8 Photography Lessons to Help Teach your Child About Life

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Mom and child with camera image

Photography is an interesting and productive hobby that can help children exercise their creativity. It can also help them learn to interact socially and appreciate the world around them. Giving your child an early introduction to it can enrich his or her life and might even be the path to a succesful career later. What's more, many of the lessons to be learned about photography can be applied directly to our daily lives. Here are a few important photography lessons and how they relate to living.

Always shoot with purpose.
Purpose is the key to creating meaningful, captivating photos. Whatever you're photographing,from landscapes to portraits to abstracts of random objects, the images will have more meaning if you think about why you're taking each shot. Starting every photo shoot, photograph and day of your life with purpose is one of the keys to success.
Try new things.
Photography provides endless opportunities to venture into new avenues of learning and experimentation. There's always something new to try and creative challenges lie in wait around every corner. Being open to new opportunities can lead to a richer, fuller life.
Find a point of interest.
A photo that attracts interest is more than just a pretty picture; it includes something that the photographer wants viewers to see. Anything can be the subject of a photograph, but the image will have more impact because it has a subject and you've made an effort to highlight it. Life, too, is more meaningful when we find something to spark our interest and create a path to it.
Maintain focus.
Nothing makes a photograph less effective than poor focus. No matter how many times we recompose a shot, change camera settings or pick up and move to a different vantage point altogether, it's important to be sure that the subject remains in focus. The life analogy here should be easy to see: once you've determined your focal point, strive to maintain it.
See the bigger picture.
It's easy to become so wrapped up in looking for the perfect shot that we miss it - not seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. There are times when we need to take a step back (or zoom out) and consider what we're missing with a narrow field of view. Life is very much the same; sometimes we have to pull back and appreciate a wider scope.
Perspective matters.
When composing a shot, it's important to be aware of the perspective created by a camera angle and/or point of view. A lower angle can add depth to an otherwise flat image. A higher angle can help open up the view of a valley. Moving to a point of view that causes lines to converge can help lead a viewer's eye's into a photo and to a subject. In other words, we can often improve the way a scene looks by adjusting how we're looking at it. I hope you're able to see how this applies to life with no help from me.
You can make a difference.
Photography can be more than just a means of self-expression. Some of the world's best-known photos are those that connect viewers to the heart of important social issues: opression, hunger, drought, homelessness, crime - the list is long. While not every photographer is cut out to be a photojournalist, we can all try to create photos that tell a story and sometimes sharing that story can make a difference, even if only to one person. No matter how powerless we may feel, each of us can have an impact on the lives of others.
Find your own photo.
There are thousands of cameras snapping pictures of the same landmarks, landscapes and even the same macro subjects every day. Of all those photos, the ones that are remembered are those in which the photographer found a unique way to show us that same old thing. Don't settle for showing your viewers what they've already seen; show them a new way to see it through your eyes. Show the world what makes you, you in everything you do.

I hope these few examples will help you see how putting a camera in the hands of your child can, with guidance from you, do more than just showing him or her how to take pretty pictures. In my opinion, there are few hobbies that offer the same potential to show our kids how to see the world and its inhabitants as well as themselves in ways that can build better adults.