Guide on how we could take great photos

How could we take great photos? This is every photographer’s question. All shutterbugs wish they could take some good photos to please themselves but also to gain confidence and motivations from other viewers. But how?

Nobody could take eye-catching photos by the first ever time he or she pressing down the shutter button. He has to go through a learning process. An arithmetic genius can answer a complicated mathematics question only if he has learned how to calculate in the first place! But is it enough? Can we become a professional photographer by just learning how to take photos from guide books, magazines, workshops, seminars and the likes? Not quite. You have to practice!

The most important thing to do to improve your photo taking skills is practice after learning from the pro’s. Pointless if you have learned all the skills from pro-shooters but without practicing them. You still need to take endless photos to improve your skills gradually. Only by shooting countless photos you could master the technical skills you have learned and also the photography tools you are using. This is why pro-shooters such as Ken Rockwell or Jarvis always emphasize that the best camera for any shutterbug is always the camera that is with you right now! By shooting more only you know how to handle your photo gears and to take better photos. If you ask questions such as, “Should I upgrade my camera to xxxx?”, you still haven’t done enough with your existing camera. Professional photographers never ask these kind of questions. They know the limit of their cameras and the time to upgrade them. As simple as that.

But is it enough to take great photos by just learning and practicing? Unfortunately, it’s still not! The ability to take great photos, as highlighted above, is through learning and practicing. However, in the process of learning, you still need to develop something that we can’t learn, which is the “Photographer’s Eyes”, or a pair of eyes that could determine if the photo you have just taken is good! You have to train your eyes to determine what is good in a photo. And this is the most difficult part. The major difference between a pro and a beginner is how they see surrounding lighting or scenes before taking a photo. Professional photographers know how and when to take a shot with the best lighting and post edit it to become a great photo in the eyes of other viewers.

Good Photographers’ Eyes cannot be developed overnight. It has to take a long time of learning and practicing to be gradually improved. Try looking at those old photos you took some times back and you will notice how bad was your shots and how bad was the compositions those days. But you did not realise that previously. Why? We always think we have produced our best photos until we have developed further our “Photographer’s Eyes”. When we are progressively learning, practicing our skills and developing our eyes, we see our objects differently and make shots differently until coming to a stage (after a long period of time of course) where we are able to shoot similar photos to other pro-shooters that are great to your own eyes as well as most others. And this is when you are able to take great photos!

Taking great photos is as easy as 1,2 and 3, but it takes a long time to achieve… 🙂 – Cecil Lee Photography