This Saturday Series focuses on photography. A new “lesson” will be published every Saturday, for a total or ten posts.
In this 10 Photography Tips series, I tried my best to give you some insight on various aspects of photography. I wanted to close this series with five final tips for photographers. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something!
Are you one of these photographers who take hundreds of pictures, glance at them on the camera screen view, upload them to a computer and forget them there?
Well, stop doing that or your camera will get really mad at you and never take good pictures again.
Some days, I pick up my camera and I simply don’t know what to take a picture of. Seriously, how many pictures of Parliament Hill can I take before being completely sick of it? Some days, I simply have zero inspiration. Fortunately, I discovered some great websites to develop and build on my photography skills.
When I first started blogging 5 years ago, I was more of a writer than a photographer. Most of my posts were text-only and I didn’t even have a profile picture.
And then came magazine-style blog themes, with thumbnails pictures. They quickly became popular and enabled a lot of bloggers to add pictures easily to their posts.
Alright, let’s be honest: yes, I edit all my pictures. Doesn’t mean I do much though. First, my editing skills aren’t that developed, second, I like my pictures to look natural. Indeed, photo editing is an art in itself and plenty of photographers spent hours developing new techniques or following processing fads.
When I got into photography, very little made me happy. Basically, as long as you could recognize what was portrayed, I was fine. Blurry? Meh. You can kind of see people’s faces, right? Oh, and this tiny black spot in the foreground —yes, that’s the beautiful insect I was telling you about! Look at this building… why would I straighten it? You can tilt your head, right?
You heard me complaining about Canada’s extreme weather more than once, but to be honest, I enjoy it. First, you never get bored; second, it offers some great photography opportunities. Stormy skies, snowy mornings and rainy days are a chance to get some great shots. Yes, staying in is tempting as well… but you can always have your hot chocolate when you get back home!
A few years ago, concert photography was pretty much off-limits for amateur photographer—unless you knew the band. Nowadays, it seems that most venues gave up on banning cameras.
The last few years, I was able to get in with my DSLR and a couple of lenses. Suits me. It allowed me to experiment with concert photography.
One day, a couple of years ago, I was browsing through my pictures and I realized I rarely shoot people. In a way, landscape photography is easier for a beginning photographer, since you can take picture freely (unless you are into airports and military bases!) and aren’t in a rush. On the other side, taking pictures of people, especially strangers, is slightly more difficult: you have to capture a moment, risk being seen and — gasp! — you may even have to talk to people.
Digital cameras are now widespread and the price of both DSLR and compact camera went down quite a lot. Pretty much everyone has some kind of camera these days, whether it’s a small camera phone or a high end DSLR. But few people realize that it’s not that much about the camera – it’s about the photographer’s eye.