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- Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots – Flickr
In this solo show Bart describes how he’s going to pivot to the unintentional insult of complimenting his camera into an opportunity to evangelise the craft of photography, and offers ten simple tips to get people started.
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One of my oldest pet peeves is people admiring my photos and musing about how great my camera must be. That made me cranky as all heck because it removed all agency from me, and replaced years of hard work with an assumption my photos were only better because I'd opened my wallet further. I've worked bloody hard to develop my craft for literally decades now, so it sure felt insulting!
Based purely on emotion, I've generally replied with snark, musing about how great Shakespeare's quill must have been, or how I need to buy one of those typewriters Hemingway used. A few people would catch my drift and apologise, but most just stared at me blankly. Sure, it felt good to respond to these un-intended insults with snark, but that rather misses the point! They were unintended insults, sure there must be a more positive way to respond?
Last weekend, totally out of the blue, something hit me — I haven't shot with a DSLR since before the pandemic. So, literally every shot I've shared on social media in the past 5 years has been shot on my smartphone. Sure, for some of those five years that was a top-of-the-line smartphone, but since I generally keep my phones for two or three years, I usually don't actually have the best phone camera out there. So, these days it can't be my camera that's making the difference!
I'm a little ashamed to say that my first inclination was to crank the snark up to 11 next time and really go to town on the next poor soul who trod on this proverbial landmine, but then I had a better and nobler idea — from now on, I'm going to use these misguided compliment as an opportunity to evangelise the art and craft of photography. From now on my response is going to be something like; "actually, I just use a regular smartphone, so it's just that I've learned a few things over the years, and, with a little practice you could do the same"!
Ten Tips to Kick-Start People's Photographic Journeys
Simply planting the idea in people's heads that they could learn to shoot equally nice photos with their own phones is good, it sure beats snark, but I think we can do better! To help me prepare for these envisioned future conversations, I spent the the last week distilling my various thoughts and ideas in ten simple tips.
The process has been very helpful for me, but I'm hoping it proves useful for others too. Let's all try help our friends and family empower themselves to shoot photos they're deservedly proud of!
Tip 1 — Change your Perspective
Crouch down, shoot from a weird angle, hold your phone over your head, anything to get your phone's perspective to be something other than the natural height an adult holds a smartphone at! At the very least, you'll get a shot that's more eye-catching simply because it looks noticeably different.
For children and pets getting down to their eye-level works really well.
For bigger flowers and plants getting below and shooting up so you get the sky as the background instead of what ever random clutter happens to be around can be very effective.
For really small plants you can get really low — I love holding my phone up-side-down so the lens is just a few mm from the ground, and putting it right next to the flower or what ever I'm shooting.
Tip 2 — Try Every Lens
If your camera has two or three lenses, try them all when you can.
When you're shooting a landscape they'll give you wider and narrower perspectives, which may be more or less interesting.
When you're shooting something up close, as you change lenses, move in and out to keep your subject the size you want, and watch how the different lenses affect the background behind your chosen subject — pick the one that works best!
Tip 3 — Think in Two Layers
Really great landscape shots often have many carefully chosen layers, but the phase change between a snapshot and photograph comes from shifting your mental focus from just the subject, to the subject and one additional layer.
When you're shooting something big and far away, remember to take the time to find a good foreground. Often, it's just a matter of taking a few steps and/or crouching down. Just find something other than a sea of grass or asphalt seen from adult arm level!
When you're shooting something small and close, give some thought to your background — changing your angle and/or your lens can make a huge different here. Sometimes you want a smooth distraction-free background, sometimes you want to keep it at least somewhat focused to give context. There are infinite possibilities, but the important thing is to give it some of your attention!
Tip 4 — It's Good to Crop
Your phone's camera app may not be anywhere near as capable as a fancy-pants editor like Lightroom or Photoshop, but it will surely let you crop — so use that functionality!
A small composition tweak from a crop can make a stunningly big difference.
One of the subconscious queues that distinguishes photos from snapshots is whether or not the framing feels arbitrary. Cropping to get your composition to feel deliberate will make a real difference to the perceived quality of your shots.
Once you get into the habit of cropping every keeper, you can give your self a little slack and start erring on the side of shooting a little wider than needed to give yourself a little more wiggle room. After all, it's easier to crop than to add content you didn't capture (though AI can do a passable job these days)!
Speaking of the composition — forget all the rules, they're just guidelines anyway! When you're cropping, focus on how the shot feels, not on whether or not things are perfectly centred — if it feels lob-sided, give some more room on the other side to balance it out!
