Complex Numbers

Freeze Frame

I'm not going to have too many comments on the article I'm sharing today. It's more for informational purposes; these days, everyone is a photographer, and while phone cameras do a hell of a lot of the work for you (more than most people can appreciate), there are still things anyone can do to improve their picture-taking ability.

    How to take better photos  
Anyone can learn the principles that are essential to capturing quality images. Follow these tips and see the difference

Before the era of social networking sites, creating and sharing photographs was more deliberate and less instantaneous, which made picture-taking feel special. Families cherished the physical print – a link to the past with sentimental value – and kept their precious memories in albums, rarely showing them outside the family. Today, people commonly take photos not only to serve as memory cues but to tell others who they are, what they care about, and how they feel.

One might be tempted to think because I learned photography and even made a bit of money from it before digital cameras were a thing, that I'd have things to say about how kids these days have it too easy, that photography used to mean something, dammit, and that I'd yearn for the good old days of film and the techniques involved in developing it.

While I'm glad I got that experience, I'm also something of a technophile. Digital cameras can be amazing, and they've democratized the act of recording images for posterity.

In this Guide, I will provide some photographic principles and specific tips for casual, amateur and aspiring photographers on how to take better photos. By ‘better photos’, I mean appealing images that evoke emotions in the viewer and capture the essence of a subject or scene (and that resonate with how our brains make sense of the world).

I find that no matter how good you are, or think you are, at something, learning more about it, even some of the so-called basics, can help. Even us engineers were expected to keep learning throughout our careers.

So. Like I said. I have no real comments on the article; I think it's full of good information, whether you're using your smartphone as a casual snapshot-taking device, or have invested inspent money on a fancy DSLR (it's only an "investment" if you expect to make money from it).

Everyone's a photographer now, but that doesn't mean they're all good at it.