Improving your photography with Andreas Øverland

The Checklist Top

Before you start shooting, or before you leave just for a short walk with your camera, there are some things that you should learn to do by instinct. Then, when you have found something that may be worth immortalizing there are still more things you need to keep your mind on.

1. Consider if you will be needing a tripod. If not, bring one anyway.
2. Is there a card/film in the camera with enough available space/frames?
3. Remove the lens cover. If you forget this, or even worse: skip it on purpose, it may haunt you forever. Consider that you have just a split second to catch the best photograph in the world. And when you desperately want the camera to take the picture, it just says "I cant see anything but the back of the lens cover down here. What's going on?". Even more great is when some person you really want to make a portrait of happens to walk by, and you are given two seconds to make the shot... Yes, embarrassing.
4. Turn on the camera. Most cameras use very little power when they are on, unless they have some sort of forced continuous live view function or similar that shows what the camera sees on a screen.
5. Check that the basic settings are correct. For example, if you used your camera last night at ISO 3200 and you are now taking a walk in bright sunlight, then ISO 3200 will for the most part be way too much and not at all necessary. Another annoying thing is when you forget to turn off the self-timer. So when you spot a cool raven perching on the bust above your door, you hit the release and the camera goes beep..beep.. for ten seconds before it takes the picture, long after the raven has gone, to return nevermore.
   If you are inside, and the lighting conditions are difficult but fairly constant, it could be well worth it to set the exposure time/shutter speed and aperture to manual, dial in a fairly good exposure and keep it that way until the lighting changes. That way you avoid confusing your camera, which of course you don't want to do. Poor camera.

Great. So now you are ready to start taking some photos.

6. Anticipate the moment. Try to figure out situations that are about to happen and be ready before they strike.
7. If you have time, look through the viewfinder or at the camera screen and begin to compose your shot. If you don't have time: shoot anyway, and continue shooting until the scene is gone or you have enough. If you manage to get the viewfinder or screen up and running before the shot has to be made, then do something like this:
   • Measure the light, and lock the exposure. Be aware that large dark or bright areas in the frame can trick the camera to over- or underexpose. Use spot-metering if you can, to get exact metering on the subject you are actually photographing. If you don't have spot metering, one trick is to go real close to the subject you want correctly lit, let it fill the entire frame and THEN measure the light. Remember to lock that exposure so it stays the same when you recompose, and be careful not to cast shadows on the area you are measuring.
   • Decide how much depth of field you want (or can) use while still keeping the shutter speed within reasonable limits (more on this in chapter 5, Depth of Field)
   • Compose the shot by placing the main subjects appropriately (more on this in chapter 6, Basic Composition )
   • Make sure you are not too close, cutting away important parts of the motif. It's better to get a bit too much, which you can always crop away afterwards. Cloning out a building or a tree in the background is much easier than to "clone in" a person's head. A typical error is not noticing that you are cutting the shoes or toes of a person in the bottom of the frame. Let your eye follow the edges of the frame, all around
   • Check the focus. Is the autofocus on at all? It can be very hard to see the difference between a perfectly focused scene and an almost perfectly focused scene in the viewfinder or screen. And the results can be disastrous if the focus is not spot-on. This should be especially stressed when shooting with a large aperture like f/2.8 or less. When coming down to f/1.8 and f/1.2 you have to be careful if you want to focus and then recompose, because the range of acceptable focus is just a few millimeters, even if the subject is meters away. So a slight movement of the camera (millimeters) can ruin a photo. If your camera has live-view, and then with 100% zoom, you should use that together with the tripod that you brought even though you thought you wouldn't need it. (See? You did need it!)
8. Now then.. Click! Shoot! Capture! Expose! Create!
9. Have a quick glance at the preview and if possible take care to understand what the histogram tells you. Even if the result looks ok on the small screen, snap a few more so you increase the chances of getting at least one very good shot.

Allrighty. The next two chapters will be published on Friday, September 12th.
Andreas Øverland, 2008.09.03

Know your Camera Top

For a photographer the camera is (of course) a pretty important tool. It doesn't matter if it is some big Hasselblad with a fat digital back, or a shoebox with a hole in it: If you don't know how to use it, the chances of getting good results are small to none.

I've heard photographers with top-of-the-line professional cameras complain that the auto-setting does not give them the "correct" depth of field, or the "correct" shutter speed in all kinds of different situations. I've heard other photographers, with equally impressive photo gear, declare that an aperture of f/8 is always best, no matter the situation.

