How many times have you been a situation where you kinda wanted to take your camera

bag, but ended up not doing so because of the thought of lugging the bag, or even the DSLR
itself?

It’s understandable. Do you want to take that DSLR everywhere you go? Who would want to
dangle that thing while going to the grocery store? Nah. But one thing I’ve learned, is that
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images don’t wait for you. I’ve been through too many “I wish I had my camera with me”
scenarios to know so.
Caption: An abandoned cart on my way to get a sandwich

One of the best things I did as a photographer was to get myself a pocket camera (The Ricoh
GRD III, now I have the Ricoh GRD IV) and take it everywhere with me. It freed me
photographically, and it made me stop thinking in terms of “photo shoots” and start thinking
in terms of “life photography”.
Caption: At a hospital for a baby checkup

While the small compact ended up being my main camera, you don’t have to do the same,
but do get a pocket camera. You have no idea how many images pop up in otherwise
mundane situations like grocery shopping, or taking a stroll at the park.
Caption: In the park

In a nutshell: photographs don’t wait for you, get a pocket camera to ll in the gaps where
your DSLR is absent.

P.S: Your phone might do but I don’t know about you but I can’t stand using it, there’s no
buttons nor dials! Also check out the Canon S120,

2 – Your background is as important as the subject

When making an image, there’s bound to be a subject. But the subject is rarely alone, there’s
the background to deal with. When looking through the view nder and you spot your
subject, the rst thing to do is not to press the shutter release button….it’s to pay attention
to your background rst.

There’s only two things a background can do for your subject: it can either bring attention to
it, or detract from it. Say you are having a conversation with a friend, you wouldn’t want
someone else’s voice distracting from your own, would you? So why let your subject be
distracted by the background?
This guy was on the bus and was just priceless, after some entertaining conversation (too
much, he was drunk and the whole bus was watching), I told him I would make his portrait.
Even before rising my pocket camera, while talking I was wondering how I could draw
attention to him.

At rst I wasn’t going to include the guy on the left, but by changing the guy in the back
leaned back and bought further attention to my subject. I happily made the shot.

In a nutshell: be attentive to your background, ask about every object, line, color: Does this
distract or enhance what I am trying to focus on?

3 – Everything is light
What is the rst thing you notice when you see your
child or signi cant other? A person, right? Well that’s ne
and all if you are dealing with them as another person,
but when it comes to photography, you are dealing with
LIGHT, so you have to train yourself to see everything in
terms of LIGHT.

Did you ever notice how the face lights up when

someone is watching TV? Did you notice that you feel
di erently when a landscape is shot at twilight versus
dawn? Do you notice how there’s ugly shadows in the eye area when there’s harsh light?

The examples are in nite, but the skill starts when you force yourself to pay attention to the
light. In the image above of the building, I was going to the bank and it was pretty overcast
out, and I looked up. While I didn’t go to the bank to get this image, I knew what to expect
(soft light, nice re ections of the clouds) and simply looked up and made the image.

In a nutshell: start noticing light, its qualities, the shadows it makes, the shapes it forms.
4 – Treat your work as wine

Some photographs are either made by luck, or maybe you’re just a genius and you didn’t
know it. I’ll vote for the second option because I like you. In all seriousness though, while
your best photos might be made tomorrow, you could potentially have gold in your older
work.
Caption: An image I found months later, I overlooked at rst

Fact is, you might have something that you wouldn’t know the value of until you look at it
with more mature eyes. I have shots from 10 years ago, (I never dreamed of becoming a
photographer back then) that are stellar.
I wouldn’t have seen them if I didn’t revisit the work. The image above was shot 10 years
ago. Granted, there were only a few nuggets of gold in the whole pile, but who says no to
gold? Plus after time has passed you won’t be as emotionally connected to the images,
making you able to judge the images more objectively. Sometimes I go through my old stu
and I can’t believe what I missed! Or I am amazed at how I can recover images I believed
were ruined.

