.

“Great pictures just stop time.”

-Susan Welchman, National Geographic Senior Editor

.

The Path to Photography

.

If you begin learning about photography, you will hear certain phrases over and over again.

“Great photos create a connection with the viewer.”

“A good picture makes the viewer feel something.”

“Great photos should speak to the viewer.”

“Wow,” you will think, “this is the secret to great photography. That was easy!” And you go out with your camera and shoot for a whole day.

Late that night you start looking over your photographs. You have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of photos. You chuck most away until you have a handful. Then you start wondering whether even those are worth keeping. This one doesn’t really have a subject… this one is too blurry… this one, well this one is just shit now that I look at it. Now the sun is coming up, and you realize something…

“How the hell is a photograph supposed to speak?”

.

The Soul of a Photo

.

Every great photographer has a secret. They have no real idea why “that” particular photo they took became the iconic image that everyone in the world has seen. They can tell the story, and it may be a good one. They’ll talk about the lighting, or the frame, or how it was something that they had never shot before. But in that same shoot they’ll have taken hundreds of photos, and not every photo is as good. And as a pro, every photo has good lighting, good framing, good camera work. And every photo is different. So why is this one so good?

When asked, the photographer will blather on about the day of the shoot, the awesome sky, the calamitous events going on. But there may be that one tenacious interviewer that keeps prodding, keeps asking, “Ok, but why this photo?”

That’s when they’ll say the catchphrase: “Well this photo really speaks to people. It makes them feel something.” And that’s that. After all, it’s true. When you see that photo, there’s some unspeakable emotion that comes over you, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times. We accept that and move on.

There are two ways to think about these images. One is with science. We can point to reasons why certain photos are great in terms of psychological appeal. Symmetry is attractive, patterns are comforting, lines draw the eye. While there is knowledge to be gained from understanding these scientific validations, science has always been poor at explaining emotion. Plus, many iconic photos tend to break the rules of conventional photographic theory, the ‘psychological’ appeal theories.

The second way to look at these images is to understand the art of photography. As in all art, the established rules are only loosely respected. But as Christian Tudor from the Academy of Photography states, “There is a methodology to help you cross the line, that eliminates the risk of failing the shot.”

.

The Basics of Shooting

.

Most professional photographers shoot in some form of manual mode. The reason for shooting in manual is the same as the reason for driving in stick. While automatic can get the job done, driving stick gives you more control over the car, and that matters… in a race at least. Shooting manually is the same. You get more control over the image, which matters… if someone is paying you boatloads of money.

But why should you care about shooting in manual if you just photograph for fun? If your primary camera is just a cellphone? Two reasons:

1. It’s not that difficult.
2. Understanding what is being adjusted in manual mode will help you understand what makes a good photo.

The reason that manual mode is not rocket science is because 90% of shooting in manual mode is just about one thing. Controlling light. Photos are just reflection of light captured on a sensor and then printed. So it makes sense that controlling light is really the crux of good images. This short video from Joe Edelman shows the impact that light has on the subject of a photo.

As you can see how the light is positioned changes the image dramatically, even if the subject is just an egg.

Now to control light in manual mode, there are only three key settings that form the holy trinity of photography. These settings are called shutter speed, Aperture and ISO.

.

Shutter Speed

.

Shutter speed is the time that the shutter stays open while capturing the image. The longer the shutter stays open the more time light has to be absorbed into the image. So long shutter speeds, which, in terms of cameras today, is anything longer than 1/30th of a second, will result in brighter images. Changing shutter speed to adjust light has side effects. Motion will blur the image, and even the slightest shake from pressing down a shutter button will cause unwanted blur at higher shutter speeds. Long exposure photographs, which are the nice images of city traffic becoming streaks of light, are long shutter speed, tripod mounted, remote activated shots. When you see these images, the primary manual setting used is shutter speed.

At the other end of the spectrum, for any fast subjects, such as animals or athletes, shooting at slow shutter speeds will only result in that same incoherent light blur. For these shots, to get a clear photo of the subject, we use faster shutter speeds.

So now you know, if you are shooting your cell in low light situations vs in sport mode, the difference is shutter speed. Be sure to hold your phone extra still in the dark!

.

Aperture

.

Aperture is a strange word for the size of your shutter hole while taking a photo. The larger the opening, the more light will be captured, and the smaller the hole the less light goes in. Again, we see that this setting is just a way to toggle the brightness of your image. But unlike changing shutter speed, the side effects of changing aperture are different.

