I've had a number of people recently mention that they are impressed with
the photos I have online, and to be honest heaping more praise than I really deserve. I did do a 1U Photography course at high school which helped me understand the basics, but I'm certainly not professional. (If
you are, then you will find the rest of these blog entries a vast simplification. Please feel free to suggest improvements I can make.)
With the rise of people being able to simply share photos online, it has become much easier to spot some basic mistakes that people keep making, and I thought I'd throw some simple advice out there so that you can hopefully take "good" photos too.
- Always have a camera with you - This is a variation on the photographer's mantra "the best camera is the one you have with you". The idea is that the whole point of photography is to have photos of interesting subject matter, and you'll always be able to grab these photos if you have a phone camera of some sort. (You could also lug your bigger camera around with you, but this is far less likely to happen in practice).
In reality today, this means get a decent phone with a 2 or 3 megapixel auto-focus camera. (If you have kids, get one that records video too.) This will produce acceptable images in daylight and crappy ones which still trigger the memories of the event at other times.
- Think about your composition - If you're taking lots of photos (and you should be! Plan to throw lots of rubbish ones away), you won't have time to edit them all in Photoshop later (I don't even have this program). As you are about to press the shutter, think to yourself "could this be improved if I move the framing around a little? What about if my subject is off to one side, looking across the frame rather than straight at me, smiling? What about if I was a bit closer or further away?"
Some people bang on about the rule of thirds and "power points" but all you need to know is that putting your subject away from the middle of the frame will make your photo more interesting than right in the middle like most people do.
- Vectors - and this is one that I did learn at school - look for interesting straight lines in your photos. Both solid lines like a gutter or a side of a building, and imagined lines like the line somebody's gaze is making. I find this is probably the single biggest factor that will make you move from "mediocre" to "good". Try it for a while each time you take a photo.
- Don't use a flash - Really, flash photography just looks plain ugly compared to natural lighting - the subject is super-bright while everything else goes dark. There are a number of ways around using a flash, but the simplest and cheapest is just to think - turn on the lights in the room, get your subject to move so that they are bathed in whatever ambient light there is. Of course, better equipment can help too (see below).
All of that said, eventually your phone camera isn't going to cut it. You'll reach a point where you have a very interesting subject but poor technical image quality, and you want to improve the latter. Let me stress however that the former is more important to get correct first!
That's why I've made discussions about equipment a separate post, over at Part 2.
(It should be noted that I may in fact owe my father and both my grandfathers a debt of gratitude for some photographic skill as they all are/were fantastic at it. My brother now even makes
some of his living from photography.)
