[close04]

> and take candid photos

This is probably the best way to get a good photo regarding the people in it. Composition, lighting are important as far as they make the picture "readable" if what you're looking for is the memory of the person. You'll still look kindly on a dark, blurry photo of a very authentic moment rather than an exceptionally well composed photo that's so staged you can't match it against the person you knew.

Staged photos aren't all bad, they're just usually unrealistic if you knew the people. Many group photos have a bunch of upright poses and stiff faces that maybe those people never had naturally. So you recognize the face but not the person, it's not the memory of them you would keep.

If you want to capture the memory of a person, take photos of them doing whatever they were usually doing, with their usual expression, lighting and composition be damned.

[MarkMarine]

Without going into the 50 different things that go into a good photo, where you position yourself and the light are important. Being technically sound (correct exposure, depth of field) is the floor, then where the light is coming from, its quality and feel, there is a ton that goes into this. This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful than some random person’s photos walking around with a point and shoot.

I agree with you, I basically never take the staged photos (don’t have a self timer on my cameras anyway) but just snapping the shutter when people are doing things isn’t enough. I have boxes and boxes of photos of my family that I’m not even spending the time to scan and color correct because it’s not worth it. The great ones combine good light, technically correct, and an interesting subject.

[close04]

> This is why Garry Winogrand’s street photography looks so much more powerful

You're just on a different, more professional rail. Talking about professionals doing professional stuff. You don't warm your tires before you go for a drive just because that's why F1 cars have so much more grip in slow corners.

Capturing the perfect moment in the perfect technical conditions is perfect. But that doesn't happen very often in real life with family moments. Most of those perfect moments will be absolutely serendipitous and you'll capture them however you can. Not a single non-photographer looks at the snapshot of the perfect moment and thinks "different ISO would have been so much better, and look at those harsh shadows".

One of the photos most dear to me and my entire family was taken at the light of a low-power infrared heater. Which is to say just enough light to not accidentally poke a finger in your eye. The details are only barely visible but you can tell who's there, everything is as noisy as you can imagine and more, and the brightest thing in the picture is the glow in the dark pacifier between the 2 figures. And no amount of good lighting would have made that picture better without ruining the moment.

In fact almost all of the "most memorable" pictures in my album are technically crap. Over- or underexposed, crappy film stock or digital resolution, bad framing, bad focus, motion blur, fringing, the list goes on to tick all the mistakes one could possibly make. They're all subjectively better than the technically superior shots because the moment they captured was better. If you talk about family it will always be the moment. If you can make it technically good, go for it, it's just icing on the cake.

[MarkMarine]

I think I'm being misinterpreted, probably my fault for the way I'm explaining things, I'm trying to be concise but I'm passionate about photography so I'm struggling.

I am not a pro, so far from it. I'd be embarrassed to even let a pro see my work. I don't want to advocate for needing things to be technically perfect, what I was advocating for was taking a single class, reading a single book, studying a couple blog posts or something. The little changes you can pick up can add so much to a photo. Say you move a little so the sun isn't behind your subjects, or you have the camera out explicitly in the winter mornings when the light is streaming into your windows and hitting a light curtain over the window... you've got yourself a free soft box. Or you've got the camera out in the hours before/after sunset and sunrise.

Little changes to behavior, your position, use of light that can put the extra thing on a photo that would already be great because it was a great moment.