Those photographers fall into two categories: A) The ones that have been saying those things for a long time and will never change, B) The ones that are yet to discover the wonders of NOT using the auto-setting and NOT using f/8 all the time.
Cameras living with category A-people should be redistributed among the people in category C (those who don't say any of those things, but can't afford the cameras that the people in category A have).

But why do I think that it is wrong to say those things? Well, it may not be wrong for everyone. But for those who want to improve their photography it is very wrong. And the reason it is very wrong is that if you cannot control your most important tool for taking pictures, the results will suffer. You need to be able to know how to control your camera so that it will perform well in all situations, and most importantly, you should tell the camera how you want to interpret and capture a scene. Don't let the camera tell you. Have a look at the examples below.

These two pictures of exactly the same scene illustrate how much of a role the choice of aperture, or f-stop, makes in a picture. The picture on the left was shot at f/16 and the one on the right at f/1.2. With the auto-setting on, the camera would perhaps end up somewhere in between. Or perhaps with a quite large aperture, or a really small one. It's actually quite hard to say. And that's the point. With the auto-setting it is difficult to predict what the camera will do. But even if you do manage to correctly predict it, its very unlikely that the camera interprets the scene exactly the way you want it to.

Here is another example, with two pictures of the same situation: "The jumping kid"

Here the aperture, or f-stop is the same in both pictures but the shutter speed, or exposure time, is not. This is controlled by adjusting the ISO-speed. That is a number that says something about how sensitive the film or digital chip is to light. A low number (around 100) means that it is not very sensitive to light. A high number (1600-3200 and upwards) means that even the smallest amounts of light will register on the film/chip. Again, it is hard to predict what the camera would do in this situation in auto-mode, and so the result would be more or less random.

The two previous examples touch on the three basic settings you can adjust to interpret and capture scenes and situations the way you want to. The three settings are aperture or f-stop, shutter speed or exposure time, and ISO or film/chip light sensitivity. But give your camera operations manual a quick glance, if you haven't already thrown it away. If you have an SLR, digital or not, the manual is probably quite thick. Mine is around 100 pages. If you were to guess that the operations manual for my camera spends 100 pages to explain the three above mentioned settings, you would be wrong. It actually spends on average about one or two pages for every function the camera has. This means that there is a lot more to learn about controlling your camera than using these three settings. They are indeed important and when you are in control of them you are well prepared to make better photos than before. But, together with functions such as advanced light metering with over- and underexposure, exposure-bracketing (e.g. for HDRs), shooting with flash and so on, your control of your camera and thus your photos will improve even more.

So, summed up:

• Use the Av/Tv-mode or Manual-mode as much as possible (not the auto-mode)
• Experiment with all values of the aperture or f-stop. Making horrible mistakes are OK when you practice.

Got duct tape? Top

If you have a camera with a built-in flash, then you need duct tape.

I'm not a big fan of the light from a built-in camera flash. The worst lighting I see in photographs, especially in photographs of people, are from built-in camera flash units.
Have a look at these two pictures:

The left one is shot on "auto-mode" with the on-camera flash firing away, hurray. Notice the hard shadows on the wall (they would be more visible if the subject and wall were further away from the camera), under her chin and the added "bonus" of the flash reflection in the metallic part of the background. The photo to the right has of course been shot without camera flash, with the same camera, same lens, but in Av-mode where I can decide the depth of field I want, and then the camera can choose the rest. The lighting except for the flash is the same as in the left photo (outside under overcast sky in the evening). The photo on the right has a soft, pleasant and most of all: flattering light. Being nine, this model doesn't have any wrinkles, but if your subject has any, they will all show up very well with the built-in camera flash. That's a technique that some inconsiderate press photographers use to make normal people (though often politicians) look like old witches or ugly wizards.

The best tip I ever heard on how to avoid using the built-in camera flash was to fix it down with duct tape. There is a reason that an 8000€ digital SLR does NOT have built-in flash.

Summed up in "one" word:

• Built-in flash sucks.

Change the perspective Top

We have all seen vacation photos that do not appeal to us. Mostly these photos are shot by others, and we were not there when the photos were taken. It could be argued that the photos are uninteresting to us because we have no direct connection to the situations or the scenery that the photos portray. So if we had this connection to the pictures, they would be interesting because they reminded us of something we experienced. But on the other hand we have all seen photos of places we have never gone to and perhaps never will, and still they were fantastically great. How is this possible?

