Photo How To

Sooner or later every avid street photographer makes a simple but important realization: If you always point your lens straight ahead, you’re missing out on a whole realm of dramatic angles and interesting compositional opportunities.

The solution, of course, is to look upwards, and take advantage of looming buildings, converging verticals, and the counterpoint between shadows and highlights. In the video below, photographer Evan Ranft demonstrates how to shoot dynamic “look-up” photos, and he provides a few helpful editing tips as well.

While Ranft is shooting architectural images in downtown Atlanta for the video, he notes that these tips often work equally well for nature photography. He provides a recommendation for lens selection, as well as helpful exposure and compositional advice.

The simple editing techniques Ranft describes work with Photoshop, Lightroom, and pretty much any other software you may use. So watch the video, and the next time you go out shooting remember to look up!

You can see more from Ranft on his YouTube channel, as well as in another tutorial of his we shared that explains how to avoid “eyeball confusion” when composing photographs.