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Listen To Your Creative Calling And Author The Photo You Want To Make
My cheeks got a bit flushed. My heart beat a tad faster.
The beauty of Quepos was taking a physical affect on me.
I raised my camera to my eye to make a photo, then I heard a voice.
“That’s not going to turn out.”
Accessing your lost creativity in your 30’s is hard enough without the negative thoughts in your head.
But this wasn’t a negative thought in my head. This was my Debbie Downer travel companion who was speaking to me.
Debbie had been a photographer for 10 years and had won a few awards. I had bought my first camera the week before.
She cluelessly nearly brought me out of my bliss during a week-long trip in Costa Rica. But in the face of her negativity, I would defiantly make my photos anyway.
Most of my photos weren’t that interesting. But some of them were. After all, it was my own point of view that I was expressing, not Debbie’s.
Now that I have been photographing for nearly 10 years myself, I know a bit more about how to author a photo from behind the camera.
One rule of thumb that has helped me over the years is that there is 3-part spectrum for how much energy a photo communicates. And this can be authored with the composition of your frame and the focal length of your lens. This means that you won’t have to get too technical and you can let your creativity loose.
Let’s look at how to make each type of photo.
Static Photo
A static photo gives the viewer a calming effect. To achieve this:
- Keep one subject in your frame.
- Keep your frame level, and not tilted.
- Show all of the subject.
- Use a telephoto lens.
