Photo(s) of the Day (by the Hewitt kids!)

I’m breaking form here and posting three photos of the day – each taken by a Hewitt family kid.

The kids got digital cameras for Christmas so Mona asked me to give them a little art lesson about photography. I explained to them the 3 guidelines to better photos. Then they had 20 minutes to go take three pictures: a person, a plant, a place. When they came back we looked at the photos and discussed the three questions. I’ve posted three of their best as today’s Photo of the Day.

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I learned the 3 guidelines from The Digital Photography Show, a weekly podcast that I have really enjoyed and learned a lot from this year. On one episode, Chuck Delaney, dean the New York Institute of Photography, spoke about these 3 guidelines or questions to ask yourself when taking a photo.

1. What is the subject of my photograph?
2. How can I give emphasis to my subject?
3. What can I do to simplify my photograph or to remove distracting items that take away from the subject?

Basically, asking yourself these questions makes you think about why you are taking the photo and what you can do to better convey that reason. I think that the downfall of digital photography is that it lets us snap more photos, more often without thinking about whether or not the photo needed to be taken or could how it can be improved upon.

I have tried to be very disciplined on this trip and follow the guidelines before taking a picture.  I also review my photos every night and delete my sub-par images. Even so, I’ve taken over 8500 photos and only kept 3182 – that is 37.6% of my shots. So you can see that even when I try to follow the guidelines when I take a photo I still trash over 62% of my images.

So the larger lesson is: think before you snap