P#5 Q#1: What's The Biggest Mistake Amateur Photographers Make That Leads to Dull Pictures?

Photographers should ask themselves if their subject also works as a photograph

Rob Sheppard: I think that the one thing that a lot of photographers do is that they put too much emphasis on the subject.

Now, what do I mean by that? Obviously the subject is important in most pictures.

What they do is they see the subject and not the photograph. What happens by doing that is you're relying on the technology, whether that's digital technology or film technology, but relying on the technology to capture an interesting subject.

Well, a photograph is not a subject. A photograph is something of a subject but it is not the subject itself. That's been a part of the world of visuals for a long time.

Some people may know of the very famous painting by Magritte. There's a picture of a pipe in the painting. Underneath the painting, it says, "This is not a pipe."

The point of that is that an image is its own thing. To make a better photograph, and to get a photograph that has some vitality to it, we have to treat the photograph as a photograph -- not simply capturing a subject.

Where I think we see a lot of that is just in the way people have used cameras traditionally. People would pick up their camera and sight on a subject. They would simply try to get the subject within the viewfinder, or they would get the subject within the LCD now, if they're using a live LCD, so I've captured the subject.

That's putting a lot on a subject, because subjects really are interesting because we see them in person. They have life to them. Even an inanimate subject has a certain amount of vitality due to the day that you're there, the wind blowing, the smells -- all these kinds of things which cannot be captured in the photograph.

But if a photographer starts thinking, "Okay, I have got to take a picture that is not just capturing the subject but I need to make an image that gives me a photograph," they're going to take a big step.

One of the things that I like to teach in a lot of my classes is to use your LCD. We have this technology today with digital cameras. We have the capability of seeing a little photograph. It isn't just sighting on a subject now and hoping for the best, trying to get your images processed.

Now you can actually see what you got. Now the LCDs are bigger too. You can look at it and say, "Oh, there's a picture. There's a photograph," not just, "Is there a subject in it?" but, "Here is a photograph. Is this a photograph I like? Is this something I would put on my wall?"

Not, "Is this a subject that I would like to remember?" but going beyond that and saying, "Does this work as a photograph?"

In summary

Photographers need to think of a photograph as a whole thing in itself, not just a rendering of its subject. Don't rely solely on technology to create a good picture. Learn how to see the subject in terms of the entire photograph.