One very easy way of making photos stand out in a crowd, is to change the angle of view, or the perspective from which you shoot them. We see things all the time from a "grown up" perspective. This means that we are very used to seeing landscape, sunsets, trees, beaches and everything from perhaps a height of between 1.5 to 1.8 meters (the average eyelevel of an adult standing upright).

In order to catch our attention, a photo first of all needs to show us something that we are not very used to see.

For example, simply shooting a scene from an unusual perspective increases the special character of the photo. Have a look at the pictures below. None of them contain super interesting subjects, but they show things from slightly different angles, and at least one turned out to be quite nice.


An extreme example perhaps. But it illustrates the point: To the left there is just a chair but there is no context. To the right, the chair is still the subject but with a context. Now we see what a person would be seeing if he/she was sitting in the chair. Or it could be interpreted as a chair being alone in the wilderness, whereas in the left picture you can't really see the chair's surroundings. I've used the same lens, and I stood at nearly the same place when I shot the two photos.


Here the log provided a diagonal in the photo. In the left picture, the log its too far away to serve any purpose, and again we look at the sea from a very normal perspective (adult standing upright). The right picture shows the same scene from an extreme angle with long lines and a low perspective giving a new look at things. It's still the same sea and log, but more unusual and thus more interesting. More sky, when it is cloudy and rich in contrast like this, adds even more interest.


Here the difference is huge. In the right photo, the camera is about one meter lower than in the left photo, and it is pointing slightly upwards instead of slightly downwards. When I was there, I could see that the rocks were jagged and had lots of interesting shapes, even when I looked at it from my point of view as a standing adult in the left photo. But the two-dimensional representation in a picture throws away a lot of information. In the right one, it is easy to see that the rocks have shapes, and the whole scene is completely different with a real dramatic look compared to the bland left snapshot-version.

In these three examples our view of the scenery has changed a lot just by lowering the point of view a little. It is very easy to do, gives much better pictures in many cases, and is well worth the effort.

"Look at it from my point of view" is something most of us have heard someone say, and said ourselves. The same applies to photography: Try the same subject from different angles.

Depth of Field Top

The term Depth of Field (DoF) refers to the amount of sharpness in a photo, in relation to the distance from the main point of (optical) perfect focus to the area where things start to get blurred. To control the DoF we use the aperture or f/stop on our lenses/cameras.

The first and most obvious use of different apertures is to control the amount of light we let through the lens. However, given that the exposure is as we want it to be (dark, normal, bright and so on), the aperture is perhaps the one thing has has the most impact on our composition except for the actual scene and placement of the camera as discussed in the previous chapter.

When I am not in the studio shooting I use aperture priority mode on my camera probably about 90% of the time (the rest is manual mode, if the lighting conditions require more than the usual attention). This is because I want to have full control of that very important factor in the composition.

By choosing different DoFs the contents of a scene will change drastically. The example from the example in chapter two illustrate how much it changes:


Think KISS when composing photos. KISS is short for "Keep it Simple Stupid!". Look at each element in the scene, and decide if they add necessary content to the photo or not. If not, they do not need to be in the photo. As in the photo to the left, the car in the background does not really need to be in a photo of a wet dripping branch with red berries. So, a good tool for removing the car is to make it disappear in the out-of-focus area. And that means using a small f-number, which gives a large aperture. These size-terms are easily confused, but that doesn't really matter as long as you achieve what you want in camera.

Of course throwing things out of focus is not always the answer. Sometimes we need to take care to include things in focus. Especially when doing group portraits, the DoF really comes into play. If it is to shallow/short then the people in the back may be blurred. If it is to long, it means the f/stop is The drawings below illustrate different DoFs (click on the red links to switch drawing)
1. Short DoF. 2. Longer DoF. 3. Position of focal plane.

Personally I tend to go for a very short DoF. On many occasions it is a matter of taste I guess, and there is not really a "correct" DoF for any given situation. Explore the DoF and try to find something you like.

Here are some examples where I have used very short DoF (with f/1.2)


Summed up: Use DoF to choose what is allowed in to your photo, use it for composition, not only for controlling exposure.

