Shout out to Lee, James and Marie for helping me with this post, go check them out!
As you’ll know if you read my 16 facts about me post on Sunday, I have a degree in photography. This means I also have quite a few photographer friends. So I decided to make a post about the top tips that they and I would give to someone that wants to improve or start making images. Basically, how to take better photos!
Practice
We’ve all heard the saying practice makes perfect but with creative fields that generally is the case. You can become good at almost anything if you practice it enough. The more you practice and the more photos you take you’ll come to learn what you like and dislike which can narrow down your trial and error and make it easier to get that shot you love a lot faster.
Research
I have to admit that I don’t do this so much in terms of photography since leaving university but looking at other people’s work is probably the easiest way to get inspiration for anything creative. I know it’s a technique a lot of bloggers use for blog post ideas but if there’s a certain style of photography that you want to look at I’ve always found books to be the best resource for me so try your local library for some inspo too!
Learn
Teach yourself the things you don’t understand. Youtube tutorials are your best friend. If you’re really stuck just ask someone (I’m happy to answer things as best I can, just leave a comment here or tweet me!) and remember that even if your only equipment is a smartphone camera, there can be more to learn than you might think. Look up tutorials for your specific phone to get the most out of it.
Use Manual
It’s certainly not all about the equipment but you really should have a camera that allows you to take control of how the image will turn out, i.e. have a manual mode. There are even quite a few smartphones around that can give you control of aperture, shutter speed, ISO and white balance. If you have a camera that can shoot in raw and have software that can process raw files then use it (if this means nothing to you or you’re confused about what a raw file is, then go check out Robyn’s post explaining it). It makes editing images a lot easier and you’ll end up with a much better result. That said, plenty of phones can take pretty great photos and there are so many great editing apps around that raw isn’t really a necessity unless you want to use your photos for more professional use.
Have fun
I think the most important thing is to enjoy what you’re doing. Personally, I find it a lot easier to enjoy something if I know how to do it, though. I certainly don’t know everything about photography but I know enough to love it and that’s what matters. Let me know if you’d like to see a post with some of my uni work.
I have been thinking for a long time about doing a post on the more technical side of things but I feel like there are already so many out there that there isn’t much point. So let me know if that’s something you would like me to do.
I also have a post about how I take my OOTD photos and some advice for anyone that wants to give that a go.
You can find all my posts for the month in the everydayMay tag.