How to improve your photography

 

 

Most photographers want to get better. We all look at ways to improve the quality of our work but not a lot of people actually think carefully about how to do this. Some people think that it is all about greasing the grove. Just keep taking photos and you will get better. This is true to a certain extent, but I think it only works for beginners. When you are learning the basics of photography, getting some miles onto your trigger finger is important. It is the only way to really understand the basics. As a beginner, you would go out and shoot, come back and look at your images, see what you did wrong and try to correct those mistakes. This is great when you are learning the technical aspects of photography. Trial and error is a great way to learn the basics.

 

 

But what happens when you move past the basics of photography. You understand the basics of composition, exposure is no longer a problem, and you have a good grasp of the technical aspects, so does greasing the groove and shooting a lot help then?

 

 

Honestly, the simple answer is no. Everyone will get to a point in their photography career were just pressing the shutter button will not help them improve anymore. Every photographer will hit this point in their career. No matter how much they shoot, they just don’t seem to be improving. This is probably the most difficult stage in photography to overcome and many people lose their way or give up taking photos altogether. When a photographer has entered into this stage, no matter how much they shoot, there seems to be almost no improvement. Some of these photographers turn towards gear to solve their problems, and they get caught on the upgrade cycle. They keep chasing new cameras and lenses, hoping it will lead to a breakthrough in their skill set, while others never make any more progress in their work.

 

 

The “buy more gear” syndrome that many photographers can fall for is a very devious pitfall, as a new camera can motivate you to go out shooting, you are excited and you want to click that shutter button and create some images and maybe it will even help your photography in the short term, but that new camera zeel will wear off and you will be stuck at exactly the same point in your skill level after a while and the only solution will be able to think of is “Buy more gear”. A new camera will never make you a better photographer.

 

 

The correct way to improve your photography once you are past your beginner phase is something that I call “shooting with intent”. What this means is you go out shooting, but unlike just walking around and taking snapshots, you go out to shoot with an idea of what you want to shoot and work on. You have a reason to go shooting and you are looking for a certain type of image. Perhaps you want to work on your composition of your images, then you go out shooting and you only look for those kinds of images where they fit into the type of composition you want to work on. You actively concentrate on only one single aspect of photography, shoot all day with that in mind, and when you go back home, you review your images and see where you made mistakes. You are actively concentrating and practicing on only one aspect of photography, and this single dedicated focus while shooting will slowly help your skill set grow. What really helps a lot at this stage is getting your images critiqued but that is not always possible unless you have some friends who do photography and you respect their opinion.

 

 

There are many ways you can practise shooting with intent. You can concentrate on any of these aspects listed below.

1. Only shooting with a prime lens
2. Working on shooting with one of the composition rules for the day, such as the rule of thirds
3. Shooting reflections only
4. Only long exposures
5. Focus stacking
6. Shallow depth of field.
7. Negative spaces
8. Silhouettes
9. Flash

 

There are so many different aspects to work on when you are trying to improve your photography. One aspect that I struggle with my own work is negative spaces. For a lot of my work, I am still shooting for magazines and newspapers in China so my negative spaces are dictated by the magazine who wants shots with the negative spacing on the left or right-hand side as I usually have so kind of idea before I go to the job. But in my only personal photography,  I have problems trying being creating with negative spaces so I make an effort to try and play around with my compositions when I am trying to get some practice in.

 

 

This is a good example of negative spaces for my work. I knew that that the magazine wanted photos for the right-hand side of the page, so I concentrated on making sure that the negative space of the image was on the lefthand side of the image. But in my personal work, I struggle a lot more with negative spaces.

 

 

I think this is one of the reasons that  Michael Kenna’s work is so attractive to me. His mastery of negative spaces is what I would love to achieve in the future one day. I try to make sure I go out and shoot with the intent of concentrating on negative spaces at least once a week. Just depends on how busy I am at work.

 

 

When I start to train my assistants, I will usually pick a day when there is not a lot of work and send them out to go shoot photos for me. They are free to shoot anything they like but I will often tell them what they need to concentrate on. At the end of the day, I get them to send their best 9 images(we use Wechat for communication here in China so 9 images are the maximum a person can send in a single post) to me and I critique the images for them, concentrating on what I told them to work on. The next couple of images will be from one of my new assisnts.