Basic composition Top

There are some "rules" to basic composition. And in photography, as in many other areas of life and art, rules are meant to be broken. I have seen photographs made by both by legends and amateurs where basic rules were broken. When I have asked the amateurs why they broke a specific rule, they answer "rules are meant to be broken" (without really knowing which rules they broke or why). Good photographers break rules that they know, on purpose, and they know why they did it and what they achieved.

Finding out when (in which cases) and why one should choose to break them is a big, long and arduous task. That is why (amongst other things) digital photography is so great. We can take lots of pictures virtually for free, and then get immediate visual feedback. No waiting for weeks to get a roll or two of film back with pictures we don't remember taking. It should perhaps be noted, that back in the days when the EXIF equivalent was to keep notes for all the photos, and then comparing the notes with the results afterwards, photographers probably learned stuff "better". Now we have the possibility to learn "faster", and we must take care to learn "well" at the same time.

Now back to basic composition and the one basic rule. It is far from always you have to break the rules to make a good photograph. Have a look at The Godfather movies for example. Many of the greatest scenes there (if not all) are composed using the most basic rule. Also, many of the great photos made by Henri Cartier Bresson are composed using the same basic rule. It is sometimes called "the rule of thirds", or the slightly more advanced "the rule of the golden mean". There are tons of good literature on the web explaining the principals behind the golden mean, and the examples of where they appear both in mathematics and where they exist in nature. One of the more interesting articles I read, was how the ancient Greeks used the golden mean when they laid out and designed the buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. Its worth a google or two to find out more about that.

The rule of thirds, works by first dividing your frame into a 3x3 grid like in the figure below:

Then, place your main subject or subjects alongside or in the intersection, or intersections between any of the four lines in the frame.

The theory is, that it will create a picture that is more pleasant to look at than a version where the main subject is placed dead center.

The rule of thirds doesn't really stop there. It could be applied to what you include into your photo. Its not always applicable, but having 1. a foreground, 2. middle ground, and 3. a background in a photos is also nice. Obviously it gives depth and in many cases a feeling of scale to the scene.

The rule of the golden mean, is almost exactly the same as the rule of thirds when it comes to placing the subjects of interest in a frame. The on only difference is that the number 3 has been exchanged with the number 1.61803399. Dividing a frame into segments that match that number is more cumbersome. Below is the a figure that illustrates how the golden mean places the lines and points of interest:

As you can see, if you switch between the two variants, the diffrence is not huge. So in camera where its easiest to approximate the rule of thirds, go for a 3, and then, if you really want to be mathematically correct (or mathematically incorrect if you are breaking the rule) you can do that in post processing.

But why do we sometimes want to break this rule? Maybe one answer is that we want to make a more striking photo. For example if we cut a portrait of a person real tight, and use a widescreen format to display it, the eyes and the mouth may end up far away from any of the lines or intersections. Would it still work? Yes and no. Sometimes it will look really good, and dramatic, and other times the portrait will loose its point entirely. One has to experiment not only with learning the rules and how to break them, but also why and then find out what really happens with a photo when you break or follow the most basic rule of composition. My tips is to play around a lot in PhotoShop or similar, with the cropping of your favorite photographs to see if you can make something else come out. Often it is very valuable to have others standing by looking at it as you work. Other people might not have the same preconception as the photographer has, of how the photo is supposed to look like.

So summed up: Experiment with using, and not using, the rule of thirds, both in a the 2d-sense and with depth in the scene. Take pictures that work well for experimenting in post processing. Don't be afraid to crop away to the core of the photo.

Two other chapters that are relevant to this process of learning what works and what does not, are "Learning from others" and "Explore mistakes".

Learning from others Top

Giving your own photos negative and at the same time constructive critiques is not easy in the beginning. Writing negative critiques on other people's photos are not that hard. Still, making them constructive takes some practice. I had one of my greatest "moments" in my photography when I all of a sudden could take that constructive criticism into my own viewfinder, and pre-criticize my own compositions before I hit the shutter. I achieved that by practicing to put into words what I found good and bad in other people's photos, both technically and artistically.

To get good training in criticizing other people's photos, you should join one or several photo-communities (online or off) where it is accepted and perhaps even expected that people give constructive feedback. It's important to note here that the main point is not that you get lots of critiques on your photos. Rather, you should practice putting into words what you like about photos, or why you don't find them good, what could be improved technically, or what was technically good. If you can distinguish good and bad in other people's photos, you are able to use that knowledge in your own photography as well. And that is your goal here.

