Photography Advice

I am 16 years old right now and it has been a dream of mine to be a professional photographer. I love to travel so I think it would be awesome to travel around the world taking pictures. Its one of those things that you really want to do but will probably never happen. Even if it isnt going to happen I would still like to be a better photographer so I am looking for advice. It can be something really obvious because I havent taken any classes so there is a lot I still need to know.

Here are some of my best photos so far (excluding a few good ones I have taken in Colorado because I havent downloaded them yet). I had to resize them so they might be a little blurry.

The first three were taken in Hawaii, the next two were taken in Minnesota, and the last one was taken in Cozumel.

A couple of important things are composition and lighting.

Composition involves where all the pieces of your picture are located in the picture frame. The point of view of the camera also comes into that. I took photography classes in school and I had a real hard time with composition. Something about looking through the view finder and trying to imagine the scene as if I was looking at a photograph was very hard. Now with a digital camera where I look at the LCD display it is easy for me to see it as a photograph and I think my composition has improved. BTW, I like your composition of the scene with the dock. It makes it more interesting to have it slightly off-center as you do.

Lighting can get very technical and when I learned it, it was all with black and white. Maybe others will have some good tips for you.

One other technical thing that is very important if you are ever going to take pictures that are not just long shot scenes like the ones you showed here. That is the concept of depth of field. When you focus your camera (or it auto-focuses) there is one exact distance that is the focal point, but in fact there is a whole range of distances that appear to be in focus. This range is called depth of field and is very useful to make pictures come out the way you want, whether you want everything to be in focus or you want only your subject to be in focus and everything else to be blurry.

The way you control depth of focus is to control how wide open the lens is, also called the f-stop. This means not just letting your camera go on full auto mode. The more open your lens is (which is a lower f-stop number) the smaller your depth of field will be, which means there will be a shorter distance in front of and behind your focal point that is in focus.

Okay, that's good for starters. I'm sure you will get many other good tips.

Added:
I forgot to say, I like your pictures. Thanks for sharing.
Looking back, it looks like you did center the dock in the picture. I think what makes it look off center and more interesting is the unbalanced land masses in the background.

If you want to make a living at photography, concentrate on doing studio photography; People and Products... That is the biggest market;

There is way too much competition in landscape photography, and the magazines etc. tend to rely on a couple dozen landscape photographers of international reputation as their 'go to guys'. VERY difficult to make one or two decent sales a year as a 'landscape generalist', much less make them regularly enough to pay the bills.

If you are a good writer, writing travel type articles with a lot of photos in them are an easier sale.

Oh, and Join PhotoSig and Photo Net submit lots of photos for critiques, read the forums etc. to learn.

I went into pro photography at the age of 16. I was luck enough to get a job as an assistant photographer. You can learn at college but nothing is better than working with someone who's in the business.

Digital cameras are great for fast results but you have to experience at least once taking pics on a 8" x 10" Gandolfi camera. The quality is fantastic but it costs 5,000 British pounds without the lens!

Over the years I worked in most of the fields, fashion and advertising but I most enjoyed working in food photography. The grunt work is to be found in the low end of the advertising market including catalog work.

Good luck!

I'm going to disagree with Silviron.

Making money doing something you hate is the worst thing you can do with your life. If you find something you love, and can live with the money you make, you will be happy. If it IS studio photography, then go with it!

Yes, there is an ENORMOUS amount of competition in landscape photography. However, SOME people are making a fortune; A number of people are making a good living; many people supplement their other "job". Silviron is definitely on target that if you can write, you will sell a LOT more.

It's also generally true that if you have a true, unfailing passion for something, you will suceed and do well in whatever that is.

Ansel Adams' family bitched at him about his landscape photography until he started a wedding photography business. He hated every moment (I've done some weddings and I know exactly what he felt). Then, he went with his passion and we all know what happened.

Experience is the best teacher, but if you don't learn the fundamentals, you will gain a lot of experience making the same mistake over and over. Read all you can, take all the classes you can, and shoot all the pictures you can. Enter contests. Check out the local photo stores for weekend seminars. Some are free or very cheap; others cost several hundred dollars. You will learn something valuable in anything you do.

I've found the weekend photography tours to be very good. They can be expensive, but the ones that actually critique your work in the evening are well worth the money.

Taylorf,
Your photos are not bad at all though as Drizzle says you should do a little more study on the topics of composition and lighting. Learn what the "rules" are even if you decide to break them later. A couple of my most popular photographs completely ignore several of the basic rules of composition...and yet still people love them (go figure).

Also, if you are serious about becoming a professional photographer you NEED to have some understanding of what running a photography business is all about. Dan Heller ( http://www.danheller.com/photo-inc.html) has a lot of information on his site

Probably the most important thing you can do is have a camera with you ALL THE TIME and take lots and lots of pictures. Review them about a day or so after you've taken them and you'll be amazed at how your perspective on the shots have changed. Keep a little log/diary of the things you do/don't like about your pictures and eventually you'll start to see patterns emerge.

Good luck, it's a tough field!

Photography is a very challenging, yet rewarding field. I'm 24 and started back when I was in high school. At that time, I shot with B&W film and learned the ENTIRE process starting from loading film off a large spool into the roll, learning about composition, lighting, aperatures, shutter speed, and finished with developing my own film and producing my own photos from the negatives in the dark room.

Throughout college I lost contact with photography, but recently got back into things when I purchased my first digital SLR (Canon 350D) in Nov of '05. Since then I've been relearning a lot of skills that have gotten rusty.

