Margaret D. Andrews
A good way to develop your kind of photography, your own visual language, is to work with subjects you are familiar with. Walk down some of the streets of your city. If you are civic minded, what do you see that needs improvement? Streets cluttered with debris? Take some pictures of this and present them to the city council. If your photos provide strong evidence, they may listen and act. Streets jammed due to a lack of parking space? Get your camera into action and prove a point. Submit some of your revealing photographs to the local newspapers, and you’ll be on your way to becoming a photojournalist. School newspapers will be eager to publish your photos and will help you in your interest to make things better.
Let your photos show people (and yourself) that your city has good things, things that they might have forgotten or may have not seen in the ways your photos show. Try a photo essay on this.
Other ways to put your camera to work for you might include using it in school work to illustrate information you present in themes or essays; compiling an original family album for a gift (perhaps a record spanning one year); and/or taking photos of stores, factories, or offices for local citizens. Entering contests will also help you gain experience and give you incentive to produce better photographs.
After you have accumulated quite a number of photos, line up a batch of them to see where your interests lie: with people, animals, architecture, or nature. See what caught your eye. Was it special light effects, patterns and details of nature, people and their expressions, or abstract shapes and textures? What kind of viewpoint seems to be surfacing most often? Let that be an area for further picture taking. Be ready always to take a fresh new direction when your interest shifts.
Start a collection of your photos: it could be a scrap book or a portfolio. This will keep your work organized and ready to be shown when you desire.
You are your camera. For it is you who will find and record the shape of a tree, an expression on a face, or bring out the visual sense of a mood whether it be loneliness, sadness, excitement, or joy.