 This episode is brought to you by Lexar and their amazing 1800x gold series flash memory cards. If you would like people to pay more attention to your photos then you need to work on making them less boring. You don't do this by finding more interesting things to photograph but by photographing the things that are all around you in a more interesting way. Think about all the photos you know both your own and other peoples that have stuck in your mind. That is because those images are based around a single idea. The best way to catch someone's eye and have them actually spend more time looking at your photo is to in the first place create a picture that leaves that person in no doubt as to what that photograph is actually about. Look at these two pictures of cows right? One is quite clearly about the cow and the other is kind of less cow and more well cow and other random bits and bobs. Which one of these two communicated to you immediately what this photograph was about? So from now on ask yourself what is it why is it that you are taking this photo? What is it that you want to share with the person who might see it? You can do this at the most simple level by simply isolating the subject completely like in these Dan Winters photos or at the other extreme with a photographer like Fan Ho who worked with light and the people of Hong Kong. You don't really need to understand photography in any really great depth to know exactly what these photos are about. What was Fan Ho interested in and wanted to share with you? The opposite of a boring photograph isn't one that just kind of goes look at me look at me look at me right but it is a photo that elicits at least some sort of reaction in the person who's looking at it. The easiest way to get hold of this and understand this idea is to use your own photos to think about the photos that you also like looking at. When you were flicking through you know pages of a book or a website or walking through a gallery what was it about one picture one photo that arrested your attention? Why was it this photo and not the other one? To help you kind of get deeper into this and understand what it is about these things that caught your attention think about the pictures that you like right and when you started being interested in photos and stuff okay it was enough to kind of go I really like this picture it's pretty cool you know that's wicked and or I like the person who's in it and that was enough but now revisit some of those photos go a little bit deeper pull apart the the layers of the onion to try and figure out what has the photographer done what have they done to photograph this particular object this particular subject in a way that that isn't the obvious way this is the core thing that separates most interesting photos from those kind of average boring snapshots that are so easy to dismiss if you never go beyond taking the obvious photo then you are putting your images at a huge disadvantage it is all too easy to go out wander around with a camera see something pretty or unusual and just photograph it think how clever you are and then move on to the next picture the problem with this is that you are photographing that thing in the same way that many people have done before you even if you're not aware of it think about all those very famous landscape environments you know the ones we see day in and day out and they've been photographed by hundreds if not thousands of photographers a year now how long does it take you to look at these photos of the same subject photographed in the same way before you can be completely bored with them so if you want people to notice your photographs to spend a little bit more time on them instead of just flicking straight past them you need to go beyond the obvious you need to explore the subject take some time to you know photograph it from from different angles even just doing that you've gone beyond the run of the mill picture I photograph in what most people would consider to be very boring places you know this is the shopping center in burno I think if I seem to recall and this is a stairwell the other one is a gate at an airport when I was waiting to you know in Dublin going on a flight to very dull places and then there's this photograph of a giant star-spangled banner at Fort McHenry in Baltimore now how many tourists go there every day do you think and take a picture just of this big flag okay and and that's the obvious thing so in this picture and I'm not saying that it's an amazing photo because it's you know it's pretty average right but at least it's showing something different there's a bit of a sense of scale there's a bit of a depth to it there's a bit of context and placement we can see you know the skyscrapers of Baltimore in the background and that's all little bits that are starting to separate that photo from the boring obvious picture when you combine this with the idea that you learned earlier you know about having a single purpose in your photo it makes your image so much stronger and it's already starting to stand out from the crowd earlier we looked at the idea of the idea of having a purpose in your photo and that's the thing that's going to help catch people's attention what's going to keep their attention is composition of having a strong image that then invites the viewer to spend time you know exploring it have their eyes wander around now throughout this whole video you will have seen examples of strong images that have strong composition and you know people talk a lot about rules of composition of all these kind of things and there aren't as far as I'm concerned specifically rules there are more kind of suggestions you know much like when we talked about being inspired by other people's photographs as suggestions it's helpful to look at examples of a photographer who uses composition very very well and I did a whole video about Steve McCurry and his his awesome composition stuff which is a wonderful introduction to using composition your own photographs I'll link to it for you at the end of the video but know this the way that you can make somebody spend some more time is to throw them a curveball you know you don't have to always do the obvious thing in the composition you know change it up a bit have people half cut off and stuff just go a little bit off-piste and see what happens just feel free to explore as soon as you start exploring and playing with composition and not worrying about the rules then you are going to help make your photographs inherently more interesting to give you some