Hey guys today i have a very special guest with me on my channel. this is Mr Jon D Barker
and he is a freelance photographer. Mainly I take photos of fashion bloggers, or live
music. I also do bits and pieces of tour photography so I travel around with people like Lindsey
Stirling and Bastille and stuff like that and take pictures of them whilst they're performing
out on the road.
Jon is here on my channel today to give you guys some tips for taking pictures of your
work to put in your portfolio which is something that every graphic designer has to do at some
point.
So I'm gonna be giving you three tips to hopefully improve the way that you take those pictures
and then get more work as a result of it.
the first tip I'm gonna start with... let me, not be looking down at this while i'm
doing that. "you were just saying before that you really hated that" yeah, I hate it when
people like...
So the first tip that I'm gonna give you is the importance of having a nice clear space
that you're gonna be taking the photographs. Not only will it make it easier for you to
actually really work with what you've got, but you've got nothing to distract other people
when they're looking at your work. Clear out either a flat desk or a table. Don't take
it on bedsheets or something like that. it's done so often because it's a convenient space.
"i've done that"
So if you've got a nice clean desk or something that you can make use of, do that. it will
keep all the attention on what you're trying to take the photo of and therefore when people
look they're not going to be looking to any of the clutter around it.
That was something that i always struggled with when i was learning photography. My photography
teacher would always tell me to look in the corners of the frame before i took the photo,
cos I was doing film photography so you couldn't like review your photo afterwards.
you don't really want to be cropping the image either. as nice as it is, and we can do so
much in post now with it, get it done right at the beginning and then everything else
is so much easier.
the second tip with that would be working on making sure you've got a nice well-lit
image. That includes setting the white balance beforehand. You can either do this by taking
a photograph of a piece of paper before that and setting your white balance to that image.
How about in here we'll put in some examples of the white balance being wrong and it being
right, so that you can see what the difference is.
yeah you don't want it to be too warm or too cold, you don't want it to be too grey or
anything like that.
and you wanna show your work in the best light... haha
So once you've got a nice space and you've set the lighting up as best as you can, whether
that's using soft boxes or flash guns or something like that..
What about if you don't have that sort of stuff, can you use like, a a bedside lamp
for example or anything like that? Is there anything DIY? Okay so, for instance with your
lamp there, you can, if you have like a sheet of white paper or something that you can have
it in front of it, it diffuses it so it makes the light softer.
So from that point you then want to frame your image in the most important way. If you've
used things like Instagram you'll have noticed that they have, they divide it into like six,
so you've got three down the side and a line down the middle. that's a good way to work
out where important parts of your image want to be. You mainly want to work with the rule
of thirds which is.. what is that, that's vertical isn't it?
yes. (giggles) Horizontal and the other one, which is karate chops. You mainly want to
be working with the vertical lines and having key important details of your work in each
of those areas. it doesn't matter if your image is centred, but usually the eye is drawn
to the left or the right of the frame. We do this a lot in film, and we do this a lot
in the photography side of things as well.
hopefully you found those tips useful. i think i learned some as well, so hopefully you guys
did too. Thank you for sharing that with us Jon. "you're welcome" So sincere!
Make sure you go and check out Jon's channel, I will leave a link on his face right now.
we did a video over on his channel talking about the importance of your online presence
and branding. i gave some tips on design over there.
It was much better than mine so... I don't know about that.
thanks for watching. Make sure you give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. "and
you can subscribe" oh yeah that too, thanks Jon. "somewhere down there, you can go click
on the red button" there's a red button yeah. "it's worth it. she's great. there's so many
much better videos than this. This is good though, this is awesome, but like.."
now you're insulting the video while you're in it! I'll see you guys next time. bye!