Performing triage

If you've ever been in the emergency room at a hospital, there's a process called triage …where they sort out the patients. In this case, they tackle the life-threatening emergencies, …followed by the serious injuries, and then the not so serious. Well, the same general …approach can be applied to photos as well, and it's important that you look at your image …and decide what's actually wrong. …In the case of this photo here, what you're seeing is a complication of problems. …First off, there's an easy issue here, and that's composition. I've flagged it with a sticky …note, and what you're seeing is that this image isn't properly composed. I'm going to …apply the Rule of Thirds to it in a moment.…

I also look for distracting elements here and in this case the background is just a …little bit taking away from the photo itself. There were some flowers behind the head of …the eagle, and the color here is just pulling my eye up from my subject into the background. …So I'm going to go ahead and remove some of those distracting elements, both through cropping …