 Today's video is very kindly sponsored by Pickdrop. This is a wonderful way of streamlining your sharing and editing process with clients, with family, with friends. It's simple to use, intuitive, just drag and drop. Click and share to check out your free trial. Click on the link in the description box below. How's it? The other day, I watched a video that said, if you can't hear this, then you are not an audiophile. And as my father-in-law is a huge audiophile, I thought, okay, well, I'll watch this. I'll see what the mystery is. And I thought, do you know what? What is interesting, we could do this in photography. There are, as we know, people who will spend thousands of dollars on lenses that you get a similar focal length for a hundred or two. Under the belief that they can see a difference in their photographs. And okay, I'm prepared to believe after fashion that they can see a difference. If the images would put up side by side that they would kind of see, yes, that sort of thing. But I thought, let's do the same thing in photography. Let's see if you can see what a photographer would recognize as a problem in these photographs. Okay, so those are my pictures that I took back when I was a wannabe photographer for one of a better word, right? It's fairly standard gear. And there's something that is missing in there. That is fundamental to, I feel, solid photography. Photography, that's really good. Irrespective of what genre you photograph, there should be an understanding about this very particular aspect. Now I'm gonna show you some other photographs. And I want to see if you can see what a photographer has seen in these pictures. So that's a photographer called Hugh Holland whose work I've discovered recently. It's 1970s skateboarding in Southern California. It's amazing. I love it as soon as I sort of fell in love with the photographs. Not least because I liked skate culture when I was a teenager, you know, power parol to all that kind of stuff. But there was something else immediately that leapt out and appealed to me as a photographer. As someone who I'd like to think that I have now a bit of an understanding about how a photographer actually sees the world. Did you recognize the difference there? There's something throughout all of Hugh's photographs that is absolutely gorgeous. It's the light. Look at the way that he has used the light in these photographs. It is absolutely gorgeous. My photographs, which were taken on a very similar piece of equipment, you know, right? They didn't have the eye of the person taking the photograph that recognized the light. I was more concerned with the subject matter. You know, what have I got? I've got some pictures of skateboarders here but there's nothing to do with the light as a photograph in the middle of the day. It's all just kind of very arbitrary because I'm under the misapprehension that the subject is enough to make the photograph interesting. Now, often that can be the case, the photograph. Okay, the subject is, you know, it's there. But the light, when you add in the light that Hugh has at his disposal, with this interesting subject and somebody who's passionate about what they're photographing, then elevates these photographs into something that is outstanding. I love these. It's seeing the light, it's being able to look beyond the subject. That's what separates, I feel, the photographer with a capital P from somebody who enjoys taking photographs. It's very tricky. I don't think there's really a definition that you could say like there's an equivalent of an audio file or something in photography. But I just wanted to say to you, you know, look, it's Democrat and everybody is entitled to enjoy photography in their own way, of course they are. But for those people who are looking to improve their photography, this is one of those times where it's like, okay, these are the subtle differences. This is what you need to look for to help elevate those photographs. So how do you go around and find this stuff? Okay, well, to begin with, yesterday I was in Cambridge doing a photo walk with a couple of other photographers and we started off the day, it was a very mortally muddy, just kind of a sort of light day. You know, when there's kind of slightly overcast days with the lights, it's very just kind of, just meh. And we started off, we walked out, had a coffee and looked there, said, okay, fine, let's have a look at the light. What do we have to work with with the light? Now I want you to notice what I did there. Instead of going, hey, look, we're in Cambridge and you've got King's College here and you've got, you know, Clare College and all this great architecture and history and bicycles and punts and things is to firstly go, what do we actually have to work with in our palette of photography? Light, I think that is the foundation of every single photograph that we take. I mean, obviously naturally, that's how it works. But what kind of light do you have? That's going to dictate the photographs that you start off with and we started off looking at a bit of shape, a bit of form and as we walked along a bit, the light started to change. All of a sudden the light came out and it broke through some of the clouds. Obviously we was confronted with, you know, some directional light that gave sort of, okay, this is, it's interesting now cause some shapes and some shadows on the floor. We're going to work with that. And as we went through the day, we're thinking, okay, how's the light changing? What have we got now? Always mindful of what the light ends up with. And eventually at the end of the day, went down one of the backs of the colleges around King's, I think it was, trying to find a way to get across the river, which if you know, Cambridge can be quite tricky if you don't know exactly cause often they end up in colleges and you can't actually go through the colleges cause it's like, you need to be a student and there was a corner there where there was a gap coming through the light was just beautiful. And it was like, ah, okay, I recognize this kind of light. I recognize what to use. And we waited and we took photographs. This is the whole point of like, this is what a photographer sees. When you see light, when you see shape, when you see texture and form, that's when I feel you become a photographer rather than somebody with a camera who enjoys taking photographs. So if you've never looked at images and gone, oh, what is it that people love so much about these? That's what it is, it's the light. And once it all clicks into place, it's super easy to find, it's there. You don't need all the fancy expensive gear and stuff like that, that serves a different purpose. To become a photographer, to see the world, you just need to train your eyes to see how you can find the bits and the bobs that other people just kind of walk past without giving a second thought to. If you'd like to figure out how to change your, the perspective in photography to train your eyes, I'm starting a cohort in the next fortnight, it's four weeks, super, I was gonna say, super intensive, it's not, it's intense, but it's laid back and it's supportive about how to learn to see, to get to grips with these fundamentals in photography that are gonna help elevate your photographs to something like that, people go, wow, this is amazing. To find out more about that, click on the link in the description box below. Thank you ever so much for watching and check out this video next and I'll see you again soon.