This article is copyright © 2004 CJ Morgan and is published with the permission of the author.
The material first appeared as a post on the . It is an interesting and thought-provoking piece that I think deserves a better fate than disappearing into the archives from which much valuable material is never seen again.
Let me suggest five different ways to both strengthen our photographic observational skills and improve our image making. These are: "kill the clutter", "think graphic design", "dark on light and light on dark", "be mindful of relationships" and "shoot not objects, but rather appearances".
Few of us suffer from images that are too clean, too simple, too dynamically boring. It does happen once in a while (although that is a study for another time). Mostly, however, our images suffer because they just have too much "stuff" in them - more to the point, too much meaningless stuff. Many of our images just have too much clutter.
When it comes to raising the camera to shoot, most of us already know full well what it is we want to photograph. Heck, even as an 11-year old kid with a camera, I knew how to do that.
But what I didn't pay attention to as an 11-year old was all those other things that were getting into my frame - the great multitude of visual distractions that disturb the eventual viewer of the photograph, diluting the visual impact of what I wanted to show.
And so it was that somewhere along the line (although I can't remember exactly when) it finally dawned on me that if I was going to make stronger visual images, I needed to pay more attention to everything that was in the frame space, and to then make decisions that would help remove (or at least minimize) those visual distractions.
It was time to start "living in the viewfinder". That label came from those years of attending photography club meetings, sitting in the dark basement of some church, each of us critiquing (and basically verbally ripping apart) the others' slide images (an activity that was sometimes just two steps short of just throwing tomatoes at the screen).