The photo opportunities around you

- Now it's not that the other topics covered in this video course are unimportant, far from it but I'm still going to say that this video right here, this one covers my very favorite photo-related topic. Here's the deal. Whenever I share this topic with designers I start by telling you the single most important thing that I do when it comes to being a designer who's also a photographer. You ready for this? Here's what I do. I carry a purse. I carry a purse with me, yeah. I mean, I prefer to call it a courier bag or a shoulder bag, you can call it whatever you want but the point is I keep this thing with me pretty much all the time. In my bag, among other things, I make sure to carry these three things at all times. I got a notebook and a set of pens which I'm going to say no designer should ever really be without and of course I've got my pocket digital camera. So, first of all, why a pocket camera in my bag when I already have a cell phone camera in my pocket? Well, as we talked about in the first video of chapter one it's just because pocket cameras they take shots that are much more likely to be useful in print media. Much clearer images, and less digital noise. Now, what kinds of pictures do I recommend you take with your pocket camera? Mainly, yeah, take pictures of anything that catches your eye and I mean anything. There's bugs, there's birds, you could take pictures of living creatures or even dead creatures or fish, how about bicycles built for two? Or for one or for clowns and there's bottle caps, there's beverage signs and there's signs that say surprising things. And how about shiny things? I like shiny things. I mean, I like observational binoculars and I like this brushed steel wall. And this one actually brings up a whole topic, the whole thing about visual textures and don't even get me started talking about visual textures. Not now anyway since I'll be devoting all of the final video in this chapter to that topic. Don't miss it. Okay, as you can possibly sense already this is something of an addiction for me, this capturing and collecting of images, photos of whatever captures my eye. And it is an addiction. I can hardly go a day or even a morning or an evening without snapping at least a couple shots and sometimes a whole lot more than a couple shots. But we're not talking here about an unhealthy addiction. This is the good kind of habit. This is one that can improve both my and your creative instincts and our camera know-how too and it all starts with simply keeping a pocket camera with you as often as possible and you know, there is one other thing this healthy, creative habit has done for me and it was actually a little unexpected. What it's done is that it's opened my eyes like by a factor of 10. I mean, there's just something about knowing that I've got a camera within reach at all times that tells my eyes to be on the look out for photo opportunities. I pay so much more attention to the world around me these days and the more photos that I shoot with my carry-along camera, the more my eyes start paying attention for more shots. And this, this has done still another great thing. It's given me a fairly gigantic and extremely useful collection of ready-to-go images, photos that can be used simply for display or they can be used professionally as theme setting images for client work. Plus, a fairly large percentage of the photos that appear in my design, my photography and my creativity books, well, those are pocket camera shots too. So, it should all go without saying that this habit of carrying a bag over my shoulder and keeping a pocket camera inside it's been a really, really good thing both in terms of tangibles like money earned and also in terms of intangibles like artistic growth and improved photography skills. All right, let's talk about you for a minute. Are you interested in a little warmup exercise related to this habit? Well, I hope so and it's something that you might not be expecting. Here's what you'll need, you're going to need that pocket camera that we've been talking about and maybe a couple of lights and you'll also need something from that utensil/junk draw in your kitchen and I know you have at least one of those drawers. Now, just choose something and then photograph it and not just one or two photos, start with 50. 50 or 60 or 100 photos, at least. And what you're viewing right here by the way, these are 66 of the 130 or so shots that I took, shots that I converted to black and white later on in Lightroom 'cause I like black and white and some of the shots as you'll see they're partly or totally abstract and that's 'cause I also like abstract. Go on and be as creatively daring and open to ideas as you possibly can during this exercise which sometimes will mean getting that camera right up there with your subject while also finding a way to focus on whatever part of the scene that you really want to focus on. Okay, sometimes I have to say this is a little tricky to do so let me just insert a little tip here. It's a trick for this kind of focusing and you might already know about this technique. Anyway, for starters, do have your pocket camera in close-up mode. Now, most cameras prefer to focus on what's at the middle of a scene but what if I want my sharpest focus to be on say something further back and away from the middle? Well, one thing you can do is press the shutter button halfway down while aiming it where you really want to focus and then while keeping the shutter button held in this halfway position re-aim and re-compose your scene and then and only then do you press your button all the way down to take the shot. Give this one a try. There'll be plenty of chances to practice this trick during this exercise. So, back to our slideshow and let me just add one more thing here. Once you do this exercise, I'm telling ya, for the rest of your life whenever you pull that camera out of your bag and you're wondering if there's really any photo potential in that thing or that scene that just caught your eye, whether it's something exotic and rare or something as common place as a household utensil, you can just think back on that one day when you took 50/100, maybe 200 shots of that simply, ordinary household object from a junky drawer in your kitchen.