His voice is like silk. His music is straight from the throneroom. His name is Cory Asbury.
Song: Always Faithful (Prophetic Song)
Artist: Cory Asbury
Album: Let Me See Your Eyes
Just picked up a hardcover of Bear Gryll’s autobiography on Trademe and I’m amping to get stuck into it. (Hurry up, postie!) If it’s even half as good as this or my all-time-favourite non-fiction book, it will be a winner for me. I’m expecting great things. After-all, as the great proverb goes, adversity introduces a man to himself, and this book looks to be full of adversity so should be a highly compelling read.
Here’s to hoping you see a raving review from me in the not-too-distant future.
People tend to think photography is one of those easy things that isn’t really that difficult to master. They couldn’t be more incorrect. Believe it or not, there’s more to taking a photo than pointing a camera at a subject and depressing the shutter. If hearing that little fact was a lightbulb moment for you (or even if it wasn’t), then please… keep reading.
This is a list of my top 10 tips to taking a better photo. (Note: please don’t take offense if any of these apply to you. We all make mistakes–especially me–and the quickest way to learning is recognising the area of weakness in what it is you’re trying to get better at.)
So whether you’re just starting out or already own a Canon 1D X, I hope you find this guide useful. And, as always, I love to hear feedback! Got some photos you’re unsure of? Struggling with a photography term like aperture or shutter speed? Loved the article? Hated it? Like my new socks? Whatever, feedback rocks. I love feedback!
Here we go.
10. What’s all that wasted space about?
This one’s a classic. There’s someone’s head (or in the case of the example shot above, some boring mountains) right at the bottom of the frame and about a million miles of empty space above them. Don’t get me wrong, this can be a good effect. Sometimes. However, mostly it just looks bad. If your shot is currently featuring a whole lot of empty space, make sure your subject is in a position that makes good use of this. For example, if it was a front-on shot of a family member, and nothing but blue sky behind him, I would tend to put his eyes two-thirds the way up the shot. For more info on this, check out tip 8.
9. Slapping an Instagram filter on a poorly framed shot in no way makes it “arty”
The surge of free iPhone apps that are “changing the way people do photography” is quite astounding. Not in terms of being astounded by creativity, but being astounded that so many people use it and think it is super duper artistic. You’ll see it on a daily basis on Facebook. A photo with an olden day colour palette of mostly browns with a faded colour area splotch the middle, all nicely frame in a polaroid film border with a random number up the top. Sure, the person who first did it was cool, but photography, like any type of art, is all about creativity and doing things differently. The polaroid and oldschool look that made a comeback these last few years is now so overdone that it’s just getting silly. Here’s 3 words that will forever stretch your photography skills: Try something different.
And on a quick side note, this same principle applies with black & white photography. Just because you snapped a deck chair and the back of someone’s head and changed it to grayscale does not make it a work of art.
8. Framing, framing, framing
The golden rule of framing goes something like this… Picture your photo in your head. Now imagine that same photo with lines drawn over it dividing the shot up into thirds. 2 lines vertical, 2 lines horizontal (as illustrated in the above example). In the 4 places these lines intersect is where your main subject could potentially be. If the subject is not around one of those four general areas, chances are the shot isn’t well framed. This rule is often broken to good effect, but it is a very safe and proven way to frame a shot. A couple of notes to go with this: Remember headspace, and mostly avoid centre framed subjects. Headspace means the area between your subject’s head and the top of the frame. If you have placed them on either of the topmost two intersecting “third lines”, the gap between their head and the top of the frame should be just under a third of the frame’s total height. Confused? Rule of thumb: Is the main subject’s head sticking into the top of the frame? Unless your shot is a close up, this is not a good sign. Tilt your camera up until there is a not-too-small but not-too-large gap there. Give them some breathing space, but not too much!
