Tuesday February 10
 
01:00
 
How To Improve Your Photography

Four simple ways to improve your photography skill

I have a number of friends who have bought DSLRs and are just starting to get into photography, and I want to help them learn. So I started thinking: How did I progress my photography to the level it is at today?

I am by no means an expert, but I have learnt a lot since I bought my first DSLR. I’ve come to really understand how the various photographic controls on my camera relate to each other so that it’s becoming second nature to know the right settings for the right situation; I’ve started to move from reacting to an environment as-is and taking photos, to adjusting the environment to suit the effects that I want; and most importantly, I’ve learned why I am not getting the photos I want, and what I need to change.

So what has helped me get from bairn to kindergarten graduate? (I can’t call myself any more than that until I’ve completed the learning and practise for “what I need to change” and I’m consistently getting good results!)

I’ve liquidised it down to four things:

1. Projects

This is something I knew about for a long time, but never really did anything about. Once I did, I really started to see a difference.

Rather than taking photos with the aim of “taking something nice”, set yourself a couple of projects to work to.

Projects can be daily or continuous. One continuous project I have at the moment is to try to take close-ups of buildings to show repeating geometric architecture (click for an example). Most people see a building and try to frame it to take everything. I am trying to achieve a different emotion: taking the viewer away from the building as a whole, and revealing the underlying architectural rhythm and structure – detail and beauty which is often “not seen”.

Another project I have is “Real Urban Tokyo”. Instead of the 1000s of photos of Tokyo Tower or Neon or Shibuya crossing or 109 girls, I’m looking at urban graffiti, concrete architecture, retro railway crossings, and juxtapositioned buildings.

A daily project I did recently was to go out and take photos only with my f1.4 30mm lens. I’ve had that lens since I first bought a DSLR but very rarely used it. Why? Because I always got frustrated with the fixed focal length and ended up swapping for a zoom (I’m a sucker for long zoom shots, which works well with the architecture project above). So I decided: “Ok, I’m going to see what this lens can do. And I’m going to see how other photographers manage with just using a prime.” The photo at the head of this page is part of that – beautiful colours, and a depth of field so shallow that even the leaves of the plants close to the camera are blurred. Conveniently, it also fits in with my “Real Urban Tokyo” theme, being a side of Tokyo that you rarely see photographed.

Projects give you two things. Firstly, they give you focus (no pun intended). Rather than trying to photograph everything in a multitude of different styles, you start to concentrate on how to photograph certain things better. That concentrates your mind into thinking about how you can improve and where you need to gain understanding, and when you improve for one style of photography, the improved knowledge and skill can’t help but rub off on other subjects you apply your photography to.

Secondly, projects give you a measure of progress, and an organised set of themes in your portfolio. I now have a theme on geometric architecture, which I can pull out if necessary – and I see how my eye and technique has improved from when I first started taking them until now. For my daily f1.4 project, I can see that by the end of the shoot, I had started to understand the lens and learned how to work with the focal length limitation.

2. Pick one thing at a time to learn in detail

If I wanted to study history, I’d be crazy to try to study all of history at the same time. I might start by getting a general overview of world history from the dinosaurs to modern times, and then pick some areas which interest me to study in detail. There’s no way I could be an expert trying to study everything at once.

So it should be with photography. After getting a basic grounding on what ISO, aperture, and shutter speed do, the next step is to pick an area of interest and research that area in detail. By doing so, you’ll not only get to understand that particular area, but through real examples, you’ll start to see how the other pieces of the photography puzzle fit together.

For example, if you study macro photography you’ll find out that it’s about more than moving from pressing the macro button on a P&S to buying a dedicated macro lens – you’ll find out there are different ways to achieve macro photography (close up lens; macro lens) and different magnifications to consider (1:1, 1:4, etc); you’ll see that contrary to what you might think, the lens isn’t always close to the subject to achieve macro; you’ll find out about the importance of depth of field and why it restricts aperture particularly in macro photography; you’ll get a glimpse into the importance of lighting; etc etc. You can see immediately that studying macro, you’ll learn things which will apply to other situations also, such as lighting and DOF.

Some areas which I worked on studying as individual topics include white balance, portraits, depth of field, macro, post processing – and I’m currently working on lighting and strobe photography. Other potentials are flowers, travel photography, food, landscapes, architecture, children, animals, and night photography. The areas you study feed naturally into short and long term projects, and each one will improve your photography understanding and technique in general.

3. Give yourself the advantage the pros have

As amateurs we compare ourselves to the highest standards: the professional photographs we see around us every day. And when we don’t get those results, we often blame our technique and knowledge.

What we tend to forget is that we’re generally walking around with a camera snapping off photos as and when something “looks good” to us, whereas the pros are doing prep in advance and post processing after taking the photos. The number of books written by pros that I’ve read which includes a line similar to “To get the sky that colour I had to apply a gradient filter and increase the saturation” or “This photo wasn’t straight until I adjusted it in Lightroom” or “The lens distortion at the edge was so distracting I had to manually compensate by dragging in the right side of the photo” – it’s no joke.

So if you want pro-standard, you need to think that a pro, and give yourself the advantages a pro gives him(or her)self.

