Photography workouts
Attempting to do some moving foreground and stills at the same time
Before you buy your new body or camera lens, thinking that it will help you to improve your photography, it would be beneficial for you to read this post, where I share my opinion about what will actually be helpful to improve your photos. I know that those more Megapixels that the new body has or the sharpness that promise that new lens are actually tempting. But perfection comes from the user. Doing photography is actually like doing exercise, you need to practice, you need to build muscle memory, and you need to know how to set the camera settings to know what you are looking at and what type of composition you are looking for. Some of the next photos were taken while I was having a break moment on a working day, and definitely they are not great ones.
Playing with reflections and contrasts
Traps:
The main one is to buy equipment that you actually don’t need. I consider myself very passionate and very intense when I start with a new activity or hobby. My intensity is so high that I cannot control myself, and I end up buying lots of stuff that is now completely stored, that I probably have only used once, or I sold not at the price I paid for. With this, I do recommend finding ways that you could replace the urge to buy it, unless you actually know that the photo you want to take actually requires the equipment you need.
Online courses. I have many online courses that I signed up for, and I haven’t even started them on Udemy or Coursera. I actually finish some courses, but I notice that I could learn those specific topics by practising more.
Get into trending things from social media. We have all seen photos on Instagram, and we want to replicate them, but we actually don’t know why we like them. This is a continuous problem because we only have 10 seconds to analyse the photo, and we actually didn’t process it.
Observing people and try to seek for emotions
Things that you can do:
Go out and take photos. This is the important thing, and is where you should focus. Stop watching videos of new equipment or doing online courses. “The world is not in your books and maps, it is out there” Gandalf
Take your time. We live in a chaotic life, everything is now and urgent. But it is also our live and we only have one. Take those 15 minutes, go out and take some photos outside your office. Or arrive earlier at work and take photos of people who are also commuting.
Always carry your camera. One of the difficult parts of photography is understanding your camera, and you can only get it by building muscle memory. You need to find those settings or experiment with new functions from your camera, for example, double exposure.
Taking a photo of yourself. You can do it maybe with friends or just yourself, you can try different focal distances or use different poses.
Another way to improve is by thinking in photography projects, it can be different topics such as social context, composition, or even you could try a different type of photography like sports.
Definitely going out with other photographers will help you to try new things…
But you will master those new things by going out by yourself. It is the moment when you can wait, have more patience, and make errors. The key to having good photos is to fail getting bad photos.
Sometimes is complicated to carry your camera everywhere, for these times is actually good to also practice with your phone with specific photography apps. Some that I do recommend are Leica Lux and PGYTECH.
Finally, maybe get a diary. Here you can document your progress or store ideas about what you want to try next time.