Working With Photography Themes

Working with themes is a great way to practice your photographic skills. When choosing a theme you can chose:

  1. Similar subject matter ( war, poverty, sports, doors etc)
  2. Similar technical composition (all black and white photographs, all negative space photographs)
  3. Similar mood or feeling (representation of love, anger, fear etc).

If you want a list of things to shoot go here.

It’s good to learn how to work within themes because later when we get you to create a photography portfolio we’ll ask you to organize it by a particular theme. Likewise if you’ll ever have your work shown in a gallery a theme is a must. Galleries will never just place a mishmash of photos up on their walls. They need to be organized in some type of thematic grouping.

Taking pictures is like writing an essay. You want it to tell a story, take a stand, give examples, allow for debate and have your work organized in such a way that it’s understandable to the general public. Like a writer, a photographer is a story teller. However, instead of using words you’ll use pictures.

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