Last updated on January 20th, 2017 at 04:37 am
This past week in South Africa I learned so much about what it takes to produce great photos that my head is spinning. While I still have a long way to go (and tons of equipment to buy) before I become great at photography, I’m excited to keep on learning in future travels.
How did I learn so much in such little time? Well, one of the members of my safari group had an amazing photographer and I picked up on many of his techniques by simply being able to ask him questions about his craft and see how he produces such great images. There’s no short cuts, it’s a combination of capturing great images in your camera, having the right equipment and then mastering post-processing of photos before publishing. There’s even a little luck involved!
It will take a lot more practice and thousands of dollars of equipment to produce great photos, but I’m hopeful to get there some day.
One of the things I learned from watching a great photographer is not to be afraid of snapping multiple images of the same thing. In fact, it may take several snaps of the same image to get one that comes out of the camera perfectly. The key is to delete the photos that don’t turn out and eventually whittle down the selection to a single image that represents your image. While this adds more work to the process of sharing your photos, it also helps you get the best results.
The photo of the week was taken near the end of about 40 snaps of the sunrise on our second morning of the safari, as we stopped for our morning coffee at sunrise. I started out with a wide view of the situation and slowly zoomed in to capture the tree where the sun was shining through. At the right moment the sun began to shine through the tree, producing our featured image.
For those of you who like to see the process develop, here is what the same sunrise looked like zoomed out slightly:
And here is a view of the sunrise with the surrounding sky.
The last thing to note is that I did very little color or contrast modification to these images – this is what the sky actually looked like!