Composition

Sometimes you only have a few minutes to capture a photograph. I always find it difficult to capture beautiful images on film that I see with my eyes. I suppose that's the beauty of photography. When you can bring to life what you've seen, as you've seen it and have it evoke a special emotion in people, you know you have a good shot. When I was walking by this park, I loved seeing the outstretched shadows of the trees in the snow, the sun setting in between the trees and the way the trees were placed in the park. Knowing that I needed a high shutter speed to make the trees silhouetted, my main concern was composition. I shot five frames of this in different perspectives. I like the second photo because of the shadows stretched across the snow. But I cropped off the top of the trees. I don't have enough of the tops of the trees to make this a great photo. The top photo I also cropped the tops of the trees but not as much. You can also see some of the shadows in the snow but this photo is more about the silhouettes rather than the shadows. 

I always tell myself to look around in the viewfinder before shooting. Just so you can see if what you are shooting is what you want. While you may only have a minute to shoot the scene, there is always time to take a second to look around to set up your shot so when you see the final product you aren't disappointed with a branch coming out of the corner of the frame. This also applies when you are photographing people. So, set up your exposure, look in the viewfinder, set your composition, take a second to look to see if you have too much headroom in people shots, make sure they don't have anything coming out of their head, make sure you have the tops of trees in the frame, take a breath and shoot.