7. You call that lighting?
If you remember only one thing I say, remember this: Lighting will make or break your shot. Some examples of poor lighting are: bland natural light (for example, overcast days, that look the sky gets right before it’s about to rain, brilliant midday sunshine, etc…), low-light (if it’s getting dark and your camera decides to use its built-in flash, chances are the lighting sucks), Fluorescent-tube indoor lights (they make humans look like pale-face zombies). Some examples of excellent lighting are: early morning first-light looks (that awesome newness the earth seems to exude up until about 10:00 am), twilight or sunset lighting (be careful here; the sweet spot doesn’t last long and you don’t have much time to grab your perfect shot using this great lighting time), summer evenings when the sun is nice and golden (again, don’t dilly-dally as this type of epic lighting waits for no man!). I can’t stress it enough: Lighting is everything (well, almost everything). Never discount the importance of good lighting in your photography.
Too dark:
Just right:
6. Bold shadows tend to look revolting
Ever taken a photo at lunch time on a sunny day and wondered why it looks ghastly? Dark, pronounced shadows under the eyes, nose and certain types of sticky-out-foreheads are not flattering. At all. Everything looks much too contrasted and the colour palette is washed all out of kilter by the domineering sunshine. The blacks are too dark, the lights are too light, and all in all, it makes for a photography disaster. If you ever find yourself in the situation where you simply must shoot at midday in brilliant sunshine… don’t. Errr, I mean, try find a shady tree or somewhere out of direct sunlight. Even then it’s hit or miss whether you’ll get something usable.
5. Shoot children on their level
This is good:
This is not so good:
No, don’t take a gun to kids. Rather, when you are photographing children (this can be quite trying, especially if they are young children), always, always, always shoot at their height. Photos from an adult’s height looking down on what the kid is doing scream “Look at me, I am an amateur photographer!”. Sure, you can break this rule to good effect, but most of the time you should stick to it. It can be a little embarrassing getting down on your stomach, or even hands and knees to take that elusive perfect shot, but really, we’ve just gotta get over ourselves. The photos look 10x better, I guarantee it. Rather than coming across as looking down on a child from an adult’s perspective, the photo will look a lot more natural, candid and friendly. Three things photography needs a whole lot more of these days.
4. Stop putting all your unused junk in your shot
This is good:
This is terrible:
This one is almost as common as the common cold! How many times have I looked at photos taken by well-meaning relatives only to see all kinds of random oddities cluttering up otherwise OK-looking shots. Sometimes it’s so bad you think the subject is the broken pram alongside the baby rather than the newborn that will forever change the parents’ lives! I’ve seen it all… things like toy tractors, random poles, chairs, fingers over the lens, vacuum cleaners, big foot, Pikachu, books, plates, lawnmowers–aaargh! A photo is for the purpose of drawing attention to a subject; not distracting from it. It tells a story. What does useless junk that has absolutely no relevance to that shot do? It ruins it. This is all part of the lengthy process of learning to frame your shot well. But just remember the next time you’re about to click that shutter, stop. Take another look at what is in your photo. Sure, you can crop later on, but take a better photo first so you don’t have to! Photography is an art, not a bunch of happenstance things that accidentally give you good results.
3. There’s safety in numbers
The beauty of digital photography is that you can take many photos without the expense of getting them all developed. While I definitely do not endorse filling up a 6gb memory card with millions of photos of the same thing, I do recommend taking 3 or 4 shots of the same subject, especially if you are waiting for the perfect facial expression or waiting on an action shot to unfold (diving into a pool, riding a bike, watching paint dry, whatever it is you like to fill your memory card with).
2. Watch that focus
This is good:
This is absolutely disgusting:
Depth of field (the amount of the frame that will be in focus) is a great tool–use it. Portraiture where the subject is in focus and the background is nicely blurry is textbook stuff for building a professional shot, but it can also cause many headaches later if you muff it up and the subject does not end up pin sharp. The classic mistake is to get the focus around the wrong way (trust me, I’ve done this… at a wedding–eeek!) where the background is in focus and the subject is blurry. Experiment at home with the way your camera handles focus and never have another focus-ruined shot again. (Yeah right.)
