Photography Skills

I take a fair number of photographs.  I take pictures of my kids and grand-kids.  I take vacation pictures when we travel.  I take pictures of the dog and the goats, llamas and alpacas.  I take pictures of various things for this blog as well as pictures of the items we have for sale for the website.  Some of my pictures are wonderful and manage to convey exactly what I want.  Other photos aren't very good or don't really show what I want in the way I want.  The problem is I don't know how to make less than ideal pictures better.  I can't look at a bad picture and know how to improve it.  All of this is why a webinar entitled "Basic Photography Skills for Fiber Artists" caught my attention.

The webinar was offered by Interweave Press and given by Gale Zucker, a professional photographer with an extensive resume of work.  The cost was $19.99 for the one hour presentation with additional time for Gale to answer questions at the end.  This sounded like a great idea to me.  I could get some photographic help and insight that is specifically focused on the fiber arts.  The only problem was it's scheduled time - 1 pm on Tues March 18th.  That's a time when I was not available.  I was at the meeting of West Side Spinners in Houston.  No matter how perfect this webinar sounded, I wasn't about to miss one of my favorite meetings.  But not to worry!  For my payment of $19.99, Interweave promised to send me a link so I could download the webinar and have it on file to refer to whenever I liked.  Yes!  I went happily off to my meeting and waited for the link to arrive.  It did arrive, just as advertised although it took me another week to sit down and watch it.

The webinar was fabulous!  Gale had lots of examples of photos she had taken that included both really wonderful pictures and the not so wonderful ones.  She talked about what to think about when you're getting ready to photograph that shawl or scarf.  How to think about the background, how to make the model comfortable and in just the right mood, how to set up your shots to get the best out of what you are photographing.  She talked about some things I knew, more things I had forgotten and lots of things I'd never heard before.  Here are some of things she talked about...

Pixels are free so just keep taking pictures.

There should only be one story per picture.

Get closer!

Odd numbers of things are always better.

No flash!

I've managed to absorb some of the content but I will probably go back and watch the webinar at least several more times.  In the mean time I'm trying to apply the concepts she talked about.  If you hear about a webinar given by Gale Zucker - think about taking it.  You will learn a lot about photography and how to make it do it's magic for you when you're photographing your hand made treasures.