Here's a simple shooting skills exercise that might be of use to you if you've never worked on it before. It's best if you give it about two hours. The purpose is to make you more aware of tonal contrast as a way of making a main subject more clear.
You can do this with any camera, including a phone (these illustrations were taken with my old iPhone), and with either a zoom or prime lens. It's equally useful for color or black-and-white. And definitely don't worry about whether the pictures you're seeing are "good shots" or not. This is just an exercise, for practice. However, you should be "single-tasking," not multitasking. Do this when you have a clear stretch of time during which you can concentrate entirely on shooting.
What you do is look for any picture in which there's a plain or obvious single main subject, and try to take a picture of it with a background that tonally confuses with the main subject and then, a background that tonally sets off the main subject.
What you'll notice is that the changes are often not drastic. Often the difference is either just a slight change of angle or of camera position—maybe walking a few steps, getting a little higher or lower, or being more aware of backgrounds. The purpose of the exercise is to start making those little changes more automatic. What you're changing is your visual thinking, your awareness.
For practicing, the subject can be anything. Here, the subject is just an odd flower that reminded me of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus virion we've been seeing in scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope pictures. In the first exposure I made the lower boundary of the head of the plant (I'm not naming it because I have no idea what it is!) confused tonally with the yellow-green plant behind it:
Note that you might actually prefer this version, but don't pay attention to aesthetic impressions for now. You're just doing an exercise, not trying to second-guess which alternative might actually work best.
Just a slight change of camera position puts the whole head of the plant against a contrasting background.
Here's an even more mundane picture, but an excellent example of what we're looking for here. A telephone pole:
The subject is in direct view and is clear visually. The bottom third of the pole is set off against its background. But other than that, the background isn't helping; neither is the background "giving" us anything, i.e., doing any work in the picture. But take just a few steps to the left and notice the improvement in the perception of clarity:
Now the whole pole is clear against the background and the background itself is stronger because it's simpler. There's no technical trick here and the lens and sensor don't matter. It's just a matter of seeing, is all.
Mindless groove
If you've never done this exercise before you might not find a suitable subject for the first five or ten minutes. A hint: look at the world, not at the viewfinder. It will become easier as you go along and start to get the knack.
Most people don't have the stamina to do a shooting exercise for two hours. After about about 45 minutes, you'll be getting tired of the drill and be eager to say "that's enough of that."
But keep walking and keep looking. It's the second hour when most of the benefit accrues. You're bored and fed up. Finding examples is no longer challenging, and you start rejecting poor opportunities that you've learned won't really work very well. In the second hour you start to get into a more "mindless" groove. Your mind wanders and you start thinking about other things. Maybe taking fewer pictures, but still looking—ah, there's one. Yeah, this works. That's when you start to cruise, and that, I think, is when it starts getting to be second nature.
Because that's what you want. You want it to something you kinda don't think about—so that during normal shooting you'll just juke and move a little bit here and there to get rid of undesirable tonal mergers. And you'll see those problems when they come up without having to think about looking for them.
But I know that most people will quit before two hours. They don't have the stamina. Heck, some people get tired of any kind of shooting before the two-hour mark. If you want to be good at any skill you have to have enough determination to put some hours in.
Note that you can do the opposite too—you can de-emphasize an unwanted element, say by moving a little to put it against a tonally similar background so it doesn't show up as well. A few weeks ago I was shooting a car on the street and I noticed that two dark-green trash bins were vivid against a patch of light background. A change of shooting position didn't make the car look worse but camouflaged the trash cans against the dark shadowed side of a garage, de-emphasizing them. Using this trick you can sometimes "take something out of the picture" without taking it out of the picture.
I think I had something else to say about this exercise, but I can't remember what it is. If I remember, I'll add it later as an update.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Jim Metzger: "I took a class with Moose Petersen many years back. One of the exercises involved putting a small stuffed bear in a tree and asking the participants to set up a shot as if this was going to be a wildlife photo. Since this was pre-digital we had no way to exchange images but Moose just walked from tripod to tripod, glancing through the viewfinder for no more than a second or two. He declared only one of the eight participants would have a 'good photo.' The other seven were perplexed as to how he could know this. It was all about having a 'clean' background. That lesson stayed with me for the last 20 years or so and it is the first thing I explain to people who want some tips for better photos."
Jim Richardson: "Excellent! You can often tell much about a photographer by how they achieve 'separation' in a picture, making sure that competing elements get their own space. It becomes even more important when you are trying to maintain the visual presence (and thus meaning) of a small element in a composition, a small figure of a person in the distance, for example, that you don’t want to lose in the clutter. And silhouettes require this sort of thinking lest the graphic shape become indecipherable. In another realm, old time newspaper printers in the backshop always advocated that they liked photos with good contrast. Photographers (like me) often misunderstood their advice, thinking they meant we should print on No. 4 paper to get more 'contrast,' when what the actually wanted was clear separation of tonal areas."
[Ed. note: We have two Jim Richardsons who comment hereabouts. This Jim is the National Geographic photographer.]
Rodger Kingston: "I think I pretty much do this when I'm photographing, but I've never done it as an exercise. Interesting. I'm curious enough that I'll give it the two hours and see what I get. Who know, maybe this old dog can learn a new trick."
[Ed. note: Rodger is a major collector of vernacular photography and has published numerous books of his own work including 2019's Train to Providence as well as books of selections from the Kingston Collection.]
Peggy C.: "I learned this exercise years ago. It's also a good one to use when my photography is in the doldrums. I will carry my camera around and set myself a task. For example, isolating one set color against a dark background or a pattern of only one kind. I don't expect to really get anything great but it's good for my creativity. Works equally well for my painting."
Pros van Heddegem: "Thank you. Excellent elementary exercise! Good to mention this two-hour 'rule': learning is indeed also a matter of discipline."
John Krumm: "You inspired me to look through my Flickr feed to find shots where I more clearly simplified the background to emphasize contrast, or maybe emphasized it in another way. Looking forward to trying your exercise as well. Even doing that was helpful. Here’s an album of some that stood out to me."
Robert B: "Just to elucidate the biological facts: your flower is some species of allium, i.e., garlic, onion, or leek."
