Eight ways to improve your photography skills

Like any other occupation or skill, photography needs to be improved continuously. As long as there is room for improvement, we should work hard for even 1% improvement. Whether we regard ourselves as professional photographers or amateur photographers, we should keep in mind the phrase “learning is endless and climbing the peak”. However, we also often face the following difficulties. During the continuous shooting over the years, we often form an inherent shooting mode and become no longer want to change or difficult to find space for improvement because of falling into our own “comfort zone”. So, how can we improve our photography technology? Now I will provide eight ways to help you better exercise your photography skills.

1. Shooting with fixed focus lens only

It has to be said that the appearance of the zoom lens has greatly facilitated our shooting work. By allowing us to freely change between different focus segments, shooting outside is no longer a manual work requiring a large number of lenses. Although in view of this obvious advantage, more and more people tend to choose zoom lens when purchasing equipment, the traditional fixed-focus lens still has its own unique advantages. One of them is that it can make us more diligent, or force us to go into the subject for more careful observation, or move back and forth to find the best shooting angle. Therefore, the next time you go out to shoot, we suggest that you only carry a fixed focus lens, and then try to slow down your pace in this impetuous society, and try a “slow pace” photography way to more carefully examine yourself and your works.

2. Shoot under the worst conditions

This is somewhat contradictory. After all, as a photographer, we should shoot under the best possible conditions, especially the light conditions. However, if it is to hone photography technology, it is still a good way to shoot under the worst conditions. It can not only help train our ability to deal with different conditions, but also help us to open our minds and show more creativity. You should know that for professional photography, not every shooting condition can be perfect. For example, if you are fond of scenery photography, you can try to shoot in cloudy or cloudy conditions.

3. Memory card only leaves a small amount of space

One of the advantages of the digital photography era is that we no longer need to consider the problem of wasting film. Generally, our memory card has enough space to meet our shooting needs for a whole day or even longer, regardless of how many times we press the shutter during the shooting process. However, this convenience will also be the reason for us to be lazy. Pressing the shutter is no longer a prudent action. Imagine if you could only take 24 photos a day, would you still press the shutter so hastily? Taking a specific number of photos with limited storage space can force us to seriously consider the composition, light and focus of each photo. Of course, perhaps a more rigorous training is to use film for shooting, so we can’t even get additional shots by deleting photos.

4. Shoot “proposition composition”

You should know that taking photos based on your own interests is completely different from taking photos of specific subjects entrusted by customers. Therefore, inviting others to arrange shooting tasks for us can also help us improve our photography skills. It is not only because this way requires us to have the ability to grasp the customer’s ideas, but also requires us to complete all the content on the customer’s shooting list perfectly. We can carry out this training by asking family or friends to assign tasks, treat it as real work, remember that they are customers, and they have no need to praise your work.

5. Try film photography

In most cases, film photography is a kind of photography that can’t see the result immediately after pressing the shutter. So, how can we know the quality of our works? The answer is that we can only know when we print the photos. Undoubtedly, the emergence of digital photography has greatly lowered the threshold of photography and made it easier for people to take photos, but if you really want to test whether you are a qualified photographer, using film for photography is absolutely the ultimate test. In addition to the limited number of shots mentioned above, we must rely more on our intuition, eyes, skills and skills to shoot better works because we cannot preview the shooting results directly.

6. Limited time shooting

Another good way to improve your shooting efficiency is to set your own time for shooting. Completing the work within the specified time can help you manage your time more consciously and effectively, and make you more organized. Before that, you need to develop a shooting theme (for example, shooting a specific market within an hour). After training, your shooting speed and quality will be greatly improved.

7. Try something new

If you are already a photographer with rich experience, you may encounter the phenomenon that your photos start to become uniform, or the stage called “bottleneck period”. At this point, you should probably remind yourself that instead of repeating the same thing every day, try something completely different. If you are a wedding photographer, try to shoot the scenery; If you are a street photographer, try to shoot sports themes. This way will not only enable you to learn more new technologies, but you may also be able to find new fun from it.

8. Abandon late return to the original

Undoubtedly, in the digital era, the late stage has become an indispensable part of a complete photography workflow. At least, the picture is cut and corrected, and at most, each part of the picture may need to be individually polished and color corrected. However, if you really want to further improve your photography technology, I suggest you learn to “take” a good picture rather than “create” one. In fact, a good photo hardly needs post-processing. So, why not try to shoot your own works without any late stage? This way will detect whether you are a qualified photographer.