Your pictures aren't bad. The colors are nice and you can tell that there is effort in trying to compose the photos. One thing you should consider is think more about the rule of thirds. Many of your horizons are dead center vertically. Either move them up or down a little. What are you shooting with right now? The quality seems a little like a P&S, but it could just be due to the resize. There is TONS of info available on the web and forums can be a great resource. Check out dpreview.com and fredmiranda.com as a start. My site in my sig contains some of my better work, but just know that photography is a hobby for me and not a profession! The best advice would be to get out a keep shooting! Nothing takes the place of experience. Hope this helps!

Thanks for all the replies!!

ResQTech- I am using a 5mp Casio s500. I would get a better camera but I do not have enough money to buy one.

I've got to disagree with some of the advice you've read here. There's a difference between amateur photography (and there are some talented amateurs) and professional photography.

When I was working in the field I never carried around a camera when not working. The camera bags and flash equipment we used was heavy enough to carry during working hours.

Also, taking lots of pictures won't make you a professional photographer.
Knowing how to use a 5 x 4 inch Sinar so that everything is in focus from and inch to infinity is the kind of stuff you need to learn, or how to work with unhappy models when you're on a deadline!

The secrets of how to make a mixture that looks like icecream (but won't melt) are best learnt from someone else who's been in the business for years.

It's true, you have to have some artistic inclination to make it in the field but there's a lot of technical stuff you need to learn and a lot of organizational skills you need to master to make it big.

You won't need the fancy cameras at first if you work for someone else and when you are ready to start out on your own you can make the investment in equipment and studio.

It's true, you should go with what you enjoy. Don't worry about the money at first. Just have fun!

it's as much a head trip as an eye and camera trip. you have to become concious of what you're feeling as you look at a scene, and realize what components of the scene are contributing to the emotional effect. if you get too close and lose necessary information around the periphery, you lose the impact of the shot, if you get too far away and include all sorts of information that have nothing to do wit the 'light message' you lose the shot.

a good way to learn to do this is to take a lot of pictures, then look at them as soon as possible and compare the feeling you get from looking at the pic to the feeling/impact of the real life scene -- this is so easy these days -- you used to have to go into a darkroom for a few hours... did you capture the essence or not? if not why not? what is lacking in your pic that was in the original scene? what did you include that was irrelevant? sometimes you can come upon a scene and feel beauty all around but it takes some thought to figure out what to point your camera at..

learn to make every shot perfectly focused crisp and clear, interesting not only in content but in arrangement of forms, and conciousness of light and reflection..this may take some time..

there you are. follow this advice and you'll be the next Henry Casio Bresson!
good luck!

when I was a kid I thought being a photographer for Life magazine would be the greatest thing. Then National Geographic, because they had more animals. What I did mostly were portraits and some weddings..

tadbik said:

I've got to disagree with some of the advice you've read here. There's a difference between amateur photography (and there are some talented amateurs) and professional photography.

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Excellent point!

I thought wedding photography would be cool and lucrative. After shooting 3 or 4 I realized that 25% was photography, 50% "bookkeeping", and 15% marketing, and 10% dealing with getting people off their butts and ordering/sending proof books to the next person, etc. Very little time was spent actually photographing.

There is a tremendous amount of pressure with professional photography too. If you screw up the pictures of your trip to Hawaii, you're dissapointed. If you screw up the pictures of someone's wedding, not only have you wrecked part of the wedding for them, but you are likely to get sued. You have to double and triple check EVERYTHING. Extra batteries; extra film or memory cards; extra cameras; extra lights; extra lenses; extra tripod and head; even backup transportation! Mistakes are not allowed.

I found is was neither cool nor lucrative (when you actually calculate all the hours involved).

magic79 said:

After shooting 3 or 4 I realized that 25% was photography, 50% "bookkeeping", and 15% marketing, and 10% dealing with getting people off their butts and ordering/sending proof books to the next person, etc. Very little time was spent actually photographing.

There is a tremendous amount of pressure with professional photography too. If you screw up the pictures of your trip to Hawaii, you're dissapointed. If you screw up the pictures of someone's wedding, not only have you wrecked part of the wedding for them, but you are likely to get sued.

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BINGO! My friends used to ask me why I didn't go into photography as a full time job and you pretty much summed up my answer. On the other hand I go to all sorts of festivals and events and take a LOT of pictures and then contact the event organizers early in the next year. I've sold a good number of images for promotions and such that way but the pressure is off me when I'm actually taking shots which is the way I like it!

Hello Taylorf! Those pic shots you've got are better than me. I don't have the "eye" for the shoot and if seeminly so, I'm slow. . .

..didn't mention that I also printed and mounted b+w photos, sold a few of those, to be hung on walls.. pictures of the park, of the city..didn't make a tremendous amount of money, but I was a kid. Photographing Phillipe Halsman's daughter's wedding was the highlight of my career...yep, he looked at my portfolio and hired me, under condition I use no flash, or lights, just me and my M3. Turned out pretty well, except Phllipe was a little mad because I am so much taller than he is and took a shot pointing down at him with a wide angle lens that made him look like a midget..oh well, cant please everybody I guess..

Though it can be a harsh place, I'd suggest you check out photosig.com, register and leave some comments and receive some comments.

The professional photographer in the family suggested getting a job at one of the volume studios (Target, Walmart etc...) Pretty humble beginings, but some very decent photogs have started there. At one of my local Targets, it is quite obvious that at least one of the workers can do some great work.