 Great photographers have mastered a number of vital skills in their photography, and today I'm going to share with you how to tap into and harness the most important of these in your own images. By the end of this video, you are going to be seeing the world to the eyes of a great photographer, you. How's it, how's it? And thank you ever so much for being here. It's wonderful to see you. Picture the scene, you're 30,000 feet above the ground. You're basking in the glory of the heyday of jet travel. When people dressed for the occasion and drinks were still served in glasses, now your companion has just ordered a cocktail and placed it down on the tray table in front of them. You peer out of the window at the passing clouds and then you turn back to your magazine. The moment has passed and the image has been lost. However, William Eggleston didn't. He saw the way that the light created a wonderful shadow on that tray table. He raised his camera and with a soft click of the shutter created this photograph. He was able to do this because he had mastered his skill. And this is the skill that you are going to use to improve your own photography today. When you go about your day-to-day business, you are filtering out visually so much of what is around you. If you didn't, you would become overloaded. Of course, this is a shame because it's detrimental to your photography because in effect, you're making your eyes lazy. So when you go out to sea and take photographs, your eyes aren't really up to the task. Luckily, you can give your eyes exercise and train them up anywhere, anytime. You don't need a gym or any sort of special equipment. All you need to do is to look around you. Really look. As you do this, pay attention to the small things that before you would have passed over. And as you do this, the more that you are going to become aware of the opportunity for images that are all around you. I would like you to take a few minutes every day just to take in your environment. The next time you're on your commute or waiting at a doctor's office, don't bury your head in your phone, but try to find visual interest in the things around you. In your mind-eye, imagine how they could look like Eggleston. See if you can start to be more aware of the role that light plays around us all the time. How it changes depending on the time of year, the time of day, the shapes and the patterns that it can create. I did a video recently about how to recognize and understand light, which I will link to you for the end of the video. And this is a great way of tapping into the potential the light has in your photography. Even sitting at a desk, try and seek out images. How does the keyboard look? The way the light highlights the keys. If you do the dishes in a sink, or if you're like me, you put the dishes in the sink before they go in the dishwasher, is there a possibility for a photograph in that motley collection of crockery and, in the words of Wittnell, matter? This awareness needs to become second nature. I know that it's difficult at first, but think about Rocky when he started running. He could barely manage to get up those steps in Philadelphia the first time. But by the end of his epic journey across all of the films, you know, he was running up mountains covered in snow, barely, you know, barely breaking a sweat. So now that you're becoming more aware of what's around you, how do you translate this into your photographs? Edward Weston, he of the Peppers, his bedpans and the shells, said that anything excites me for any reason I will photograph. And he wasn't alone in this. Imagine Cunningham, Minor White, you know, just to name two, also photographed, we could, I suppose we could call basic things. In the modern world of photography, subjects apparently should be spectacular. But you, the more aware photographer, know that anything can be a subject. Anything has the potential for great images. The bedsheets in the morning, as you wake up, they aren't merely sheets, but they are mountains and valleys and canyons. You're not going to fall into this trap that so many other photographers do who discount familiar objects and scenes as photos just because of this familiarity. In the early 2000s, I lived in Edinburgh, right next to the castle. If you've been there or if you've seen it, then you know, this is like, this is picture postcard territory. And every day, thousands of tourists came with their cameras, Marvel, not just at the castle, but the buildings that surrounded it, the views of the city and, you know, the hills to the south and all that sort of stuff. And they took photographs, they were in all of things. But I took them for granted because they had become familiar. During my time there, I barely took any photographs of the old town because that's where I lived. It was only after I'd been away for, you know, like 10 years that I actually returned with my camera and photographed the things that had been under my nose all the time. I had been guilty of being lazy with my vision and falling into that trap of dismissing the familiar. A fork is familiar to you as are tools. There isn't a single object that I can think of that doesn't hold some type of potential for an image. The next time you're in the mood to take photographs, turn your attention inwards, stay at home, or some of that you visit regularly. Take photographs of the things that you've seen a million times before, and not once have you considered actually photographing. I guarantee you that as soon as you start photographing the familiar objects that you see every day, day in, day out, then people will start to connect to your photographs more. Anyone, anyone with a camera or even just a phone, can take a photograph of a spectacular scene that people will go, oh wow, that's amazing. But