Follow the leader. This was a game that I used to play as a kid. The aim was to follow the person who was chosen as the leader. Failure to follow the leader meant that I was out of the game. Quite frequently, I was left standing while the other kids went on playing. Now that I have grown up, I still fail to follow the leader.
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter. Not too famous, painted very few works and never traveled the world. With such a few paintings, he was an almost obscure painter until some famous names gave him his due regards. For photographers, his paintings can also be an inspiration and a source of learning.
KISS… Keep It Simple, Stupid!
A girl-friend had once told this to me. Quite a famous line and I don’t even know where it originated initially. Little did I know that after so many years, this will become the opening line of this article.
Keeping the compositions simple is one of the easiest ways to make them powerful. A strong composition which is easy to understand and conveys the point across in a straight forward manner, is the best gift that you can give to your viewer. This is minimalism in photography.
A few weeks back, I was at Maini’s Hill Cottages, NataDol with a friend. Nice and cool night with no moon in sight. Once the sky was almost dark, we planned on capturing some night shots of the cottages itself. Switched on all the lights and went out to the far end of the driveway… tripod set, camera set, exposure settings checked… and we started capturing the scene. These were to be used for marketing purposes.
A motivational speaker and a friend of mine once told me, “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. This is especially true when it comes to learning photography. It sounds obvious but very few of the photographers actually make use of it. If you are a photographer trying to improve your skills, do try to get some artists and photographers to critique your work.
