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  OPTIMIZE THE LIGHT

  If you’re shooting indoors, especially in a cold climate or during cloudy weather, you might still find light is a limited resource – even by day. Your camera or phone has lots of technology to help you adapt to this, but there are also physical, practical things you can do to maximize the light in any given room.

  Firstly, clear off the windowsills! Stacks of books, vases of flowers, picture frames and bric-a-brac all look innocuous enough, but it’s amazing how much light they can block. Likewise, pull back your curtains as far as they can go; fully open the blinds, or even unclip them if it’s easy to do. If you have dark-painted walls or surfaces, draping them with white fabric or propping up spare sheets of white cardboard can work wonders at reflecting the natural light, opening up the space and giving you more light to work with. Likewise, mirrors, cheap folding photography reflectors and even a lick of white paint – where practical – can be valuable tools to increase the brightness of any indoor space.

  Of course, this isn’t always practical for a quick, off-the-cuff shot, but if you find yourself shooting regularly in a gloomy spot, perhaps in your home, look at what you can do to make that location less shady, and bring in the light.

  PAINT WITH SHADOWS

  With light forming such an essential ingredient in our images, a shadow – the absence of that light – is a powerful thing. Whether it’s the shade cast by a high-rise building, or the frame of your kitchen window against the sun, a stretch of dark, empty space can have a tremendous impact in your composition and really draw a viewer in. Keep an eye out for interesting shadows and patterns in your day-to-day life, and be ready to snap a picture of what you find. Just like with music, the pauses and empty spaces have as much to say as the details.

  BREAK THE RULES

  Photography traditionally comes with a whole host of rules – and light governs a long list of these. Thankfully, rules are made to be broken, and as a creative photographer you get to do whatever you find visually interesting. Shoot directly into the light. Let sun flares and artifacts – the coloured patterns and orbs that can appear as a result – paint themselves across your scene. Underexpose, overexpose, highlight the wrong parts of things. Worst case scenario, you learn that something just doesn’t work. Best case? You create something beautiful, creative, and uniquely your own.

  SMARTPHONE TIP

  Most smartphone camera apps offer a simple slider to allow you to change the ‘exposure’ of your shot – meaning, how light or dark the scene is before you hit the shutter. It’s generally best to get the shot as close to perfect before you take it than to try to fix problems in editing after the fact, so play around with this, and don’t be afraid to try different settings. With low-resolution cameras and earlier smartphone models, it’s generally best to err slightly towards underexposed (or darker) to preserve the details, as overexposure (too bright) is not so easily fixed after the event.

  WHAT GRABS THE EYE

  What is it that makes an image stand out among a sea of others? Why do we skim over some without noticing, while others almost compel us to click?

  It’s something that’s fascinated me for years. Naturally, it has a lot to do with the elements we’ve looked at already – composition, visual storytelling, beautiful light and subject and mood. But there’s a final factor that comes into play on platforms like Instagram – something I tend to think of as ‘click appeal’.

  Browsing online can be a remarkably passive experience. How many times have you picked up your phone intending to check one simple thing, and twenty minutes later discovered you’ve been sucked into an app?

  Most of us are familiar with the idea of clickbait headlines – how journalists and copy editors are having to become increasingly skilled in the art of writing titles that tease, titillate or intrigue readers to try and compel them to click. What we don’t often think about is how imagery can work in exactly the same way.

  Clickbait works by appealing to our curiosity; it creates a mental itch that we simply have to scratch. We click, not always because we want to, but because our attention has been snagged and we feel compelled to follow it down the rabbit hole.

  Photo-sharing site Flickr has an algorithm that works along similar lines. They call it ‘interestingness’; when they show a batch of pictures to a range of users, which photographs garner the most attention? Which thumbnails bring the most clicks, comments, likes and saves? The ones that rate most highly are assumed to be the ‘most interesting’, and are shared with new visitors to the site’s ‘Explore’ page.

  I’ve always liked their term ‘interestingness’ because it is something we can overlook in our work. We’re more likely to worry about beauty, or technical perfection, or the personal significance to ourselves. And these can all be important, of course – but what happens if we shift our focus to how interesting our images can be? How can we make our images more captivating, more engaging, more interesting to the eye?

  To work on our ‘click appeal’ we need to consider how our photographs sit when surrounded by other photography, like on an Instagram Explore page. What qualities are likely to attract people’s attention to our work?

  Some of it, of course, is simply down to personal taste and interest. The rest of it though is just basic psychology – the impulsive snap decisions that our brains pass down to our scrolling fingertips, long before our rational mind has even had a chance to make any sort of choice.

