Kobi Israel photographed this young girl on a trip to Cuba. He was drawn by the series look on her face and her dark, expressive eyes. The entrance to her family house, with its plain cement wall and the battered, weathered wood of the door , made the perfect background. The textures and colours added warmth to the picture but were natural enough not to distract attention from the girl.

The photographer was faced with a number of options in framing the picture. He could have shot from relatively far back to include the whole of the girl's body and a large part of the house and door, or he could have turned the camera on its side to take a full-body, vertical portrait. Instead, he chose a horizontal crop and moved in close for a tight composition. Using a 28-105mm zoom lens meant he could try out different framing options quickly.

Israel used the rule of thirds to compose the shot, placing the girl a third of the way in from the right-hand side of the frame and balancing the composition with the dark, vertical line of the half open door on the left. Her face was near the top of the frame, placing her eyes, the main focus of interest, on an intersection of thirds for added emphasis.

Kobi Israel encountered this group of boisterous children in Nepal, and was struck by their happy faces and the colourful clothes they were wearing. They were quite happy to pose for the camera, so he arranged them in this classic group composition, with one child prominent at the front and the others looking over her shoulders .

He cropped in tightly so that the children filled the frame. To make the girl at the front he stands out more, he focused on her face and selected a large aperture. This meant that she would appear quite sharp while her friends behind her were slightly out of focus. The light levels were low so, even with a large aperture, he only had a relatively slow shutter speed to work with. This meant that unless the children stood absolutely still, they would appear slightly blurred.

Israel wanted a dynamic picture and so deliberately exploited the effect of the slow shutter speed. He took a series of pictures as the children continued to laugh and joke, knowing that he slightly blurring would create and impression of immediacy. He gave the picture its unusual colouration at the processing stage by developing the colour negative film in colour transparency chemicals.

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Chapter : Lighting

Lighting for Mood

Seeing

Thinking

In autumn and winter the sun is low in the sky and its light is directional, creating long shadows. The strong, slanting light picked out the old lady's white hair and walking stick and threw a shadow on to the wall behind her. Such light does not last long, however, before the sun dips behind buildings or clouds, so Israel knew he had to work quickly.

Acting