What Makes a Good Photograph?

Photography Tips

Tales by Light is a collaboration between Canon Australia and the National Geographic channel. Watch this breathtaking trailer full of images that say a thousand words in one frame, and listen as photographers share what they think makes a good photograph:

“A great photograph needs to make you feel something. More importantly, you need to make your audience feel something. You need to move them, to motivate them, to get a reaction. May not always be a positive reaction. But it needs to be a reaction. That’s the starting point to great photography.”

“I think what makes a great photograph is if that photograph tells a story. And it can be a very simple story, but it has to evoke. It will speak to you and it will speak to everybody in a different way.”

“Through our photography, our books, we want to take you on a journey. We want to make you feel that actually this is life.”

“There’s so many different ways a picture might make somebody react. And I think that’s what so great about photography. The things that people like are all very different. But I think it’s really about starting a conversation. Those are the ones that are great.”

“The most powerful photographs that speak to me are of truth. So the photographs that have been captured at the moment of ecstasy or at the moment of trauma, at the moment of life, at the moment of death; it’s that moment, that Cartier-Bresson moment, it’s the decisive moment.”

What do you think makes a great photograph?