After that trip, I spent years researching, learning and testing every technique I could find that would help me learn the secrets of how to find beautiful compositions, no matter where I was.
Then the light bulb turned on for me. It hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized that I had been thinking about photography all wrong. The missing piece was storytelling. Every picture needed to tell its own story!
You see, every good story has a hero (Luke Skywalker), a villain (Darth Vader) and the friends of the hero (Princess Leia, R2D2 and C3PO). Was there a way to apply this same type of storytelling to my photos?
Yes! There is! And I could use storytelling when I framed up my photo and selected the composition. All I had to do was identify the hero, crop out the villains and including the hero's friends.
This helped me to isolate THE ONE THING that would be the centerpiece of the story of my picture.
It sounds complicated, but it's not! If you can understand a simple story then you can easily learn how to use storytelling in your photos!
Once I started using storytelling in my compositions, my photos changed overnight.
I started coming home from photoshoots and looking at my photos on my computer screen and feeling so good about the look of my photos. I started entering my pictures in contests and I began winning awards. I got followers on social media, and the most AMAZING thing started happening...people contacted me and asked if they could buy my prints.
And the best part? I went back to the Grand Canyon 9 years later and took some photos that I LOVED!