Thinking outside the box in photography

Being a photographer is not only about knowing the rules of photography and applying them. It's also about being able to break them and to think outside the box. I think that the latter is particularly important for those who try or want to be creative - without the ability of thinking outside the box will make it very hard to stand out in the crowd!

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So what does thinking outside the box mean for me as a photographer? Ohh it can mean so many different things. I think it comes all together to a combination of various things: the ability to break the rules of photography, creativity and the potential to see the world around in a unique way.

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How can you learn to think outside the box? Well, I really can't give a definite answer to that. I can definitely tell you that you don't have to be born with it (although it can be helpful to a certain extent) but you can learn it as well. i can tell you how I try to think outside the box: I look around at the world around me from different angles and various perspectives. I keep trying to see it in a way others don't. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It's important to train yourself, your brain and your eyes and not to give up. The more you try to see the world around you from different perspectives, the easier it becomes.

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Article Pictures: I visited my friend Ada in Den Haag, the Netherlands in June 2010. I think the pictures correspond pretty well to how you can think outside the box in photography.

Assisting and Behind the Scenes with Bert Stephani

Bert Stephani has posted recently a blog article "Be an Assistant". I had a great pleasure to be his assistant in his recent Diva Shoot, where he invited a bunch of women to his studio (called 'The Barn), and he shot portraits in two different sets. We met a week before the shoot to prepare the sets, which was also lots of fun. Although my assisting during the shoot was mainly about taking behind the scenes pictures, I have to say that even during such assisting, I learned a lot.

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However, assisting is so much more than learning how to take pictures. While you learn, you also observe things that you might have already knew before, which is also a great thing to remember these for the future. Basically, the things you knew before get better embedded in your memory and the likelihood that you will forget them in your next photo shoot gets much smaller.

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But assisting is so much more than that. You also learn how to talk to and approach a client during a photo shoot (especially because every client is different) and you can learn much more than the photo shoot while talking with a photographer after a shoot. Although I was just shooting behind the scenes pictures and I helped Bert with preparing the sets a week before, I learned a lot! Make sure to check Bert's website and portfolio at http://bertstephani.com.

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How to shoot better pictures - Film Camera Style Tip

I was looking over some of my older photography gear few weeks ago and obviously I ran across my old film cameras and old memory cards from my first digital cameras. I started to recall the times of film photography and compare it with the experience of the digital world.

It took me awhile (being so deep in digital cameras nowadays) to realize that film cameras limited me by certain number of pictures a photographic film roll could contain (not like digital cameras, which can take from few hundred to few thousand RAW pictures, depending on the capacity of a memory card). The limitation of a number of ‘exposures’ (in photographic jargon of course) in film cameras forced me to spend some time and think about a composition of a picture, how to frame a subject, inspect closely foreground, background, double check the lighting and any other details that could improve a picture so that no film and frames would be wasted. This limitation of a film camera was (and for someone who uses a film camera still is) a very important step in the learning process of the art of photography and I personally believe that it still should be a part of the learning process of photography.

I think that digital cameras with their huge memory cards give us the freedom that actually does more harm than good for those who want to learn photography – we don’t take that extra time and effort on checking composition of a picture like in a film camera because we know that we can re-take a picture countless number of time and delete easily ‘bad’ pictures without any financial costs (as it wasn’t the case in the photographic film roll era).

I think I have found a solution for those who own only digital cameras and who want to learn composition in a way it was done before. The solution is quite simple: next time you will go for a photo walk, do an assignment for yourself or just take pictures, leave your 8 or 16 GB memory card at home and take with you only one memory card of 1GB or even less (the less capacity, the better; I just checked that 1GB for shooting 12.1 MP RAW will give you about 68 exposures). Depending if you shoot RAW or JPEG and how many megapixels your camera has, you should find a memory card that enables you to take not more than 30 exposures. And remember to leave all other memory cards at home! This way you will limit your gear but you will definitely expand your knowledge and experience in composition!

I strongly encourage you to try it out few times and I guarantee that you will see improvement in your photography soon.

Happy Shooting!!!

Article Picture: I took it in the evening with my Nikkor 35mm f1.8 lens in Jubel Park in Brussels (Bruxelles), Belgium. Jubel Park in a part of Parc du Cinquantenaire (click to see Google Maps). EXIF info: Nikon D90, Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec., f/1.8, ISO: 200.