Trying To Improve My Skills

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder they say and that applies to photography as well. If you have one photo and ask five people about what they see or how they see that photo, you most likely will get five different answers, or six. When it comes to architecture, you have high chances to get different answers, especially if among those five you are asking, there's one or more professional photographers. Some can only see the building, while others look for lining up horizontal and vertical lines.

A couple of days ago I got a nice comment from Hive account@castleberry, who I respect a lot. He's the curator of the Photography Lovers community and he's not a newbie in photographic field with a cheap plastic camera in his hand, so his professional comment and advice meant a lot to me. I studied the post that he linked me in his comment and can say it is like gold as it gives you a lot to think about. Check it out as you may learn something too.

He doesn't know yet, but I've been struggling with lining things lately. I love architecture and love taking photos of buildings, however, that doesn't mean I'm good at it. Quite many times it happens to look into the camera, see how to line the lines, take the perfect shot, then when I get home I see that what I did can be qualified as total crap, because the camera did not see what I saw or saw it differently. Obviously with the 21st century technique, you can straighten a photo, which can make it a bit better, but can also make more damage to it, as straightening a photo means losing in size here and there.

Lately I've been trying to find the best point where to stand to take a decent photo of a building and not just snap a photo. The truth is, I need to find time and go do a proper photo shoot, experiment and learn to be prepared. Prepared for what you may ask. Prepared to take 1k photo of the same building, to see the difference and see which photo is the best and why. Otherwise I will never learn anything and will stay at this level or even worth.

Today I decided to give you a few examples of photos I have taken and have missed to line things, for various reasons.

Churches, especially orthodox cathedrals are very good for this purpose as the architecture can be spectacular. I took these photos in June and have never posted them as have been waiting to have more. Now it's a good occasion to show you what I meant at the beginning of the post.

I took several shots and none of them was what I wanted. If you look at the bottom, you can see each photo is leaning right. Every single one of them and not just them, but I suppose always.

When I took these photos, I was already thinking of making them black and white as that way we focus more on details. So when I got home, I saw the building was leaning right, so I tried to straighten it, but it was still not right as it wasn't symmetrical.

Now comes the question, how perfect you want your photos to be? I think photographing is similar to creating art, paining or sculpture as you never know when it is finished, you always find something, a little detail, that could be better. The difference is, a painting can be adjusted, a sculpture as well, a photograph can't, as you have to take it again as editors can work only to some extent.

My biggest problem as I see it is holding my camera (my phone as I'm using my phone camera) straight. Meaning the distance between the object I'm photographing and both sides of my phone should be the same. Obviously there's no way to measure that on site and as I'm not using a tripod either, so ... 😇 it's not that easy.

However, life is funny sometimes and no matter how hard you try, there are things you can't change. There is this photo I tool at the Bethlen-Haller castle and I love how it turned out after applying filters and all the stuff we do when editing photos, but there is something that is bothering me.

See what I mean? But unless I go back and have another look at it, take a bunch of new photos, I will never know if the architects got sloppy or I did a crappy job. However, architects are professionals, so this is on me :)

This is the original photo, to show you from where the whole editing started. (Not to find excuses, but under those circumstances, I'm glad I could take this half decent shot as was in a hurry, not to be left behind by the group.) The railing was something I had to decide upon, how much to cut out and how much to leave in. I decided to go with what you see on the monochrome photo and I don't regret it. I think it's the perfect size.

So there's definitely room for improvement and if you don't want this kind of headaches, stick to flowers or sunset photos 😂 I'm going to try to improve my skills, maybe looks for tutorials online, after reading all the posts from Hive account@castleberry, then go out and practice, when the rain stops.

If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides: