Today I want to talk about your process for taking photos. Take a second and picture yourself walking around with your camera. Maybe it’s on the street, or in a national park, or just in your backyard. You see something you want to take a picture of. What do you do?
Depending on what kind of shooter you are, you probably answered something along these lines:
Raise camera to eye
Point camera at the thing
Focus and click the shutter
Look at the LCD to make sure nothing has gone horribly wrong
Move on
Maybe you have a few more steps in there, like setting up a tripod, changing your lens, trying out different zoom levels to see what feels best, or dialing in exposure. It’s all too easy to do all of this without thinking. This is what I call “autopilot,” and it’s the enemy of great photographs.
Psychologically speaking, humans are really good at doing things subconsciously. If you had to think through putting one foot in front of the other when you walked, or remember to breathe or blink, you’d be mentally exhausted within 15 minutes of waking up. It is estimated that between 45% and 90% of everything we do is done without any conscious thought. Our natural tendency is to avoid expending a lot of mental effort on something when we don’t need to. And cameras these days are so convenient to use compared to the wet plate collodions of the past, that it’s natural to turn our brains off a bit when we’re out photographing things. This is especially true when we’re using photography as a way to unwind and de-stress in the first place.
I want to encourage you to get out of autopilot when you’re shooting. Fair warning: it’s hard. Even I frequently find myself just going through the motions when I’m doing photography; it’s a difficult habit to break. But I’ve outlined some steps below that will help you do just that. You will be amazed with the results you come home with if you consistently implement them.
Before you even raise your camera to your eye, figure out what made you want to take the photo. Maybe it was a spectacular sunset and you couldn’t look away from the colors. Maybe the light was shining through the trees just right. Maybe you noticed an unlikely pattern or texture. Perhaps it was more than one such thing that caught your eye. Regardless, take the extra minute to think through why you felt compelled to photograph your subject or scene, and try to identify in concrete terms what the photo is going to be about. Do your best to dig deeper than “it’s a pretty flower” What makes it pretty? The shape? The color? The symmetry or arrangement? A memory the flower stirred up?
After some time thinking about it, I realized the reason I wanted to take this photo is because the canyon seemed to be beckoning to me, begging to be explored.
Pay attention to what you’re feeling. Boy, that sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? But I’m serious. When I’m out in nature, I frequently find feelings of relaxation, serenity, peacefulness, and calm. But not always. Sometimes I feel awe at the raw power of a waterfall or the size of a mountain. Sometimes I’m in nature in the first place because I’m feeling stressed or upset, and those feelings haven’t subsided yet. My favorite nature photos are ones that convey a feeling and an emotion. Your job as a photographer is to figure out how to get the photo to express that feeling.
This isn’t my photo, but when I saw it, it immediately gave me a feeling of respite from the stresses of life. The photographer masterfully used the tones, depth-of-field, and composition to emphasize that feeling. Click through to see the original photographer’s post of this image on Flickr. I liked this photo enough that I asked him to mail me his negative from Germany so I could print a 16x20 in my darkroom.
Think through your composition and visualize your finished product. What is the brightest part of the scene? Where is the most contrast? What elements do I want to include or not? Which focal length and angle will allow me to show only what I want to show? Are there lines? Do I want horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines? What shapes and textures are present? How can I make this all work together to aid in communicating what I want to communicate? Does it look better if I crouch down closer to the ground? Would it look better in a different light later in the day? This is the real work in photography, and what sets a great photo apart from a mediocre one. Painters have it easy, they start from nothing and put in what they want. Photographers have to start from what’s already there and figure out how to subtract what they don’t want. Spend time on your composition. Don’t settle for the first thing you see through your lens. Learn when it’s best to zoom in and when it’s better to take a few steps closer instead. Make your composition tell the story you want to tell. In order to do this, you need to know what story you want to tell, which is hopefully what you figured out in the above steps.
Don’t forget your settings. It’s easy to get in the habit of shooting all portraits wide open, and all landscapes at f/16. Every river or waterfall gets the longest shutter speed you can get away with, and everything else gets 1/focal length so you can avoid using a tripod. Right? I challenge you to experiment a bit more. Maybe slowing down your shutter so you get a little bit of movement in the leaves will enhance your photo—but maybe freezing the motion is best. I often find I like a middle ground depth-of-field where I can selectively control what’s in focus and what’s not, as well as the rate at which things blur out. My DoF Preview button gets used a lot! Your shutter speed and aperture are as much compositional tools as your focal length or shooting position. One of the reasons I like shooting film (and especially large format film) is that there’s already a pretty long checklist of things I have to make sure to do before I actually click the shutter. That forces me to slow down and think through what I’m doing carefully, which almost always means my shots are better planned, and my rate of successful photos goes way up.
One thing you might find when you’re forcing yourself out of autopilot during a shoot is that you don’t go home with 850 photos on your memory card, but more like 20. Great, less culling and less wasted hard drive space! And I’d be willing to bet you have the same number of “keepers” on the card, if not more. Another common occurrence is that I start thinking through a shot, and realize as I’m going that it’s a weak photo. Sometimes I still take it, sometimes I try again with a different composition, and sometimes I just don’t take it, and choose to simply enjoy the experience of seeing it in person instead. Knowing what shots aren’t worth your time is a big part of getting better at photography.
What does your process look like? What steps do you make sure to include before you press the shutter button? Let me know in the comments.