Improve Your Photography 30 Day Challenge

The Lenscraft 30-Day Photo Challenge was originally published as a series of emails designed to help you improve your photography . Each email provided a 1 week mini challenge to help you develop an aspect of your photography. At the end of the 30 days you should see noticeable improvements in your work.

The email challenge has now ended and the individual emails are reproduced below. I hope you enjoy and benefit from the material.

Finding Inspiration (Week 1)

Welcome to week one of the Lenscraft 30-Day Photo Challenge. This week we will look at Inspiration and how it can improve our work.

Inspiration is the elusive quality that drives us to pick up a camera and take photographs. But here’s the thing, not everyone finds the same things inspirational. For some, inspiration may come from seeing the work of another or even from seeing a particular photograph. For others, it may be less tangible, perhaps coming from a feeling or from being in the great outdoors. Whatever the source, you need to learn to recognise and act on your own inspiration when it comes. You also need to cultivate ways of developing or triggering your own inspiration.

To help you achieve this, your exercise for the coming week is:

1. Consider all the different forms of photography and identify how much inspiration each generates for you. For example, do you feel inspired or excited when shooting portraits, or landscapes? What about weddings or still life or macro? What subjects inspire you to want to take photographs? These are going to be the areas that you will work to develop during the 30-day challenge.
2. Create a “clippings file” of images that you love from the genera of photography that inspire you. These should be images that you feel are exceptional and not just images that you think are good. These images are the ones that connect with you and that make you want to shoot something similar. The clippings file could be physical images you cut from magazines and placed in a file. Perhaps better still, you can create a document on your computer and copy the images you find on the internet to this. It doesn’t matter which method you adopt providing you collect images you love.
3. Towards the end of the week review your clippings file. Analyse the images to categorise them images in some way. Does this tells you something about the things you like to photograph or the styles of photography you like?
4. Now spend some time reviewing each of the images in turn whilst trying to answer the question, “what makes this photograph so special for me?”

Be sure to record the results of the exercise and watch out for the next email in the series. Remember, there will be one email each week.

Developing your Vision (Week 2)

Last week we examined what forms and styles of photography inspire us. This week we will work on developing and improving our vision.

Vision is the vital component that helps set our work apart from the work of others. Vision is what can transform a humble scene into a masterpiece of photography and holds the viewers interest. Vision is something that’s unique to you; it’s how you see the world. I’m sure you may have had the experience of taking a photograph and feeling excited about image. But when you review the image on your computer, you feel disappointed as it looks nothing like you imagined. This is the vision gap. It’s the gap that exists between what the camera captured and how you imagined the photograph would look (your vision).

Have you have ever seen the photograph “Winter Storm Clearing” by Ansel Adams? (http://www.moma.org/collection/works/52135?locale=en). Ansel himself said that it wasn’t until many years after he shot the photograph, that his skills and equipment allowed him to print an image that matched his vision. If you have even seen a straight print from the negative, there is a significant improvement in the printing over time.

Vision can be difficult to tie down but investing effort in trying to do this is essential to your success. It’s often much easier to imagine a finished image than to crystallise this by making any form of notes. When you try to do this, your vision can often fade or even appear to vanish. You need to work very hard on the process of refining your vision and bringing it into focus in order to capture it in your photographs.

Now that you have an appreciation of vision, here is this week’s exercise to help you develop your skills:

1. Take your camera and shoot a series of 10 images. Any subject so long as it inspires you and the series of images must be as creative and different as possible. As you shoot each image, take a moment to note down your thoughts about how the finished image will look. Answer questions such as is it black and white or colour? What format (portrait, landscape, panoramic, square)? What elements of the scene are you trying to emphasise or de-emphasise with your composition and how? What levels of contrast do you imagine? Are there areas that you imagine being darker or lighter than others? You should also try to work into this some of the ideas you might have developed during the inspiration exercises from last week’s challenge. Are there any techniques that inspire you that you might want to adopt for this challenge?
2. Back at home, load your images onto your computer and review each in turn. How does the image match your initial vision? Make notes about the areas of difference and how you might change the photograph to bring it closer to your vision.
3. Now you have compared your images to your vision, would you change anything about the way you used the camera to capture the photograph?
4. Make a sketch of the image then write notes onto the sketch to show the changes you might need to make.

Be sure to complete the exercise and watch out for next week’s challenge.

Mastering Technical Skills (Week 3)

This week we will take a closer look at how we use our camera and equipment to capture the photograph. This is the area that most photographers tend to concentrate on developing but unless you have a vision for your image it will be difficult to decide about the settings and equipment to use. Be sure to remember the previous weeks work as you progress through this week.

Mastering the technical skills of photography means that you feel confident in being able to take control of the camera settings. Changing the aperture, selecting the right focal length, picking where to focus, choosing which lens to use etc. It also means understanding the limitations of your chosen settings and how you can compensate for these. For example, if you want to use a long shutter speed, you won’t be able to hand hold the camera steady. If you want to avoid the camera shake you will need to use a tripod or other support.

It should go without saying that you will need to know how to use all your equipment, almost without consciously thinking. But you also need to know how to select the right settings to produce the results that match your vision. It’s your vision that should inform your choice of settings and it’s your settings that inform your use of camera accessories.

Let’s take a simple example where you decide to photograph a waterfall. You decide your vision for the photograph is that the motion of the waterfall is recorded so that it becomes a smooth cascade. You also want to achieve full depth of field so that everything in the frame is sharp. To achieve this you realise that you need a long exposure of at least 2 seconds as well as a small aperture for the depth of field. You decide on a small aperture of f/16.0 and your lowest ISO setting of ISO50. The result is a shutter speed of 1/5” which isn’t slow enough to create the look you imagined but the aperture setting of f/16.0 achieves the depth of field. To slow the shutter speed further you realise you need to use accessories (a Neutral Density filter of around 6 stops). You also need to use a tripod and remote camera release to avoid touching the camera (and introducing camera shake) when taking the photograph.

What you should take from the above example is not a formula of how to take such a photograph but an appreciation of how your vision for the photograph drives your choice of camera setting and how this can introduce the need for accessories to further control the camera.

This week’s exercises:

1. Read your camera manual to be sure you know how to control the shutter, aperture, ISO, point of focus and exposure compensation as a minimum.
2. Look back to the work you did on vision and inspiration. In order to achieve your vision for the images, how might you need to control the camera? What sort of accessories might this require you to use and do you have these available?
3. Look back at example images from your clipping file and try to identify how the photographer created the effect you like. What camera settings did they use, what lens did they use, how have they used the characteristics of the lens, what accessories might they have used?

Next time we will look at how to edit and improve your images.