"Your First 10,000 photographs are your worst" - Henri Cartier-Bresson
See the quote above? Probably one of the most famous photography quotes of all time. You would probably understand straight away the quote when you first time read it and is it true? You decide. I started my photography nearly about two years ago and a lot has pretty change based on my skills of taking photos. Some people they don't' have the natural instinct to take photographs nicely first time. They would probably tent to say the camera does it's job but I totally disagree with the statement because "it's not the camera but the person behind the camera". The fact that YOU control the camera and shoot the photographs, you are the one that makes the photographs happen. I mean 2 years ago I entered a photography competition with my school by just using a
small Nikon point and shoot camera and the last thing you know it you realized that you were able to learn new things by just using a point and shoot camera. It's not about expensive equipments. It's not about having the best camera in the world if you can't understand how to make photographs properly. But experience and skill is key of making a photograph happen. I'm just going to list down 5 things that you can improve your photography skills:-
1. Look for inspirations
From my experience when you suddenly stop taking photographs because you get lazy and uninspired. Therefore, I tent to start by looking photographs from FLICKRIVER (FLICKRIVER is just another way to look for photographs from Flickr). You see looking at good photographs
being taken by professional photographers from around the world helps you inspire yourself to do take the photographs like that. You could always observe by analysing the photograph you like and practice. Never ever forget that practice makes perfect. Other than that, reading photographers blog is another thing to inspire yourself. Buying photography books is always another good option to improve your photography.
2. Improvise your composition
Composition. It's basics. When you learn basics you eventually will master it. Everything you do you compose. Everytime you wakeup in the morning you go take a bath. You compose your time schedule everyday and it's the same when you compose photographs. Learn a bit in depth about composition and I promise you it will change the way you take photographs. For example, the Rule of Thirds is probably the golden rule in composing your photographs. Furthermore, your POV or otherwise known as your Point Of View of taking photographs. How you are trying to show the the subject of the photograph in a different way. The ability to see the potential for a strong photograph and organise the graphic elements into an effective, compelling composition has
always been one of the key skills in making photographs.
3. Be aware of your surroundings
What this means is that you got to sharpen your vision of the moment you want to capture. This is another skills that you could practice. Again it's not everyone's natural instinct of having a good eye of the moment you want to capture because a photographers eye is different when its
about looking for the moment. Design is the single most important factor in creating a successful photograph. Therefore, you have got to sharpen your vision to get the best result out of your skills. You could practice by doing architecture photography. Start to look for pattern, shapes and lines. This would not just improve your eyes but your eye for composition as well. And don't be afraid to shoot a lot because you can always delete the pictures you don't like.
4. Understanding the Photography Language
The photography language is light. When it comes to light in photography its always about lighting. Photographers in the digital world now tent to think to that everything is possible to recover photographs in Photoshop. But it depends with the situation. Your photographs would more likely to increase noise, lots of highlights and lost of tone and colour. You see understanding the direction of lighting is vital when it comes to make effective photographs happen. When the camera gathers light, the shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings all comes in one which comes out as Exposure. With the exact right exposure of a photograph could make a huge impact on your photographs. Therefore, working on directional lighting would effect a lot on your photographs.
5. Aim your objective
People have different taste in photography. It could be portraits, landscape, street photography, architecture, or even food photography. Therefore, I would suggest what topic you want to improve on your photography. Not every photographers can take photographs of posed portraits. Some find landscape photography easy to master. You decide. Or you could do a photography project such as 365 photo a day. Even though I've never done it before, I believe it could improve you photography skills. In the past I 've done a project on taking 99 photographs of portraits, which the objective was to improve taking photographs of portraits in black and white. The black and white effect was done in Photoshop as I was looking at editing the tone of the picture.
Finally, I hope you have learn something from this article. Another option if you would like to get your photographs comment, I would suggest joining a photography forum. There's a lot of photography forum out there so it's all about finding the right one really and get ready for the critics because the negative critics will help you improve your photography skill. If you have any suggestions of what I should write please write a comment bellow or give me a shout at the "ShoutBox". That's it for me. I'll end this post by putting this comic strip bellow. Enjoy and Laters!
ps: Good photography website to look
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