Rambling about photography on a glorious sunny day when I am trapped indoor in the grounds of my workplace.

Posted on March 13, 2007
Filed Under Photography |

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I am amateur photograph rambling about my hobby and how I am learning to improve my photography skill. To be a good photographer one must be able to identify what is good and bad in a photo. It is called the ability to give constructive criticisms. I find this an extremely difficult task simply because of my inexperience in photography but I am trying to improve by training myself to look at photographs taken by professional and amateur photographers. You can find a huge resource of photographs from stock photography web sites, magazines, books, etc. and I am learning to analyze the photographs. I tell myself I must set a standard of what I personally see as a good photograph and use that as a base line to evaluate the quality of my photographs. It's setting a personal photography benchmark. As a realistic measure I would use an average photograph as a base line and set to improve
above the average benchmark. So what criteria do I use to determine my base line? I use a list of criteria that I think is a good starter's guideline to evaluating the quality of photographs. It is divided into 8 categories as shown below. I use a rating scale of 1 to 10. 1 being bad and 10 being perfect. This will provide measurable quantitative indication of a good or bad photo.

1. Composition
This is the arrangement of the elements of art in a work.

2. Creativity/Originality
This is a quality given to ideas expressed as unique, novel or different from any other previously recognized ideas of a similar nature

3. Depth of Field/Focus
The maximum clarity or distinctness of an image rendered or the apparent sharpness of a photograph considering the distance between the nearest and farthest elements that appear to maintain acceptable sharpness and clarity

4. Colour/Tonal Range
The quality of a given colour and how that differs slightly from a primary colour

5. Noise/Grain
The granular particles in photograph

6. Exposure/Lighting
The intensity of light falling on a photograph

7. Tells a story

8. Dramatic effect

What I also do is upload my photos to stock photography web sites so that more experienced photographers can critique my photographs. Ideas and comments are very useful improvement tools. Sometimes when I come across a good photograph online, I will look at the EXIF data. All digital cameras will provide EXIF data showing the photo details, i.e. exposure value, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc. The data is useful because it tells you what settings were used when taking the photograph. When I am I taking photographs in the similar environment or lighting, I will use those settings and compare the result with the settings that I would normally use.

What I learnt so far about photography is taking good photographs come with a lot of experiment, patience, constantly referencing the camera manual and having a good tripod. Of course a good DSLR camera will definitely help