Thirty Ways Photography is Good For You

·Photography helps you think.

People need things outside themselves to think about, and photography furnishes abundant food for thought. You can think about the photographic process and never run out of things to ponder. There is something for everyone, from very beginner to the most advanced professional. Whether you use a point and shoot camera or a Hasselblad, there are numerous things to catch and hold your attention.

Developing and printing also engage your thought. You can think about the pictures you have taken. The things in the pictures, why you shot them, how you feel about them and so on. Since nearly anything can be the subject of a picture you have the whole world to choose from. For example, people are the world’s most interesting problem. The things people do or might try are almost endless. The chances of running out of things to think about and subjects to photograph are slim. This is good for you.

·Talking about pictures with others

Merely talking with others is good for you. Photography, pictures, and photo equipment can be great subjects for conversation and help keep the talk going. People will converse better when they can talk about pictures since pictures can be an integral part of our lives. Usually you will find the conversation quite intelligent and perspective. Belonging to a camera or photography club could be good for you.

·Discovering your personal symbols

Your personality shows your symbols. Everything in a photograph can be such a symbol. This includes lines, color, tones, and textures as well as identifiable objects. The clear implication is that everything in one of your pictures can stand for yourself. Discovering your personal symbols is a life long quest; it is that when you get a better picture of which you are, which is good for you.

·Identifying with your pictures

A part of the symbolization process is to identify with your pictures. Your emotional reactions while people talk about your pictures can be a mirror of yourself. Identifying with your pictures can make you miserable, uptight, or embarrassed. These feelings can be well worth the self-discovery. There is nothing that is better for you than that.

·Solving problems

As long as you can solve problems, you are in good shape. Photography offers you an abundant amount of problems. Large or small you will well rewarded when you solve them. Since photography consists of problems stacked upon problems, you will never run out of things to work on.

·Understanding a complex process

Learning to understand any complex creative process is good for both mind and emotion. It increases your feeling of substance and completeness and proves that you are capable of handling difficult matters. Understanding photography is difficult, and anyone who does it has good reason to be proud of you.

·Revealing yourself to others

When you show people your photographs and the personal symbols you hold, in a sense you invite people to see who you are and how you feel about yourself. This can be good for you.

·Relating to people

Although it isn’t always easy to take picture of people, it is a good way of learning to relate to them better. Photography can serve as the excuse for a relationship to begin. This can happen both before and after the pictures are shot. Before you shoot, communication is important. Afterwards you can relate imaginatively to their prints. Indeed, such pictures give you many things to talk about.

·Stimulating your imagination

Photography can stimulate you. Call it excitement, the medium cannot only challenge you when you are shooting, but stimulate your thinking during development and printing. Both your successes and your failures will stimulate you. The later will allow you to seek improvement.

·Learning to see better

Photography is one of our primary modern tools for pursuits such as this. It is well known that it helps you learn to see, but the seeing goes much deeper than some people suppose. In truth, if you learn to see really well as a photographer, you will be seeing very well indeed. This involves seeing deeply into people, things, and events, not just perceiving what they look like superficially. It involves an awareness of what is actually going on in front of you as you photograph. Appearances can be very deceiving. Seeing without this awareness is not really seeing at all.

·Developing as a critic of reality

If you have good mental and emotional balance, it means that you are a good critic of reality. This means you have the ability to look at things and see them for what they truly are, as a picture maker you learn to criticize photographs. In doing this, you make decisions concerning the nature of things. Which is what criticism is all about. Developing yourself as a critic is a long and arduous process, but you improve your own health as you so do.

·Developing as a self critic

To be a truly healthy person, you have to be a good critic of yourself. Criticizing yourself fairly as a photographer can help you learn this art. Good self-criticism implies self-knowledge. When you criticize a picture into which you have projected yourself, you are criticizing yourself, too. The important thing is to treat both your picture and yourself fairly.

·Becoming more aware of things outside yourself

One of the big challenges of life to be aware of the things that is not of you. This is not easy for some people to do, for they are all wrapped up inside themselves with no apparent possibility of escape. Photography provides you with pictures of outside things to look at and think about. Indeed it is hard not to think about them when they confront you from your own pictures. Photography is mainly about tangible things that are outside. You have to deal mentally and emotionally with outside things in order to even make a picture. You have to be aware of them to a fairly marked degree.