I've seen some people argue that a negative critique can not be constructive. I strongly disagree. I use the definition of constructive as something that produces progress or development. Others define it as something that is just positive; according to them a constructive negative critique would be impossible.

If you want to learn a bit more about photography, consider these critiques on a photo:
a) That's a fantastic photo!!!! :) Great work!
b) Oh, that's really nice. I really like photos of people having fun, it makes me so happy.
c) I don't like that photo. I don't get the point.
d) Probably ok for anyone related to the people in the photo, but angle is just 100% non-interesting.

It's always nice to see that people like your photos, so a) is something we would like to hear. But it can be doubted that the person giving that critique has any idea about what a good photograph really is. Alternative b) is positive, but unless this photo is for one specific person it is not really interesting for you to know whether this person likes pictures of people having fun. The only thing you learn here is what this person likes, not if your photograph was any good, let alone why. The negative critique in alternative c) is almost as uninteresting as alternative b). It doesn't give you any information as to how you could make the photograph better, why it was bad or what was unclear for the viewer. Typically that kind of critique is given by people who are too much tied up in rules and only expects normal, unoriginal, non-creative, safe and politically correct photos (according to their views). They don't want to be surprised or shocked. So, here you may be on to something, but you still don't know exactly what :) Maybe. It could also be that your photo is bad, for several technical and artistic reasons. The last alternative is also a negative critique, but it contains a couple of hits at why the photo is not super duper. It could be better if the critic had taken his/her time to explain for example how the angle could be improved to make the scene more interesting.

In the beginning, it may be hard to write the constructive part of a negative critique, and it will also be hard to express why the photo is good or bad from an objective viewpoint. But if you find someone else in the communities who writes constructive critiques you could learn from reading their critiques as well.

I have experience with a few online communities such as: PhotoSig.com used to be pretty good, until they decided that quantity was better than quality in the critiques. Now the "heroes" there are most often really below-average photographers that write loads of seemingly clever critiques, when they should be out practicing photography instead. But that should not keep you from honing your critique-writing skills there. The photos range from fantastic to crap, so you can practice every level of positive and negative.

The scandinavian site PhotoSight.org was overflowing with category a) critiques, and people got angry if you wanted to point out flaws in their photos. The amount of photos there is just a fraction of that on PhotoSig.com, and the quality is not that good, but it still offers good grounds for practicing.

Flickr.com is now where I do most of my critique practicing. Flickr is not meant to be a photo critique site like the other two, so people are more friendly and just seem to enjoy photography more there. In addition, flickr has so much more than the other two when it comes to community-thingys which inspire and makes it all more fun.

There exist countless more such photo critique sites out there so have a look around to find one or two that suit you.

Summed up: Join a community or two online and/or offline where you can get critiques, as well as practicing giving them. Your goal is to take the same constructive critiques into your viewfinder so that the resulting photo has already been through a round of critiquing when it comes out of the camera.

Waiting for the light Top

When you are not in a position to directly control light, you may just have to wait for it. Some time ago I read about one of the Hasselblad Masters (a photographer who has been awarded a master photographer by Hasselblad). He was travelling the Swedish coastline looking for motives when he came across something he really liked. And then he waited for eight hours on the spot, until the light was right. Then: "clickkaswchok" (sound effect), and then he went home.

I think that tells us quite a lot about what being a good photographer is. Granted, a press photographer may not be in a position where he/she can ask for example Senator Obama to stand in one place for eight hours because the sun might come to create some nice light right there if it were to set nicely. But in my opinion light is the most important part of photography after all, so why should we not take a few extra hours in order to make sure it is really good when we take our pictures.

To anticipate the moment is a good tip in photography, but it doesn't just cover anticipating situations that may occur in a few seconds or so. It also means that we could anticipate situations such as the possible occurrence of a future sunrise. Perhaps there will be a sunrise following this very night? An action to be taken upon such anticipation would be to get up before sunrise, and bring the camera.

Light can change drastically in just a matter of seconds. So shooting the same subject at the same plac can give very different results depending on the time of day and the season. Also, changing the perspective changes how the light falls on a subject in relation to the camera. Have look at the following examples:

The two photos are shot with only a few seconds in between, and the subject is the same; only the angle is different. The resulting change in lighting is drastically different and changes the entire scene. So even if you cannot move the light source, you can in most cases move yourself so the light falls differently into your scene.

