For the last few months I’ve been an Adobe Elements Ambassador sharing some ideas for photography and photo editing. Today I’m sharing 5 photography tips that I’ve found useful as a blogger. I’m not a photographer but I have spent a lot of time behind the camera in photographing images for the blog. Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way, I’d love to hear your ideas as well!
1.Waiting for the best soft light. Figure out where the best light is in your house. It may take a few days to see what areas look best in sun, shadow, or rain. I’ve found that my living room gets great light in the morning, my kitchen midday and my sunroom in the later afternoon/early evening. Lately, the sunroom (which is my favorite spot to shoot) is getting great light at like 7pm, which seems nuts! It’s worth it to wait until the best, soft light to take your photos. Sometimes I’ll finish a project and then wait hours for the light to be just perfect.
2. Try re-creating an image (Image above from Sweet Paul Magazine). I learned this trick from taking Nicole’s Tabletop class. She had suggested working on your photography by finding a beautiful image in a magazine and trying to copy it. Maybe you won’t have the same objects, but paying attention to the light, props and placement can help a lot in your own shoots.
Keep reading for three more tips…
3. Strategically placed props. This watermelon image below is a good example of this. Although the focus was on the watermelon slush, I thought pieces of watermelon, seeds and rinds would be good objects to have in the background and going off the corners of the photos. For food photography especially I like using things that make up the object you’re photographing so readers have a good idea from the main image what you’re making.
5. Lighten and increase contrast and saturation. This is a really quick photo-editing trick to help your photos pop a bit more.
Here are some instructions on how to do this in Adobe Elements:
A. Open up your image and select ‘quick’ on the upper right hand corner
B. Then adjust the shadows, midtones and a bit of saturation (just a teeny tiny bit). You can also push that auto contrast button to see if that helps as well.
4. Trying another angle. For blog images, I often will take several final shots from different angles to get a different perspective, texture and focus on different parts of the object. It has helped me a lot in paying more attention to composition.
