How To Improve Your Photography
It’s impossible to talk or write about all types of photography so i’ll just write about the two most common types of photography used by amateur photographers or to use a better word enthusiastic photographer, and that would be landscape photography, and street photography or people in the streets photography.
In Landscape photography, you could say it’s also included seascape photography.
This are my tips to get there (making better photos) fast.
I will start with Landscape or Seascape Photography
1.-Shoot everything in RAW ( you need this to be able to fix anything needing fixing in Lightroom (that’s the program i use)
2.- Good photos are not made by accident
A lot of enthusiastic amateur photographers think that if they are going to get a good photo by just pure luck, well it’s not impossible, but winning the lottery is also not impossible but very improbable.
Good photos start in your head with a vision of what you want, then you pick your equipment depending on what you have in your plan, and then you choose your location also depending on what you want, and then you check the weather, it’s better to take photos of landscapes in cloudy days than empty sky days, and sometimes it’s better when it’s raining than when it’s not. So you plan even the weather.
Once you have all that is needed and you know where you are going, you have to pick your spot, this also will take some planning, this is where you frame your photo, some people like to call that composition but to me it’s not composition it’s actually just framing your photo, because that’s actually all you can do, a studio photographer is the only one that can actually compose a photograph but a landscape photographer can only frame the photo, unless you have the power to move a mountain and put the sun where you need it to be to project the proper illumination.
So first thing you have to look for is to see if you can incorporate a Foreground a middle ground and a Background, that way you can simulate a bit of depth which is always good for a photograph because there’s nothing worse than a completely flat image, all images in photography are two dimensional but you can fake or simulate a bit of three-dimensionality if you put your three grounds.
3.- If it’s landscape or Seascape you are after your best time for a good photo is the golden hour, it doesn’t get better than the golden hour, it’s the time of day when the sun is almost about to set in the horizon or it’s also when it just rose in the morning, it could start about 30 minutes before sunset or 45 minutes before, or just after sunrise that’s when you will get the best light and the best shadows for a good photo.
If it’s a sunset in the sea you are after then, of course, you have to be in the west coast of the USA but if you are in the east coast then you need to be waiting for a sunrise which is sometimes the same.
If you want to include the sun in your photo then the best thing to do is to take the photo when the sun is kissing the horizon and use a telephoto lens, minimum a 200mm and then go back to include some of the foregrounds, with the telephoto lens you will make the sun bigger in the photo making it better than just a small sun
So you see taking a photo is just not taking your camera and clicking away, the photo above was taken at the Oceanside Ca. Pier in California, just about an hour away by car from where i live, and i am very happy with that photo, but it took me about 3 days or 3 Saturdays to get that photo and a lot of walking around looking for the right spot.
In the next post, i will write about street photography