photography tips

 

I have a list of 40 things to do before I’m 40. You know all about it already right? Come on, of course you do, have you been paying no attention?

On my list is to learn to take a decent photo. I’ve felt for a long time that my photography is the thing that lets down my blog. I can string a sentence together, sure, but so many other blogs I look at have decent sentences and ace photos too. Proper photos, on white backgrounds – collections of beautiful objects, flowers casually placed in jam jars, or breakfasts that look actually like works of art rather than badly lit piles of sick on a plate.

I know how important the visual side of things is online, and I’d just love to know how to do it properly. I bought a half decent camera a couple of years ago – an entry level DSLR, a Nikon D3100 – but I’ve never learnt how to use it properly, and so always end up taking photos on my phone.

To give you a flavour of just how much help I need, here are some examples of my Instagram photography over the years. Bear in mind that these are the photos I have felt are good enough to put on Instagram: View Post

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Last weekend I did something I haven’t done in a very long time. (No sniggering.)

I went to Boots with a disposable camera that Belle took on school camp about a year ago. Two days later and £4.99 poorer we had one of those cardboard wallets containing 24 negatives, 3 half decent pictures and 21 snaps of the sky/blurry thumbs/close up faces that were unrecognisable.

Those were the days weren’t they?

*sighs nostalgically in that ridiculous way that old people do when they are remembering something that was clearly much lower quality than what we have today*

Nowadays of course it’s all phones. How many photos did you take on your phone last month do you reckon? 50? 100 maybe? 200 if you spend a lot of time around cute babies or attractively styled cakes? I had a quick browse and have taken pictures of things I would never have wasted a disposable camera shot on, like jars of biscuit spread and my restuffed teddy in a pair of new dungarees, giving you a glimpse into just how rock and roll my life is right now.* View Post

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I was at a dinner earlier in the week, attended by a group of other bloggers.

“I have to ask,” said one, “how did you get that woman to agree to let you use her picture as your Twitter avatar?”

“It’s me!” I said.

“Really?!” she looked disbelieving. “How?”

“Well, a lot of make-up and professional lighting obviously, but it is me, I promise!”

I get some version of this conversation pretty much every time I meet anyone in real life who knows me primarily from Twitter, because my Twitter avatar looks like this: View Post

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When I turned 35 in April this year I made a list, (or started it at least), of 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40. I have only done three so far, so feel I need to crack on a bit.

One of them was ‘to learn to take a decent photo’, as I am really not very talented at all in the photography department. It is only recently that I have even begun to get my head around the rule of thirds and stopped lining up everything dead in the centre of every picture. I don’t have the steadiest hands either, so every photo I take has a very faint fuzziness about it.

I feel that before I can start taking awesome photos though, I really need to invest in a decent camera. Boyfriend did offer to buy me one for Christmas but I do really like getting lots of little surpises for Christmas, so decided that I would buy one in the January sales instead. (If the January sales are even a thing any more and it isn’t all just year round online voucher codes and whatnot.) View Post

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I am at the age now where when confronted by an unfamiliar remote control I panic and don’t know which buttons to press.

When I recently upgraded my phone I specifically chose the exact same model as Boyfriend, just so that he could show me how to work it. I currently have an HTC One X+, so had just about got to grips with Android, when I was asked to review the Nokia Lumia 925 with Windows.

Argh!

*deep breaths*

‘You can do it,’ I reassured myself. ‘If you can give birth to two children and run your own business then surely you can get to grips with a new phone?’ View Post

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A few weeks ago, I went to Totnes with my lovely friend Rin, a very talented lady who writes Glass Jars & Photographs. Rin’s passion is interiors, and she has one of those proper cameras with a big lens that comes in a case like grown-ups have. I felt a bit silly pootling about behind her taking pictures of pretty things with my phone, but actually it was great fun, and made me even more determined to get a proper camera and learn to take half decent pictures. (Camera companies looking for review take note here.)

The day was extra special as it was on the train on the way there that we decided to set up our own media training business, which is very exciting. We have a proper name and bank account and everything, so along with Rin’s camera, I think this definitely makes us Very Grown Up and Important Indeed.

I very rarely post pictures for their own sake, but today I am feeling happy in that way that makes you smile, sigh and look about in a contented way, and I wanted to be frivolous. I know the photos aren’t amazing, but I had fun taking them, and they remind me of a very serene and inspiring day out.

