The Secrets to Creating Amazing Photos. Marc Silber
masculine, picturesque
52.Curvilinear, tender, soft, pleasant, feminine, beautiful
60.Meandering, casual, relaxed, interesting, human
61.Erratic, bumbling, chaotic, confused
64.Formal, priestly, imperious, dogmatic
65.Rising, optimistic, successful, happy
66.Falling, pessimistic, defeated, depressed
70.Rise, attainment with effort, improvement
71.Fall, sinking without effort, improvement
75.Broken, interrupted, severed
76.Direct, sure, forceful, with purpose
79.Parallel, opposing with harmony
PART THREE: PUTTING YOUR TOOLS TOGETHER AND FINAL TIPS
“A picture is a poem without words”
—Horace, Roman lyric poet
No matter what type of camera you’re using, and this most definitely includes smartphones, there are two key skills you must master to make creative photos that you and others will love: how you compose your image, coupled with your use of light.
These skills have been with us ever since the first caveman had a breakthrough and figured out that scratches on a cave wall could communicate to others what he saw or imagined.
This breakthrough of picture making, and others that followed, opened the way to a most powerful urge we all share: to tell our stories to others. It must have been an exhilarating moment when that door began to open and, like our modern tech breakthroughs, it no doubt spread through the other caves at lightning speed! Imagine you and I in a cave, now having the ability to tell each other about what we each saw and even felt. Since we were using pictures, we were able to break though the communication barriers of our limited language.
From that moment, man had a superior communication system to all other life forms on the planet: as individuals, groups, and as a species we could now tell stories to each other in picture form.
But soon, it was not enough to just crudely scratch. Being what we are, man is always looking for the secrets to effectively tell stories. From scratches to rock art, they kept pushing the available technology further and further. And this very definitely embraced composition: how these pictures depicted and reflected life all around them.
Moving forward through the ages, all advances of picture making built on and expanded these initial breakthroughs. The urge to make pictures and share them with others runs deep within mankind. When you take the very long view, is it any surprise to see the explosions we’ve witnessed with our “modern” picture sharing outlets of YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and whatever else has come along by the time you read this?
When photography was first being developed in the mid-nineteenth century, by early pioneers such as Louis Daguerre who invented the “daguerreotype,” exposure time could be about fifty seconds to ten minutes, and the developing process was very complex. These early versions of photography were complicated and cumbersome, so the average person was not going to go through the painstaking process to make a single photograph of sometimes questionable quality. It was easier to stick with drawing, sketching, or possibly painting as the available technologies of the common person at the time.
A major breakthrough came when George Eastman (who went on to found Kodak in 1888) embraced photography and figured out a means to put a camera in the hands of anyone in the western world, have them take photographs, and then make prints easily and quickly. This again resonated deeply and it seemed that everyone soon had a camera. From the release of the inexpensive Kodak “Brownie” in 1900, to the much more sophisticated models, photography had become mainstream, which was a major advance in story telling and sharing through pictures.
This boom in photography kept right on