The best way to understand is to try it yourself. Open your eyes as wide as you can and stare one specific item. As you force your eyes wider and wider, and you focus until you are almost cross-eyed, you will see the object in your focus become brighter and sharper. But notice that everything else around you, all the other objects on your desk lose focus. This is the effect of a small aperture value, which represents a large opening. (Yes, just to make it slightly confusing.)

If you squint your eyes now, and still focus on the same spot, you will notice that the focal object is now a little hazier, but everything else is more clear, or at least, the same clarity as the focus. This is the effect of having a larger aperture setting, which makes the lens opening smaller.

Aperture is the setting that many portrait artists use to create those blurred backgrounds behind the subject. In these shots, the aperture may be something like f/2.8, which again, is very wide.

On the other hand, a landscape shot where everything must be clear will use a small aperture like f/22.

.

ISO

.

The final setting of the three main light controls is ISO. (Pronounce it how you like, it’s not important) ISO is sensitivity to light. Low ISO values mean that the sensor is less sensitive to light, and more ISO means the sensor is more sensitive to light. It’s like your eyes when you have been in the dark for a long time. You can see better at night after a while in the dark because your eyes have become more sensitive to light and your eyeballs kind of grab onto light more greedily. This matches to a higher ISO value in your camera. And when you suddenly see a bright light, it will blind you until your eyes start to lower their “ISO” again.

Unlike Aperture and Shutter speed, the only side effect of ISO is noise. That’s the grainy, pixelated look some photos have. In the days of film, some photographers used the high ISO “film grain” effect artistically, but in modern digital cameras, there really is no artistic side use for digital noise.

While this usually makes ISO the last setting to be adjusted, kind of like a last ditch effort to get a bright enough shot, there’s no need to avoid the setting like a plague. Today, most DSLRs have amazing noise reduction, and the fact is that when you are shooting in a dark area, a little noise is better than not getting a picture at all. Just don’t overdo the it.

.

Putting it all together: Composition

.

You could write a book about composition, and it could go into art history, psychology and voodoo. What I’ll do here is basically summarize everything you would learn in those books in a few bullet points.Here are the basic tenets of photographic composition, which you will see over and over again, for a good reason. Following these rules does tend to make your photos better.

1. Shoot with the rule of thirds. Break your screen into a 3×3 grid and put interesting points where the lines of the grid intersect. This rule is a complicated way of saying stop putting every goddamn subject in the center of your picture.
   1. An addendum to this rule would be to not always have the horizon/sky split your photo in half. The sky should be 1/3 or 2/3 of the frame, not ½.
2. Use natural lines guide the viewer’s eyes. Often times, there will be lines created by the profile of objects in your photo. Use those lines creatively, try to point them towards your subject or make a nice little frame for the subject.
3. Patterns and symmetry look pretty. And objects that stick out from a scene because they break patterns, well they make your photo stick out.
4. Use the whole frame. Bruce Gilden once criticized a photo by saying, “Look at all that empty, dead space.” Don’t have that in your photos. If there’s too much nothing in your photo, get closer.
5. Be conscious of your background or foreground. The idea is to avoid photo-bombers… whether they are annoying people or just distracting objects that you didn’t see at first.

.

My Amazing Photo

.

There is more that could be covered here, like going into exposure and color balance, but in terms of good technical photography skills, this is all that you really need to start shooting. If you can use and understand these three settings, and then practice the composition fundamentals, you can be reasonably confident that you will get the image you see in your mind when you take a picture of what is in front of your camera.

So what about the iconic photo, how do we create that? After all, everything here has really just been about taking a good photo, the “correct” photo in some ways. For that amazing photo, you only need one more thing. Tons and tons of other photos. In many ways, the iconic photos become iconic through sheer luck. That’s why it’s hard for renowned photographer to admit this. But those photographers had one thing in common. They knew how to get the image they saw in front of them to be captured in the way that they imagined the scene.

And how does an image speak? Just ask yourself, does it speak to me? Do I feel something when I see this image. All those photos did not become amazing because the photographer thought, “man, tons of people would relate to this.” Instead he thought, with his mouse hovering over the delete button, “actually, something about this really makes me feel good.” And much to his surprise, it would make many others feel that way as well.

In other words, it’s not the image that speaks, it’s you.

Want to learn more? Check out XW Photography!