"A sheep wearing a sock"

A sheep wearing a sock

"The pee bucket"

The pee bucket

"Curious chicken"

Curious chicken

"Casual chums"

Casual chums

"bug"

Bug

"Flower pots"

Flower pots

"Bee"

Bee

"Another bee"

Another bee

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So I thought I’d tell you about it. It’s not very interesting, but it’s been a while since I told a proper story, without so much as a mention of a product of any kind, so here you go. What a treat!*

Yesterday I took Bee to the dentist for some fillings. (That’s not the funny thing. In fact it’s funny that I’ve not had to take her sooner, given that she has clearly inherited my horrible rotten teeth.)

As she is now practically a grown-up, she went upstairs on her own for her appointment. I also get a little bit funny around dentists, and have to count things to stop feeling panicky, and I didn’t want to have to sit on the one chair in the room with Belle on my lap, wriggling about and blocking my view of the phone cord by the door that I like to count the loops of.**

So anyway, waiting downstairs away from the drill I felt much calmer, and didn’t need to count anything at all. In fact, I spent a good ten minutes instead horrifying myself with Men’s Health magazine. Honestly, it was dreadful. Pages and pages of different exercises for your abs, interspersed with pictures of women in their pants and articles telling you how size really does matter. It’s no wonder men are insecure is it? No-one actually cares about abs, and most women I know would take an offer to do the washing up over an abnormally large penis any day.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the dentist.

So, I’d been sat there, fretting about the state of the media, for about ten minutes, when a man walks in with a large camera. (Not a euphemism). He has arrived, it transpires, to take pictures of the surgery for the company’s website, and for the Business of Dentistry Magazine, which looked actually rather stylish for such a dull sounding publication, and probably has far less ab exercises in it.

"dental x-ray"

My teeth pose for a picture

One of the receptionists, a red-head, immediately turned the colour of her hair, and the other patients in the waiting room looked like they’d rather have teeth pulled than get involved, which was fortunate really, given our location. The second receptionist though, an older woman in the brightest blue eyeshadow you have ever seen, was well up for it, and was cracking jokes about contacting her agent and winning an oscar.

Belle and I of course played it cool. I waited at least two seconds to volunteer us to play the roles of ‘interested looking customers’. You know I don’t like being the centre of attention after all. (Oh no, hang on a minute, that’s a lie). Anyway, I’d actually brushed my hair before I went out, which doesn’t happen often, so I thought I should make the most of it.

So while Bee was upstairs, having adrenalin accidentally injected into one of her blood vessels, (which I did feel afterwards that perhaps I should have been there for), Belle and I pretended to look fascinated by some floss, while the photographer snapped away. It was quite fun really, and meant we could casually say to Bee when she came down that we’d ‘just done a quick dental photo shoot’, which sounded funny, and is ironic, given the state of my teeth.

Who knows where this could lead? This year it’s the Business of Dentistry Magazine, next year I might be in my pants for Men’s Health…

*Heavy sarcasm implied here, as it really isn’t a very interesting story.

**In case you ever want to try it, I should warn you that counting the loops on a phone cord is very hard to do without hurting your eyes. Every time I blink I have to start again.

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I read some research today that I found fascinating. A group of European researchers have found that the media can influence how readers interpret the amount of power held by somebody, purely through the angle they use to shoot the photo.

Pictures shot from below are seen to represent powerful people, while those shot from above are seen to represent less powerful people. The media therefore can change how we feel about individuals with just a bit of clever photography. This might all sound a bit obvious, but what you might not think about so much is how this influences our perceptions of gender.

In their experiments, Dr Steffen R. Giessner, Associate Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), and his colleagues found that there are more photographs of women in advertisements, newspapers and magazines shot from above than from below, while the opposite is true for men.

All these camera angles therefore reinforce our perception that men are powerful and women are not, strengthening our stereotyped ideas that women cannot become leaders.

“Such simple associations of power and angle of shot do not take place in a social vacuum,” said Giessner. “Rather, context related to power (such as within organisations, or portraying the 100 most important people in the world) easily trigger our thinking about power. As a result we may consciously or unconsciously use cues to show the attribution of power in a picture.” He concludes: “While it is the job of researchers to uncover such effects, it is the job of the media to decide when to use and when not to use such subtle cues.”

So there you go.

Have a look for yourself – flick through a magazine or newspaper and notice the camera angles. Are there more women shot from above? Does a simple picture change the assumptions you make about people?

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