Free me

by Lyra
(Philippines)

We were asked to take a shot of this monkey looking straight towards the camera.

It was difficult to that because the monkeys would often shy away from people unless you have food - but were not allowed to feed them . . . well got a lucky shot!

I used Sony Ericsson K800i with 3.2 Megapixels


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Cheeky little thing, isn't he!

Getting eye contact in photos like this is a definite plus point in photography. Photos can work well without the eye contact, but generally speaking it does improve things if the eye contact is there.

The cage makes this shot more tricky. The problem is that you can't get remove the bars (unless you want a monkey running off with your nice shiny camera!) and you can't ask the monkey to move back so that you can poke your lens through the bars.

So the best option open to you is to use the bars in the photo itself.

Now, here's where I think there is a tip for Lyra – crop this photo (or, better still, zoom in close when taking the shot).

The photo I'm thinking of is this – see the two squares that encompass the monkey's eyes and nose – crop to just outside these two squares.

It's a severe crop, but it would really add impact to this photo. Cropping is easy to do too, you can read a digital photography cropping tutorial here.

Other than that, there's not much else I would do to this photo.

Lyra, if you still have your original photo, have a go at cropping it and then post the results – we'd love to see how it turns out; and thanks for the submission!

Ed.
Want more tips? Get our recommended eBook.
Read a hands on review here