showing the sense of place of being at the Olympics is a heavy favorite and it's all about the background. Let's tackle this in stages. The first reason to get a good background is to avoid bad ones. What I mean by this is that bad backgrounds actually take away from your image. Take this photo of mine of these cute fox kits. They're interacting. They're cute. It's great, right? But this background full of branches just ruins the shot as good as the subjects are. In this situation, knowing your settings better or having better gear

2:19 won't save you. You need a better angle, one that takes the background out of the scene. And this leads to our first tip. Getting a better background is a matter of angle and perspective. If you can't move your subject to have a better background, you need to move. You need to explore the space and look for things in the background that at a minimum don't take away from your photo. Telephone poles, clutter, fire hydrants, and man-made elements in a nature scene can all take away from your photo. Now, we know we need to avoid a bad background, but what does a good background do? The first of the benefits of a good background is to give a sense of place. This is to show the viewer something about the scene that describes either the location, the scenario, the

3:06 time, or the place. When I shot a recent music concert at my old high school, it was the 45th anniversary of this concert taking place. So, getting a shot of a musician with the 45 in the background was an important storytelling feature. Another shot with musicians in the background makes it clear that this wasn't singing along to recorded music, but a live band. Anything to add more story. So when I was in Spalbad, Norway, taking photos of polar bears and wares without those pretty mountains in the background would be a shame. They tell such a story about the location. This is where photojournalists are really, really good. For them, fancy editing of photos to make them pretty is highly discouraged. And you need to say something about the context for your

3:51 subject. A photo about something, not of something. Have you used this technique before? And did it work for you? Let us know in the comments below. Here are some great photojournalist examples of storytelling, giving a sense of place. As you can tell, the storytelling doesn't all come from the subject. The background matters. I even do this in my wildlife photography. I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video, Squarespace. If you haven't heard of them, they're an all-in-one website platform that helps you create your website from scratch. You don't need any coding experience or even to be techsavvy. They have lots of templates and tools to choose from to make it easy to get your own website up and running in no time. Even though they have great templates like ones for

4:36 photography, for example, the place to go now is to use their new design intelligence feature using both Squarespace's experience and cuttingedge AI, helping you tailor your own website to your own specific needs. It can even help you write text to describe your business or your products and help you with search engine optimization. It looks really professional to have your products or services and online galleries and your own domain. And a website is also a great way to monetize your work by setting up an online store using Squarespace payments, which you can set up with just a few clicks. You can do buy now and pay later with options like Afterpay, or you can send invoices to your clients for them to pay you by PayPal and credit card from all over the world. Go to squarespace.com to

5:22 sign up for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/simon for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. My third tip is around how to get the background you want. What you need to do is to be looking at your background the second you find something interesting to photograph. Then move or get the timing right to get that background lined up with your subject. Think of putting your subject in the background that you want in the photo. For me, at the recent music concert, it was clear that the artist would often be my subject. What my mind was really looking for at that point was what else can I line up in the shot to add some context, often getting a background singer or musician lined up. I was trying not to cut one in half and get a visual balance in the shot

6:07 between my subject and the background so that the singer here felt balanced with the backup singer here. Move a little left, right, up, down, and get the angle to the background element that you want. Don't forget to turn the tables and have the foreground out of focus and the background in focus, like in this example. I do this in wildlife, too. And play around with your depth of field. Do you want the complimentary pieces to be very out of focus or just a bit to be more identifiable? By the way, give me a follow on social media by taking a photo of the QR code here. And a heads up that I just launched a new course on processing wildlife photos in Lightroom. 29 modules and 10 hours of content. If you want your photos to go from this to this, see the link below. Now, I just

6:53 mentioned the background elements and how out of focus they are. The other big variable for you to be aware of and play with is the distance to the background. This is hugely important to the background look. It will decide if your background elements are in focus or not and their scale to the subject. Remember, the farther they are away, the more they will shrink in relative size and be more out of focus. These are important variables that you may or may not control. If your subject is something you can move, that's one option. If they can't move, then moving yourself to get the background a different distance will give you options. I do this in wildlife photography to get trees, other wildlife or vegetations the perspective that I want. Sometimes this is just done by

7:38 waiting for the perfect timing, like in this shot. At my recent music concert, waiting for the perfect timing gave me this versus this. Also, don't be afraid to play around with your aperture to get the best separation that works for you. Wide open at f2.8 for lots of background blur and separation, or maybe f5.6 six to bring elements closer in focus and easier to identify. So for this music concert, once I nailed the settings to get the right exposure, the whole rest of the event was doing two things and two things only. Waiting for great moments and finding or making great alignments to get the backgrounds I wanted. And finally, how did I go from this to this? Note the problem with the background here. No separation of the subject and the background. If the two

8:24 are the same color or brightness, you can't tell them apart. To try and fix this in the field, try to get the alignment that allows the subject in the background to be different brightness, different details, different colors, different tones. Move around to get the difference that you want. If you can't control it in the field in post-processing, try changing the brightness of the different elements of the photo to get better differentiation between them. Stop taking snapshots of your subject and just taking photos and move around to get the background you want and making photos. I'm pretty sure your friends and followers will definitely notice that you raised your game. Please give this video a like if it was deserving and I hope you can use these tips the next time you go out to get your own very unique and amazing

9:09 photos. I know you can do it.