I'm subscribing to a podcast series published by Rob Nunn over at www.robnunnphoto.com. Today I listened to his episode touching the british painter John Constable (1776-1837). He talked about painting the same subjects in different lighting conditions. A quote I found particularly inspiring was this: "No two days are alike. Not even two hours. Neither were there ever two leafs of a tree alike since the creation of the world."

When you are waiting for the light, time passes slowly. When the light is there, you must make good use of it. Mother nature will not be waiting for you to get your camera out. Even though she presents us with wonderful light, we must do the work by capturing it at the right time.

Summed up: Good light is worth waiting for, staying up late for, getting up early for, and even moving a little around for :)

Using the 4th Dimension Top

There are quite a few different ways we can use the fourth dimension; time, to make our photographs more interesting. We can leave our shutters open for seconds, to capture the unreal shapes of movement. We can keep the shutter time really short to freeze motion unseen by the human eye. And we can take several photographs and present them as a series to convey a development in a situation, a movement or an expression.

Time is a strange and unexplained phenomenon. Still we are quite used to dealing with it in our daily lives. Even so when taking pictures we have to give it some thought if we want to incorporate or use time in our compositions. I have listed some examples to each of the above mentioned ways to use time.

Below are two technically simple photos to take. You need a tripod (told you so in chapter one), and you need to use a long exposure. Some moving and splashing water would be nice too.

For stopping movement, and giving a real feeling of stopping time, you need to use a really short exposure. Fun things to photograph are of course moving things, but they should disturb something as they are moving along. A horse running in loose dirt, a stone making a splash in still water, and the classic macro of water droplet hitting the surface. The photo of the bird below is shot with 1/8000 of a second.



A series of photographs is needed when you intend to show that something happens. Not just that something is about to happen, or has just happened. If you presented just one of the photos in the next series, it would be hard to see what Ole is really trying to do. First photo: Is he so angry at the film that he cuts it to pieces? Last photo: Is he just taking a picture?



Summed up: Think not only about a photo as a two-dimensional representation of the real three-dimensional world. Think of time as an extra dimension that you can capture to make your photos even more interesting.

Perfectly Boring Top

When things, for example a camera, a lens, a car, a helicopter-engine or a computer work perfectly for a long time we are usually very happy with the thing in question. However when it comes to the creative arts, like music, design, painting, drawing and of course photography, photo-technical perfection should no longer be a holy grail.

In music, artists sometimes use computers to generate all kinds of instruments. Computers are very good at keeping time down to milliseconds and beyond, and thus they can keep the rhythm mathematically correct and perfect. But the musicians know that it does not sound real when everything is mathematically perfect, so the computers are made to make small errors as they play. It is not much, but it is enough to make it sound more human. Some drum-machines for example have a button called "humanizer", so they can introduce human-like errors into the otherwise perfect sound.

Then think about all the different, yet great vocalists. Here enters the matter of taste, but if you compare for example Thom Yorke (radiohead), Bono, Diana Krall (jazz musician) and Madonna, they all have very different but undeniably great voices, for the music they make. None of them have "perfect" voices. And if all vocalists in jazz, opera, pop, death-metal, gospel and so on had the same perfect voice, it would sound the same, and it would be boring (but still perfect).

Many of the best paintings in the world are not perfect in any sense when it comes to the accurate reproduction of reality. In the painting of Mona Lisa, the horizon not only changes place, but tilts differently on the two sides of her head. Monet's renderings of the world are nothing like the world at all, even though we can clearly tell what his paintings are supposed to represent.

So why is it that perfect is boring? Perhaps it is because it is obvious, or just plain expected. If you look at a photo, and it appears just like you expect the world to be like, as seen with exactly your eyes, it would not be as interesting as if it had some surprise or unexpected quality or a unique character to it. Just like in music and painting.

Seek not the technically perfect photo. Rather see if you can avoid fulfilling the obvious expectations the viewers of your photograph have. That way you have a better chance to create something new, unique and interesting for your viewers. When you take pictures, ask questions like: Do horizons need to be level? Do people need to be in focus? Does over- or underexposure always result in bad photos? Do the colors (if any) have to be 100% realistic (which is impossible anyway)?

Below are a few examples of non-perfect photos, that still sort of work out nicely in the end.

Level horizon? No thanks, I'll have the diagonal instead.


Correctly exposed? Then the eeriness would disappear.