a real creative, a real visionary, or somebody who can actually see the beauty around you, which is what you are starting to develop, goes beyond the mundane. They take the familiar and they make it unfamiliar and interesting and they make people go, wow, wow, how did you ever see that photograph? This is what we're looking for. We're looking for people to be blown away by the sheer awesomeness of your photographs of things that they think are completely ordinary. I'm sure some of you have seen images that have been totally, the subject has been completely banal, but the image itself has made your jaw drop. If you have, let me know in the comments. I'd love to see some new photography. Now, I must give you a warning here. As you start to photograph the everyday and the trivial things, you are going to become a little bit frustrated with your efforts. Do you remember Rocky and how you looked like you wanted to give up after you first run up the stairs? So there will be a temptation within you to start to try and find more and more interesting everyday things to photograph, which of course is the problem here. But don't, don't fall back into that temptation to be lazy in your photography. The reason you're developing this photographic skill of teasing out potential for unfamiliar objects is so that when you are confronted with this spectacular, the amazing that you don't just photograph it in the way that everybody else does and expect the uniqueness of the subject to carry the photograph. But what will happen is that you will be able to take your newfound photographic skill of awareness and make this great scene into something amazing. As you develop this vital skill, it would be helpful to work on it alone or with others. Certainly, I found that in my own experiences because when you are trying to take photographs like this with some other photographers around, often they will say, oh, but why are you photographing this, you know, little piece of thing when there are some other better things to be photographed? You know, they mean well, but they, they, they don't get it. You get it. They don't. Think about all those photo workshops that we've been on, all of us, you know, where there's all those photographers standing in a clump or photographing the exact same thing in the exact same way. Be the person who stands apart from the crowd, who sees the whole scene, not just the tiny rectangle in their viewfinder. Tied into awareness is observation. Think about how a scene familiar to you looks across the year. Don't think about your house. They're outside my house right now. The sun is starting to get stronger and it's a bit warmer. The snow drops are coming out. There's, you know, daffodils starting to poke through the, through the grass. And the garden looks very different to how it did three months ago. And in three months, it is going to look different again. So what has this garden got to do with, you know, your photography? Well, it's like this, right? If you say you see in a subject that kind of interests you, because now that you're on the lookout for these interesting subjects, you know, perhaps it's a tree on your commute or, you know, unremarkable building. And you think most of the time, it holds a bit of potential. We could go and we could photograph it, but there might just be one day in a year or one time of, you know, of the day where everything just aligns the right way in the, in the right setting. And it makes that subject absolutely sing. Think about this. This is the art of observation in action. You're finding something and you're watching how it changes depending on the time of day or the time of year. A project you could do with this is to photograph the same object or the same scene, maybe outside your bedroom window or something, the same way across the, you know, the day or the season or the year if you could, see how these things change, how the, how the same setting can look so radically different. Make a mental list or if you like me, like a physical list to probably be good of all the places and things that you could photograph that are utterly familiar and completely mundane most of the time, but have that one moment that we talked about where everything just comes together because you've been observing over time and you've seen, you know, not only how it can hold interest in its banality, but has that, that potential for a small window time for a great photograph. Of course, having an idea about a photograph isn't the same as actually taking it, so with that notebook that you're making the little sketches and what have you, you know, write them down and the places and the times and all that sort of stuff and any sort of idea that you have for a photograph, because that's going to help you actually engage and follow through with taking the pictures, but also what it does is to help to start you thinking about the world photographically, to training your mind and your eyes to see the world not just as a collection of objects to be filtered out, but as a world of vast amazingness. The more that you practice the skill of learning here, of awareness, of observation, the benefit is going to be that your photography will become more fluid, that the idea that you have in your mind will actually translate better into the final image. Your challenge is to create one image of a familiar object that goes beyond the obvious. It's something that you can do right now, that you can, you know, that in half an hour it's gone and takes a photograph of something that you would never have considered and see what you can find. Light plays such an important role in photography and this is the video earlier that I mentioned which will help you understand it in simple terms. Thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.