5 Creative Photo Tips to Make Your Photos Stand Out

If you are trying to sell or even take part in photo competitions these statistics might scare you. Or, if you consider yourself a creative photographer, these statistics might just excite you to be more creative with your photography. Cameras have become faster, cheaper, and easier to use.

And even the cheapest mobile phones can take great photos while the more expensive ones from Samsung & Apple come with so many creative photo apps along with extremely powerful cameras & photo processors that almost everyone can create astounding pictures.

According to 2014 surveys on Flickr, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp & Instagram added 1.93 billion photos were added everyday. WhatsApp added 700 million photos a day, Snapchat added 760 million photos a day. Facebook & Instagram were just starting & had almost half those number of photos added everyday. That amounts to about 700 billion photos per year in 2014. In 2019, about 3.2 billion photos were added online daily, amounting to about 1.2 trillion photos every year.

So to be able to stand out in that clutter, your photos have to be very unique & creative. Of course that has to be backed up by marketing, advertising and other fun stuff if you intend to sell as many now as you did back in the days. And by creative I mean 2 things – creative in choosing a subject & creative in presenting your photos. Personally, since I do not do any extensive phot editing I focus on the choice of subject & the design of the photo in my attempts to stand out creatively.

5 Creative photo tips to make your pictures stand out

Creative Photo Tip 1: Look for simple subjects around you

Many of us think of creative photography as traveling to an exotic place where no one has been earlier & shooting photos – not necessary. Sometimes the most interesting subject could be right next to you, maybe your backyard, maybe right in your living room! If you make a living selling photos, this pays off both ways – you get your picture & you save on travel!

Images like these are always popular with creative agencies and always on demand as stock image.

Creative Photo Tip 2: Use a thin focal plane

Even an ordinary subject seen by millions everyday could be creatively presented when shot within a very small depth of field. I prefer to use tilt-shift lens to achieve this thin focal plane. Many photographers use products like Lensbaby to achieve similar results.

Fotodiox makes numerous Tilt-Shift adapters for various camera & lens mounts that you can buy & create images like these easily. Although not exactly like this, but you can also achieve a very small depth of field using macro lenses if you want to throw the foreground and background out of focus only. Macro lens and lens used wide open also creates nice bokeh that add a very nice creative look to the photos.

Creative Photo Tip 3: Fog & mist makes interesting photos

Just behind our house there is a small pond. Every now & then there would be some fog in the early morning. I have photographed some of these trees very often and every time I am amazed at the pictures, especially at that moment when the sun tries to shine through the fog & mist.

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Creative photos with mist & fog are available on prints in the online shop.

Creative Photo Tip 4: Make interesting photos with camera shake & long exposures

Creative photos made by using long exposure modes cannot be done easily with many of the cheap cameras or mobile phone cameras yet since they often require manual use of the cameras, helping photos made using these techniques a little above the ordinary.

Significant long exposures or camera shakes could create magnificent abstract photos which are still very popular with fine art galleries. I am a huge lover of impressionistic photography, that gives the picture an appearance of a brush stroke painting & can be done all inside the camera without having to use any photo editor.

Creative Photo Tip 4: Make vintage & retro photos

You do not need any photo editor or even a tool like Lightroom which I use, although if you are shooting in RAW you might already be using one. But even if you are not, you can still create retro or vintage looking pictures easily.

One way, probably the simplest technique too, is to play around with the Color Temperature & Tint tools in Lightroom or an editor. You may have to adjust the sliders to give you the effect you want. However, changing this drastically also increases the color noise to a certain degree, which may often make the picture look a lot grainer (which also adds a nice texture especially if you are making a vintage or retro picture).

In case you don’t wish to do this, you can try by changing the color temperature manually on your camera while shooting. The downside of this approach is that it might give your pictures an unwanted color cast instead of the effect you are trying to create.

At some point in time I have used one or all these creative techniques to come up with eye catching pictures without having to spend a ton of money either on photo editors or my travels. I always look around my home first, especially the back yard or the patches of flowers or plants around the house first and most of the time I do get great subjects. If not, I know I will always get the sunrise & sunset everyday to try to make some creative colorful pictures.