Photography Question: What matters most?

Time to ask an important photography question: what matters most to you?

I take a lot of photos all the time, it is all apart of my project to document life. A Document Life Project that has been going on since I first got my wee hands on a camera when I was a child. Right now I am taking even more photos because of the online photography class A slice of life by Darrah Parker that I am in. I enjoy being inspired by different approaches to photography, thinking about it and getting new ideas, especially during this the first month of the year. It got me of on a good start with my camera, snapping more photos than I usually do in January, when most of the day time is still quite dark.

The most important thing I’ve learned in the class is to ask one important question when sorting through my photos: What matters to me? It is a good question to ask when looking through similar photos of the same subject. I tend to take at least two photos of everything, sometimes up to five and then I have a hard time deleting anything! Yes the GB of photos on the hard drive builds up fast.

This question is a really simple way of thinking about what photos to keep and which one to delete. You can use that question when you take the photo too, while composing your photo through the lens and deciding with what you want to include and what to exclude. It is changing the way I am thinking of my photography and what I am looking for. Try it out and define what “matters to you” in your photos next time you look at them.

Indirectly through Darrah’s class I’ve also learned to use a new program. It was a user comment that named Adobe’s Bridge as her “sorting and browsing” software, and I knew I had it installed but never used it before. That comment and Noell Hyman’s blog article about metadata that finally inspired me to do something about adding tags to my photos on the computer. I’ve used windows for this before but doing it that way is such a task! In Bridge you can make a Keyword Set, kind of a folder with the keywords in so that it is really easy to find them through themes like People, Places, Common motives etc. Check out Noell’s article on metadata, coz’ it is The most important word for you to learn this year according to her! :-)

I’ve made fruit salad twice already this year, but only took a photo of it the first time.

Here are a few more photos from January:

I look for light and where it is coming from. I enjoy the coziness of being inside in winter.

What matters to you?