How to improve your photography

Photography is an art as well as a skill.

You do need a good camera and you do need to become familiar with its manual (tedious, I know)

But you can start off with a modest camera and just point and click skills.

You will get some photographs and you will like some, if not all of them.

After a while you will notice that what you clicked does not look the same in the photo and you may experience a sense of disappointment.

But what you must realize is that the eye and the brain see in 3D.

The image you have produced with your camera does not see in 3D but simply in 2D, and the camera really does not have your brain.

So what you have in front of you, printed out or viewed on a computer screen is simply a flat image.

Like an artist you need to develop a sense of perspective, which means you need to align your subject in a way so that far away things, although just simply sitting in the flat plane of your photo, do look far away and other things which are close to you, do look close.

To achieve this you must try to develop some of the skills of a seasoned photographer and apart from knowledge you need to look at photographs of experts and try to understand how they achieve these effects.

Initially I’ll not dwell on the technical aspects for you can make quite good progress by concentrating on composition.

If you’ve ever studied or participated in art you’ll have a distinct advantage.

 I’ll put on a number of photographs later which address some of the things you need to know. You can run through them one by one with a small description and then I suggest you view them as a slideshow, and if you’re seriously interested in photography I think you’ll like that.

Have you heard of such things as rule of thirds, converging and diverging, aspects, angles, depth of field, exposure, lighting, use of the flash, red-eye and many will find if they have a modern camera the red-eye effect will be overcome by the camera.

Have you heard of street photography, of framing, of what makes a photograph famous, these just open up ideas of the many things you must know.

But back to the idea of composition, should you just photograph what is in front of you or can you pick out features that are very interesting, do you want the whole creek or a creek in its natural setting, should you set the creek to the foreground, to the rear to the left or the right, is it really the creek you want to photograph or something else in the scene, do you see the best image by morning light, evening light or with the overhead sun of the day, would it be better in the rain, should you go for colour or black and white.

You may already be aware of some of these things but not too sure about how you go about them with your photography, and is your camera good enough.

I think the next thing I should do is to set up that gallery for you, the photos are taken from the web but they serve a good illustrative purpose and if you want to focus on what the professionals do, do use the link above and I think I should give you one more link before I go and do have a little look at your camera manual, just for starters, you can go back and read in more depth once you know just where you want to go with your journey of photography.

The link is to what makes a photograph famous:

 http://www.photographytips.com.au/photos-famous-people-places-scenes/

Good luck with your photography you’ll probably find that you’ve improved already.