Five Tips for Making Better Pictures with the Camera You Already Have

Tip # 5 – Seeing the Big Picture: Shooting the Details

You could have gone on a vacation or attended an event (wedding, birthday, school exhibit, etc.), and you just got home with your memory cards bursting at the… err, seams (for the lack of a better word) with photos. You transfer the images from your card (or camera) to the computer in excited anticipation. You plop down on a comfy chair and start browsing through them only to notice that your images are a little too… banal generic. You could’ve very well gone to the corner sari-sari (the Filipino analog of sorts to a convenience store), snapped a few photos of you and the shopkeeper, and told your office mates you went to an obscure and ‘exotic’ Southeast Asian country.

Sometimes, we get caught up in getting the big picture that we neglect to notice the small details that make the whole.

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If you attend a wedding, it would be unsurprising to find that a LOT of your photos are of people; however, you should also take photos of the minutia that give visual cues to anyone who might be viewing your photos as to where you were. Multi-tiered cake = wedding, stack of gifts = birthday, empty beer bottles strewn over a table = christening. Well, you get the picture.

crepe paper flower 'growing' out of a shower = ?

You will find that shooting the details will help you tell a story with your photos, especially when you upload all 212 of them onto the web for your family and friends to ‘enjoy’. I could talk about the careful selection of photos here (and not seemingly make stop-motion animation), but I’ll just reserve that for another post.

With all five tips posted, thanks for reading and bearing with the inanity.