PHOTOGRAPHY
Contents 1. Is photograpy an art ? 2. What is photography ? 3. Tips for making ugly locations look amazing 4. What makes photography uniques ? 5. How to be different and make your photography more uniques ? 6. 15 Popular photography themes 2
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IS PHOTOGRAPHY AN ART ? Photography can be an art form, but not all photographs are created to be artworks or as forms of artistic expression. It took time for photography to be truly recognized as a valid form.
What Is Photography Art? Photography art is photographs that have been created to be seen as artworks. They have been developed specially for creative expression, not for a commercial brief. They are rare and collectible and can be exhibited like other forms of artwork.
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TIPS FOR MAKING UGLY LOCATIONS LOOK AMAZING Focus on emotion, not environment Use your photography skills to showcase the emotion of the scene and subjects, not the environment. Give your clients prompts to elicit those emotions, whether that’s joy and love or confidence and grace. Consider the photo above of the happy toddler in the sand. Make decisions in-camera to highlight those emotions and more often than not, the physical backdrop doesn’t matter!
Walk Around! My best advice is to move your feet and examine the entire area you have to work with. Look around corners, on the opposite side of buildings and the back side of trees.
Add light If your biggest hang-up with the location is poor light,find some way to add light !
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Add light If your biggest hang-up with the location is poor light, find some way to add light! Open curtains, blinds, and doors to flood the area with light. Use a reflector to bounce light back into your scene. Shoot at the edge of the shade to maximize the light that is available.
relocate it. This could include pictures hanging on the wall, items on crowded shelves or even major pieces of furniture. Outdoors, look for open areas free from clutter. Turn around in a circle slowly and evaluate the area.
Avoid or eliminate clutter If you are shooting in a clients’ home, ask permission to gather up the clutter and temporarily
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Shoot wide If you can’t get away from an ugly background, render it into oblivion using the power of your camera and lens. Shoot with a wider aperture to have a narrow depth of field. Background elements shot at f/8 might not look near as distracting when shot at f/2.8.
Get your subjects away from the backg r o u n d and use a telephoto
lens which is optically squish-
Another way to render that background smooth and creamy is to get your subject as far away from it as possible. You can also use a telephoto lens
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to help smooth out backgrounds. Get as far from your subject as you can, then zoom in on them to create your composition. This harnesses the power of compression,
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ing a scene from front to back. A portrait shot with a 35mm lens at f/1.8 might not be as pleasing as a portrait shot with a 200-500 mm lens at f/8. Knowing your lenses and
their capabilities can definitely help in this situation!
Find
lights
to
create
cool
Are there areas in your scene where you your subject correctly and take adbackground light? That helps creidentifiable bokeh, or those out orbs of light. Look for strands add your own!) or light through trees or other Shoot
can light vantage of ate really of focus of light (or coming in objects.
tight
If the scene is exclude it ing tighter Use a teleto get in make your star of the hideous dumpster. sliver of tiny bit of you need!
Use
bokeh
ugly just by shootportraits. photo lens close and subject the show, not the weed patch or Sometimes a single blank brick wall or a open space is really all
good composition
Good composition can make ugly locations look amazing, or at least more visually appealing. Evaluate your scene. Are there opportunities for framing? Do you have natural leading lines to work with?
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Make use of symmetry or reflections or the rule of thirds. Just because the location is unattractive doesn’t mean your composition should be! If the space is small, shoot through doors or windows or down hallways to add a sense of space and dimension!
Play with color and texture and contrast Use the colors and texture in your scene to make your images more visually appealing. A wall full of graffiti, for exam-
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ple, can make for a really cool backdrop when p a i r e d with a neutral top. The texture of corrugated metal might be a fun contrast to your look amazing. client’s smooth Or at least make pink party dress. it less distracting. Get down Change anlow and shoot gles up toward your subject to elimI have a ter- inate distracting rible habit of elements on the shooting most ground. Or get of my portraits high and shoot s t r a i g h t - o n . toward the Taking different ground to avoid angles not only elements like provides variety ugly ceilings or to your clients, obnoxious signs. it can help make an ugly location
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Try different poses You aren’ the only one that moves,your subject can probably move too! Try some poses where your client is sitting, kneeling or lying down. Lean him perpendicular to that ugly wall and shoot down it. Have her lean down on the railing but look up. Sometimes better posing can help make ugly locations look amazing.
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WHAT MAKES PHOTOGRAPHY UNIQUES ? 1. The Subject and its meaning and symbolism. Think of the Great Depression. One particular image comes to mind. A mother, holding her children, a determined set to her expression. The photographer, Dorothea Lange, was part of a government team charged to document our American life in the 1930’s. Lange’s 1935 portrait is now called Migrant Mother, and it is THE symbol of the Great Depression. Lange’s image became the central visual signpost from thousands of images of the era.
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2. The Detail in the image. There is a wealth of story-telling detail in this 1941 portrait of Churchill by Yousef Karsh. The details of the Prime Ministers cane, handkerchief and watch add to his persona. While we do not know that a moment earlier that Karsh took Churchill’s cigar away from him, the intense expression that Karsh captured symbolizes how we think of Winston Churchill.
3. Frame Master photographers compose with a rightness of framing. Everything that appears in their photographs is essential. Compositions are often stark, direct and honest. Ben Shahn’s 1938 image below was taken outside an A and P store in Somerset, Ohio. What is left o u t o f t h e portrait is as important as what Shahn put in: his framing
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gives us a location, tells the season, offers hints about the era, and frames humanity in the moment. Everything in Shahn’s frame needs to be there.
make for a compelling image; we can even pick out the cars in the background as Model T Fords.
4. Vantage Point
All photographs involve Time: its passage, space-time, surreal time, hyper-real time, time as illusion, static time. Some images involve time as an icon, others use time as a symbol. Modern advertising photography for the web seems to be driven by market needs involving shorter slices of time. Immediacy, economy and speed are the livelihood of today’s commercial photographers.
Marion Post Wolcott stood inside a tobacco barn in Mebane, North Carolina, and shot down a wooden floor to the street. For her image, she chose the vantage point that defines the action of organizing tobacco baskets. Wolcott’s technical skill with the details of time, place and subject
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5. Time
How to Be Different and Make Your Photography More Unique 1. Put your own spin on things you’ve learned You cannot go against the grain if you don’t first understand the traditional techniques of photography. Take all of the photographers that you admire and teach yourself how to do what they did. Take the best aspects from all of them, whether it be content matter, lighting, exposure, overall look, or other technical skills, and integrate them into your own work. Become a hybrid of them all.
2. Don’t be afraid of people not liking your work Follow your gut. Follow your instincts. Search through your archive, and find work that you’re afraid of showing. That is usually the best stuff. Put it front and center, and de-
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velop the ideas of that work further.
3. Take some
blurry photos, or create weird and off-kilter compositions. Make bright or dark images. Embrace imperfection and ambiguity. Not everything has to be beautiful. 4. Think about, and create, exactly what you like
technical risks Try out as many alternatives to the traditional way of doing things as you can. Shoot in bad light, experiment with
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What are you interested in? Maybe it is nature, sports, politics, identity, community, Pokemon, or a particular place nearby. Create a story. It literally could be anything. Think about what you are most interested in, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, and see if you can figure out a way to combine that with photography.
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15 POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY THEMES 1. Architectural photography 2. Monochrome photography 3. Urban life photography 4. Sunset photography 5. Waterfall photography 6. Food photography 7. Vintage photography 8. Travel photography 9. Reflective photography 10. Beach photography 11. Surrealist photography 12. Storm photography 13. Sports photography 14. Flower photography 15. Forest photography
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