I am lucky to hear praise like, “What a great picture!” pretty often when I show people my photos. Less frequently, I get asked, “How do you do it?” I think many folks think that they cannot do what I do. Anybody can make great photos. Here is my two-step guide to doing it. There are gazillions of articles and videos on photography technique and the “best” equipment. Honestly, though, it’s much simpler than that. If you have literally anything which takes pictures, and you have eyes, then you have everything that you need to wow your friends with your pictures. Technique and equipment can come later.
Rule #1: Only Show Your Great Photos
This might seem silly but, honestly, it is the most important thing. If you want people to think that you take great pictures, only show them your great pictures. Don’t show the rest to anybody. (Well, that’s not quite right; Candy does get to see more of my work than most people but she has Special Status.)
For example, I went to the St. Louis Zoo yesterday and came home with 89 pictures after visiting just the primate house and the herpetarium. Of those 89, I kept just seven and have only publicly posted five. Here is one of yesterday’s pictures that I particularly like.
Now I am going to do something that I never do. I am going to show you a couple of pictures that I rejected. And I will tell you why.
First up, here is one of many pictures that I took in the primate house.
Cute photo, right? It’s a little low in contrast but that’s easily fixable. A little cropping to eliminate the dead space on the right would help, too. So why did I delete it? Let’s zoom in.
Now you can see the problem: the faces are not razor sharp, nothing like the faces of the chuckwallas. You cannot see individual hairs on the lemurs’ faces. That is not fixable; no matter what magic I work with software, this will never be a wow! photo. Here is another photo which exhibits the level of detail that I want in pictures of furry faces.
You can clearly see individual hairs all over the capybara’s face. The sun even highlights the inidividual lighter colored hairs nears it’s nose. If you click on that photo, you will see a larger version and the detail holds up at that magnification.
Next up: I shot a series of photos of this gila monster and deleted all of them.
Those are all nice shots but none of them make me go, Wow! They are just “nice.” That one big problem is two strikes against them. Here is a close-up of the best shot.
Once again, it is not sharp. All of the photos look essentially the same. Strike three. The whole batch of photos is trash. Was I disappointed? A little bit, sure. It is a cool looking lizard; I wanted a picture of it. On the plus side, I learned that the camera settings that I used for the gila monster did not work well. Next time, I will use a faster shutter speed and I will look for a composition which is more interesting.
Rule #2: Take Lots of Pictures
My dad taught me that if 10% of the pictures that I take are worth showing to anyone then I am doing well. If 2-3% are really good photos then I have done great. That proved to be remarkably accurate until the advent of digital cameras. It used to be that every picture cost money. I might have a single 36-shot roll of slide film for the day. Or I might have a roll of black & white film, which would still require printing (more money) for every frame.
Today’s digital cameras let me push and hold the shutter button and get a whole series of photos, increasing the chances of catching that fleeting facial expression. There is no cost to doing this, since I can just delete the bad pictures, but it drives my shot count way, way up. My new version of that adage is that if 5-10% of the pictures that I take are worth showing to anyone then I am doing well. If I get one to two really good photos then I have done great.
Simple arithmetic drives me. If I shoot 100 pictures then I might end up with five to ten that are worth showing. The remaining 90 to 95 pictures will teach me something about how to do better next time. But if I go out and only shoot five pictures, the odds of one of them being worth anything are pretty much zilch. And if I whine because I don’t have the right camera or the best lens or the right kind of experience… if I don’t take any pictures at all… well….
The bottom line is,
- Only show your great photos, and
- Take lots of pictures.
Amazing your friends with your photographs is really that simple. It is all about taking pictures of the things that you love and sharing them with the people that you love.
You can see more of my animal photos in my St. Louis Zoo 2022 photo gallery.
