What makes your images work? Certainly the camera of course, but you already know how to work most of the buttons on your camera, how to focus and expose, but what makes the images work?

The issue with photography is how do you take a 2 dimension image and convey the story you are trying to tell. If you think about it, a still image has a lot of parts. There is depth of field. How much of the subject do you want in focus? Do you want the background in focus as well? What about shutter speed? Are you going to freeze the subject with a higher shutter speed or blur the subject with a slow one? Then there is exposure. This can determine the mood of the photograph and is a conscious choice you make when creating your image.

These are choices you make before even putting the camera to the eye. Successful images have layers, and I’m talking about the ones we may add in Photoshop, but rather, the choices we make at the time we go click and a successful image can have infinite possibilities. Where do you place the camera? What lens do you use? Are you shooting at eye level, up high or down low? Where will the subject be placed in the frame?

Then there is the post processing choices we make. Do you make the picture brighter or darker? What do you do with contrast? How do you use the colors? Is it “all saturation all the time” or is there a more subtle approach? And how do you make the eye move around the frame the way you want it to?

A photograph isn’t made, it’s constructed with careful choices before, during and after the capture. A photographer that can utilize all these things will make stronger photographs.

I submit to you the best way to make more successful photographs is to make more of them. People who write and write well, do it a lot and they also read others work to determine what works. It is know different in photography. Follow and find photographers whose work you admire. Study their photographs. Analyze what drew you to the photograph and what makes it succesful.

Take a moment to look at the photograph above that I took at the Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica in upstate New York. What choices did I make? Would more or fewer elements make this photograph stronger? How about the composition choice? What about the focal length? Would it feel different if I had used a different choice?

You should be able to look at an image and be able to say why it looks the way it does and (here’s the key) what choices the photographer made to make it look that way. It’s a non-negotiable. But here’s the payoff: if you know how to do that kind of thinking with the photographs of others, you will know how to do that kind of thinking with the camera to your eye. You will have trained your eye. You will become a little more fluent in the language we speak as photographers.

Please share your thoughts, I would love to hear how your thought process works.