1. Always be poised and ready to attack!
This is my all time top tip. OK, so maybe the word attack is a little melodramatic, but always be ready for action! The best photo opportunities come out of nowhere, last about half a second, before never ever happening ever (ever!) again. You’ve gotta be super speedy and have fingers like little mini Burt Munros. Learn your camera controls inside out so that you don’t miss that award-winning shot looking for that one setting you found that one time that you quite like. If that happens then I can almost guarantee you’ve missed the shot by a good two minutes! And in photography time, that is a very, very long time.
Bonus tip: Straighten that horizon!
Crooked horizons can be arty, but usually they just look bad. Next time you’re taking that shot to hang on your wall of our beautiful New Zealand coastlines, stop and check if your camera is straight! Some cameras have guides in the viewfinder or on the LCD screen to help you gauge this. These are useful. Use them.
This is good:
This is ridiculous:
Every SIM card has a name… Pfffffft! No they don’t. But every day Facebook has a new hoax, fallacy or chain status update that is complete piffle, and the cellphone SIM card one is merely the latest.
Is adding such-and-such a person going to give you a virus or make you susceptible to hackers? Hardly. Is this-or-that company going to give you a free gift voucher for filling out a form giving away extremely personal information? I wouldn’t hold your breath. Is unsubscribing from a friend’s updates going to stop the ticker updater from somehow allowing hackers to plunder your page? Don’t count on it.
I’m constantly amazed at how many fake, fraudulent and utterly ridiculous things are pasted around the internet every day. So, as a tribute, here are my top 5 favourite internet hoaxes to date.
5. Bigfoot’s Body (2008)
In 2008 a couple of twits pulled a prank on the American media when they claimed to have found the body of Bigfoot. They held a press conference and somehow managed to get coverage from mainstream news outlets like CNN. A California Bigfoot fan was so taken in by the gag that he decided to pay the two Georgia men $50,000 for the body, and later found that it was just a costume packed in ice. Gutted!
4. The Montauk Monster (2008)
Like all good hoaxes, this one started with a newspaper article from a local paper in Montauk, New York in 2008. Some bizarre looking thing had washed up on a beach. Nobody knew what it was. Hence, the Montauk Monster was born.
Nobody still really knows what on earth it is. But whatever it is, the Montauk Monster was an instant hit on the net and it has sparked an almost unending debate over whether this is just another hoax or actually legitimate. I’m going with the former.
3. How to Charge an iPod with an Onion (2007)
I still can’t believe how many people fell for this one. Come on, plugging your iPod into an onion is going to charge it? Seriously? Safe to say, it got a spot on Mythbusters and the verdict was exactly as we all might have predicted: Busted!
2. The Derbyshire Fairy (2006)
Prop-maker Dan Baines of Derbyshire, England created what he told people was the corpse of a “fairy,” but really it was just a big April Fool’s Day prank. He went on to put it up for sale on eBay and on his web site. He couldn’t have fathomed the success it would bring when it resulted in his site getting over 20,000 visits in one day. Even after he revealed the whole thing was a load of faff, Baines still received emails from fairy believers accusing him of covering up the truth with his myth story.
“I’ve had all sorts of comments including people who say they’ve seen exactly the same things and one person who told me to return the remains to the grave site as soon as possible or face the consequences,” he told the BBC.
1. Kidney Thieves in New Orleans (1997)
1997. Long before Facebook was around, yet hoaxers were just as prevalent. An email started making the rounds warning travelers that a ring of organ thieves was operating in the city, and punters were likely to get their kidneys stolen. A little disturbing, but it took so many people in that they had to release a statement declining its validity to keep the tourism numbers up. Yikes!
The moral of the story, folks, is don’t believe half the stuff you read on the internet. Chances are it’s a load of cock and bull.