Two bonus tips — unless there's a reflection, horizons generally look best a little above or below the actual centre, and if something's moving or looking in some direction, give it a little extra space to look/move into.
Tip 5 — Straighten those Horizons!
Maybe it's just me, but I rarely seem to get my horizons level in camera! Often it doesn't matter, but there are times when it really matters, and rotating even one degree can turn a snapshot into a stunner!
By the very laws of nature, water find its level, so if your shot has a watery horizon, it absolutely better be level, or it will just look wrong!
After water, distant horizons also really need to feel level, but other than that, don't stress too much about getting it mathematically right, focus on getting it to feel right!
Tip 6 — De-skew Those Buildings!
On most camera apps, the screen for rotating the shot probably also lets you adjust the keystone effect in the horizontal and vertical directions.
When you use a lens that's not exactly neutral in terms of magnification, and you shoot anything with parallel edges at any angle other than exactly face-on, the parallel lines won't appear parallel. Sometimes that's a feature not a bug – think roads vanishing into the distance – but when you're shooting buildings it can make them feel like they're falling over, which is not good!
What's worse, the more you take my advice to shoot from fun angles, the stronger the effect gets
Use those keystone sliders to de-skew things like buildings, lamp posts, road signs, and similar things that just look wrong when they're distorted. You'll never get it perfect, but you don't have to, just get it to the point that it's not distracting or uncomfortable feeling.
Tip 7 — Try the Auto & Present Options
Your phone's camera app almost certainly lets you do more edits than just cropping and rotating your shots. At the very least, it probably has some kind of the automatic enhancement button, try it! You can always undo if you don't like the result!
Many camera apps now have an auto button that just moves the other sliders for you, so if you don't like the result you can fine-tune things by nudging the sliders yourself afterwards!
As well as a simple auto button, many camera apps also offer more opinionated presets or looks which you can apply to your photos, and some even let you fine-tune those presets.
The earlier you are in your photographic journey, the more useful these automatic edits are — they can help you see what's possible, and start to give you a feeling for the kinds of looks you like and dislike.
When you get more experience you'll start to manually create more fine-tuned versions of the looks you like.
Tip 8 — Experiment with Every Slider!
Once you get your feet under you, start to play with all the sliders your camera app offers. Figure out what they do to your photos, and slowly start using them to inject ever more of your personality into your photos,
Do remember thought that most of the time, less is probably more
Tip 9 — Break the Rules!
Remember, they're only guidelines, they're not religious commandments, breaking them won't send you to photography hell
When you choose to break the rules, don't do it by half — make it and obviously deliberate decision!
If you want your composition to feel cramped and uncomfortable, crop really close to someone's nose. If you want to make people feel sea-sick, put that rough see at a 30 degree angle!
The key thing when you choose to break the rules is to break them enough that it feels deliberate, otherwise it will feel like just another arbitrary snapshot!
Tip 10 — Shoot Freely, Cull Mercilessly!
Finally, experiment, experiment, experiment!
The two biggest luxuries of our modern phone camera age are that you pay no financial per-photo cost what so ever, and that you always have your camera with you. When an opportunity presents itself, grab it! When you're not sure what approach to try, try everything you can think of!
But, don't subject people to your voluminous shutter clicks — it's your job to sort the wheat from the chaff, not theirs! Ruthlessly cull the experiments that don't work, and only ever share that the stuff that does!
The key to sharing ten great photos is shooting a thousand and discarding nine hundred and ninety of them!
Final Thoughts
These ten little tips are of course just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. No matter how much you learn about photography, there's always more to learn, which is one of the reasons I love it so much!
But, when you're tying to get some inspired to embark on their own photographic journey, don't bombard them with too many things, that'll just intimidate them. Always remember that it's the simple things that matter most. The 80/20 rule really applies to photography. A few simple rules get you 80% of the way to a great shot, and you spend the rest of your life trying to get that last 20% to perfection
This was such an engaging episode that I lost track of where my train was. Just as well I wasn’t getting off before the terminus.
The only thing I disagree with is culling. I wonder if it is a factor that shooting with your phone means you have every photo on your phone by default. Shooting with a DSLR, I keep every photo. Instead of culling, I *select* those which will be edited and then shared, both on Flickr and via adding it to my Apple Photos library.
I have gone back over old photos *many* times and often find gems that did not grab me at the time. This photo was “unearthed” nearly 3 years after I took it. I absolutely love it now, but it obviously didn’t make the grade in the beginning. https://flic.kr/p/2mV4yhN