How do you learn to make better pictures?
Once you have all the technical basics down, where do you go from there? Every time you make an exposure you make choices, either on purpose or by accident. Do you show the whole scene or just a detail? Do you make everything sharp, or just focus on one area? Do you use a fast shutter speed to freeze motion, or a longer shutter speed to blur it.
Your First Step
Your first step is to see the potential of the photograph in front of your camera. Before you take a picture, try to visualize the way the scene will look as a print. Looking through the viewfinder helps because the scene is reduced to a smaller size and confined by what the lens will see. As you look through the viewfinder, imagine you are looking at a print, but it is still a print that you can change. You can eliminate a distracting background by making it out of focus, by changing the position to a better angle and so on.
Try to See the Communication
Try to see how a picture communicates its visual content. Photography transforms a three-dimensional event into a frozen instant reduced in size on a flat piece of paper, which is sometimes in black & white instead of color. The event is abstracted, and even if you were there and can remember how it "really" was, the image in front of you is the tangible remaining object. This concentration on the actual image will help you visualize scenes as the photographs that they will soon become while you are shooting.
With that said, those are the basics of taking a better picture. Over the next few posts I plan on diving in deeper in order for you to see your photographs.
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