Coming Soon: Photography 101

Here, we focus on the art and craft of blogging — sharing tips to write more and better, hosting writing challenges to push ourselves and polish our craft, and establishing a space to interact with and learn from others.

Everyone’s “blogging process” is different, from our approach and content to our reasons and goals. For most of you in this community, words take center stage. Yet blogs are very visual platforms, and telling our stories with images is a huge part of the process. Our weekly photo challenges, ever so popular, illustrate this.

We know many of you publish photos on your sites, so we’re excited to dive deeper into the world of photography. In an upcoming series, we’ll introduce the basics — and push you to think about your site with a visual eye and enhance your posts with images.

With the help of guest photographers in our community, we’ll cover the essentials: composition (framing a shot and figuring out what type of image works best for a post); point of view (the position from where you take a picture, like from above, as Sara illustrated in a recent weekly photo challenge); color; shape, line, texture, and pattern; and light.

Then, we’ll take what we’ve learned and discover how to approach blogging with images in mind:

• experimenting with effects in the post-production stage
• selecting and presenting the right images for a post
• deciding when is best to use a gallery, slideshow, or embedded images
• recording details and metadata

Along the way, we’ll share specific tips to get the most out of the features in your dashboard and themes on WordPress.com — and learn which tools and designs are best for you and your blog.

We’re currently scouting for photographers interested in contributing tutorials and tips for this series — particularly those who display exemplary work in the field. If you have favorite photographers on WordPress.com who fit this description, let us know in the comments. Tell us, too, if you’re interested in learning something specific.