I think you know how Pinterest works. For those who are living under a stone. It’s like a digital pin-up board. Create a pin from information like documents, photo’s, blogs. Create different boards where you can digitally pin your Pinterest pins. Easy does it. A perfect spot to use this social network for photography reference work. This is the way I use Pinterest a lot.

Interest = visual learning

When I started with photography, I read a lot about camera’s, color, black and white and much much more. I read a lot about differences also, but with my lack of knowledge, I did not understand this clearly. This was the step to use YouTube more. In my previous blog, I wrote about YouTube with a lot of links to useful videos.

Sometimes you are looking for particular information, watching or scrolling through videos takes a lot of time. You wished you had a fast and visual overview of certain techniques, tools, gear. This is where Pinterest is a great tool to create the pin-up board with visual tips and tricks you have at hand.

For instance:

• you want to know what the effect is if you change your lens from 50mm to 135mm. What can you expect? Finding a Pinterest pin can help you get a quick visual overview to help you choose the right lens

• Do you want to get an overview of possible light setups for a portrait?
• What is the effect of the aperture - Fx?
• What kind of poses are usable with portraits?
• What is the difference between JPG and RAW?
• Besides Instagram, also Pinterest shows great pictures, but the pictures are pins with maybe much more stories or other tips like this one below:
• An example couple of useful pins:

Pinterest = Inspiration

Pinterest gives me other inspiration than YouTube or Instagram for instance. For Street photography, the photos are a tool to get people to the link with more tips and tricks about the subject of the photo. Like, great shot of Amsterdam and the link goes to a blog or website about great photography tips in Amsterdam, can be very useful though. I use these kinds of pins sometimes.

I use this social network to get more inspiration about portrait or other photo shoots. I get more request from people to do a portrait or photo shoot and I love to do this. But how do you start with a photo shoot? so different than walking down the streets and capture people in their natural element. Now I have to direct the model, find a nice spot, what are the poses the model has to do. Some poses are overdone, but on a picture, they are looking great. I had three different assignments:

• Wedding
• New Born
• Pregnant

Very different than my ”daily” photography style, Street photography. Pinterest helped me to get the necessary information and even more, inspiration, to do these jobs with a lot of fun..

Pinterest = preparation

How did Pinterest help me getting myself prepared? First I started to search on Google. You know, you can find everything with Google, but store the information for later use, I find it quite difficult. So my second thought was Pinterest. The place to create a different kind of boards full of pins and information you can access very quickly.

NewBorn project

So, for the newborn baby shoot, I created this board full of ideas I could use for the "poses" and also for the mood and scenery. You can find lovely and some amazing sweet photo's, but yeah... don't feel the pressure to achieve these kinds of photos. specializing yourself in a certain genre cost a lot of time and practice. The images I used to create a mood helped me to talk about the clothing you want to wear the newborn and the parents. This is a very important step to talk about to create the right balance in your photos. I thought about some attributes to take with me. We have chosen for white, to create a fresh look. I showed them a colored and a black & white photo and they preferred black and white.

Eventually, the idea for the poses did not work out very well, because, the baby was too young to sit by itself. So many of my ideas were not even possible. But the mood was great though and the lighting too. Most natural lights with a small fill flash. Here are some samples:

For privacy reasons, I selected photos where the baby is not recognizable

Pregnant / Urban photoshooT

A good friend of mine asked me if I could take photos of her pregnancy together with her friend. She liked my style of photography, a tough style, kind of industrial. It got me the opportunity to do my first urban photo shoot. I had three challenges:

1. My camera - only 23mm

2. My lack of knowledge, how to guide a model

3. My lack of experience of poses that will work

Again I started to create a board with pins of images about pregnancy and urban photo shoots. I started the board about photoshoots and meanwhile, I get more and more pins about poses and the position of the shoulders, arms, and legs to get the perfect pose.

I needed inspiration about how to fill the frame with my X100F 23mm camera. And again, Pinterest showed me a lot of portraits and shoots with this kind of lens. A place with endless examples what I used for the inspiration for the shoot in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Click here to see more of this shoot

Or read the blog about this photoshoot. Link below.

Pinterest = Your visual Library

As you can see, Pinterest helps visualize my question and store the answers as a pin on the many boards you can create or follow board from others.
Pinterest can help you get the right information within one platform to inspire yourself and build a quick reference guide for you to make yourself a better photographer, even if you don't have any experience. You can use it for photoshoot location, photoshoot poses, moods. Create a board per photoshoot or street photography style you like to achieve and compare your work with that particular board. It is an amazing platform!

Have fun using it.

Here are my best boards I like to share with you.

If you have missed the other parts of my series "How do I learn photography", here are the links to the other blog posts:

How do I learn (street) photography - Part 1 - Introduction

How do I learn (street) photography - Part 2 - YouTube

I hope Pinterest will bring you as much inspiration as it does for me.

Thank you for reading, until next time!

All the best,

Stefan