Often times, I am asked how to take good photos. Then I asked them this question. “What is your definition of a good photo?” Usually people don’t respond immediately because they never thought about it seriously.
In my opinion, a good photo is something that makes you curious about the story in the photo. Sometimes, I see a stunning looking photo. Then I would say “wow” but that’s it. The image won’t last a day in my brain if the photo has no story. But if I see a photo like the above, I get curious about what she might be thinking or what was so special about the space that she was staring at. In other words, I ponder more about the story behind the photo rather than the photo by itself.
Let’s assume this photo without a person’s silhouette behind the siphon machine. Without it, it’s just a description of the siphon machine but with it, your imagination start working.
People blame their camera for what they call bad photos. But good cameras won’t give you good photos. You may be able to produce high quality image but without a story behind the photo, it’s just a photo of an object.
You don’t necessarily need to composite a frame with a person. A photo in the above, I didn’t put anyone in the frame but due to dramatic color changes in the sky, people get mesmerized by the scene.
If you want to take a good photo, take a lot of photos daily, then delete the one you can’t get anything out of the photo while leaving the one you can imagine out of it. If you practice this daily, you will end up getting more photos with stories as opposed to just a pretty photo of objects.
What do you see in this photo? Start writing your own story out of this photo.
If you are interested in portrait photos, you might be interested in this posting.