Ellie shares her top photography tips, gleaned from working with the experts on Countryfile
“My memory feels shot. Perhaps it’s running a five-person family, or too much screen time, or a family medical history of Alzheimer’s disease. So I take a lot of photos for fear of not remembering.
Since a camera first came with an iPhone in 2007, I have around 60,000 pictures. None for social media, all for me. And I’ve been proven right when scrolling back to reminisce about experiences I had entirely forgotten.
It’s a fast track to gratitude, for one. But it’s not all high days and holidays. Even ordinary moments, when the kitchen used to look like that, can stir the memory of a state of mind from the past. Photos is the app I absent-mindedly go to most since weaning myself off social media (I’m now three years clean).
IN CONTROL OF THE IMAGE
The downside is that, as the photographer, I feature almost never in the annals. I gave short shrift to a kind soul who offered to carry in the lit birthday cake, for fear of losing my spot in history.
Occasionally I might envisage a moment of magic with me in it and hand over my phone, only to quickly regret it as my feet get cropped and my face looks weird, before stroppily deleting all 40 of them, annoyingly taken all in one hit so as to have fulfilled the role of photographer and not be troubled by it for at least another six months.
TRAIN YOUR EYE
Nevertheless, in spite of this vexed relationship with photographs, mine are all good because I have the eye. I didn’t know this until I took a photo between takes at work and our director of photography told me so, and I have been proud of it ever since.
I’m not one for cameras proper as they are never in my hand in the right moment, so there’s nothing about f-stops, but instead, from experienced crew over the years have come a small sample of simple and valuable pieces of advice.
1. The three classic framing aims for portraits are the tight shot (head and shoulders), the mid-shot (head to between elbow and wrist) and the full (head to feet). There are others, but unless you’re making a movie or you prefer it, these three will serve you well.
2. When photographing people, remove the head room. A lovely long foreground is almost always preferable to loads of sky above the head.
3. Aim to take things out of the frame rather than add them. Simplicity is more powerful.
4. If you’re shooting a person plus something else, such as an animal, place the human at the back with the animal in front. It can take some patience but it’s worth it.
5. If you can, have a backdrop that isn’t sky. A photo taken from a choppy boat of a hauled-out seal on a tiny island rock in Loch Etive, offered both options of seal-with-sky-behind or seal-with- Munro-behind. The latter was way better.
6. If you don’t have it naturally, work on your photography eye. It’s seeing poignancy in a moment, rather than just a moment in time.
Armed with today’s simple tech, I can fly across the screen map, evenly scattered across every grid reference, thanks to Countryfile, all brandishing various moments of bluster, greens and browns.
I’m thankful for each experience, human encounter and calming vista. And I’m thankful every day that I can remember.”
Watch Ellie on Countryfile, Sunday evenings on BBC One.