How to make your photos memorable
I wrote this a while ago to a friend who takes photography classes and I thought, why not sharing my crystallised experience with everyone else?
My photography journey started almost 10 years ago by being very technical about cameras and settings, so much that I still automatically translate the ambient light in “object movement” vs (“aperture” vs “exposure” vs “noise”). While this was an absolute necessity in the early days before Facebook era, nowadays more and more cameras and external flash lights together are so advanced that they do everything brilliantly and all we have to do is point and shoot. So keep the passion boiling and forget about how camera works. At the beginning, maybe is best to just create.
I know you might have read this a lot before but I’m gonna say it anyway. Great photography is not about photography but rather about a story or a narrative. If the viewer finds in there a story, it really doesn’t matter how technically astute the photographer is. It doesn’t matter much if the photo misses the ideal resolution or has been poorly cropped. Of course, there are great images about isolated emotions (i.e. an actor laughing) or about products etc. but I find the narrative photos as being the most powerful for they engage complex emotions and most importantly, subjective ones. That’s what makes them memorable. If you’re not sure of your photo memorability, then surely it isn’t.
The closer the photos are to the human patterns, the more we are drawn to them. For example, shooting a building is very far for “humanhood” because that’s geometry imagery, but taking a photo of a baby elephant is closer to our hearts and well, no one can get any closer to the human hearts than photographing real people.
Personally I like to take portraits. Many photographs - especially stock photos that are used in commercials - contain unilateral, oversaturated emotions. What I find hard to achieve is capturing mixed emotions (like, imagine a murderer convicted to a death sentence and the last wish is to check his facebook account: this triggers laugh, sadness, poignancy, triviality etc. so the audience is more interesting to look at.) Having this on camera, to me, is gold. I’m not good at it, but this would be my chosen path if my day had 48 hours.
There are 2 main ways to get good photos:
1 - Practicing a lot. It is not just a statistical result. Of course, by shooting 3000 photos, there is a very good chance to get 1 or 2 really good, but basically the mind starts to be more selective in choosing the way a photo is taken. It’s like letting yourself on autopilot mode, take an enormous amount of photos and in 2 years time, an implicit wisdom will magically emerge. This approach, however, has its limits - you won’t gain a meaningful philosophy or an outstanding artistic vision but rather an ability to recognise and hunt for a range of visual patterns which are rather accessible to anyone. Shooting photos around is a lottery in finding a good narrative and most often, when this refuses to bubble up, the photographer is post-rationalising the scenery. Sometimes too much. (Ex. photographing a pair of glasses next to a pair of boots and having a blurry person walking away in the background. The post-rationalisation might sound like: “ the character wanted to feel the grass on his feet - freedom - and walks down the path with his own unfiltered vision.” Too much? Definitely. :) Avoid this.
2 - Manipulating scenery with a purpose so that every object and subject in the picture is intentionally placed as a result of in deep thinking. In this case, nothing is left to chance. It is like when writing a dramatic novel, as an author you absolutely need a premise. For instance, in “Madame Bovary” (by G. Flaubert) the premise is “illicit love leads to suicide”. Sometimes the premise can come to you by chance, without planning but nonetheless, looking for a premise upfront, makes the result memorable, appealing and compelling. And the best part is, the result is not that easily replicable by any photographer, so you leave the competition in the dust.
What is easy replicable is not memorable because it blunts our senses throughout repetition when other photographers are doing this over and over again.
For example, the photo that I took to Evie (see picture bellow) wasn’t planned out but for a fraction of a second there, she looked at my 8 y.o. son like she transcended the childhood. It is an after rationalisation kind of a photo, I know, but I still love Evie’s posture. My premise here is “kids can grasp in flickering moments, adulthood”.
That leads me to, how can you tell when a picture is good?
1 - like I said, the premise or the narrative is paramount. Having this in a picture, it’s like hacking a viewer’s memory for an undetermined period of time. To some professionals, this is a trick to be remembered. To me is how a random consciousness (the viewer) gets elevated.
2 - stage setting. This is not just about how a scene is framed (source light, rule of thirds etc.) Even for photojournalists - who are supposed to deliver the objective, unaltered reality - this is a very tempting thing to do and many of them are actually doing it whenever they have the chance. A dead cat on the road is way less than a dead cat AND a doll arm next to it. No matter how cynical this might sounds like, it increases the drama and touches a larger audience. Bottom line, manipulate your scene like a God.
3 - light is crucial. I’m not gonna go into detail here because this is the most emphasised topic when teaching photography. There are thousands of videos out there showing you how to set the lights right. Any kind of lights.
When a photographer is ticking all these 3 points, the picture has a great change to be outstanding but when only two points are met, probably is just a good picture.
Now, don’t care too much about the point 2 and 3. They will naturally come to you with practice but the narrative or the premise is what can make a photographer great and as a matter of fact this is not a photography domain at all. It has to do with our entire life, cultural inheritage, education, personal values and alike. Think about your shot for days, see it from every angle, ask yourself how it will fit culturally, add and remove elements as you wish to reach out your goal. It becomes trivial in time? How will it stand out to different points of view and critiques? Become obsessed by it. Or extremely passionate, if you’re reluctant to clinical words. :)
Make your photo a climax of an easy assumable story by a majority of viewers.
So, if photography is about narratives and premisses, which are born out of personal values, then my only advice to anyone is this: don’t mind about the camera and technicalities because in the next 5 years our Cannons and Nikons will be 10 times better than they already are. And anyway, when you’ll get thwarted by blurriness and noise, most likely you do the search over the internet how to fix it. Frustration is a very eloquent teacher.
Conclusion
Don't reach out for the low hanging fruit because the internet is full of them but rather take your photo after you thoroughly planned everything in advance. Just like a painter does. Be patient and the result will be outstanding.
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