Photography For Writers and Digital Marketers Part III

What to Do and Challenges You will Face

So far in this series, we’ve talked about why you need to be adding multiple forms of media to your arsenal of tricks as a writer. Then we talked about what equipment you need. In this article we’ll talk about some basics of photography and some of the challenges you’ll face, before wrapping it up with how to make money as a writer with photography.

This article is a fusion of nuts and bolts photography, or what you actually do to take a photo, and philosophy of photography – i.e. why you do those nuts and bolts. Photography is mainly down to composition, so we’ll start there.

Basic Composition

Composition in photography is about how you make the photo.

What is the subject of your photo?
What’s in the background?
Where do you want your subject to be in the photo? (Left, right, top, bottom, centre.)
What is the lighting like? Is it in your control? (A room with adjustable lights) or out of your control? (The beach on a sunny day?)
What story are you trying to tell?
Where are the lines in your photo? (For instance, the horizon line might be one, or a row of houses might create lines.)
What are the colours like?

These are fundamental questions you can ask yourself. The whole point of thinking about composition for a beginner is thinking in terms of the end product. Writers create a piece of work over a very long time – we write, we draft, we tear our work up, we edit, we sculpt, we trim. When you’re taking a photograph, most of your work is done in the second you click the button.

When you look at a painting, you’re seeing everything at once. There’s no dramatic reveal over the course of hours. When you look through your camera’s viewfinder, you are seeing all the raw materials that are going into your photo. Essentially, the view on your screen is like a painting. You’ve got to make sure everything is in that you need in, and everything is out that you don’t want in there.

A Few Quick Hints Regarding Composition

Get a clear background before you start.

You can always put more stuff in. If you can, take everything out of the way before you start. It’s always irritating to get the perfect photo and then realize that your finger is in the top right corner, or you’ve got a computer cable running behind your subject.

Get on the level of your subject.

If you want to take a picture of your dog and have it look as close to its real appearance as possible, then you’re going to need to have your eye-line, and your camera’s viewfinder, at the level of your dog’s eyes. If you take a shot from above, your dog is going to look tiny.

If you can, try and control the light.

My first couple of days had me sat around at home trying to take photos of random objects. What I learned pretty quickly is that you need to control as many variables as you can, with light being a major one. Even if it’s the middle of the day, draw your curtains and use lamps as opposed to the sunlight. For some reason beyond my limited understanding, the camera does strange things to light, so that the briefest glimmer can be blinding in an end photograph.

Here is a video that I found on YouTube (credit Jared Polin,) which explains some of these things with a bit more expertise than I do:

Challenges You Will Face

Photography is pretty tricky. I’m never going to master it. If you’re looking to master it, you probably need a bit more help from this series by a complete amateur.

That said, even for a writer looking to take small photos so that they can break up the text on their website or make a cover for their short story, there are going to be challenges. Here are a list of challenges that I had within a couple of weeks of learning to take photographs.

The Sun hates you.

I’ve talked about lighting above, so I won’t repeat myself. The Sun hates me, and it’ll probably hate you too. Learn to get an angle where your subject isn’t being completely swallowed by the light.

I’m still boring.

Photography is about making a record of something funny or interesting. I think a lot of people imagine that when they start taking photographs, their life will become interesting and full of National Geographic sunrises (or Playboy photoshoots.) In reality, you need to get out and make yourself take photos, otherwise you won’t have any.

You need to make sure your equipment is ready to go when it needs to be.

The amount of times I’ll go to take a photo and not be able to is infuriating. I’ll forget to put the SD card back in after uploading photos. Or I’ll forget to charge the battery and be able to take 3 photos total before the thing dies on me.

You’ll realize how good photographers are.

Yesterday, I was surrounded by squirrels. I thought I’d win the next Countryfile Calendar competition. The squirrels would not stay still for the briefest second. I have about 200 grey blurry blob photos. The amount of skill it must take to photograph something for a David Attenborough special is completely unfathomable.

Data Storage/Saving/Uploading

I know I’ve written about this in a different article, but I can’t remember which one. Essentially, if you start photographing with a high quality camera, you’re going to need a solution for storing all the digital files. They take up a massive amount of space compared to a phone camera image, and so you’ll eat up images quickly.

I said above about getting in line with your subject. This is more difficult than you think. Taking a photograph of a flower is easy in theory. In practice, you’re six inches from the floor and you’re not at the right angle and so you have to twist your head and the like. You might want to take up yoga.

Those are some of the challenges I faced.

I’ll leave the rest of the article at that. A lot of learning about photography is trial and error.