That means:

Prep: Think about your shooting in advance. That can be something as simple as knowing when to shoot landscapes for the best lighting (around dawn and dusk), or as advanced as bringing your own lighting gear. One of my favourite demos of how dramatically lighting can affect a photo is this demo from Nikon – try the wireless demo and increasing the light in front of the model (M) to 1/4 and taking a shot; then increase the light behind the model (A) to 1/4 or 1/1 and switch on B and C, then shoot again. See the difference? That’s the kind of thing pros do, and that’s why your photos don’t look as good – because you’ve not prepared your lighting. (And lighting doesn’t have to mean multiple expensive flash units, a reflector to catch window lighting can work wonders, and placing a camera on a tripod can allow you to catch more ambient light without camera shake.)

Shooting: Shoot RAW. If you’re concerned about long term disk space, at least shoot RAW and JPEG – you can always delete the RAW files afterwards. RAW on my D60 is about 10MB, JPEG about 5MB – it’s only 2x difference and an 8GB Transcend Class 6 SDHC card costs less than $17 (updated March 13th 2009), so memory card size isn’t an issue.

Update 28th May 2009: The 8GB card above is now around $20. However this 16GB card is less than $35 dollars – what a price!

Shooting RAW gives you three things: (1) you can adjust white balance after shooting (which means you’re not stuck with an incorrect white balance chosen by the camera during JPEG conversion, and it also allows you to creatively adjust white balance – eg, choosing fluorescent to enhance sky), (2) extra dynamic range, so you can post process and keep quality (RAW generally contains 10-14 bit information; JPEG is 8 bit, meaning that colour range information is discarded), and (3) you control how the raw sensor data is interpreted into colour and grain, rather than the camera making decisions for you. (Depending on your PP software, there may be a fourth: (4) Bad pixels removed automatically – Lightroom does this.)

The point of getting a DSLR is that you are in control (eventually) – eg. you choose which aperture to use for focus range and creative license; you choose whether to select a shutter speed which blurs action or freezes it; etc. When you shoot JPEG, you’re giving back the important final colour and light control back to the camera. You’re only half in control, even if you’ve manually done everything else.

Post processing: Get something like Lightroom 2 or use the RAW processing software which came with your camera. Take back “the other half” of control – adjust the intensity of the blacks, recover blown highlights, decide on the strength of the colour and contrast of the light. You don’t need to do it for every photo – but do the ones that matter. And don’t be intimidated by RAW – in the beginning, you can leave all the settings at automatic, and only tweak what you want. Something like Lightroom makes this process as seamless as using JPEG, and it’s completely non-destructive.

If you do all these things, you’ll be following the process a pro follows, and you’ll start to get results like the pros. Don’t do them, and no matter how good your technique is, you’ll never quite be there.

4. Learn from the masters – or at least from others who know better than you

If you want to get better, then who better to study from than the best? We can’t all meet professionals, however, so try the next best thing: read their books and study their websites. The Strobist site has an excellent On Assignment section. This book by Scott Kelby will teach you the best times of the day to photograph, how to avoid the mistakes that amateurs usually make, and a number of other things – and it’s an easy read. The second book has a good introduction to lighting. The same author’s book on Lightroom 2 is not only the best I’ve read, but has a very informative (if small) section at the end showing his workflow in two real situations – reading those can be an eye opener, showing just how much post processing photographers do.

Next best: the people around you who are also into photography. Just through taking to people at work, I found five people that I work with daily who own DSLRs. Some of them I talk technique with, which can help clarify my idea of concepts or give me more areas to think about. Those who are newer to photography, I help them improve their basic skills, and despite them having less knowledge, sometimes their “basic” questions can lead me to thinking about things from new angles.

If you don’t have people around you, do what I did: find people. Look for photography clubs locally, or place an ad on Craigslist or the local paper. I placed an ad in one of Tokyo’s free magazines “looking for fellow photographers” and got several replies.

Finally, I can’t mention learning from others without mentioning forums. While there’s no doubt you can learn from forums, it pays to use them wisely. Don’t use them as your only education or your main way to interact with other photographers. Remember: Professional photographers spend little time on beginners’ forums.

For most of my photography queries, my first stop is usually Google – and then I read around from a mix of sources. If it’s something I’m learning, I’ll look for online tutorials or a relevant book. If I have a specific question which I’m stuck on or I think there’s a fault with my camera, or if I have something with which I think I can help others, then I’ll go to a forum.

Although I don’t use them often, flickr user groups can be useful. They tend to be more targeted than general forums – eg, low light photography, macro, city photography, even food porn (!) – and can be a good place to see how others do things and talk about specific technique.

That’s it.

Mushed down to be simple to digest but still including all the right nutrients, those are the four things which have helped me improve my photography from when I first started.

If you found this useful, please do one (or all) of three things!

1. Leave a comment to say “thanks”. That will leave me warm and gooey.
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3. Consider donating a dollar or two. Not only will this make me feel double warm and gooey (because when someone’s moved to actually pay for something, it means they really did find value in it), it will also help me run my free site The Korean Blog List.

Hope this helps you!