A good photo tells a story. It conveys emotion, and really brings a scene to life in a single frame. One moment in time can have you feeling, smelling, and hearing things. Those are the most powerful ones.

This weekend is Thanksgiving, and I want you to show me what you are truly thankful for. It can be an object, a place, a person, an event, etc. I want you to show me why you are thankful for something. If the photo is good enough, you shouldn’t even really need to explain it.

Take a lot of photos this weekend, and pick out the most powerful ones. I want 3 photos of 3 different scenes next week.

Have fun with this! Take this time to think about what’s really important to you and how you can really show that off!

Something that you have to get used to as a photographer is the fact that most of your photos won’t turn out well. As you get more experienced, the percentage of good ones goes up, but for now, you have to accept that most of your photos are not great. And there’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT!

I take a LOT of photos, and even though I’ve been doing this for longer than you, I still need to throw out half of the photos I take. For you, that percentage might be 75%.

When going through your photos, THROW OUT THE TERRIBLE ONES. Learn something from them so that you don’t make the same mistake again, but there’s no fixing a photo that’s out of focus or really badly shot. Just junk it and TAKE ANOTHER ONE.

This is especially important when dropping photos off to me. I don’t have time to go through thousands of BAD photos (and by the end of the year, it is in the thousands,) so I NEED you to do some of that work for me! If something for an assignment doesn’t turn out well (like last class) TAKE MORE PHOTOS! You can’t get marks for a bad photo, and we certainly can’t use it for anything, so TAKE IT/THEM AGAIN!

These photos were dropped off to me. WHY?

Some good beginner tips:

Today I would like you to go on Flickr and explore photos. Explain what you like about 3. Not the content (yeah, that flower is beautiful) but what did the photographer do to make that photo amazing?

Example

Below this post you should post a comment where you provide a link to the photos you choose and then EXPLAIN what you like about the photo – what did the photographer have to do or think about in order to make that photo so great?

Now go take at least 3 of your own. Even if yours didn’t turn out as amazing, what were you thinking/doing to try and make yours great? (Keep in mind that a lot of your photos are not going to turn out to be as beautiful as you’d like, so TAKE EXTRAS!)

Information: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s123/sh/7490332f-a311-489a-ba69-f7229a5226dc/b9839d70ebf2c13d99522f0e024ff37c