THE LOOK AT ME SHOT - A few tips

If you're gonna follow the trend and get a popular shot... might as well make it extra good.

We made it to the end of Observation Trail and I rested and ate... it was clear skies and I knew the landscape photo ops weren't gonna be as epic as the cloudy day before. But I did the hike because of the good company. In any case there were what felt like hundreds of people up there that saturday afternoon. As you may know ZION National Park is a pretty popular place.

Everyone was getting pictures of themselves with the view and I was just content eating and probably checking my steemit I can't remember. I don't usually get a lot of selfies but I guess that was the thing to do and everyone was getting them from up over their head looking down.... AKA basically a shot like this next one with themselves in it. Which can be a pretty cool shot if done well. And for a wide angle cell phone it makes sense a lot of the time.

My friend Elyse wanted a shot so I told her we'd get her an extra good one. So i took the challenge upon myself.
I think my thought process for these shots was....

1. If I'm coming from this angle I can get much of the valley and have a nice backdrop.
2. I'd also be doing wonders to avoid the crowds... you wouldn't even know there were tons of other people around.
   In fact if you look at the picture of me the reason for the tree placement is because there were people over there.
3. From this angle then you'd be looking into the nice light as opposed to taking it from the back and having to deal with a more difficult lighting situation
4. Get the subject close to this left hand side next to the jutting out corner and it looks more precarious and we can actually show of the cliff vertical drop a little better... no need to show that even though we're 2000ft+ off the valley floor the next ledge in this shot is really only 20-30ish feet down. haha
5. All in all there are many shots to be had from this location but I think they can portray different kinds of feelings in them. I think these have a sort of delibrate vibe that I like and I knew Elyse would like.

Then I got the bigger picture as well with more of the valley. Again the tree is there to frame and mostly to cut out a bunch of people and give her a moment to herself.

We also did get the straight on shot handing my camera to a random person. It worked out mostly because I was able to pull out a ton of the shadows in post processing and even things out