See It As It Is — 7 Practical Tips to Improve your Eye as a Photographer
Your Call To Adventure
In the beginning of our photography journey, we really have no idea what we’re getting into and it’s important that we don’t.
We are stepping out on our Hero’s Journey — we are meant to be naive and full of blind exuberance. It makes us take risks and reach out to make connections that we otherwise wouldn’t have. We are meant to make beginner photographer mistakes.
I’m not going to go through the entire Hero’s Journey of becoming a photographer. That’s too long and winding and it gives too much of the magic away.
I’m just going to give you what I wish I had known at that very first stage. Just simple, objective advice that would have saved me a lot of fluffing around with bad editing, bad crops, and bad scene setting.
It’s something that would have made me a clearer director and it would have made my subjects (humans and horses) enjoy their time in my photoshoots much more.
It is going to sound really simple but don’t be fooled by its simplicity. So much more of life is revealed to us when we look more deeply into simple concepts.
So here all of the advice rolled up into one piece of wisdom I wish I had understood back when I first started photography:
See it as it is
“Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.”
― Dr. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Now, if you are young and in your first season of photography, you definitely won’t be seeing it as it is. Seeing a scene as it is in front of you takes a certain quality of attention that just takes time to develop.
I don’t even see reality as it really is. No one really does.
It is more an attitude that we can adopt of wishing, hoping, desiring to see it as it is. Which means allowing it to be as it is.
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”
— John O’Donohue.
The tree before me when I was 20 is not the same tree that stands before me now and it will again be another tree when I’m 80. I am growing in my inner capacity to see the tree for what it really is.
Now, that’s all very symbolic and meaningful — but where does that leave us sitting around right now?
My Libra sun means that I adore the quality of beauty in metaphor and poetic ideas – but my Capricorn moon is (not so) patiently waiting for the practical information to utilise.
So here it is,
7 practical tips to improve your eye as a young photographer
If you are learning how to develop your photographer’s eye, read through these 7 tips below and write out – in your own handwriting – onto a piece of paper the bits that stand out most and place that paper somewhere you can see it while you’re in your editing chair.
1 — Give the subject context
If you are photographing a subject/object — step back and allow it some context. Give the girl some grass to frolic in at the bottom left corner and the fruit bowl a good table cloth below it to sit on. The corners and edges of your images want to add something to your subject.
Say you are coming in for a close up, of the eyes for instance, there’s still context to give within the frame – it’s just that the context is now the face.
2 — Develop your original lenses — your eyes
Pretend that they are a camera and go for a walk and anytime something catches your eye, stop. Observe it. See the qualities of it that made you stop. Maybe even frame it up with your hands. Good photographers are really just master observers.
3 — Hesitate to stop the moment
Which happens when you’re directing too much. When we ask the people to be still, it will flatten the image. Stillness is close to deadness. Emotion and movement add dimensionality. What really brings a photograph to life is the real living energy flowing in the scene that you are capturing.
4 — Create the conditions for aliveness
Piggybacking off of that last one – setting the scene before you pick your camera up will do a lot of your work for you. You’ve picked a beautiful set up and placed one subject across from another (girl and horse, girl and boy etc) — if they have an authentic connection, let them show it to you.
5 — Learn to love people
Or at least be interested in them. Talk unscripted with people — get into conversations that light you both up. It’s hard to do that if you’re concentrating too much on your camera settings. Practice it without your camera. I’m hesitant to say ‘practice’ here because that sort of implies forcing yourself to be interested in people and you don’t want any amount of forcing interest because that’s inauthentic and people can sniff that from a mile away.
6 — Prime lenses/restriction
This one is more subjective but I think there is still an objective lesson in there. Giving yourself too many options is confusing and distracting. I am so glad that I bought myself prime lenses that kept me present in that one frame of reference. My 50mm is a whole different mindset to my 135mm. Am I welcoming more context into this scene with my 50mm or am I isolating the subject away from context to focus onto something specific with my 135mm? Sticking with one at a time allowed me to see more deeply into the scene.
7 — Perfection isn’t achievable, but don’t stop striving for it.
A paradox. The idea of perfection is a trap we all fall into because we want to create beautiful things. Beauty and perfection have an interesting correlation.
“The possible ranks higher than the actual.”
― Martin Heidegger
Without getting too philosophical about this heavy statement, I’ll just say that there’s an unlimited amount of possible. So any great photos that you take will always have more possibility of what it could have been, ad infinitum. It’s a thing to strive for but it is also an illusion. Let go of any ideas that you will ever achieve it and that will open your perspective up to see authenticity as the real beauty.
Bonus tip
— Follow the light
Light is our paint as photographers and there are certain aspects and conditions that bring out lights best feature — its capacity to highlight a thing we love and bring more information / meaning into being.
If you are reading this — I admire you, just like I admire who I was when I first started photography. Yes I made ‘mistakes’ and took ‘bad’ photos, but failure isn’t just an unfortunate thing we have to deal with – it is absolutely necessary for the process.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett
It’s perhaps hard to accept that when you’re frustrated with your images not being at the level you want them to be — but the fact that you can imagine a better version of them implies that you’re capable of doing them – remember #7.
If you want to chat through your frustrations or go through any of this stuff in relation to your own subjective circumstances, you can message me on WhatsApp — https://wa.me/c/64279348238
3 voice messages at around 3 minutes each and 3 thoughtful replies. Get it off your chest and make more beautiful images.