As a creative, knowing how to take photos well is not the key to success anymore. Having the ability to sell yourself, editing style and finding your own rythm and flow, engaging with the people around you + increasing your networking range are some of the factors that are key to increasing your snowball in this competitive creative industry.

So here are 10 + 10 + 10 quick bite sized tips that will hopefully help you to better your snowball rolling!

10 tips on improving your photography

1. Potential in your eyes.

Your eyes tend to single out things from their surroundings, if you take notice of how scene introductions in movies are made, they usually start out that way too. So be sure to make full use of what you are looking at, re look and re shoot.

2. The weirder it is, the better.

After years of shooting and researching on visuals, I’ve came to realise that our eyes fall for tricks really easily. That is actually a flaw we can all tap on. Now think about it, when we were all younger, we often hunt for interesting angles, interesting ‘alternate dimensions’ and basically anything that catches our eye that are out of the norm. So here are a few things to look out for when you are out shooting the next time.

Weird shadows
Mirrors
Puddles
Illusions caused by items
Unconventional angles (Ultra low/high)
Glass reflections
Odd one out of a repeated pattern

3. Get really, really close.

It took me pretty long to overcome the fear of getting up close but trust me, it’s worth the picture. When you get up close and personal, the intimacy is a perfect balance of fear and beauty. When taking subjects, you are filling up the entire frame and wasting less space, this makes the image pop and you can see their facial expressions too.

4. Make a visual board.

This is really important for me and I thought will be very useful for you. I’ve had so many ideas everyday and chanced upon cool locations and subjects, it’s not possible to remember them all. So I always take a picture or note what I like down, and have a place to store all of them. Whenever I revisit them, sometimes I find new inspirations and even new ideas by mixing some of them randomly together.

5. Fishing technique.

This is one of the most used techniques for a street photographer, camping at one place and waiting for a perfect timing or subject to come by. Once you find a frame you want to shoot, be patient and shoot as much as possible, I usually go for 50-75 if I have time. Shooting more will allow you to master the scene, and determine in your head what kind of shot you want and filter out the bad ones immediately.

6. Hunting technique

Now this is the exact opposite of what was mentioned above and they both work wonders. By using this technique you are constantly moving around, engaging your shooting instincts and ready to deploy your camera to snap away. You’re always going to be looking out for intriging frames, and a pure run and gun approach - shooting until you get something. Here are some tips on the hunting technique:

Be swift
Blend in your surroundings so you don’t stand out.
Pretend you’re busy but keep an eye out always.
Stalk a subject if you deem as interesting and get the perfect frame. (Might be creepy to some people so watch out for their body language)

7. Copy, paste your lighting.

Ever saw an image that you really liked and wonder how it was lighted? Light to photographers is everything, it sets the mood, tone and even the expression of the image. So copy the image that you like and light it the same way, once you master that you’ll be able to use that knowledge and apply to many other amazing ideas you want to do!

8. Watch for contrast.

Contrast = emphasising differences = difference between black and whites in photography. However, contrast in real life are a whole lot harder to notice and they subtly make your images better. An amazing juxtaposition will make your visuals pop so be sure to practice your eyes and look out for some of these and much more you can think of yourself!

Some examples:

Soft vs Hard: Dresses on concrete floor/Suit in swimming pool

Colors : A pop of color in monochrome setting

Culture: Classic old vs new (Traditional clothing with a modern wear)

9. Take a break.

We often stress about how important it is to shoot everyday to further improve our skills but taking a break is as important! Take photography like going to gym sessions, it’s important to maintain building/toning your body but essential rests are required to ensure you’re fully recovered with max capacity to go again.

10. Bring a photography friend as your ‘Second Eye’

Having another friend shooting alongside you no matter what setting it is can be very refreshing. Exchange images, compare perspectives, sharing is caring! Also the benefits of having someone doing the same thing with you is that you’ll definitely pick up things faster than looking at images/videos on the internet.

10 tips on editing images

These tips and examples are based off Lightroom but most of these tips should apply across all editing platforms that you are using.

1. Learn how to read the Histogram.

The histogram is basically information, they store data from the darkest blacks to the whitest whites in your images. Having a balanced looking graph will allow user to be able to see the whole dynamic range. If your graph is spiked, it means data is loss, eg. spiking at the left of the graph means you are losing a lot of blacks. So keep that in mind and try not to make too much spikes in your edits.

2. Be organised with your photos with the star attribute.

So how do I usually breakdown my images from lets say a 100 to 10 of my favourite ones? The star attribute is key to making everything neat and tidy. My process of going through images are as follows:

1.After importing all the images, go through them one by one
2.Press 1 on my keyboard on the images I like and that will attribute the selected images to ‘1 star’
3.After going through all images, under the ‘attribute’ tab, filter the rating by one star
4.Re-look at those you have selected and again, the ones you like but this time press 2 to make your selected ones ‘2star’
5. Filter as much up to 5 stars.

3. The ‘HSL’ tab.

This is one of my most used settings in Lightroom and there are infinite combinations you can make! A little trick I do to change the colors is using the ‘picker’ too as shown in the image below to select on a certain color, and slide up or down to change the hue,saturation, or color. This is a very useful tool as you are only segregating a certain color and not the overall image.

4. Fake lighting with gradient filter.

When the image islacking of a certain punch, I do this to let it pop a little. A nifty trick too that you can take away!

