Two Pictures – Editing by Mike Davis

Mike Davis, MU alum and photo editor, will critique your work. Send him two photos, a paragraph about yourself & the photos, and he will give an opinion that helped newspaper & magazine stories win POYi awards. Mike critiqued the work of community college student Matt Burkhartt.

You have to exceed the cliché.

The first step in doing this is to know your subject, to earn and deserve her trust. You may have heard the notion that you as a photographer have to be a fly on the wall, the subject has to act as if you are not there in order for you to make telling pictures. This is sort of true. But the only way for people to become comfortable with you is if they trust you and that can only happen if you have established a relationship with the subject. In other words, you as a photographer can only be part of a person’s life when you are part of a person’s life; life happens in photographs only when you know the person you’re photographing and they know what you are about.

Connectivity with any subject is what makes photographs compelling. The deeper your understanding, the more you will know what to say and how to make pictures to best convey your impressions in given settings.

Check out more examples on Mike’s blog.