"Drama for your Momma!" or "How I learned to stop worrying and take pictures I love!"

Photographer, know thyself.  Recently, I have really been challenging myself to shoot fewer, higher quality pics.  But I found I had a problem: How do I define higher quality?  I had to decide what I wanted before I could chase after it.  Choosing photography values helped me crystallize my vision so I could focus on only taking pics that meet that vision, and forget the rest....so what are my photography values?


More after the jump



I took about 15 minutes and looked at my "inspiration book" of pics I love and brainstormed why I liked them.  Pretty quickly, out popped my values, listed in order from most important to least important.


1. Pictures should be exciting.  What creates excitement?  Well, excitement can mean different things. Exciting photography can be whimsical, funny, sad or dramatic.  I usually look for drama through conflict in my sports pics.  I have one gazillion boring pics of my kids kicking a ball.  Great for me, *Snore* for you.  Even a portrait should evoke emotion or curiousity about the subject. 


2.  Pictures should be what I thought they were.  Pictures are usually previsualized in my head and that is what the end result should be.  I should be technically proficient enough to translate my vision from inception to realization using the camera as my medium. 


And......that's it. I don't strive to be a technically perfect photographer, even though Daddy paid plenty good money for me to learn it right.  If I had 15 values for each photograph, I would be tied up in knots trying to get a shot. 


So, how do I live my values in the pic of Raegan above? 


Exciting: while it is far from perfect, it is not boring, there is a collision happening as both girls struggle to control the ball.  I also tried to emphasize the action by being below eye level.  This low perspective helps to heighten the sense of movement.  Sell that drama!


What I thought it was: I want to showcase faces and emotions.  However, it is tough to bring faces out of the midday sun when no flash is allowed, so for years, many of my pictures had unrecognizable faces.  To get around this, I (finally) figured out that overexposing anywhere from 1/3 to a full stop will get me the exact results I want.  This blows out all the highlights of course, but remember, that's okay because it is not one of my values to have my highlights exposed perfectly and it achieves my goal of bringing the faces out of shadow.  In past years, I would have had a picture that was correctly exposed for the scene, but wasn't what I had visualized, leaving me frustrated and confused, because I was locked in to the mindset that I had to expose correctly for a picture to be good.


Try to clarify the values for your photography, and if your journey turns our anything like mine, it may help you find the answer to why you don't like a whole lot of the pictures you have taken.


Happy shooting.