Upgrade Your Eye: Five Tips for Better Photographs

By Joshua Scheide | February 21, 2026

Photography is the most accessible of the visual arts now. We haven’t needed a darkroom for decades, and pretty much the entire planet has a camera in their pocket.

Unlike painting, sculpture, ceramics, or drawing, each of which demands a significant investment in materials, instruction, and physical skill before you produce anything worth looking at, photography hands you the keys on day one.

And yet most people never get much better at it. Not because they can't, but because nobody ever showed them where to look.

I was a photojournalist and then an event photographer before becoming the creative director at Old California. I've taught photography and videography one-on-one in the field and to full classrooms. I still shoot alternative process work on the side, the kind that stains your fingertips and slows you down in the best possible way. It was the work of LIFE magazine photographers that pulled me into this world in the first place. I wanted to be Henri Cartier-Bresson before I found my own eye, and I suspect that's a formative experience I share with a lot of photographers.

What I loved most about teaching was the reshoot. I always gave my students a second pass at their assignments after their critique sessions, and they almost always came back with something better. Not because they suddenly had more talent. Because they finally knew where, and how, to look. That shift, from not seeing to seeing, is satisfying every time.

You have good taste. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. These tips are about giving you the craft to match it. When you see a photo that stops you for more than a second you might know that you like it, but not necessarily how to replicate it yourself.

Let me give you five tips so that you can start to match your skill level to your ideas.

The word ‘photography’ comes from Greek roots meaning ‘writing with light.’ That's not poetic license, it's a literal description of what a camera does. This is the lesson I return to most, because understanding light is the single highest-leverage skill you can develop. No amount of composition or technique can save a badly lit image.

Here's the core challenge: your camera cannot capture the same tonal range your eyes can. In fact, it’s significantly less nuanced than your eye and brain working in tandem. Your visual system makes constant, unconscious adjustments as you scan a scene. Your camera makes one fixed decision. This is why a beautifully sunlit room often photographs with a blown-out window and a murky interior, even though it looked perfectly pleasant to stand in.

Expose for your brightest area. On a smartphone, tap the brightest spot in your frame to lock exposure there. The shadows will go darker, but a photograph with rich shadows and a well-exposed highlight reads as intentional and dramatic. Blown-out highlights distract and disrupt.

Timing matters just as much as technique. Midday sun creates hard shadows and punishing contrast. Early and late light (within an hour or two of sunrise and sunset) is warmer, softer, and more directional, it wraps around subjects in a way that feels three dimensional rather than flat, and once you start noticing the difference you might find yourself planning your whole day around the light in a way that will seem slightly obsessive to the people who live with you. For nighttime exteriors, shoot during the ‘blue hour,’ the twenty-minute window just after sunset when the luminosity of the sky roughly balances with the output of exterior electric lighting. You avoid the stark contrast between a jet-black sky and an overexposed subject. It might require a tripod and some planning, but the results are worth it. Depeche Mode wasn’t lying when they told us to get the balance right.

When I’m out with friends and see golden hour light streaming across a building and just stop mid-sentence: “Good grief…look at that gorgeous light. It's so beautiful it hurts.” They just laugh and roll their eyes. But I can't help it, and I don’t care. Once you start seeing light the way a photographer sees it, you won't be able to help it either.

The tip: Tap your brightest area to set exposure, and experiment with time of day before you decide a location isn't working.

This was one of my favorite things to teach in the field, because the improvement was immediate and impossible to argue with.

Most people photograph from a comfortable ‘middle distance,’ where they don’t feel like they’re invading their subject’s personal space. The problem is that ‘comfortable and natural’ produces images viewers have already seen a thousand times. And, when you pinch to zoom on a phone, you're not moving closer; you're magnifying and cropping. Digital zoom degrades quality.

Moving your feet does something entirely different. Getting physically closer changes a subject's relationship to its background, emphasizes foreground detail, and creates a sense of presence that no digital manipulation can replicate. Get close enough to show texture. Then step back, get higher or lower, and show context. Find a low angle looking up at your subject against an evening sky. Let the space around a subject do some work.

The tip: Think wide, medium, tight, low, high. Move first, zoom second. Your feet will always outperform your camera's zoom.

No formulas required, I promise. In this case I’m talking about visual relationships.

Every photograph is a two-dimensional arrangement of shapes, lines, and tones. The most powerful images are ones where someone thought carefully about how those elements relate within the frame. I have beginning students walk around not with a camera, but with a small handheld cardboard frame they can use to isolate part of their view of the world around them and practice seeing in two dimensions. Do they look weird doing it? Yes. Does it work? Also, yes. Give it a shot some time.

There are a few basic ‘rules’ of composition that will help you to frame things better in your photos, also.

Start with the rule of thirds. Imagine your frame divided into a 3x3 grid by two horizontal and two vertical lines. Where those lines intersect, four points, are positions of natural visual weight. Viewers are conditioned to find a composition satisfying when the primary subject sits near one of those intersections rather than dead center. Centering isn't always wrong; it creates formality and symmetry that can be exactly right in the right context. But it often leaves a lot of surrounding space doing nothing useful.

Then look for leading lines. A staircase railing, a hallway runner, a porch balustrade, a garden path, anything that draws the viewer's eye toward your subject. And look for natural frames within the frame: an arched doorway bordering your view into a room, a window focusing attention on the subject beyond it, a tree branch overhead giving context to what’s below. These secondary frames create depth and a sense of discovery.

This is where Cartier-Bresson's concept of the ‘decisive moment’ begins to take shape. The geometry was always there. The photographer's job is to find the position and the instant where it all clicks into place.

The tip: Before shooting, be deliberate about using at least one element of composition in the image.

A photograph can be full of things to look at and still succeed, as long as it has one clear point of interest where the viewer's eye can rest before it wanders. Without that anchor, even a beautiful image feels unsatisfying. I saw this constantly in critique sessions: technically satisfactory images that left everyone cold because nothing was asking for attention.

Your focal point can be established through composition, through light (the eye moves instinctively toward brightness in a darker frame), or through contrast. In home photography, it's usually the fixture or the architectural detail you're celebrating. Give it prominence. Let everything else in the frame support its story rather than compete with it. A beautiful chandelier can share a frame with a well-set dining table, but the table should be working for the chandelier, not against it.

If you look at your image and can't immediately identify where you'd want someone to look first, that's your answer. Recompose before you shoot.

The tip: Ask yourself where you want the viewer to look. If the answer isn't obvious to you, it won't be obvious to them.

A beginner's eye only notices the subject of their image as they’re taking the photo. An experienced photographer’s eye absorbs the entire frame at once, because all of it ends up in the photograph. Before you tap the shutter, scan edge to edge and corner to corner. Is there something that doesn’t belong? Something overly bright, unsightly or out of place?

These visual disturbances and distractions are invisible when you're only focused on your subject. They are glaringly obvious the moment you look at the photograph later.

This is the other dimension of Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment: knowing not just when to press the shutter, but what to exclude. The frame is yours to control. Use the edges deliberately rather than letting them happen to you.

The tip: Give yourself two full seconds to scan every corner of the frame before you shoot. It's an easy habit that will pay dividends.

Photography rewards patience and attention more than it rewards equipment. These five things, understood and practiced, will change the way you see, and once that happens it doesn't switch off. You'll notice light in restaurants, in parking lots, coming through a dusty window at the wrong time of day and somehow being perfect. That's the gift.

Happy hunting.

— Joshua

The photographs on this page come from Old California customers around the country. There are some talented and skilled eyes in this historic home community.