Enhance your pictures, make them tell stories

Making photographs has many purposes, for many people an image is just a decorative artifact but most photographers want more than decoration or even mere representation of a scene. You often hear photographers talking about how they like their images to tell stories, sometimes these are obvious, sometimes obscure and the story is in your head, just prompted by the image. Any picture that keeps you thinking longer is better than one that you think is nice and forget about immediately, most sunset pictures fall into this latter category in my opinion.

This article by scottbourne helps to set out some basics in making images that tell stories, as he says it is not definitive but I think the article touches on the necessary elements that you need to start telling stories with your pictures.

Here is that article

KGB

20 Inspirational and Free Downloadable Photography Magazines

“Inspiration is important for photographers, web and visual designers. It’s what gives you new ideas, shapes and influences your style, and energizes and increases your passion for visual art. And visual art that’s of a different medium from yours can be an even greater inspiration—like photography—since you’re getting a fresh outside perspective.”………..check out what magazines you can download here

A review of some of the better tripod brands

This brief but informative article from Improve Photography definitely chimes with what I think about tripods, buy a good one and you can pass it on to your grand children.

“Buying a tripod is an absolutely agonizing process.  I was reminded of my past experiences in buying a tripod when I listened to a podcast from Marko Kulik this week.  Unless you’re an absolute beginner in photography, you already know how important a rock solid tripod and ballhead can be.  If you buy a high-quality tripod, you will likely own it for at least 10 years before needing to replace it, so choosing a tripod can be quite difficult.”...more

I have always been a Manfrotto fan but know many people who love their Gitzos, Benbos and Induros, it is up to you but remeber you need to choose legs and a head and there is huge choice there also so do the research and pay what you have to. Final piece of advice get a tripod bag, makes carrying so much easier

Understanding depth of field and showing some self control

This is a really useful article from Jim Harmer at Improve Photography. Regularly in the classes I teach I find people who are so absorbed by shallow depth of field that they fail to see that some of the most important parts of their image are out of focus.

“I get it.  Depth of field is fun to play with and makes our pictures look amazing, but I’m here to say that more of a good thing is not always better.

Look at the image featured on this page of my beautiful wife, Emily.  The depth-of-field adds to this image to make her stand off the page; however, this image suffers from too shallow depth of field.  The depth of field was only about two inches in this picture because I used an aperture of f/1.8, a 50mm lens, and I was only two or three feet away from the subject.  You can see that part of her face is out of the plane of focus, and that is a bit distracting.  What I really wanted was to make her completely in focus and just blur out the background.  You might not be able to tell this on the small preview of the image, but it’s obvious if you click to make it big.  This post is for those of you who always crank the aperture down to the lowest number available.”…interested?...more

Too shallow depth of field – Jim Harmer’s mistake

Exposing to the right, or getting it right

I recently posted about Photo-Africa and brought you a great tutorial from Gerry van der Walt on metering exposure, here he explains why correct exposure is so important and how understanding your histogram is vital to getting it right. Here is that article

What’s Your Time of Day (Part 1)- Shooting at First Light

One of our favourite writers on photography, Tom Dining has a tutorial on Lightstalking about the times of day that we shoot. Seems he plans a 4 parter so there are things to look forward to, this is part one, early morning

“Recently I had a browse through my files to see if there was any consistency with the times of day I choose to take photographs for my own pleasures. To my surprise, there was an even split between early morning, mid-morning, midday, late afternoon and evening. Its good that I’m not a creature of habit.

I though it might be a good exercise to examine each of these times of day in terms of the photo’s  taken and the issues that arise during the preparation stage and the recording of the images.

So here’s the first.”….more