In a nutshell: your photos are like wine, they get better with age, but you have to dig them
up

5 – Shoot with your heart rst

You know your stu . You know what aperture is, when to bump up your ISO, you know how
to expose well. But when you look at your images, you just can’t put your nger on what
exactly is missing. Let me suggest that it’s the heart element that’s missing. You are not
emotionally engaged with your work.

Photography is not about capturing what’s out there in the world, it’s about capturing what’s
inside your heart. Shoot what matters to you and put more of yourself in the images.

Here I was in a dark spot:

Don’t judge me by this image, I was just in a really bad spot. Here I was more optimistic:
Here I was feeling the familial spirit:
In a nutshell: shoot how you feel, your images will be more powerful. Plus, humans are
hardwired to relate emotionally.

6 – Ask why

Not everyone is into photography for the same reasons. Some want to get rich, others do it
because they like it, others for fame or to document their kids growing up – you get the
point. We all have di erent motives for doing photography.

Question your motives and your photography path will become clearer. Knowing your why
is like having a loupe in front of a light source, it will help you focus and get where you want
faster. I can’t tell you your reasons because only you know that.

For me, photography is my way to dream awake. Don’t worry, my mom knew she had a
dreamer in her hands early on. Don’t call the looney bin on me, but everyday I SEE things,
no, not dead people, but slithers in the fabric of time that reveal my imagination. Take this
image:

When I saw this guy, I saw a hero ready to take on life itself. In reality, it was just a guy going
to the beach. That’s my reason for photography: It helps me be in the world and in my
imagination at the same time.

In a nutshell: it’s your turn, what’s your reason for photography? What is it about
photography that attracts you so much?

7 – You are less limited by your gear than you think

Take it from a guy that lost $1000s in gear buying and selling, it’s not about what gear you
have, it’s what you do with it. As a photographer, there are things that can keep you from
doing your work, one of them is being too focused on your next purchase.

All the images in this article, (with the exception of 3-4) were made with a pocket, small
sensor camera, with a 28mm xed lens which I used with its upgrade for 4 years (the Ricoh’s
mentioned above). Other cameras used were other compacts, my phone and one image
with the NEX7 (the next point’s portrait).
Believe it or not you are more creative with less than more. The puzzle-solving brain is much
more creative when limited in some way or another. For example, if we could y, we
wouldn’t have invented airplanes.

In a nutshell: whatever gear you have, nd new ways to use it. Plus having too much simply
makes you miserable anyways (been there).

8 – Let go of technical perfection

I think you should learn to expose correctly, learn when something is in focus, etc., and then
let it go. I think too much time has been spent arguing on how a photo is slightly out of
focus, or other small technicalities.

Some of the world’s most iconic photographs are slightly soft, some are outright blurry
(Robert Capa – D.Day soldier), some even have white skies (Alberto Korda’s iconic image of
Che Guevara – Guerriero heroico) amongst others.

Why didn’t you notice these imperfections? Well you didn’t seek them out, so you didn’t see
them. The artistic qualities of a photograph are superior to its technical imperfections, so let
go of them. Heck the Japanese have a concept, “Wabi-sabi” that basically means beauty in
the imperfect.

So stop worrying about if you are 10000% in focus, if your white balance is the neutral
greyest of neutral greys and start looking at what the photograph is about and how it makes
you feel.

In a nutshell: let go of technical perfection, and focus on emotional impact.

9 – Think making photographs, not taking pictures

Being a photographer is an attitude, and one of the fundamental shifts that must happen is
making the di erence between taking a picture and making a photograph. What are you
doing when you rise your camera up to your eye?

Are you taking a picture? In other words, are you content replicating what’s in front of the lens?

Or are you making a photograph? In other words using what’s in front of your lens as a starting
point to communicate what’s inside you?

If you learned how to use your camera through the dPS Newsletter, you have the power the
express yourself. Now you have to understand that you don’t take pictures, camera owners
do that; you make them, photographers do that.