This is Canon's red line challenge.
I'm Laura El-Tantawy.
I'm a Canon ambassador.
I'm super excited about this year's competition.
The winner walks away with a Canon EOS R5
plus lens bundle and a mentored session with me.
We want to see your photos that tell a split second story.
Here are four of my fellow Canon ambassadors, and we want to share
our favourite tips and tricks on how we tell stories in photography.
Well, I think a story in photography
is really just about expressing how we experience the world.
This is an image that I took on a bus journey, and it was just about me
kind of looking out the window and noticing an image building up.
I think reflections bring complexity
and layers into what is already a complex world.
If you want to try something
that's a bit different and something that captures a sense of mystery,
I would suggest that you go out and try to look for reflections.
once you start looking for them, it's funny, but I think you're going to start
seeing them everywhere.
So shutter speed visually articulates
the moment between the moment; it slows down time.
This is a photograph that I took in Varanasi.
It's my favourite image
because this is kind of how that moment felt and looked for me.
I want to maintain something that's experimental, impressionistic.
It evokes some kind of feeling
but it's also something that's essentially grounded in reality.
Be experimental.
Try to photograph the world from a different perspective
than you normally would.
Try to play with time,
see how the world looks when you photograph at a different pace.
And trust your instinct.
Trust how you feel at a particular moment.
And try to photograph from that place.
So a story
can be an action, an interaction, it can be a relationship
between people but it's just something that makes the viewer feel something.
I love this image because it's a found moment.
That expression on that little girl's face.
It's wonder, it's discovery, it's love.
She's with her dad and he's teaching her something.
He's, you know,
bringing her up and making her into the human being she's going to become.
In that split second we've recorded that.
this image is shot on the RF 50 millimetre F1.2 lens.
And I use it a lot because I don't want distractions
in the background of my images.
So using a very shallow depth of field, I can cut out all those distractions.
When you're planning to photograph in your own home
it's a really good idea to start to have a look at what the light does.
So a few days before you plan to take your pictures
start looking at the light at different times of day.
What's it doing in the morning? What's it doing in the evenings?
How does it work in different rooms?
Because then I know that
when I want to come in and take an image, I know where the light's going to be,
I know roughly what my composition is going to be,
and then I can just wait for the action to happen.
An image doesn't have to tell the full story, an image can leave us
wanting more, it can ask a question, it can have anticipation.
It can have tension.
This image works because we don't know what happens next.
I mean, we do, the bubble is going to burst,
but we don't know who bursts it, how, exactly what happens.
It engages the viewer.
It leaves them wanting more.
And that's a really important thing to have in your pictures.
A winning image will be one that makes the viewers feel something.
So look for an action, look for reaction.
Look for a real moment and then photograph it to the best of your ability.
Experiment with speed.
Experiment with movement.
Experiment with composition and create something that you're really proud of.
It's not hard to find stories in wildlife photography.
Wildlife stories are everywhere.
You might find yourself in challenging situations
where you don't have the best light or the best subjects.
Slow, your shutter speeds down and you're able to capture that movement.
I want to tell the story
of these zebras on their journey to find the next waterhole.
You can feel that zebra galloping on the dry sand.
Subjects like lions have been photographed a million times.
I wanted to tell the story of the lion in the lions perspective.
But then how do you capture such?
When you have obstacles like grass in the way of your lens?
When I got the R5, I knew
this was all possible with animal eye detection.
It keeps track of the subject, even with the moving grass in front of your lens.
And it enabled me to capture these unique perspective of this
lion from below the grass.
If I could
give you one piece of advice, it would be to love nature.
Understanding animal behavior plays a very big part
in the kind of stories that you want to tell.
I think that the perfect image is when you don't need to talk about it.
When you look at the image and you have all the answers
in one second, that's a good photo.
The story of this picture is all about the speed they are going on the velodrome.
Panning shots you need to practice.
It takes a lot of practice to be sure
that you got the same speed of the subject.
I just take my camera close to my eyes and try not to breathe.
That's how I'm trying to avoid shaking the camera.
The longer you practice, the better you get.
If you want to show the speed with high shutter speed,
try to find something like mud, water, dust around.
It can show the story about the speed in a different way.
The more you experiment, the more you develop
your own photographic style and it has to be fun.
Otherwise, it makes no sense.
To be able to put as much information
as you can into the image to make a story that a viewer will be able
to see and understand and feel is the skill of photography.
To be able to make those images in a split second,
you have to learn about where you are, learn about the people
you're photographing, create a rapport with everyone,
and that is what equips you to be able to be ready for that split second image.
These are salsa dancers in Johannesburg.
A single image
sometimes can tell multiple stories and should tell multiple stories.
So this is something that you can challenge yourself
with, make an image with many pieces of information in it,
and it becomes a little poem, you know, that the viewer is able
to read and find something more exciting every time.
I made this image with the idea in mind of invisibility.
The man's face is obscured by the shadow in the image.
Don't always go for the most literal image.
Create situations using light, using shadow, using perspective,
and these visual elements
that allow you to really play with your craft and play with the art.
If there is one piece of advice that I can leave you with
is to trust yourself and to know the world around you.
And this will show in your images.
There are literally pictures everywhere.
What is your story?
How do you want to tell it?
And what vision of the world do you want to show us?
The judges and I can't wait to see your photographs
for a chance to win this year's Red Line Challenge.