10 great practices that will improve your photography
1. Daily practice is the fastest and best way to improve your photography. Repetition with your camera gives you a sharpness that will set you apart from other photographers. You’ll be faced with challenges and inspirations on a regular basis that will feed the creative beast within you. Practically, you’ll become fast enough moving through your settings that you’ll be ready for the decisive moment on a wedding shoot or out shooting street photography. You’ll develop a quickness to your vision pinpointing conventions that draw your eye.
2. Targeted practice focusing on specific conventions in photography can help improve your work and your vision while shooting. For example, learning about color theory can help you identify what mood’s and ideas are conveyed when someone looks at a color. Take a week of your daily practice and focus on subjects with the color yellow. See how you begin to spot the color yellow wherever you go and look for ways to enhance your images either by using yellow in your composition or highlighting yellow.
3. Shoot in different natural lighting conditions to help you see the benefits of different lighting. By shooting with the natural light of the morning, afternoon, and evening you’ll come to know when to use a certain time of day to create a mood or match with a theme you’ve already created. Hard afternoon light creates stark shadows that you can use to compliment a model with sharp features. Golden hour is ideal, but not practical for your clients in many instances, so training your eye to different times a day will give you more flexibility as a photographer.
4. Shoot with and learn an off camera flash. Natural light is fantastic, but sometimes you might want a more dramatic look or need to expose a subject's face while backlighting with the sun. For this you’ll need to use a flash and off camera gives you the most creative freedom as a photographer. You don’t need an expensive setup, just a decent Flash and remote trigger with a little bit of diffusion to get going. You can use https://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html as a really great free resource to teach you about flash lighting.
5. Study other photographers to get inspiration. Being a photographer today is great because we get access to world class photography just by scrolling on Instagram. YouTube has a lot of great photographers who are more than willing to share their work and their techniques. Studying these greats will give a clear understanding of what the bar is for world class photography and help give you some ideas on how to improve your own photography.
6. Find sources of inspiration in your life. Film has always been a big source of information for my photography, but for you it could come in the form of photobooks, anime, tik tok, or watching your dog run through the yard. Whatever form your inspiration takes you should explore it on a regular basis to keep the work flowing and help hone what will eventually be your style.
7. Offer up your work for criticism whenever possible. No matter how good you believe your photography to be, if you aren’t putting it in front of people’s eyes it can only progress so far. Getting regular feedback can be crucial in finding your weaknesses and honing in on your strengths. If you’re lucky enough to be in a large city with a thriving photography community then connect with your fellow photographers and join in on workshops and pop ups. If you are from a more remote area you can use reddit or other online forums to politely ask for criticism.
8. Seek mentorship from a more experienced photographer. Mentorship can be crucial in learning pitfalls and shortcuts that can only be learned from years of working in the field. Many photographers are more than happy to offer their wisdom to an up and coming photographer over a cup of coffee. If nothing else, connecting with another photographer will grow your network and could lead to opportunities in the future. Reach out, send that email, send that DM, it can’t hurt to ask.
9. Remove the emotional connection of your photos. When you take a photo there is more going on than the viewer can hope to know: Your feelings at the time, how the weather felt to you that day, what you have going on in your life all go into how you feel when you look at that photo. But, the audience has none of that context and only has the merits of the image itself to go on. So, you need to edit your photos with a removed eye and be critical of conventions such as composition, exposure, balance, etc. Giving yourself at least 24 hours between the taking of the photo and editing the photo can help give you that separation that you need to give a less biased look at your photography.
10. Be patient with yourself and your photography. Know that it takes time, years and years worth of time to become a great photographer. Yes, some people have an abundance of natural talent and take to the medium quickly, but not doing so does not make your photography any less valuable or predict that you can’t reach whatever heights you wish to reach with photography. With that patience comes killing the notion of comparison before it eats away all the joy you had with photography when you first started. Understand that your path is not the same as anyone else’s and enjoy the journey your on. As long as you don’t quit you’ll get to where you're going.
I want to give credit to Pat Kay and Nigel Danson as being the sources for the practices that I follow that subsequently provided me with a lot of the teachings in this blog. They are both fantastic photographers that you should follow if you want to learn more about photography. Thank you, kindly.
https://www.youtube.com/@patkay
https://www.youtube.com/@NigelDanson
-Tarver Petersen
