I always wanted to be a photographer. I remember being a kid and stealing my brothers Minolta out from the closet and wasting all of his film on stuff I thought was important as a kid. The problem is that until somewhat recently that is about the level I stayed at for the majority of my life. “Boy, this looks interesting ill just snap a quick photo to remember it and show the folks back home.” The vast majority of people are taking photos this way, maybe even you are. Things change when you try to think of photos as Art, but I find that often they change in a bad way. Suddenly you are taking selective focus photo of a coke can or the stop sign down the street. Not trying to judge anyone’s photos in anyway it’s just a mindset that we all fall into. Some of these people think that coke can is the best photo they have ever taken, which could be true. I did all of this as well when I got my first DSLR and had control over the depth of my photos. But after awhile of this you see you’re not as good of an artist as you thought and your family didn’t like your artsy coke can on Facebook.
This leads me to the first thing that really changed the way I take photos. I don’t take them of interesting things, I didn’t take them as some edgy art, I try to use my camera to capture a moment in time. If it’s a person, coke can, bridge, landscape, it doesn’t matter. I know that I want a photo that I can take which will make people feel like they are part of the image, or an image that expresses the beauty and feelings of the moment. Here is one of my recent photos of the Sydney Opera House below.
This photo is a long exposure during the blue hour just after sunset. With this photo I wanted to express how start the color contrast was of the Opera House. I wanted to show how blue the water and sky was and then use the Opera House to break between the two. I wasn’t thinking about creating an artsy photo, and if I had just taken a simple snap shot it wouldn’t have conveyed the feeling of the dark blue evening and moment in time.
I know this sounds pretty silly to some people but when you change your mindset about a photo it changes the way to take your photos. If you really want to capture the moment you will have to plan out in your mind the best way to do so. Where do I place the camera, where should the lighting be, what angle do I want, what camera settings. Suddenly you are all over the place trying the best you can to capture that moment in time. Your brain will just naturally start putting more effort into your photos. We experience this a little when we try for those artsy photos but the energy is redirected away from the subject then. You are not trying to capture the subject as it is, you are now focused on making it edgy or more interesting. If you want your subject to be more interesting maybe you can come visit it at a different time of day, when the light is more soft like sunset, maybe if you change angles a bit, you also have the option of working on the image in post-processing after it’s on your computer.
The main thing I want you to take away from this first better photographer post is that you should think about what you really want to capture as a photographer. Do you just want to use your phone and capture that flower you saw? Do you want to use filters and edge side angles to make the flower more interesting? Or do you want to capture how you you felt about the flower and the moment when and where you saw it. None of these answers are wrong. I just find that knowing what your end goal is before you take the photo will help you imagine better ways to capture that moment. Take a moment to look at your past photos and see if they are really meeting the goals which you wanted though your photography. You just might find the solution to why your not happy with the photos you have taken thus far.
In my posts following this one I will cover things like post processing photos, photo gear, and other fundamentals which will help you along the way.
