Good Photography requires Intentionality and Practice.
The biggest mistake I see people make when shooting pictures is that they aren’t in “photographer mode.” I see it a bunch too. I visited the Grand Canyon for the first time in 2005 and it was amazing to me how many people walked up to the edge, gasped as they took in the beauty, and then assumed that they’d somehow be able to just hold their phone up and translate the largest hole in the earth into a digital frame of film smaller than their pinky thumbnail. FAIL! Those folks barely even glanced at the screen on their phones. They certainly didn’t move around to find better angles. It was clear that they were not operating in “photographer mode.” They were in “don’t make me think, autopilot vacation mode.”
So what should they have done differently? They should have turned on both their eyes and their brains. You have to disconnect mentally from what you are seeing around the image on your screen and see ONLY that image. How is it looking? “Would it look better if I changed my positioning?” Maybe the easiest tool I've found in getting a good mental image of your photo is to attempt to visualize what you are seeing on your phone in a frame on a wall. When I do this, often I'll look at the screen and think "This isn't interesting enough to hang on the wall. What if I moved over here?" You want MY personal advice about the Grand Canyon? If you want a cool photo there, you need to do the one thing that no one ever does…include elements of scale (usually people work best) in it. Without a sense of scale, it frankly doesn’t look that big. This is true of a great many epic landscapes. Adding a human in the shot makes that shot personal and allows the viewer to imagine themselves in the photo. I'd recommend following the Instagram @EverChangingHorizon to get a really good lesson in how he does this. His shots are ALWAYS epic, but often more so when you see the scale.
Tip: Even if you are shooting landscapes, try your shots with and without people. Do both. Use the image that works. Let’s unpack that just a little. More importantly, maybe the advice is “try different things.” Maybe in the case of the Grand Canyon, it isn’t people, but it’s lowering your phone down into a little clump of wildflowers growing at the base. They make the foreground and the canyon is the background. But the point is really to try different things! Experiment. Don’t just accept what you see as something that is going to translate well to a frame of film with no thinking.
iPhone Tip: The Panoramic Mode on the iPhone is superb! If you are shooting things of Grand Canyon scale and not taking at least some panoramic shots, I’m judging you right now. The great thing about the panoramic feature in the iPhone is that it is stitching together multiple single images. This means that with only a 12-megapixel camera, you can end up with 30-, 40-, even 50-megapixel finished images. And yes, they enlarge beautifully!
The shot below was shot ON MY iPHONE 8 from my seat at my daughter's wedding! (Notice the imperfections of the gray dress that was moving in the wind on the matron of honor as I rotated my phone. I left this there to prove to you that, yes, this is a panoramic shot on an iPhone. It’s THIS GOOD!) I sat there with my iPhone ready and waited for the moment when the sailboat was in the perfect spot. I'd seen it coming for a while. It was in that spot long enough to get two panoramic shots before it moved behind the people.
So what should they have done differently? They should have turned on both their eyes and their brains. You have to disconnect mentally from what you are seeing around the image on your screen and see ONLY that image. How is it looking? “Would it look better if I changed my positioning?” Maybe the easiest tool I've found in getting a good mental image of your photo is to attempt to visualize what you are seeing on your phone in a frame on a wall. When I do this, often I'll look at the screen and think "This isn't interesting enough to hang on the wall. What if I moved over here?" You want MY personal advice about the Grand Canyon? If you want a cool photo there, you need to do the one thing that no one ever does…include elements of scale (usually people work best) in it. Without a sense of scale, it frankly doesn’t look that big. This is true of a great many epic landscapes. Adding a human in the shot makes that shot personal and allows the viewer to imagine themselves in the photo. I'd recommend following the Instagram @EverChangingHorizon to get a really good lesson in how he does this. His shots are ALWAYS epic, but often more so when you see the scale.
Tip: Even if you are shooting landscapes, try your shots with and without people. Do both. Use the image that works. Let’s unpack that just a little. More importantly, maybe the advice is “try different things.” Maybe in the case of the Grand Canyon, it isn’t people, but it’s lowering your phone down into a little clump of wildflowers growing at the base. They make the foreground and the canyon is the background. But the point is really to try different things! Experiment. Don’t just accept what you see as something that is going to translate well to a frame of film with no thinking.
iPhone Tip: The Panoramic Mode on the iPhone is superb! If you are shooting things of Grand Canyon scale and not taking at least some panoramic shots, I’m judging you right now. The great thing about the panoramic feature in the iPhone is that it is stitching together multiple single images. This means that with only a 12-megapixel camera, you can end up with 30-, 40-, even 50-megapixel finished images. And yes, they enlarge beautifully!
The shot below was shot ON MY iPHONE 8 from my seat at my daughter's wedding! (Notice the imperfections of the gray dress that was moving in the wind on the matron of honor as I rotated my phone. I left this there to prove to you that, yes, this is a panoramic shot on an iPhone. It’s THIS GOOD!) I sat there with my iPhone ready and waited for the moment when the sailboat was in the perfect spot. I'd seen it coming for a while. It was in that spot long enough to get two panoramic shots before it moved behind the people.
Tip: Every photographer improves with practice.Even Ansel Adams perfected his craft over many, many years. I spent a couple summers in Russia in the early 1990s, and I look back on my photos and just cringe at how bad they are. I want to go back to Russia for one reason only: I really want the chance to shoot the same things again…and just do a better job of it.
So in summary, turn on your brain. Turn on your eyes. Move around. Use Panoramic Mode. And Practice, practice, practice. Photography shouldn’t be an afterthought of your event or vacation. It doesn’t have to dominate your thinking, but when you pull out the camera to take a photo, be intentional about it. You can go back into zombie vacation mode in a few minutes. For this moment, you are using your brain, eyes, and creativity to create something. And you don't have to be at an exotic location on a beach in Florida to get beautiful shots. The same principles that I used above work just as well when you are sitting in the stands, antsy for the Bears to win!