From the moment you click the shutter to make a photo until the final place where the photo is to be viewed, everything can make or break a photo.
After you transfer your images from your digital camera to your computer, you can view them on your computer’s screen. If you choose to change the photo’s colors, if your monitor is not calibrated correctly, you could be changing colors that need no change at all.
I use the DataColor Spyder2Express to calibrate my monitor. However, many different tools can also be used to calibrate, including Pantone Huey, X-Rite Eye-One, and other devices.
The difference between the devices is the number of monitors and the color choices that can be calibrated.
If you use Photoshop, Lightroom, or any other software to manipulate images, you need to calibrate your monitor so that you see the most accurate color possible as you work.
Here are a series of photos showing a full-framed image followed by a cropped 100% view of the same image. If you want to enlarge your photos and have people admire them on the walls of your home or office, be sure they are in focus and sharp.
For this exercise, I used a point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 camera. I took photos of the same object, handheld, and then with a tripod. Can you tell the difference in these bright sunlit photos?
Filling the frame with a subject can look quite different depending on the lens’s focal length.
In these three examples, the f/stop stayed the same. I moved the camera forward or backward to keep the stuffed ducks the same size in the frame.
The 28mm wide-angle lens lets you see the environment around the subject more clearly, as in this photo of What the Ducks.
The 105mm short telephoto focal length lens makes the background less distracting.
The 300mm telephoto focal length lens makes the background even less distracting.
Which one do you prefer and why?
You need to understand how a lens choice can help your subject.
You just need to say, “Here is the subject.” Then, consider using a telephoto lens. This will help you make the subject pop out from the background, and all the focus will be on it.
If you need the subject to be part of a sentence where you use adjectives and adverbs to help give context for the subject, move in close with a wide-angle lens. Now, you see what is around the subject as well as the subject.
There are varying degrees to this change. Just as the writer uses simple and sometimes longer sentences to tell the story, the lens helps you make it a simple or complex sentence.
If you were listening in last week when I was giving one critique after another at the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference, you would have heard a theme running through my comments.
First, I also like to review all the photos before I comment. This way I can categorize some of the comments that apply to some, if not all the photographs.
Second, I usually find a positive attribute of his or her work. Sometimes I might be pointing out how I can see why you might be interested in that subject. My point is, I think there is usually a small redeeming factor to make you stop and take a photo.
Watch those edges and keep it simple.
Third, probably the number one thing that I say to people starting is to not center their subject. Use some rules of composition to help guide the audience and make the composition more interesting. We might talk about the rule of thirds, leading lines, framing, and, of course, using light as a way to help improve the photograph.
Fourth, most everyone I find struggles with the edges of the photograph. They see the subject and haven’t quite put all the stuff around the subject and within the framework together to create a strong photograph. We might have things growing out of their heads or parts of the body cropped funny.
Fifth, one of the things I struggle with to this day is my camera drifting up. I end up with more space at the top of the frame and not doing a good job of anchoring the photo at the bottom of the frame.
Everything I have mentioned up to now is the fine-tuning thing one does to improve the photograph. You might compare what a photographer does to a sniper. The sniper aims with a rifle at a target a long way off. They will do everything to keep the barrel as still as possible. They will even control their breathing and fire the rifle in between heartbeats. If they do not control these minute details, they will miss their mark.
When photographers do not pay attention to the minute detail, like the sniper, they too will miss their mark, and the message will not come across to the audience.
Connect with your subject; you should be showing their personality.
Sixth, up to a couple of years ago I would have stopped here. But this is when I am now ready to talk to those who do photojournalism about the most important thing they can concentrate on the most to improve their photos—the subject.
I believe that until you know the subject well and not just on a mental level, but with your heart, you will not connect the audience with the subject at a level to move an audience to action.
As I go through the photos with the photographer, I ask them questions like: What did you want me to know about your subject? How did you feel about the subject?
You don’t have to ask this question with photographers at the top of their game—you feel like you know their subjects from their photographs. The reason I ask this question is to reveal what I think is the core value missing with many photographers today.
Most of the photographer’s answers to those questions were—I don’t know. To which my reply was Then how do you expect the audience to know anything or care?
I you look at any photograph and it brings up feelings of warmth or sadness, I can assure you the photographer felt this. Most likely, the photographer is crying behind the camera when you cry from one of their photos. The photographer is smiling when he made the photo of the joy in a child’s eye. The photographer is pissed when you see something that angers you in their photos.
Do you want your photos to look better? My advice is to get to know your subject and know what you want to say about it. Get to know them so well that your heart is moved to emotions and not just a mental understanding of the story. When you know what you want to say and how you want to portray the subject, then you will place the subject in the frame at the best place and wait for the moment and the light to convey what you want to say until you feel it in your viewfinder.
If you don’t know what to say and you are not feeling it behind the viewfinder, put down the camera,a ask some questions, and get to know them better. My faith teaches me that all mankind is made in the image of God. I pray that I see the world with my heavenly father’s eyes.
Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
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