 

 

In the images above, I asked my assistant to concentrate on negative spaces and after viewing them I gave him a critique. Most of the critique was done with audio messages but  I also drew lots of squiggly lines to show him what I saw and things he should work on. it usually takes my assistants a few critiques until they start to improve. I need to state that in general, I hate seeing people using squiggly lines to justify their shots. I only use it when I am critiquing images so it is easy to see the points that I am talking about.

 

 

Practicing photography with intent is a great way to improve how you shoot, but I also suggest that you don’t do it all time.  Another way to improve the way you shoot is by limiting your gear or your options for shooting. Shoot film is a perfect example for this. When you shoot with a film camera, you are usually stuck with the film you are using. So the iso is set once you start. That means you need to work the light you are shooting in. If it is too bright then you need to stop your lens down or if it is too dark, then you have got to shoot with your lens wide open and maybe even shoot with a very slow shutter speed. The single limitation of not have the ability to control your exposure with ISO makes you think differently. But you don’t need to shoot film to do this. You can go out shooting with a single prime lens on your camera for the day and it will limit your shooting and force you to adapt to that limitation. Basically, the idea is to make the shooting more difficult and forcing you to overcome those problems. If it is too easy, then you are not learning and growing.

 

 

The final way to improve your photography skills is to shoot in a compositional format that you are not used to. The first time I tried to shoot a square format with a TLR, it threw me for a loop.  I was so frustrated because nothing seemed right to me. The rule of thirds just didn’t work with the square, trying to find triangles or groups of three was incredibly difficult with a square image, and I had to really think about the types of composition when I was lining up a shot. The 6×6 film format probably had the biggest impact on my photographic learning. It really forced me to think long and hard about shooting. I had to go look at other shooters, look at their compositions, and how they framed up their images. When someone tried to improve their art form, this is exactly the effect that you want. Something to drive them to improve and change. But once again, you don’t have to buy new gear to do this. Many mirrorless cameras allow you to change your aspect ratio on your camera and you can shoot with a 1:1 aspect ratio on your digital camera and have the same learning experience that I had with a film camera.

 

 

An Instax SQ camera would give you the same type of effect when it comes to compositional problems. When it comes to gear, pick your poison. Find something that will work for you. The idea once again is to make your life more difficult so you will concentrate on the problem and overcome it. Currently, I am trying to get used to shooting panos. Shooting  a very wide pano image brings new composition problems and it is forcing me to once again do some research and it is making me think about how I compose my shots. I would love to shoot some panos with a Xpan but that camera is why to expensive so I have been shooting panos with the Pentax 67 and a 35mm adapter. But I could just as easily be shooting them with a digital camera. Gear once again doesn’t matter. It is the intent of the shot that really counts.

 

 

So what role does greasing the grove play for an intermediate shooter? If I use an analogy here, shooting is very similar to bodybuilding. In the beginning, you can do almost any kind of weight training, and you will develop some muscle. But after a few months, those newbie gains will slowly stop. At that time, you need to slowly start using isolation movements and compound movements, targeting the muscles you want to stimulate and grow. The same analogy applies to photography. Going out and just clicking the shutter button will help you to develop very quickly in the beginning but slowly that growth will stop. Practicing with intent is very similar to isolation exercises. But greasing the grove and shooting a lot will help maintain your current skill set so don’t ignore your shooting as well. As a seasoned shooter, you need to work on improving yourself as well as maintaining your current level.

 

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The desire to improve is a good thing. Striving to get better is great but don’t let your desires overtake your love for shooting. It is easy to get lost in the love of camera gear, and it is just as easy to spend so much time trying to get better and doing research but not going out and putting the research into practice. Sometimes it is great to just take a camera outside and enjoy shooting something. Photography is an art form but it is a strange art form because it is both technical and artistic in nature. Learning to balance both aspects should hopefully lead you down the correct path and you will learn while having fun at the same time.

Shaun.