Say Cheese is an amazing project by Arthur de Almeida, a brazilian designer based in São Paulo. It's a long-read website that focus on teaching basic photography concepts for people who wants to start in this area. Photography has always been a passion for Arthur. It all started in his early days of learning about photography, he recalls that the photography triad (aperture, shutter speed and ISO) was one of the few things that he could understand, but even so some important details were always confusing. “It is difficult to talk about something visual with text only” - he added.
When I thought about creating a project to teach this content to people, I had one thing in mind: this should be as simple and accessible as possible, I should avoid talking about technical words and that must start with the name itself.
Photography for beginners
“Say Cheese” seemed to him to be the most popular expression in photography. His goal was to be able to communicate what the website would talk about. Not limiting only to people in the world of photography. After creating the name, he started to write the content in a simple way, as if he was talking to a friend.
I wanted to make sure that each chapter begun in a very informal and non-technical way (like Friends names its episodes). It wouldn't do me any good to explain something technical if people didn't know how it could be applied on a daily basis.
So, after creating all the content and seeing that it was already very clear, he started explore different ways to streamline the communication through visual resources but without trying to rush, especially for the readers that were just starting.
I believed that things needed to be said slowly and always with the same objective: to communicate in the simplest way possible with people, after all I am not talking to professional photographers, but with people who just want to take their first cool picture.
