Don’t look. See.
So you’ve got a handle on the technical stuff. You’ve got a good idea about composition. Light and lenses too. So how do you use all that to take great pictures?
Well, this is where you go out and practise. Give it a go yourself. Take pictures. Embrace the mistakes and try again. But mastering techniques alone will only get you so far.
If you want to take great pictures, ones that really stand out from the crowd, you need to stop looking and start seeing.
Seeing is how Chris Levine captured this portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Originally commissioned to create a three-dimensional, holographic image using state-of-theart technology, Levine saw something unexpected when the Queen rested her eyes between set-ups. For a brief moment, he was no longer looking at the Queen, he was seeing Elizabeth.
Unfortunately your camera doesn’t have a seeing mode. In fact, it can’t help you with this at all. That’s because seeing is very personal. Everyone sees things differently – what’s fascinating to one person is banal to the next. Seeing is about turning on your eyes and turning off your brain. It’s about responding to your instincts.
So what we have here aren’t techniques. They’re not hard and fast rules. Instead, they’re much more about personal approaches, feeling (sorry, there’s that word again) and rethinking what your idea of ‘good photography’ might be.