Simple Ways To Improve Your Photography
Shoot Often
This first tip is no guarded secret, like any profession you need to put in the hours to master your craft. A bodybuilder does reps to slowly grow their muscles, you need to be getting outside and exercising your photography skills to grow as a creative. It’s always easy to shoot when the weather is nice and creativity strikes, but the gloomy days that have you stumped are the most important ones to get up and work through. Getting out and shooting frequently will place you in different lighting situations to overcome, subjects to frame, and moving components to capture. If you can experience as many shooting situations as possible on your own, you will better prepare yourself for troublesome situations that arise in professional paid shoots. Not only will you be better prepared, but you will also have an easier time coming up with creative ideas. If you force yourself to shoot often you will need to come up with new things to shoot and push through any creative block.
Shoot in Monochrome Colour Space
You may be scratching your head at this one, as it seems like a weird trick to improve your skills. This won’t mean that all photos you take are going to be Black & White, as Lightroom will automatically convert the image back to colour, it is an exercise in seeing your lighting. Converting your camera to monochrome will force you to focus on the lights and shadows in the image rather than the colours. We can already see the colour with our eyes, but our camera will show us where the light is hitting the best as highlights and shadows become much more obvious in monochrome. Beside this point are two examples of RAW monochrome images, one that has good lighting and one that has flat lighting, looking drastically different even though they are very similar photos.
Switch Up Your Subject Matter
One of the best things you can do to better understand your craft is to at least dabble in different areas of the field. Changing your subject matter will force you to think differently about what you're shooting, and it can unlock new skills you may have overlooked. You use very different techniques to capture great architectural shots, compared to product photos, but there are transferable skills. Architecture is all about leading lines, guiding the eye, and having powerful contrast. Switching back to product photography, why not incorporate those same principles? On top of learning new skills, switching what you shoot can help keep your creative juices flowing and allow you to explore new things that may excite you. Not every photographer starts out shooting the same thing they end their career shooting, so getting experience in various can guide your hand in which fields interest you more than others.
Study Online Resources
In this day and age, there’s no excuse for disregarding online tools for learning new techniques and tricks for your field of photography. Online learning resources such as Skillshare are great places to learn more about your craft. Industry professionals make lessons for you to watch, have projects to work on, and even offer feedback on the work you submit. It’s understandable if you don’t want to subscribe to Skillshare or other learning platforms as it is another subscription to add to the thousands required for TV, games, etc., but these websites often hold more value than most free resources. That being said, there are tons of great creators on platforms like YouTube that teach you about photography for free. You have to sift through lots of poor advice and clickbait, but ultimately there are golden nuggets to be found. Once you find someone that you resonate with, often they offer extra resources and even individual coaching for a fee if that interests you. With a little bit of digging, anyone can find the right information to help them learn and grow, so why not invest in the mind behind the photos?