A Simple Tip to Make Your Photos Less Boring
Everyone with a cell phone wants to take pictures like they see in magazines and on top Instagram pages. Sharing services and top brands are all creating a desire for amateurs to break into the world of photography and get noticed by thousands of people around the world. You can spend years buying a DLSR, going to school, reading books and following your idols and still never take that perfect photo.
It's a battle we professionals know all too well. Nothing is ever good enough and the strive for perfection is a lifelong journey always making the next out to be better than the last. If you read my about page you would know I started in photography many years ago and actually gave up on it for a number of years before finding it again. I got frustrated because I couldn’t ever make my images as good as the photographers I looked up to.
It was really hard learning even just the basics of photography. The exposure triangle and understanding the relationships between the three methods of affecting exposure have on each other was daunting. But I had an eye for it. While I may have not understood many of the technical terms and concepts until later in my years I seemed to find photographs where others struggled
Often in my career, I have had people express a frustration with how hard it is for them to even take a photo of something where I can take a few moments and come away with a beautiful composition. Don’t take this as a humble brag I understand where they are coming from. When you are around someone who is good at what they do it can make you feel confused and frustrated when they make some that seem so complicated seem so easy. Rest assured I struggle to this day with photography and more meaningful compositions. For me to take out my camera and shoot just a handful of photographs takes a few hours. But there has been one thing I have seen all number of people do that makes me scratch my head.
When I see people, often “professionals” taking photos they seem to exhibit the same problem of keeping a human perspective. Just what does that mean? Well, think about when you are near a landmark or a point of interest with tourists and people with cameras. Look at how they are standing. Generally, it's standing upright, looking ahead holding the camera at their eye around 5 to 6 feet in the air. This is thebest way to make sure your photos look boring, unflattering and just downright bad.
We have this perspective for nearly everything we see in a given day, 365 days a year. This perspective is shared by nearly all of the population and when we translate this into our photos we get nothing but photos that all look the same. You want to know how to take great photos? Get on the ground, climb a tree or even stand on 1 leg couched looking upside down at your subject.Just change your perspective in any way you can and I promise you that you will start to see much more interesting results and develop a style of your own.
It really is that simple.
