6 Easy Ways To Upgrade Your Photography This Summer
Photo by Weiqi Xiong on Unsplash.
You’ve probably dipped in your toes already. A backyard barbecue. Long drive to a favorite beach. Opening up the cottage. Memorial Day weekend cued the overture for the main event in July.
Summer is officially here.
So now is the perfect time to look at your photo strategy and get ahead of the curve. For many of us, June kicks off the annual photo “season” that starts with graduations, weddings, and travel events, and dissolves into Fall and Holiday festivities.
Here are six ways to approach Summer photos that will enrich your memories without adding overwhelm and turn you into a better photographer. It's like summer school without the deadlines, and you grade yourself.
1. Take photos with intention
Go looking for photos. iPhones make it so handy to take pictures that you can unintentionally overdo it, like a bag of potato chips. I call it a photo safari. It can be a 5-minute stroll through a garden, a city block, or a kitchen counter. Just the act of looking for interesting photos rather than reacting to a pop-up situation.
And take your pictures with the next step in mind.
Is it a moment that you will really savor or share? Is it just a reminder? Will those extra two shots get edited down to the one keeper? If you take your images with some clear intent, then you’ll become a better photographer and your photo library will become more interesting and naturally less cluttered.
It seems simple, but looking for photos is different than stumbling onto them. Photography is about how we see the world around us. You'll be amazed at the photos you find when you are looking for them.
Photo by author.
2. The way we were
When you get to a certain age, you appreciate the power of time. How it changes our perspective and can add value to a picture. The people, places, and events we take for granted today will be the memories that we treasure years from now when the people are older and the places have changed. Kids' first bedrooms. Family around a campfire. Beach volleyball. A trip to the city. The summer cabin. What we did and how we did it. This is the rich world between selfies and landscapes that makes up our life story.
During the pandemic, the Smithsonian Museum recognized how important it was to collect photos and artifacts that would tell the story to later generations. In truth, we are all living in moments that will someday be remarkable. You can take photos now to capture that.
Photo by author.
3. Guest photographer
Every family has a photographer who is never in the family pictures because they are taking them. It’s often the mom, but not always. You can fill that gap in their photo library by being the guest photographer and taking some family photos for them. Not the ‘stand up next to each other’ photos, but the candid, playing together, reading a book, floating sticks down the stream kind of photos. Whether you are visiting for an afternoon or a week, this is a one of a kind gift that will fill an important gap in the family photo library. You can just share the files or make a gift book. And once you’ve passed them on, you just delete them from your own camera roll.
4. Channel your inner photojournalist
Summer is the best time to take chances with your photography and push boundaries. Anything that catches your eye is fair game. From the bored lifeguard to interesting shadows on a brick wall. Graffiti. Storefronts. Travelers at the airport. People you know and people you don’t know. Your summer vacation. What interests you? Take pictures of that.
5. Motion pictures
I wish I had a video of my father. To hear his voice and see his expressions. Be sure to get some video in there where it matters. Not only for those small personal touch points, but to add depth to a story. Live Photo is both a gimmick and a gift because it can become a 3-second video. Easy to include in a slideshow. Holding down the shutter button on the iPhone will capture a longer clip as video. It’s amazing how much you can get in just a few seconds.
6. Check your work
Just like you learned in 4th grade math class, check your work before handing it in.
Remember what I said about intention? Well, the corollary to taking photos with intention is to edit photos with intention. Sometimes you just have to trust your inner photographer and get a shot while you can. Often there isn’t much time to analyze it. But there was “something” that caught your eye, so you took it. Writers talk about the words that seem to come from nowhere. Photography is the same with images.
Image by author.
So the edit is your chance to examine that judgment and confirm or challenge the intention. If you took it on wild impulse, then maybe it goes to the trash. If your instincts served you well, then you can embrace the experience and celebrate your inner genius. Or luck.
The thing is that photography is an emotional medium. Your impression of an image on first sight is usually the right one. It doesn’t matter if someone’s eyes are closed or a telephone pole is sprouting from a child’s head. If that image creates a laugh or a tear, then it is a good picture. Those are the images you want to keep and share.
So, embrace summer school. Keeping an eye on these 6 exercises will improve and enrich your summer photo experience and set you up for a new perspective on managing your photos for the Fall and beyond.