  If you’re looking to organically bring more viewers to your images, to grow your online audience or perhaps to make effective adverts for your store or your work, including a little of this ‘click appeal’ in your photography can be a fun challenge to explore. Just as with Flickr’s ‘interestingness’, the algorithms of Instagram and similar sites seek the content that attracts the most audience engagement. The more we prompt our followers to spend time on our posts, the more impact our work and our message can have.

  Below are some ways you can give images that all-important ‘interestingness’ factor. Try combining a couple in your work for maximum effect.

  ICON-LIKE

  A composition that has a graphic or symbolic quality, like the bath picture shown here. Typically these shots are styled and considered, with lots of negative space, symmetry and strong shapes that form a clear message. The impact of the photograph is normally just as powerful in a tiny thumbnail form as it is on full-screen.

  COLOUR

  There’s a reason that flowers and fruit grow in so many shades: most living things are drawn in by a riot of glorious colour. Whether it’s harmonizing colours, colours that starkly contrast, a mass of one single colour or a whole rainbow spectrum, colour-on-colour is a sure-fire way to catch people’s eye.

  SURPRISE

  Any unexpected quality grabs our subconscious. Our minds love patterns and predictability, so anything that goes against that sends up a warning sign. A teacup full of flowers, a sky full of hot air balloons, a cat snuggled up with a bird – anything that contradicts what our eyes have come to expect will tend to draw us in for a second glance.

  FINE DETAIL

  Small, hard-to-decipher details teased in a thumbnail image compel our curious minds to click. Tease something interesting – an array of beach finds, handwritten diary pages, an incredible view from a small window – and immediately we are captivated and want to see more.

  THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Similar to the ‘surprise’, there’s a huge trend on Instagram for images depicting impossible scenes, proving popular both with audiences and the ‘Explore’ algorithm. Creating these images usually requires some skill in clever set-ups or digital manipulation, but it’s possible to create them using only your smartphone camera and apps. Think: a coffee pot being poured by an invisible hand, or a small child perching high in the clouds (see Whimsy & Magic for more).

  CUTENESS

  I’d wager this is evolutionary as well: babies, kittens, bunnies, fluffy chicks. Anything that makes you go ‘awww’ or
swells the heart falls under this category. Instagram even has its own hashtag for fluffy animals – #weeklyfluff.

  MULTIPLES

  Anything in multiples or en masse is naturally compelling. There’s something distinctly eye-catching about the pile of Halloween pumpkins outside the grocer’s, a sea of flowers at the market. This approach is at its most thumb-stopping when combined with unexpectedness, showing things you don’t always see in such large volumes.

  NEGATIVE SPACE

  As mentioned in composition (see here), this is the amount of ‘quiet’ space within a frame. It makes an image easier to ‘read’ at a glance while making the fine details smaller and more intriguing.

  EXERCISE

  Thumb-stopping imagery

  So, you’ve found your style, and you’re busy identifying the moments you’re ready to share with your audience. But how can you stand out in a sea of existing accounts and photography?

  With Instagram growing bigger and bigger every day, and increasingly flooded with gorgeous, high-standard photography, how can we grab our audience’s attention and make a splash?

  The answer is in what I like to think of as click appeal, or ‘thumb-stopping imagery’.

  The basic premise is this: whenever we’re scrolling through the app (or, indeed, any app that presents a whole heap of imagery for us to consume), we’re processing an awful lot of it subconsciously. When we flick through our Instagram, we make split-second decisions on which pictures to click on and which to ignore – often without even really realizing we are doing so.

  You can test this for yourself right now with the following exercise. Don’t skip ahead and read part 2 until you’ve completed part 1, or it doesn’t work as well!

  1. Open the Explore page of your Instagram app – the one with the magnifying glass in your bottom toolbar. This is a selection of images and videos that Instagram thinks you’re likely to enjoy.

  Take a moment now to browse this page as you usually would – clicking for more detail on shots that grab you, scrolling past those that don’t. (If there are any shots that are wholly inappropriate or unlikeable to you, go into the post and hit the three dots in the top right, and select ‘see fewer posts like this’ to let the algorithms know.) But as you do it, pay attention to where your brain and eyes go. Tune in to what does – and doesn’t – grab your interest.

  2. Now, put your phone down. What images can you remember seeing? Scribble a quick list if you can, with basic points about each, and anything else you observed.

  3. Open up the Explore page again and, without refreshing, revisit the grid you just browsed. This time, look for the pictures you didn’t see the first time around, that didn’t make your list. Were you right to ignore these, or do they hold something for you?

  WHAT THE RESULTS SHOW

  What tends to happen is something curious – the photos we end up instinctively clicking on are often not the pictures we would intentionally choose given more time to consider. When we make split-second skim-read decisions, we’re letting our more primal, basic, subconscious brain make decisions based on values that might not align completely with what our conscious mind enjoys. It’s an idea which has interesting ramifications for any system sorting imagery by algorithms and clicks.