inspiration to help you get past those obvious shots it is extremely beneficial for you to have influences that go beyond the quite possibly very narrow circles that you might find yourself in if you are in a photography club or a group online where everybody kind of does the same sort of photos then you'll find that you've all been referencing the same photographers and the same works that you like you know so it's almost this kind of very muddy thing so how original can you be if you're in that situation that's why you really need to get a bigger pool of inspiration that you can draw from that photograph the stairwell that we saw earlier now that idea comes from something that I saw in an Ezra Stoller photograph right I'm not copying it per se but I looked in that image the Ezra Stoller one and and it implanted somewhere so when I was confronted with something that felt similar I could take that idea as a springboard because it was there somewhere I remembered oh there's a sort of thing and and run with it so some of the photographers that I draw inspiration from come from such wide ranges of genres and it just goes to show you don't need to limit yourself specifically to the types of photos that you want to take as you start to find inspiration to seek out different ways of approaching your photos of using your camera in different ways you're going to come across an idea that is possibly one of the worst things that you can do when you are trying to make your photos more interesting so we're going to pay a couple of bills very quickly and a big thank you to Lexar and the new professional 1800x sdxc uhs-2 gold card series next week I'm going on holiday and I will be taking my cameras with me loaded up with the Lexar 1800x gold series cards in this case I've decided to go with the 256 gig card but they also come in 64 gig 128 and a whopping 512 gig capacity if I want to indulge in a little bit of sports photography or some wildlife action or if I'm feeling extra saucy maybe shooting in some 4k video for you guys then I can do that without worrying about buffers because the cards themselves have a right speed of up to 180 meg a second the cards are also designed for durability and I have been known to drop things to fall in puddles of water and in this case which is more likely subject my photos to multiple passes of x-rays and the Lexar cards are stress tested against all this stuff so I know that whatever I put into my photos the onto that card will still be waiting for me when I get home thank you once again for Lexar for sponsoring this video and for supporting the channel we live in a world where we have access to amazing tools awesome tools that can help us express our creativity in the digital environment the problem is that none of these presets none of these actions are going to create an interesting photograph from basically rubbish you might be familiar with that especially you know putting a lipstick on a pig and and well you know that's what happens when you try when you try and put stuff onto an inherently boring photograph in an effort to to spice it up if that photo doesn't have any clear purpose or you haven't done anything interesting with it originally or you haven't you haven't gone be the obvious it's not going to be sorted out by you know just chucking on a load of digital effects what does happen though when you do this is you end up making your photo look like everybody else's and and why would you do that why would you actually actively make your photo look like everyone else's by all means use digital effects by all means work the magic in the digital dark room but don't think that that by itself is going to make your photo look awesome it isn't true that there is good light and there is bad light there is just the way that you choose to use that light however what is true that there is light which is more forgiving more interesting and a hella lot easier to shoot in the golden hour is one such example you know that time of day when the sun's down low and it's all warm and beautiful and it's just looking awesome it's you know it's hard to take a bad photograph then but when you combine that feeling of the gold now with that single purpose with a composition that invites purpose look into the photo then you are so far ahead of the pack now remember you don't have to jump up and down you don't have to shout you just need to create some sort of interest in the viewer and that's when they will stop being boring that's when your photos rather than the viewer will stop being we can make boring viewers if we want that sort of thing but this is the whole point is that you are looking for tools that you have at your disposal and light is one of them to just elevate your pictures in some sort of way if you learn to spend time trying to photograph in different types of light then you can always find an interesting photo and stop blaming other things outside of that for the reason why your images are boring it's entirely possible that your photographs have become boring at least you think that they become boring because that the image that you have in your head is not translating into the photo that you see and you just need to reset something so when you put the ideas that have been in this video into practice that you go back to the basics you think about why why am i taking this photograph what is the message that i want to send not a deeper message but i won't say look at this is an interesting thing but i want to show you that interesting thing in an interesting way when you put all the other things into practice then you are getting a step closer to aligning the ideas that you have up here with the image that ends up with and it does take a little bit of time so don't be discouraged right even little changes will start to help you feel like you're getting away from those boring everyday obvious photos and just please bear in mind remember that you don't need to be creating masterpieces they don't need to be viral sensations these photos they just want to stand out a little bit from the crowd catch somebody's eye and when you start doing this consistently you are going to consign all those boring images to the dustbin having those ideas of composition to play with and put into your photographs is as i mentioned a great way to have them stand out this is the video that i talked about that features the wonderful work of Steve McCurry and we'll give you such inspiration on how to create and use awesome composition thank you ever so much for watching and i will see you again soon