Add Interest. Add People.

One sure way to make your photographs more interesting is to add people to the picture.  You may not always need or want to put a human figure in your image if you are shooting a grant landscape or an Ansel Adams type composition. But adding a person can certainly add interest to many compositions.

The human eye is always drawn to a human image. A human figure can serve as a punctuation point in your image.  Like commas, you must use this punctuation wisely so as to not put the emphasis in, the wrong place.

Lets take a look at two pictures I made at Peninsula State Park in Wisconsin one fall morning.  This first image has good leading lines, but there is no payoff for the eye as it is led deeper into the scene.

A few moments later, a jogger came into view. It gave this image the punctuation point it needed, resulting in a much more satisfying composition.

Now for a little self critique. The photograph is better with the person in view, but still more improvement is needed.  I should have waited for the jogger to come closer to me, so he would have been more prominent.  If I did this, then the jogger might not have been in the brighter part of the scene and lost in the shadows.  I did try a longer lens, but no more people appeared in the scene in more than an hour of waiting.  By cropping the image I was able to eliminate some of the dead space on the right side of the picture, while making the jogger a more prominent part of the image.

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