Put stuff in front of the camera or next step to your photography.
Intro.
One rainy day, many years back, I was binge watching photography videos on YouTube. Those days I didn’t know yet that rain is one of the best conditions for taking photos. (I’m a lot smarter now, that’s why this article). So, instead of creating content I was consuming content, searching inspiration. And I found some. One talented photographer was sharing his secrets for making photos more interesting. One of the advises I did understood and remembered. He was shooting some shoreline somewhere in UK. The weather is dull, the location is nothing special, but he managed to take some good photos. By shooting landscapes at wide open aperture and “putting stuff” in front of the lens. “Just put stuff before the camera!” - he said. Dear photographer, who is struggling with getting creativity back, hereby I’m passing this advise further. With some twist, though. Let me explain.
Before we get confused by the phrase “Just put stuff before the camera”, let me set these words into the context. The photographer meant, at wide open aperture blur the objects in foreground. What he forgot to mention is that we better do this with taste. And that is the entire point of the article.
Composition: boring becomes fun.
This is where you will find yourself “putting stuff before camera” wisely. It’s all about arranging objects that compose a photograph. Because you don’t just put whatever in front of the lens, blur it by setting f-stop to 1.2 and - voila! - the next very interesting picture is ready. Believe it or not, there are some rules for arranging objects just in front of camera, on the middle ground and far away objects. It’s called composition. Composition is a thing in photography. Not because some boring people made up those rules for following, as they like limitations to follow. But because this is how our eye is judging what is beautiful. In practice this means that when shooting small flowers in a forest just after rain (for example), arranging a flower in the middle of the frame and blurring the grass in front of it will give the flower a chance to stand out. Human eye judges this as aesthetically pleasing. So, here is your first rule of composition - make the subject stand out. And to “put stuff in front of the camera” is simply one way of doing it.
Blurred foreground and background makes the subject stand out.
Camera: Fujifilm GFX 50R. ISO: 400. F:2.8, Aperture priority mode.
And another one is colour. The flower is contrasting from other subjects by having different and brighter colour. Keep in mind, this rule is going to work not only for flowers.
Street photography:
Camera: Fujifilm GFX 50R. ISO: 3200. F:2.8. Aperture priority mode.
There is another boring rule of composition clearly revealed by the photo above. I call it simply “creating a frame around the subject”. Everything around the red window is in the shadow, framing it. I see many photographers start applying vignette after they have discovered the corresponding slider in Lightroom. It works if not too obvious. The reason of doing it is the same - even not realizing completely, we are creating frames to stand out the subjects of our photos. The fun begins when we figure out how to do this naturally. Not artificially in post, but by finding objects naturally placed in all kinds of frames. It’s fun because of achievement we made - this is not an easy task and requires trained eye. Translating to practise, it’s 300 crappy photos before we take a good one. But there is a joy in coming home with this one well-composed and interesting photo.
Good taste in photography will result in you mastering composition.
For sharp ones here, this becomes obvious now - to take interesting photos, we need to master composition.
My way of doing it is photobooks. I buy good quality photobooks of classics and look through them time by time. Mostly photographers from last century, mostly film. Vivian Maier, Tod Hiddo, Ernst Haas. William Eggleston can teach you a lot about composition. And everything you need to do is look at their photos. Many of them. Lots. And then some more. This is how your good taste in photography starts to build up. It’s a numbers games. On your fifth book - after one thousand very good and interesting photos - you are shooting yours differently. You still can’t fully explain it, but there is a feeling inside that leads you to arranging subjects in another way than you always did.
This is how it works in my case.
Back to my flowers in the forest after rain.
I could do what used to - go close to a flower and from up above take a picture of it. (Which I also did :-) ). But this time I decided to “put stuff in front of the camera”. This meant me getting down to the level of the flower and shoot it through the grass in front of it. Photos become more interesting, composition become fun to work with.
Outro.
There is always the next step. In everything we do. To buy a camera and start taking photos with it instead of smartphone is a next step. Now you have to actually learn what a smartphone is doing on the technical level taking photos. Now you have to take those decisions it does for you each time you press the shutter. But to make it better than a very smart piece of technology which thousands sharp engineers have put together is fun.
