Teaching all aspects of photography to photographers of all abilities

Get more from your camera with practical photography, taught by a professional newspaper photographer with over 25 years experience working for the national and international news media.

What Makes A Good Phototgrapher?

One of the questions most frequently asked is :-

"What makes a good photographer?"

It would be possible to write a whole book on the subject, but after much thought the answer, in it's most concise form, could be distilled down into two parts.


First of all is technical ability. A good photographer can come up with the goods however difficult the conditions are. His (or her) brain thinks in f stops, shutter speeds and fill in flash, to the extent that he (or she) can quickly find the settings required to take a picture of anything. Some people can get the hang of this quite quickly, for others it takes a bit longer, but given enough time and effort, almost anyone can master the technical side of photography.


The second is a bit more difficult. Our eyes and brains work together in a way that a camera doesn't. For want of a better expression, our eyes have a digital zoom facility. As we look anything, our our brain zeros in on lots of different parts of the scene and builds up a complex picture within our head. A camera doesn't function like this. It records a flat image that our brains see as a single picture. I'm sure lots of people have taken a picture of something that looked amazing in real life, then been disappointed with how it comes out in a photo.


With this in mind, in my humble opinion, the essence of what makes a good photographer is the ability to be able to translate what the eyes see into a photograph. Fundamentally we could call this composition, but it's much more than that. It's the ability to look at something, see in your head how it will look as a photograph, and then use the camera to make it a reality.

At the Yorkshire Dales Photography School, our aim is to help people get more from their camera. Though we are based near Hawes, in the heart of the Dales, we are certainly not all about landscape photography. From a complete beginner who has never taken their compact camera off automatic, to an experienced photographer with the latest DSLR, we can show you how to take better pictures of any subject you can think of.


What ever your level of photography, we guarantee that there is something new that we can show you.

If you would like to take your photography further then please take a look at what we have to offer.