Decide what the photo is about before you take it, not after.
Most photos are unclear. Not in a technical sense. Unclear in what they’re actually about. What the photographer wanted to say, what they saw, what mattered to them in that moment. That part’s usually missing.
Take a market. Walk around with a camera and you’ll come back with photos of stalls, crowds, general market stuff. But what were you actually trying to show? The relationships between people. The colour and intensity. The shapes of the peppers on a stall. Random snapshots of “a market” don’t say any of that. You have to decide what you’re showing before you take the photo.
That’s what intent means. You decide what matters in the photo before you press the shutter. You don’t sort through afterwards trying to work out what you got.
Ask yourself, when you’re in front of a scene, what’s actually appealing to me about this. The light on the edge of a table. The reflection in a window. The texture in flaking paint. How old a tree looks. Once you know what you’re responding to, the next question is how you show that specifically.
If you want to show the texture in some flaking paint, standing back and photographing the whole wall doesn’t do it. Find the flakes themselves. The edges where the paint’s lifting, the layers underneath, the cracks spreading out from one point. Photograph those directly.
The task is simple. Look at your photo and be able to say, clearly, this photo is about this. If you can’t say that in one sentence, the photo probably doesn’t say it either.
Fill your frame with whatever you intend to show. Steps with strong diagonal patterns? Make the photo about the diagonals. Shadows and reflections? Make the whole photo about that. A building’s scale? Find a way to show scale specifically, not just point the camera at the building and back up.
I liked it, so I took a photo” isn’t intent. Being specific, and keeping the photo simple, is what makes intent read clearly.
Try this. Go out and take three photos, each with one clear intent behind it. For each, you should be able to say exactly what it’s about, and that thing should be obvious in the frame. No vagueness. Whatever you’re trying to show should fill the picture, so anyone looking at it knows straight away what it’s about.
Andrew Mason is a professional photographer and the founder of the 36exp Photographers School plus the London Photo Show.
He shoots mainly commercial portraits for a living, and likes to shoot landscape, portrait and travel photography.
He is a master of lighting and portrait photography, plus leads photography trips with 36exp.