Crop Corner

Many classes and tips about photography, talk about improving the fundamentals of how to take better photos.

I was inspired by this article by Jim Altengarten, an educator in photography, in which he talks about ten principles of how to take better photos.

His top 10 photography tips include:

1. Believing is seeing
2. Take five or more shots of any scene
3. Keep your mind open
4. Use every lens in your bag
5. Photograph your values
6. Use one of the seven exposure values that are available
7. Be childlike
8. Stay out late… get up early
9. Know when to pull the trigger
10. Practice, practice, practice

What I liked about the article was that he really made me think about how to get in the right frame of mind to capture a scene. Although I’m still a one lens kinda-gal, and I fumble with the manual settings on my camera, I still took away some valuable lessons.

As an educator in photography, there comes a time when you want to express more about your core values in photography than just talk about f-stops and shutter speeds. There are other messages that you want to provide your students that deal with more than the technical side of our craft. Usually these tidbits are dispersed in a more random manner--one or two at a time when the situation calls for it. At some point, however, it is necessary to put all of this information together in one place to allow your students to obtain the information more readily. This is my attempt to enumerate ten principles that I believe are important for a creative photographer. They are not listed in any particular order of importance because I believe they are all of equal value. I hope that some or all of these principles will be beneficial to your photography.