  EXERCISE

  Review your images

  1. Review your previous images taken over the last twelve months.

  If you have an Instagram business profile, you can display these by going into your stats and setting the values to show you. If not, it’s easiest to browse via the desktop site where you can hover over any image and see the likes and comments count displayed on screen. There are also third party websites that offer to pull out your ‘best nine’ from a specified time period.

  2. Make a note of which images got the most engagement – that is likes and comments – over the past year.

  3. What was special about these posts? Consider them through the lens of what we’ve just looked at in this chapter – the composition, the click appeal. Are there any key factors that seemed to work for you?

  ISN’T THAT A BIT… FALSE?

  If this seems like a step too far in the Instagram game to you, then that’s totally understandable. Not everyone who shares online cares about reaching a large audience, and there are absolutely no rules or strict guidelines you need to follow to get involved.

  But in a digital world that is being perpetually saturated in new, high-quality, beautiful imagery, it would be disingenuous of me to not talk about the factors that make some images stand out more than others, and how we can make use of that.

  Follow your heart when it comes to this side of things, and only take on board the tips which help you tell the story you already know you want to tell.

  DIGGING DEEPER

  Remember, if you’re trying to add ‘click appeal’ to your work, the trick is in finding the perfect balance. Appealing to the subconscious is only half of the task; once we have our audience’s attention, the post and caption needs to be compelling and valuable in order to sustain that interest.

  THE PHOTO VS REALITY

  WHAT THE PHOTO SHOWS

  A rooftop pool overlooking Sydney Opera House.

  WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE

  To get this angle I had to make my (poor, long-suffering) husband perch among some rooftop topiary. This was actually a much smaller hot tub, not the main pool, so I had to crouch on the ledge and sit backwards to make the narrative work. Perhaps the scale didn’t entirely work, because after I posted it someone assumed it was Orla, and commented to ask why she was wearing white woolly tights! Those are actually just my pale British legs distorted by the water. Oops.

  WHAT THE PHOTO SHOWS

  Doing my best shampoo-advert impression beside a wild Yorkshire waterfall.

  WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE

  The group of young boys, just out of shot, dropping into the water from a high rope swing, pulling each other’s pants down and generally having summer holiday hijinks. The tick bite my daughter got that day that later turned into a nasty infection and left me irrationally fearful of ever going back.

  Some people might argue that these pictures distort reality – that they are dishonest, or show an impossibly perfect life. It’s a reasonable point, and something we all have a duty to be mindful of whenever we craft an image to tell a story with a ‘happy ever after’.

  But the moments were all real and truly existed for me. I really did swim in that amazing rooftop pool; the bumblebees didn’t spoil the fun I had taking those floral photographs, and I’m all the more grateful for the pictures of that day at the waterfall because we might never go back.

  For me, this is the true reality. No moment is ever really ‘perfect’, no matter how hard we try – we could pick apart any smiling photograph and remember the argument that followed, the disappointing food. There are just as many things in life to dislike as there are to enjoy, and sometimes it’s just a question of what we choose to pay attention to, and finding the gratitude.

  WHAT THE PHOTO SHOWS

  Me posing in a happy moment in a bush in full bloom. I shared on my Instagram Stories how this photo came about – a message I sent to my friend, photographer @meliamelia.co, asking if we could go and lurk in some bushes, and we had a lot of fun.

  WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE

  The flowers were humming with bumblebees and I am faintly terrified of getting stung! Also, the new dress I was wearing didn’t quite zip up properly over my boobs, so I had it partially open at the back, exposed to the bush’s wildlife!

  BEING SEEN

  For all its reputation of narcissism and vanity, Instagram can be a scary place to let yourself be seen. Actually, perhaps it’s precisely because of that background noise of perfect selfies that it feels so vulnerable; if you don’t meet the narrow parameters of a typical Internet beauty, it’s easy to feel like you’re setting yourself up for criticism or rejection by sharing your face online.

  It’s an especially common problem fo
r women, I find. I have friends who refuse outright to be photographed at social gatherings and events for fear they’ll end up on the Internet, outside of their control. They’ve been made to hate their own image so much that being photographed feels dangerous and unsafe. However robust your body image, most of us can relate to the familiar horror of being tagged in an unflattering photograph on Facebook, leading to days of questioning ‘Is that really how I look?’

  But there are important reasons for trying to tackle this fear, and learning to take ownership of how we are seen in our own photography and in the images we share on Instagram.

  THE INVISIBLE NARRATOR

  Whose story are we telling if we never show our face? Before I had Orla, I was fairly prominent in my own photography. I’d shoot outfits or day trips, and was happy to set up a self-timer or ask a friend to shoot a batch of images while I struck a pose or four. It felt normal to me then, and easy.