I thought we’d take a break from the more focused blogs this week. To say I took a lot of photographs in Antarctica is an understatement. For an experience like that, I didn’t want to miss a moment. There’s no guarantee that I’ll ever return, and even if I do, it will be a wholly different experience. So I took a lot of snapshots, to try and capture the feel of the adventures we had every day.  For me, snapshots are personal photos. They’re images that I make solely for myself, to remind me of what I felt when I was taking them.

Just because you’re taking snapshots, doesn’t mean you can ignore all the rules for taking good photographs. Snapshots shouldn’t be throw-away shots, they should be an opportunity to make a quick sketch with your camera.  You want to capture moments that may not hang on a gallery wall, but that are good photographs in their own right, ones that evoke memories for you. Photographs can’t encapsulate everything about the experiences we have – but good ones will draw us back to the memory. Bad ones, or rather ‘lacklustre’ ones, will just be ignored. So how do we make better snapshots? By paying as much attention to making the images as we would for our ‘serious’ photography.

You can see that I’ve tried to pay attention to the composition of these images, to make them more than average holiday snaps. It’s mainly about making photography a conscious process, rather than just taking images whenever you see something interesting. Make decisions about what is important – what should be in the frame, and what should you leave out? Where do you want the main focus of the image to be? What emotion do you want to evoke? How can you compose, or expose the image to give it that feel? If you don’t know why you’re taking a photograph, you’re likely to end up with something forgettable. Making decisions about what you want your photos to achieve – even if it’s just to preserve a personal memory – will help you create better images.