Do you want to take better pictures?

By Cindy

Picture this…

Whatever your post-retirement game plan—travel, gardening, spending time with children and grandchildren—you are likely going to be taking photographs of new places, new projects, or your friends and family. If you have been wondering how to make the best photographs you can now that you have a bit more time, here are some suggestions I have for you.

Don’t stress about using a fancy camera.

Use whatever works best for you. Phone cameras have made digital photography accessible to everyone who has a cell phone, which I’m guessing is almost everyone reading this. Phone cameras are excellent cameras that provide a lot of versatility in terms of image shape (square, rectangle, panorama). Also, they have useful editing functions (e.g., cropping, straightening, filters). Images can be easily shared (sometimes too easily perhaps) in texts, Instagram, and Facebook. My phone camera is my go-to digital camera. Most of the photographs on this post were taken by me using my (not particularly new) iPhone camera. (The ones not made by me are in the image below. Thanks to @sarahjohnsonphotoart and @ronaudit for letting me edit and use their images).

There also are amazing “real” (SLR) digital cameras out there that you can use with multiple lenses and functions. They make remarkable images if you are so inclined to spend the money and take the time and energy to learn to use them. And in case you think that film photography is dead, I am here to tell you it is not. I use film for what I consider my “art” photography. There are new generations who are reaching back to “analogue” and “vintage” cameras, film, and processes. And there are older generations of photographers (like me) who never left film. If you are looking to amp up your use of photography as a creative outlet, go for it. Check out the Film Photography Project website if you are interested in this.

Take care of whatever you use.

My one piece of advice about buying a camera, new or vintage, digital or analogue, is that it should feel comfortable in your hands. Even if you can get the best deal for a particular camera online, if you possibly can, find one to hold first. At a camera store, at a friend’s house, etc. And, if you are going to travel with it, put it on your shoulder (in a bag with whatever accessories you are going to carry around for it) and think about how heavy it will seem after a day of walking around and sightseeing. Even a few extra pounds will make a difference.

Once you buy a camera, respect it, take care of it, and commit to learning to use it properly. Read the manual, and keep it with you when you are out shooting. Watch YouTube videos and/or find a community education class. If you are lucky enough to live near a real camera shop (like I am- shout out to Southeast Camera Store of Carrboro), the people who work there usually are very knowledgeable photographers themselves. People in real and virtual spaces want to help you, and can.

I buy most of my camera equipment and film at camera stores. But if I do need something I can’t get from them, my favorite online store is B&H Photo.

“Focus” on COMPOSITION

Most cameras focus images automatically, so we don’t think about that any more. But, look into the viewfinder. What DO you see? Is that the scene you want to remember or to share with your friends? Framing, focal point, and balance are interrelated aspects of creating pictures we like to look at.

Framing. What is in the picture and what is out of it? Anything essential to what the photographer wants to convey should be in, and anything distracting should be out. What you cannot take out because of the shape of the frame, sometimes you can crop out later in your editing function. Just remember, you can take stuff out of an image during editing, but you can’t put stuff in that isn’t there in the first place. Make sure you get all that is essential in the image when you press the button. Luckily, though, digital photography makes it easy to take a photo over again, so if your dog runs out of the picture before you snap the shutter, just start over.

Focal point. Where does the viewer’s eye go first in the image? If you are taking color photos, and most people are, color is often used to create a focal point. Red is often suggested as the best focal point color, but as you can see below, what is more important is the contrast created by the color of focal point against the background.

Balance. Balance is an important aspect of framing, and it is also necessary for a focal point to work. Symmetry is one form of balance, but not the only one. Symmetry is elegant in one way, but is actually hard to get exactly right, and it can be (though doesn’t have to be) somewhat predictable.

Asymmetrical balance is more interesting to me, but harder to describe. It is the perception that the objects across the image will be balanced in terms of height and width/light and dark colors—that the objects in the image wouldn’t tip to one side or the other if they had weight.

Balance is something photographers develop a feeling for over time, and can even check their work in editing software like photoshop, by looking at it through 3×3 grid lines. Simple cropping can sometime enhance balance in an existing image.

Examples of asymmetrical balance in photographs

How do you get your pictures out of the camera?

The easiest way to share your photos is from a phone camera via texts or social media. Beyond that, the possibilities are limitless—from online portfolios to single prints to printed photo albums. If you are looking for reasonably priced printing and framing options, I can recommend American Frame from personal experience.

How you organize your digital and print images is another set of possibilities. I have a very idiosyncratic system that probably only works for me, and I re-organize my work often. My one piece of advice is to use the search functions for phone camera cloud storage instead of trying to organize your photos into albums or folders by category. This may sound radical to some people, but I am able to find the photos I’m looking for in a few minutes by searching a few key words, like date, place, and/or name of an object in the photo. Which is not to say I don’t also have many photo files on my hard drive organized into people/place/object/event folders, but these are digital images I have scanned from film or prints that don’t have metadata for searching.

Oh, and one other suggestion. Rather than use a flatbed scanner for making digital images of prints, I just take photographs of them with my phone, and voila, they are jpgs stored in my cloud with machine-readable (i.e., searchable) content. Your phone camera is a great piece of photographic equipment!

What’s next in your photography journey?

If you have the urge do more intentional story telling with your photographs, look for a part 2 to this post where I will describe photographic elements that can convey meaning with an image, and also the use of multiple images to tell stories about travel or celebrations.

*****

You can see examples of my photos on Instagram @cwaszak or on my website www.cindywaszakgeary.com

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