Summer is here!  I know many of us doubted it would ever arrive.  Now that the kids are out of school and summer vacations are underway, I thought I would share a few ideas on perspective to help your family vacation photos.  I am going to use a few photos my family took on a recent day trip to the "big city" as my kids like to call it. 

This first photo is what I like to call the "standard vacation shot."

We all have pictures of us like this as kids where the family members are these itty bitty figures in front of something famous.  Here are my kids at Buckingham Fountain, but really they could be anyone's kids.  It is an overall nice shot of the fountain, but not of my kids.  If you really want a nice shot of the fountain, then just take one of the fountain.  After you get your fountain shot then take a close up one of the people you care about.  Like this for example:

Here you can see enough of the fountain to know what it is, especially when paired with a nice shot of just the fountain.  You will also notice I took these pictures at noon on a sunny day (which if you have read my blog before you know it is the worst time of day to take photos).  But real life cannot just happen during the golden hour, so I used my flash to fill in the light.   This keeps their faces properly exposed.  Lets get back to perspective.  What if you want the impossible? You want the whole fountain and to be able to tell it is your kids in the photo?  Well you can try something like this for example:

Here you can tell my children are the focus and get a nice complete shot of the fountain.  I increased the distance between the kids and the fountain quiet a bit.  I also used the rule of thirds to draw attention to them.  What is the rule of thirds?  It comes from the golden ratio based on the Fibonacci sequence.  This is a perfect example of how art and math are interrelated.  The rule of thirds in a nut shell states that an image should be divided into nine equal boxes.  Then you make sure to compose the image so that the object of significance (people) should be placed where two of these intersecting lines meet.  Here is the same photo with the rule of third lines on it.

I hope this way of composing a photo gives you some great family photos with a few breath taking backgrounds on your next vacation!