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Agree, but the other part of the advice I think is important and maybe even not fully explained in this blog post. Taking great photos is about using great light, this matters more than composition (you can crop in post) in my opinion. Rule of thirds is just a guideline, not a rule, if you’ve got great light and an interesting subject I couldn’t care less where those thirds lines sit. I mostly shoot on an old hassleblad with 6x6 square negatives and I often frame my shots with my subjects in the middle of the frame.

I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my family’s negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of the images. My family liked to take “snaps” of places and vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken against our will.

I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing, but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world by watching them develop and seeing the end product. Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don’t just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out what good light is, and take candid photos.

Might depend on your personality a bit. Basically all my favorite photos of lost relatives and friends were taken on awful cameras by people with no knowledge of lighting or composition for that matter. The photos (to me) are valuable for a wholly different reason, it never even occurred to me until this moment that they were probably bad photographers.

Yup, the best pictures I have, are those snapshots of real life action. Not the super prepared professional ones requiring set up (we also have those, my sister is a photographer).

Isn’t the sign of a professional that they don’t need that setup?

I have some friends that seem able to snap these perfect moments effortlessly.

Ah no, I was talking about my own pictures. Some of the staged pictures my sister make of us, are nice as well, but overall I much prefer the blurry snapshot or video of a nice scene.

(But then again, my sister especially recommended to me to choose my partner as she would look very good on pictures, I replied I have other priorities, but ended up with her anyway)

> Isn’t the sign of a professional that they don’t need that setup?

A professional should be able to get good results without it, but also when you are a professional, the incremental benefit of having the equipment available and using it where appropriate is more than worthwhile.

Agree, I strongly dislike the staged, hostage photos. Almost no one looks like they are having fun.

> and take candid photos

This is probably the best way to get a good photo regarding the people in it. Composition, lighting are important as far as they make the picture "readable" if what you're looking for is the memory of the person. You'll still look kindly on a dark, blurry photo of a very authentic moment rather than an exceptionally well composed photo that's so staged you can't match it against the person you knew.

Staged photos aren't all bad, they're just usually unrealistic if you knew the people. Many group photos have a bunch of upright poses and stiff faces that maybe those people never had naturally. So you recognize the face but not the person, it's not the memory of them you would keep.

If you want to capture the memory of a person, take photos of them doing whatever they were usually doing, with their usual expression, lighting and composition be damned.

Without going into the 50 different things that go into a good photo, where you position yourself and the light are important. Being technically sound (correct exposure, depth of field) is the floor, then where the light is coming from, its quality and feel, there is a ton that goes into this. This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful than some random person’s photos walking around with a point and shoot.

I agree with you, I basically never take the staged photos (don’t have a self timer on my cameras anyway) but just snapping the shutter when people are doing things isn’t enough. I have boxes and boxes of photos of my family that I’m not even spending the time to scan and color correct because it’s not worth it. The great ones combine good light, technically correct, and an interesting subject.

> This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful

You're just on a different, more professional rail. Talking about professionals doing professional stuff. You don't warm your tires before you go for a drive just because that's why F1 cars have so much more grip in slow corners.

Capturing the perfect moment in the perfect technical conditions is perfect. But that doesn't happen very often in real life with family moments. Most of those perfect moments will be absolutely serendipitous and you'll capture them however you can. Not a single non-photographer looks at the snapshot of the perfect moment and thinks "different ISO would have been so much better, and look at those harsh shadows".

One of the photos most dear to me and my entire family was taken at the light of a low-power infrared heater. Which is to say just enough light to not accidentally poke a finger in your eye. The details are only barely visible but you can tell who's there, everything is as noisy as you can imagine and more, and the brightest thing in the picture is the glow in the dark pacifier between the 2 figures. And no amount of good lighting would have made that picture better without ruining the moment.

In fact almost all of the "most memorable" pictures in my album are technically crap. Over- or underexposed, crappy film stock or digital resolution, bad framing, bad focus, motion blur, fringing, the list goes on to tick all the mistakes one could possibly make. They're all subjectively better than the technically superior shots because the moment they captured was better. If you talk about family it will always be the moment. If you can make it technically good, go for it, it's just icing on the cake.

I think I'm being misinterpreted, probably my fault for the way I'm explaining things, I'm trying to be concise but I'm passionate about photography so I'm struggling.

I am not a pro, so far from it. I'd be embarrassed to even let a pro see my work. I don't want to advocate for needing things to be technically perfect, what I was advocating for was taking a single class, reading a single book, studying a couple blog posts or something. The little changes you can pick up can add so much to a photo. Say you move a little so the sun isn't behind your subjects, or you have the camera out explicitly in the winter mornings when the light is streaming into your windows and hitting a light curtain over the window... you've got yourself a free soft box. Or you've got the camera out in the hours before/after sunset and sunrise.

Little changes to behavior, your position, use of light that can put the extra thing on a photo that would already be great because it was a great moment.

I found a harddisk with a ton of ripped MiniDV footage of the kids when they were young. What I value most isn't the kids. Sure, they're adorable and I have a ton of snapshots from them...but it's things like 'oh, we had that TV then, oh, that room still had carpet, man, the trees were really short, oh that really annoying noise the parrot makes? He's been doing it for more than 20 years.'

It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.

That's an interesting insight.

I have another probably simplistic insight.

I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.

But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.

I'm going to take a different view on this.

I travelled a lot circa 2008-10 in and around Asia and recently I've been uploading all those old travel photos to Google Photos simply because every day it randomly pops up pictures from a place I once visited.

Even the bad photos I took back then (I didn't have a great camera) are way better at keeping those memories alive than I would have expected, they may not be the best, but I was there and I took them.

My wife and I started traveling a lot after my younger son graduated and post Covid mid 2021 and we even did the “digital nomad” thing for a year. We still go somewhere to do something around a dozen times a year.

I blog about it. It isn’t for anyone else’s benefit but mine and I doubt I get any traffic to it. It’s more of a public journal. I pay $5 a month for MicroBlog. Our travel season is usually between March and October.

The blog is a much better way to remember trips than just static pictures.

I'm sure that's true but... I know that I would never check that blog again had I written one.

Google photos pops a reminder of somewhere most days for me with a photo slideshow of somewhere I've been.

I do that too. But when I’m old and not traveling, having a journal would be nice.

I've had the same experience. My new approach is to do a mental check to see if I could get the same picture from a google search. If not then I get out the camera. That in effect compels me to either enjoy the moment, or to include people in the photo to make it unique.

Pictures of the Grand Canyon. You can see on Google. pictures of the grand canyon with my kid in the foreground... Pictures of a city nearby. You can find on Google pictures of the city nearby from the top of the tallest building in the city nearby. No. Out my back door if I turn left 10° more than I normally do I'll quickly arrive in a spot no human has stood in for decades. Not in a Google search.

I don't want to claim that maybe it's the surroundings that are mundane, because I don't find that true. One of my favorite films is koyanisqatsi, which is, really, just industrial film of earth. As mundane as it gets.

I suppose I cannot fathom this yardstick you describe.

> Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull

Yah, I discovered that, too. Now I always try to get a person in the picture.

I borrowed a couple Annie Liebovitz portrait books from the library for inspiration. Lots of good poses in there, rather than the standard straight ahead picture.

My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.

I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are incredible.

Leibovitz, not Liebovitz.