Photography

Photography has always been something that has interested me. However, I'm terrible at it. I wanted to work on improving my picture taking skills so I chose a book called "The Best Digital Photography Book Series" by Scott Kelby, to help me with this. Now, I don't have a nice fancy digital camera, but I do have a phone with a camera on it that takes pretty good quality pictures. So I took what I read in the book and used it with what I had available.


For the first part of this I focused on landscape photos as those have always been my favorite ones to look at. The first trick in getting professional looking landscape photos is to remember the "Golden Rule." This states that photos should only be taken at dawn - 15-30 minutes before sunrise, or at dusk - 15-30 minutes before sunset (Kelby 132). This will give your photo a nice warm light and make it look a lot more professional. I never really got a good chance to do this trick as I wasn't willing to wake up before dawn and it was too cloudy when I had the time to try it out.

Another trick, which is the one I decided to try, is to really emphasize the most interesting part of your photo. You can emphasize the sky, like in sunset/sunrise pictures, or you can emphasize the ground, maybe when shooting a lake scene. "If you have a great looking sky, then put your horizon one-third of the way from the top of your photo. If you have a great looking ground, the put your horizon one-third of the way from the bottom of your photo" (Kelby 134). This is what I tried to do in the following picture. I angled my camera up so the horizon line was close to a third of the way from the top as it said in the book. If I would've angled it down all you would've seen was my driveway and that's not as neat as the sky.

These are just some pretty basic tricks to help get a better picture of a nature scenes for beginners like myself. There are many more that I'd like to get into and try out for myself. I'm sure these tricks could apply to any type of photography, or you could use them when photographing something else, like a portrait.

Question: What kind of pictures do you enjoy taking, or take the most of?