I don’t know about you, but I can never simply *watch* a movie. Perhaps that’s why it has been said of me that I am incredibly hard to please when it comes to watching a film. (Don’t worry, I’ll take it as a compliment.) Perhaps it’s also why I’m not a great movie buddy if the movie really isn’t doing it for me. I suppose that does ring true, since when I sit down to watch a movie, I don’t merely want to be entertained; I want my life to actually change in some way. (This seems ludicrous on the surface, but it isn’t actually as unrealistic as it sounds.) To me, movies are just like real life. This sounds even more absurd, but if you probe a little deeper, it’s also a realistic statement. The characters of a movie have to know what they want, and what they want needs to be something more meaningful than going on a crazy date (hence why I strongly disliked the movie Date Night; sure, it was mildly funny, but overall was, I think, an enormous waste of time).
A real gem of a movie that I recently stumbled upon is the quizzical slice of brilliance that is Fantastic Mr. Fox. Sure, it’s stop-motion and doesn’t look anywhere near the polished perfection of a typical mainstream Hollywood Blockbuster, but perhaps this is the magical point of difference that sucked me in. I know a lot of people strongly (understatement) dislike this movie… *shrug*… fair enough. The humour is wry; the soundtrack is quirky; the look of the movie is bizarre. (Although, to me those are three reasons for success already, but we’re not talking about me just yet 
). The thing I liked the most about this movie was the authenticity of the characters. Ash, in particular, is one of my favourites. The entire movie he struggles with his identity; he doesn’t fit in anywhere and fails at everything he puts his *paws* to (har har). He’s different and he knows that others know it and don’t understand him for it. He’s pretty cut up about that. (Although, he doesn’t give a whole lot away.) But, by the end of the film, he finds that his differences are actually his greatest strengths. They make him unique.
I know this message is certainly nothing new. It’s been heralded from thousands of pulpits, sung oodles of different ways in scores of different melodies, and yet the crazy thing is that people still don’t get it. I don’t get it. Everyday I see people–yes, me too–trying to be someone they’re not. Bands aren’t happy with their own sound so they chase someone else’s; kids aren’t happy with how they look and wish they were in someone else’s skin; teens aren’t happy with their lives and often end them as a result; adults aren’t happy with what they’ve made of their lives and prove unfaithful to their families in their insatiable hunt for something new and exciting. I guess they only loved “for better or while there’s still a spark“. All in all, a lot of people aren’t happy. They have millions upon millions of cells racing through their body, the information from which came from countless interwoven strands of complex DNA code telling their body how to be entirely unique. But still, they’re not happy. I’m not happy. None of us are happy. That is, until we’re OK with being ourselves.
I’m finally coming to grips with what this looks like when it’s not merely talked about, but actually acted upon. For example, my music probably sounds like a sick cow when compared to famous bands and artists; I like going on adventures by myself; I seriously struggle to pay attention in sermons or public addresses; I thrive on *different* movies; I’m passionate about, well, being passionate; I’m impulsive to a fault; I strongly believe living is more than just being alive; I get distracted extremely easily; I am incapable of going to bed before 11:30 pm; I like peanut butter and tomatoes on the same slice of bread; I have been told I am an English Nazi (maybe this is true, but their, there and they’re are still three entirely different words and should be treated as such ; I’m 99.9% sure that I have obsessive compulsive disorder in areas more numerous than the stars; I often find myself looking at billboards or company logos and judging them because the kerning (space between each letter) is bad; I have conversations with myself (out loud) on a daily basis; I’m a perfectionist . . . and this is just the tip of the iceberg that is my peculiarity. But all of this is perfectly OK, because all of this is me. And I’m OK with being me. Finally.
Instead of writing music that sounds like someone else, I’m going to write music that sounds like me. Instead of drawing with someone else’s pencil, I’m going to draw with my own. Instead of being a carbon copy of all my influences and merely reflecting their light, I’m going to carry my own source of sunshine and let their influence simply make the rays shine that little bit brighter. And instead of borrowing other peoples’ words to tell God I love Him, I’m going to start telling Him using my own.
Edgar Andrews
Coldplay
Adele