·Developing verbal linguistic skills

You should understand that photography is a language with all the attributes that languages have. Being able to communicate well in any language is very healthful. Being able to speak through your camera is very good for you. As you develop as a photographer, you learn to do this usually with considerable skill. It is good to know that in this visual age people usually know what your pictures are saying. Literally thousands of people develop into effective visual communicators. Without exception they have benefited from it. To be in good mental and emotional shape, you have to be in communication with others and this is what they learn to do with their cameras.

·Communicating better with yourself

In a sense you can talk to your pictures and at the same time talk to yourself, because you project yourself into your pictures. Analyzing your work is approximately the same as analyzing yourself. In pictures, the self becomes more visible in a way, and this leads to communication with it. Asking yourself why you did what you did also helps in this respect. Because of projection, all pictures are self-portraits in a way, which means that you can see yourself clearly in your work if you look hard enough. Which is what communications with the self is all about.

·Becoming aware of the nature of beauty

People have a great mental and emotional need for beauty in their lives. They also need to know what constitutes beauty. Where it comes from and what is it made of. Photography is a pursuit of beauty. People like to be creative. People like to look at other beautiful things others have created. They also like to see beauty that already exists. You as a photographer will have a chance at creating and displaying your creations.

·Seeing meaning in things

Photographs weather they be good or bad have meaning. Any visual communication object can be and will be interrupted differently by the observer. Even obscure images reveal thoughts to a great many people now days.

·Creating meaning

In photography this goes on all the time. You have taken a picture for a reason, and this meaning can and will be shared with others.

·Developing skill with the photographic medium

When you develop skill in photography, which is hard work, will develop a sound basis for liking themselves. Skills with an art medium produce things of value, which in turn make themselves valuable.

·Broadening your tastes

This implies a liking for many things. Photography helps this process because you have to see well to successfully photograph them. You will normally photograph things you like and maybe not like. We seem to have a liking of things we understand.

·Understand light better

Nothing is more important to life than light itself. What ever you have learned in science class it will be reinforced in photography. In photography we learn to observe it closely and its effects on our subjects. As we sharpen our photographic skills we learn to appreciate the light we receive.

·Expressing yourself

Photography is an infinitely expressive medium. Almost any thought or mood can be expressed. To express yourself is to project yourself into your photographs.

·Becoming more aware of others

Taking pictures of people so that they can see themselves as images will allow them to think about themselves. The awareness of other people can be achieved by taking these pictures. Pictures of people are nearly as real as they are, so time spent with them is never wasted.

·Developing insight into human behavior

You can develop the insight into human behavior by looking and studying people thru your cameras view finder. When you reach a point where you can predict behavior, you are doing very well.

·Developing personal power as a creator

Holding a camera in your hands give you some personal power. Even small creations will give you this feeling. Taking any picture at all will do it. Making good ones is even better. You can empower people to look at your work. You have the power to allow them to move, feel different with each printed picture. As a photographer the camera may give you the power to change the world.

·Self -discovery through photography

When taking or making prints, you analyze your likes and dislikes. Your photography can help you see around you. Although photography deals mainly with the appearance of things, it can make you think about them on a deeper lever.

·Expand awareness through photography

Photography encourages you to look at things, if only to see whether they would make good pictorial subjects. Since good subjects are hard to find good photographers are constantly looking. Your board awareness will keep you in good shape.

·Seeing the relatedness of things

Real intelligence is sometimes defined as the ability to see that all things are related. In photography we explore visible relatedness. For example, sometimes the forms of a wind blown sand dune are quite obvious, rocks may look like potatoes, small weeds like trees, clouds like ice cream and so on. The end point is to see that all things have a visual kinship of some kind or other.

·Handling a magical process

Everyone needs a little magic even if only to stimulate your imagination. When that image comes out from nowhere either on film or paper it seems like magic. You are the magician and you alone control this magical process.

In creating things we also create ourselves. As a creative medium, photography has nearly endless dimensions, so there is something in it for everyone. Thousands of people use to improve their lives, why shouldn’t it work for you