Trying to Become a Better Amateur Photographer

I started this assessment by reading Craft & Vision’s 20 Ways to Make Better Photographs Without Buying More Gear. I tried implementing these techniques on my own around my house. Since it’s a beautiful day, I decided to light my pipe and go for a walk outside. One of the things I’ve been trying recently is incorporating more flowers around my house. I’ve been planting a lot of perennials and some annuals in pots on my front porch. This is a picture of some of the flowers using a typical perspective (i.e., looking directly at them).

Changing My Perspective

After reading the tips from the Craft & Vision eBook, I knew that I wanted to try changing my perspective. Instead of taking a picture of the flowers as a typical viewer, I thought about the viewpoint of the flowers. To experiment, I laid my phone down in the flower pot and used the front-facing camera to try to capture the new perspective. As you can tell, it didn’t work out as planned. The picture is blurry, unfocused, and congested.

Finding My Balance

So I had an idea and it didn’t work out, but I’m not a quitter. With some repositioning and adjusting, I was able to get a slightly better quality photo. I am also using the adjective “better” very generously. It is still a bad photo, but the perspective is more of what I wanted. I liked that I was able to get the blue sky into the shot. I was attempting to incorporate Craft & Vision’s tip to experiment with balance, but the balance in this picture still seems off. There’s no depth to the picture. The flowers are out of focus, and you can see part of my porch and the side of my face. I wasn’t happy with how this one turned out.

A Wider Angle

For my last photo, I tried to apply Craft & Vision’s tip to use the best lens. There aren’t many options on my iPhone, so I flipped my phone around to point the rear-facing camera towards the sky and snapped the picture from my watch. By doing this, I was able to use the 0.5x lens, which gives the wide angle perspective. I like the contrast of the bright sky and the sun beaming around the flowers with the stems being dark and shaded. The balance between the visual mass of the flowers to the open bright sky with a border of trees is visually appealing to me. The depth was also very interesting. I wasn’t intending to get the trees in the shot, but I realized that this made the flowers appear to be the same height as the surrounding trees. I got lucky that with the lighting outside today and that the sky created a nice background. Overall, I’m very happy with how this photo came out.