Focus not correctly placed. True, and it is also unlike any other photo I have seen of horses.


The person is out of focus, in motion and cut in half. That is not how we normally see the world. Good.


She surely cannot have green skin. True, and that is what separates this photo from many other photos where the colors appear to be more correct.

Analyze mistakes Top

Many of the biggest discoveries in human history have been made while we were looking for something else. Take the wheel for example. It was discovered while the early humans tried to perfect the hole. As they were cutting a round hole in a piece of wood, the center part fell out and started to roll. On the other end of the (seriousness) scale: the way that Rutherford discovered that atoms had nuclei, how Charles Darwin found out how the evolution of species works, how Archimedes discovered volume, and how Newton came to think of gravity; these are all examples of where the discoveries themselves, or precursors to the discoveries, happened when the final discovery was not even a thought.

Brainstorming is a process or a trick to get our brain into a state where moments of extra insight or creativity more easily occur. That's good if you don't have any ideas on what to photograph. But if you want to find new ways to photograph subjects you already have, it's hard to just think up that from nothing.

When I try to find a new technique with for example lighting or composition, I start by doing something I know will give a really crappy result. Note that "a little crappy" is not enough, it must be utterly catastrophic.
Then I try to overdo and slightly alter the effect that causes the bad results. This sometimes gives interesting elements in the result. These elements do not have to be caused directly by the effect, but they might not have appeared without the mistakes made intentionally. If interesting elements come up, I analyze those and try to isolate them to remove the crappy parts of the result. This way, what was originally intended as a really bad photograph is stripped down to one or more elements that I like.

Of course this method is not foolproof; therefore it is not guaranteed that new discoveries will be made every time. But it is still a valuable exercise, as you may learn that you must not be afraid of taking some bad photographs now and then. Because you can learn a lot from them, it could actually be important to take bad photographs from time to time. But if the bad photographs are to be of any value to you, you must look at them and analyze the mistakes and the results, not just delete them after a couple of seconds of viewing on the camera display.

One common thing I see in amateur/hobby photographers who never move up from the very beginner class, is that they always pursue the technically perfect photograph (see previous chapter). That means they rarely look at their worst pictures with an intent to learn something from them. These photographers are afraid of experimenting, or put in another way: they are afraid of being creative. And that is not a good trait for someone who wants to take good photographs.

Summed up: Make mistakes intentionally, analyze the results thoroughly, and be creative.

Seek inspiration Top

There is a very large number of extremely inspiring photographs available at your very fingertips. Being inspired by great photography is a pleasant way to improve your own skills. Making photographs (both taking the photos and editing them afterwards) when you are in an inspired mood increases the chances you have for discovering new techniques and styles. And more importantly it increases the chances for great photographs.

One of my best sources for good photography at the moment is the people I follow on twitter. In addition, Twitter allows you to search for tweets tagges with anything you like. In my Tweetdeck setup, I have a search running for the tags #photography #photo #flickr #photoshop and #photoblog. Through that search I get tweets with lots and lots of links, and many of those point to excellent photography. When users post good stuff, I follow them.

Another great source for inspirational photography is Flickr. Though their group system you can find and join groups that have photos that match your taste. Some of my favorite groups are:

• The Flickr Portrait Gallery
• Fine art portraits in Black&White
• The Art of Landscape
• Tilt & Shift Photography

Other more obvious but some times harder to find sources, are the web sites of the photographers them selves. With the enormous amount of personal photography web sites out here, the best ones easily disappear in a big heap of lousy ones. Here are a few photographer that inspire me:

• Hans Strand
• Marco Grob
• Michael Christopher Brown
• Morten Krogvold
• Petter Hegre (Contains Nudity)

Magazines, both online and in print are great not just for looking at photographs but very often give tips that cover a broader set of themes that can still be inspiring. I regularly read and/or visit these magazines:

• Lens Culture
• Lenswork
• Black + White Photography Magazine UK
• Black and White Magazine US

Summed up: Seek out great photography and let yourself be inspired.

I need coffee Top

Did you find these tips valuable? Please consider donating a little so I can buy more coffee and stay up late writing more stuff like this. If you have wishes or suggestions please use the comment-thingy below or just drop me an email at andreasoverlandyey@wheegmathingyil.com. You can also follow me on Twitter, where I will "tweet" links when new tips, articles and photoblog updates are posted.

Andreas Øverland