ESFotoClix Blog

What will make me a good photographer and help me capture great photographs? I continue to grapple with this question, but for now I will share some thoughts that reflect my journey to become a better photographer. This journey for me includes the following facets, in the order given:

1. Technical proficiency: this involves getting to know your equipment, camera(s), flash(es), lens(es), etc., inside and out. Primarily, it will involve learning to "nail" your exposures, and other related side-bits such as White balance and post-processing.

2. Compositional proficiency: here you learn about the rule of thirds, leading lines, shapes, color, etc. It all adds up to developing the skill to frame (what to include/exclude) your image and how to graphically arrange the elements within that frame.

3. Lighting appreciation: You may have learned to expose in 1, but just because you know how to avoid the blinkies or prevent excessive shadows by adjusting aperture, shutter speed and ISO to account for the amount of light doesn’t mean you fully appreciate the role light plays in an image. Here you will learn about soft vs. hard light, the direction of light (side, back, front, above), and its color (warm vs. cool). Then you will figure out how to use available light, or how to "bend" it (reflectors, etc.), or how to augment it (bulbs, flashes, etc.).

4. Artistic vision: Here’s where many never get to, I’m afraid. It’s the hardest phase, often riddled with indecision, imprecision, self-doubt, fits and starts. Some opt to just be clever and call that their “style.” But artistry is about asking the hard questions. In photography, those questions are “what is this photo about” and “what am I saying with this photo?” It is the story-telling aspect of the image, and most never get there — or they shoot first and figure it out later. Or they try to capture something unique or unusual, and hope that will make the image stand out from all the other unique and unusual shots out there. For most types of photography, it is about bringing out emotional impact and connection (for the viewer) through that 2-dimensional set of pixels.

5. Capturing the spirit of the image: Lately, I am realizing all this builds up to an ephemeral, yet answerable question: “what is the spirit I am trying to capture and convey?” Here’s one reason this is even tougher: answering this question requires you first connect with your subject matter, and that you do so emotionally (often painfully) and yes, spiritually; whereas often we are quite content with being separated from the scene or the people before us, letting the camera be the convenient looking glass — we outside, they inside.

I’ll illustrate this last point with a recent experience I had while photographing a volunteer, community service event. I instructed my team to capture people in action: "show them at work, and you will have captured what the event is all about." In other words, use a journalistic, action-based story-telling approach. After issuing my instructions and in the course of preparing myself for the event, I realized my directive was okay, but also would yield a cold, functional rendering of people serving their community. The real question was: "why in the heck are people giving up their weekend to serve total strangers?" Or, more to the point, what is the motivation (spirit) behind their service? I set out to capture that, and not just the action, and the result was what many viewers found to be a compelling and self-describing story.

In the end I don’t know whether my journey to improve my photography will uncover additional facets I must work through. For now, the five I list here are enough to keep me busy, and I’m guessing they’ll keep you plenty busy, too.