1.Create a gradient filter with the rectangle icon and increase your exposure to 1-1.5.
2.Increase/Decrease the temperature to match your image initial lighting.
3.Drag the graduated filter to half of the image as shown or tune it accordingly to make it look as natural as possible.

5. Use the radial filter to focus on a certain point.

I love to use the radial filter, it allows me to create a custom vignette and that’s how I start off with my signature dark look.

1.Create a radial filter by using the circle symbol
2.Drag and create a circle around what you want to highlight
3. Reduce the exposure to about -0.5 and feather it to about 70

6. The ‘S’ curve

For editing pros you might already know this, but yes the ‘S’ curve is basically adjusting the graph in the tone curve to look like it. This way it will boost the highlights, midtones and darken the shadows. In return this makes your image pop!

7. The transform tool

This tool helps tremendously on getting my photos straight and I can’t emphasise how helpful this is, here are some tips:

1.Always enable the ‘Contrain crop’ option, without it you will have weird white borders around your picture. This is due to auto rotation and rescaling of the image
2.Use the ‘auto’ function, usually it does the trick! I usually tune alittle after using the auto function, just to perfect it.
3.The guided line makes your buildings extra straight, set two points by pinning the top of the building to the bottom, make sure you are pinning somewhere like the edge of the building where there is a definte straight line.
4.Use the ‘Aspect’ tool to make your subjects skinnier as it ‘squeezes’ the image.

After!

8. Exporting settings for social media

Here are the settings I use to export for Instagram/twitter/facebook. They are high res exports due to the compression social media does.

9. Split toning to give your highlights and shadows some coloring.

There are infinite combinations to this as well but I love to give my highlights a slight blue and shadows a slight brown, in return I also reduce the overall vibrance/saturation to give my pictures a muted look.

10. Leave it, come back later.

This is always the last thing I do and one of the most important factors to fine tuning my work! We often get deeply dived into our edits and some aspect might be blinded by our ignorance. Look back after 30 minutes, 1 hour or however long you like and when you’re back you realise for example the red saturation you increased is too much, fine tune that again and re-look.

10 tips on social media growth

1. Be consistent.

Your audience probably follow you for the niche you are in, tap on that and excel in it! Master that and keep delivering.

2.Collaborate with another artist.

No matter who it is, big or small. It’s basically a win-win situation, you both are tapping each other’s audiences and learning from one another! It’s probably never anywhere close if you do it alone.

3.Do not over use hashtags.

There used to be a time where the more hashtags you use, the greater your post’s discoverbility is, I personally don’t think that true anymore. In fact, you might even get shadow banned on Instagram. This will result in your post doing worse than usual and nobody wants that. So just use minimally! About 3-5 will do. Here are some tips on hashtagging

1.Use the 33% method ->
33% on hashtags with little volume of posts
33% on hashtags with medium volume of posts
33% on hashtags with high volume of posts

2.Don’t waste your hashtags on those with millions already tagged, your post will immediately get pushed down within seconds and no one will see it

3.Follow hashtags and engage with those posts!

4.Make an ecosystem and link it all back.

Whenever you post something on other platforms, be sure to link it back to your main social media. For me it’s Instagram. For example, whenever I post something on twitter I will always input a link for them to check out my Instagram feed out. Likewise for Youtube. This way you are gaining traction not only from your main channel, all those little referrals mean something when added up all together.

5.Use engaging captions.

With thoughtful and interesting captions, you’ll allow your audience to really dive a little deeper to talk to you. That actually means a lot, a more engaging post will be longer lasting, it will also allow more eyeballs on the post, given the amount of saturation of content nowadays. Use questions, or feedback to get your audience to think and reply!

6.Make visually appealing stories

It’s easier than ever given there are so many apps that can aid you in making your stories visually aesthetic! Having quality content is very important and it also upholds the brand image you are building. People also tend to spend longer time looking at higher quality produced content. Here are some apps that can help you in your creation:

1.Unfold
2.Inshot
3.StoryLuxe
4.Over
5.Made

7.Give something back to your audience.

Thank them and show them a gift of gratitude, be it big or small. Hosting a contest to give somthing back to what you have build helps tremendously in boosting your quality of followers and also gain traction to get new people to follow you. As easy as asking them to share the post or tag someone will multiply your engagement tri fold and more.

8.Check trends as much as you can

As tiring as it sounds, it is actually super important to stay relevant. No matter if they apply to your content or not. See what is currently trending and find ways to see how you can use that and tap into your visuals.

9.Network around in real life.

Now this is probably the most underrated one out of these 10 tips I gave. The snowballing you get on this is HUGE, just imagine showing your profile to someone, and he/she got famous within lets say two years. And during some videos of theirs they mention you in it, that’s how you’ll grow unknowingly by investing some time to talk to people in real life.

However, always be truthful and geniune. Do not come across as a social butterfly and remember, have something to already show like your portfolio. Else it’s just all talk.

10.Don’t overflow your content.

You might be thinking, ‘shouldn’t I push out as much as I can so I can get maximum reach?’. In fact, if you do that you are harming your own content’s reach capability. Give every piece of content that you spent hours on and carefully crafted, some time to run on social media and gain it’s needed traction. Stacking many posts together at once will greatly reduce each’s reach and in return you are wasting it all!

Once again, thank YOU for supporting my work and I hope all these little tips will benefit in one way or another.

I am constantly learning so if you have your own tip too please don’t hesitate to share over -> YK@leeyikkeat.com

-YK

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