There are few things more annoying than getting home after a long day photographing, importing your photos, and then seeing that you didn’t get the photo you wanted. Maybe you overexposed it or missed focus or didn’t nail the composition. Here’s how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In this article, I’m going to be using landscape photography as an example because everything happens nice and slowly; or at least it does most of the time. The steps are the same for other kinds of photography, although you may need to skip test shots—the difference there is that you have to do everything a lot faster.
Visualize the Image
The first step in getting a photo you want is to decide what photo you want to take. That might sound a bit like a truism, but the reality is most photographers don’t spend enough time thinking. It’s easy to arrive at a beautiful location, start snapping away and assume you’ve got a good photo because everything is pretty. When you get home, you’ll be disappointed. With the image on your computer screen, you’ll notice the telephone wires and tourists you didn’t see when you were there.
Instead, slow down, look around, and start thinking about what sort of photo you want to take. Do you want to capture the waves breaking against the beach or the nice rock formation? There will generally be a few different shots on offer. For example, I took this photo:
And this photo:
About 20 minutes apart. When the sun was below the horizon, I saw I had an opportunity to capture a zen, mellow black and white image. As soon as the sun was high enough, I wanted all the colors. Both photos were deliberate choices based on what was available at the time.
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