10 Photography Tips:

1. Learn how to see light. Look specifically for shadows and highlights, then you can set the exposure accordingly.
2. Try to recreate the depth and dimension in your photographs, that you see in real life. A good way to do this is to use a foreground object within your composition.
3. Take the time to walk around the location you are photographing. Don’t be too hasty in picking a composition. Look for all the different angles you have available to you.
4. Continuing on from the last tip, look down, back, and up. Often some of your best shots can be directly behind you.
5. Tell the whole story. Don’t take only one photograph. Instead, take wide angle, medium and close up shots of the same scenery. Shoot both verticle and horizonal photographs. With a lot of different photographs, you can tell the whole story.
6. Frame your photographs. For example, look for an opening in a rock from which to photograph a landscape through, or photograph a person through a window or doorway. This will help make your images more interesting to the viewer.
7. Be aware of the background. This is something I’ve personally trained myself to do automatically. When looking through the camera’s viewfinder, take notice of all the background elements before taking the shot. The background can make or break a good photograph. For example, last winter I took the perfect stock photograph of a snow gum. Except when I returned home, I realised the image also had an ugly power line in the background.
8. Move in tight and fill the frame. Take out any elements that don’t add interest to the picture. If they are not part of the story, then get rid of them by zooming in and filling the frame.
9. Photograph in RAW format to get the most out of each image.
10. Envision the end result, or what it is you want to achieve. Rick believes in 50% camera work, 50% digital editing. For example, if you are intending on changing the image into a black and white photograph with Photoshop CS2 later on, then envision that picture before taking the shot.