The Wheat and The Weed Pt 1: My Latest Thoughts on Improving in Photography
Intro (Where did this come from?): Photography is the first art form that I have dedicated a significant amount of time to try to get good at. I have read a lot of blogs and tutorials and some books on photography and have had hours and hours of experience trying to take good pictures. All these activities have shaped and influenced my thoughts on improving in photography. In this post I'll address the attitudes that I personally found are necessary to improve in this art (which turns out is *surprise surprise* an instance (a more refined form) of what enables improvement in anything).
For all the don't-order-me-around people out there - for this post, when I say 'you' I always mean ME. I'm summarizing stuff to the beginner photographer me in a parallel universe.
So without further ado, let me begin by listing and elaborating on *my* (as in, everything is prefaced with an invisible in my humble opinion) thoughts:
YES, WE CAN become a great photographer
But how do I know? I had a time machine and looked, I brought it up on gchat with god, I had a dream, I had a vision, the fortune teller said so, Obama whispered in my ear, ... in short - who the french cares. I looked and I know and I am certain that you and I shall become great photographers.
Little doubtful inner voice can you be silent now?
I just decided once and for all to STFU this question, because it always, always distracts me from actually making my goal happen. The simple truth is, I can't know, he/she/it can't know, and in my experience, engaging with the question and finding reasons why I probably can't become something is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Taking great pictures is HARD
Taking great, influential, moving, makes-me-wanna-look-at-it-a-bit-longer kind of pictures is hard, period. The rightest exposure, most artistic shutter speed, perfectest moment to capture, bestest lighting, originalest idea... It is hard to get all that right, mostly by yourself, considering the impatience of the model, social norms about how long you can point a huge lens to a stranger's face, wrath of Poseidon, your seratonin levels, etc. It is hard.
There is nothing you can do about it but learn to develop your little strategies, read up on other people's little strategies, devour old Vogue's, go to photography galleries, and most importantly get out and take pictures and start punching the timecards for 10,000 hours.
The more you do it, the HARDER it gets. That's normal.
Yes, harder. Because now you've mastered the art of making a sharp picture in which the world doesn't look like it's soaked in orange paint and the subject is occupying more than 4.1% of the area of the picture. After that comes, finding interesting angles, finding just the right framing, catching just the right moment. Those get easier with experience but not that much. And after that there's something that just never gets easier - making something compelling and original.
Experience and practice make the end results more gratifying. Not necessarily every picture taking experience will be smoother, but overall, your pictures will get better or more exciting, because you'll have read up on some technique and try it. Or you'll have made so many sucky shots of a place that finally you get the settings right.
But it just won't get easier. Stop expecting that. All the petty annoyances of lugging gear around or carrying a heavy camera will remain. All the strangers will keep staring at what you're doing. That goddamn bird just won't fly in the direction you want it to. The sun will come out in the wrong moment. All the intellectual challenges will also remain - the challenge of capturing something that makes onlookers want to look at it longer.
Those things will remain hard and actually get harder as your standards rise.
Others will not appreciate your photos as much as you. Deal with it.
Yeah this sucks, but it's just something that needs to be sucked up. Only you know that it took you 10 tries to find the right angle of the model, 20 tries to get just the most beautiful composition of people walking in the train station, 30 tries to get one picture of the Eiffel tower that is remotely original.
Nobody else knows or cares about how much effort the picture took.
The less experienced in photography the audience is, the less appreciative will they be. They won't appreciate the implied efforts of composition and lighting. They won't understand that it took you ages to find the most pleasant configuration of people in the big hall and how you managed to get across both the vibrancy and the cheerfulness of the atmosphere without making the space seem empty even though not all the people had arrived yet. They will just like or dislike quickly go to the next picture. Making these people stop to look at a picture a few seconds longer is a big achievement.
You will not be able to tell your progress. But you are progressing.
Photography happens to be one of the more unmeasurable things to see if you're getting good at. You may think you can measure it by the number of good photos you take, by the number of Facebook 'like's (more on that in just a bit), by how wide the audience smiles, by how much money you can get for its print, but all these are approximate at best and misleading at worst. So before you get an did I just learn something or did I waste my time crisis, just realize that there is no exact way of quantifying photographic knowledge.
That said, it is my opinion that practice garners progress. First, let's stop thinking about the past half hour and start thinking about, the last, say, 200 hours you spent photographing. Do you think that after 200 hours of photographing skylines, you're going to get better at it? You bet. Second, bad photos always make you learn. You learn to check this and that setting before you take a skyline photo. You learn that 30 seconds of shutter is a bit too dark and you need about 45 seconds in this cloudy weather. You learn, you always learn. Some of it will stick, some not, but the valuable lessons will be repeated until they stick.
Negative criticism is worth the weight of the criticizer in gold. Cherish it.
First, I want to make a quick distinction. There is negative criticism and then there's pure hate. Ignore pure haters. But cherish the negative critics.
Negative critics are sometimes referred to as people who give "constructive feedback", but they may just not be that optimistic in their tone. Stop being sensitive and start fishing out the truly workable parts of their criticism. I told you you are going to be a great photographer, right? So don't get existential here.
Now why are negative critics worth their weight in gold? Because they help you improve and they are rare.
Positive feedback is ambiguous: a Like on facebook means just about nothing. They might like the person in the photo, the place, or, maybe, just maybe, the photograph in and of itself. You have no way to know. A 'great' on Flickr or another photo site means a lot more, but that has to do with how many people ever see your pictures in the first place, so the absence of such positive comments should not be mistaken for bad photography.
On the flip side, negative criticism is never ambiguous (otherwise they are just haters). They don't like the fact that the tree was cropped out, they don't like the yellow hue of the editing, they don't like the subject's expression and think you should've waited a bit more, etc. And negative feedback takes more inertia, because it's more intelligent to write and because they are not sure of your reaction and basically hoping that you will interpret it in the right way. So really, a negative criticism giver has done you a favor and they are hoping that you will get that.
The wrong thing to do in response is to say "what do you know, heck who are you" and give them the silent finger. The right thing to do is to consider each advice as though Jay Maisel himself told you so. You may agree with it or you may not. But give it a good thought. And then write an intelligent reply to the person. The reply should say "thank you so much" at least 5 times. Write how constructive feedback givers are rare and that you appreciate their time. Write how you have applied or thought about incorporating all their advice into your photography. If you don't agree with some stuff, say it, but don't make it sound as though they need to reply to you and continue debating. They can, but they shouldn't have to to keep face, because you should make it sound as though it's a matter of personal preference. If you give the right reaction to criticism, you will improve.
And that's it for now. If I think of more, I will shamelessly write them in and pretend they existed since the first second this post hit the servers. I need to reiterate that I'm no expert on photography. I just felt that I had to write out my existing opinions about improving in photography. I had to write to think more clearly, if you will. Cheers, amigos.
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