The Photoholics Blogs of 2025
The best photography blogs make you want to keep scrolling.
Photography blogs for beginners can instruct on technical basics, inspire with captive imagery, and demonstrate how the craft can be used for both storytelling and information-sharing. Journalistic photography, food photography, travel photography, wedding photography… There’s no shortage of avenues for blogs on photography to take.
While what constitutes the best photography blogs depends greatly on personal preference, we’ve compiled 22 sites that no doubt will make the top of many lists this year.
Step 1: The Formal Elements
If we are going to talk about pictures – or take them even – it can make sense to start with the ‘Formal’ or ‘Visual’ elements. There are descriptions aplenty online, but in simple terms this is the visual information that we see. To my school of thought these are: Colour, Shape, Line, Texture, Tone, Form, Pattern, Space, although you will find some variations on these. Not to be confused with the actual subject matter – the things in the photograph (kitten, ball of wool etc.) – the formal elements (and the relationships between them) bring what we see into visual existence.
Understanding the formal elements provides the vocabulary to unpick photographs in new ways. More significantly, it encourages new ways of looking: Once our traditional perceptions and expectations of the subject matter – whatever that might be – are adjusted, new sensitivities can begin to emerge.
Photographers such as Paul and Edward can all provide food for thought (see what I did there) when it comes to early (modernist) photographic notions of abstraction – when the formal elements become the thing, rather than the thing itself.
However, how we select or control the formal elements, is another matter….
Step 2: The principles of composition
Photography is not painting or drawing. Rather than starting with a blank canvas, Photography is most often a process of selection – of framing, cropping; of deciding what formal elements to include and draw attention to (or not). And understanding composition – how to the information that we see – is fundamental to this. Possibly. Words such as Balance, Harmony, Tension, Rhythm, Movement, Emphasis and Contrast come into play here, alongside a variety of potential theories and viewpoints, from the Rule of Thirds to The Golden Section. But then, knowing something in theory is one thing…
Step 3: How a camera works
A photography course should teach you how a camera works, I’d have thought. Some would suggest this should be
If we are going to talk about pictures – or take them even – it can make sense to start with the ‘Formal’ or ‘Visual’ elements. There are descriptions aplenty online, but in simple terms this is the visual information that we see. To my school of thought these are: Colour, Shape, Line, Texture, Tone, Form, Pattern, Space, although you will find some variations on these. Not to be confused with the actual subject matter – the things in the photograph (kitten, ball of wool etc.) – the formal elements (and the relationships between them) bring what we see into visual existence.
Understanding the formal elements provides the vocabulary to unpick photographs in new ways. More significantly, it encourages new ways of looking: Once our traditional perceptions and expectations of the subject matter – whatever that might be – are adjusted, new sensitivities can begin to emerge.
However, how we select or control the formal elements, is another matter….
Step 2: The principles of composition
Photography is not painting or drawing. Rather than starting with a blank canvas, Photography is most often a process of selection – of framing, cropping; of deciding what formal elements to include and draw attention to (or not). And understanding composition – how to the information that we see – is fundamental to this. Possibly. Words such as Balance, Harmony, Tension, Rhythm, Movement, Emphasis and Contrast come into play here, alongside a variety of potential theories and viewpoints, from the Rule of Thirds to The Golden Section. But then, knowing something in theory is one thing…
Step 3: How a camera works A photography course should teach you how a camera works, I’d have thought. Some would suggest this should be |
Such a Nice Blog!
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