Latest / Wildlife and Adventure Photography / Why some photographers improve, and others don't

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Why some photographers improve, and others don't · Wildlife and Adventure Photography

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like you to think about two people, two photographers, they buy cameras at roughly the same time, can even be pretty much the same camera gear.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Five years later, one is producing photographs they are genuinely proud of, and the other's still taking pretty much the same photos they did when they started.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, what happened?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what I want to talk about in this podcast.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Graeme Elliott from Graeme Elliott Photography.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Please remember to give me a like, subscribe, hype, whatever else you can do to uh just help the uh podcast to get a bit wider because I'm here to help people.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, what actually happens in that situation, and maybe you can relate to it, maybe you've been in that situation where you've started taking photographs with somebody else at more or less the same time, and one of you has moved on considerably while the other one is still stuck, really.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the last couple of podcasts, I talk about buying gear and what it was important to think about.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I really want you to well keep in mind when we start this podcast is to remember that this isn't about the gear.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, there's a lot of marketing out there which is telling you you need the next new camera because it's got a greater uh resolution and all of this kind of stuff.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is you don't, in most cases, you don't need the latest thing, you just need to have a good understanding of what's appropriate for the kind of photography you're taking.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, what makes the difference between these two photographers?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing to look at is what has actually happened in those five years.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of them has managed to create five years of experience, where the other one is very likely they created one year of experience and simply repeated it five times.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that might make sense, it might not.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So let me dive into that a little bit further.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I often hear people talk about going away somewhere and and they come back with and they tell you how many thousands of photographs they took, like it's something to be proud of.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not convinced, honestly, because um I much prefer quality over quantity, but there you go.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is though, someone can take thousands of photographs without necessarily improving, and the reason that they don't improve is that all they're doing is making the same mistakes over and over again.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: They never take the time to step back and look at why a photograph didn't work, or more importantly, perhaps why it did work if they've got a good one.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: They tend to rely entirely on luck.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, they're not consciously putting the frame together.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe their grasp of composition is a little bit basic.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they see something happening, they just grab it and then they move on.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're certainly not reviewing their work critically, or they tend to jump from one technical piece of advice to another.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to be clear about the last two, especially because it's so important to judge your work critically.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But here I'm not talking about finding all the errors and getting into this kind of mindset that you're a bad photographer.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The chances are we were all pretty bad photographers when we started.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really the point.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: The point is, how do you get from being a bad photographer to a good photographer?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And a really good way of doing that is to just sit back and look at a photograph you've taken and first of all ask yourself, do you like it?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you think it could have been better?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Are you disappointed with it?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're disappointed with it, start getting a bit more specific.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: What is it you're disappointed about?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the composition?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the lighting?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the exposure?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the shutter speed?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is it blurry and you you wanted it to be sharp?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So start asking really specific questions about that particular image, and that will give you essentially a checklist, I suppose, or a list of what's wrong.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then what you do, you start working through each of those issues one by one.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: You don't do it all at once because that's just overwhelming and it's silly.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: You won't get anywhere, you'll get uh frustrated because the chances are you'll make exactly the same mistakes again, because it's very easy to forget things as well.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a whole list, um, I know I've tried doing it particularly early on when I was learning photography.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have a whole list in my head about things I wanted to do.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if I remembered half of them, I was doing really well.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: So do it one at a time and start working through methodically.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've listened to me, if you've been on any of my um webinars or if you have done any of my training courses, you know that one of the things that I kind of emphasize is that consistency is really important when you are learning anything.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's very true for photography, but pretty much anything else you're uh learning.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do I mean by that is simply to be able to produce the same result again and again through choice.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't have to be particularly good, but if you know how you got there, if you're able to reproduce it, then you know what the steps were that you took in order to get that result.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in knowing those steps, if you need to change something, you can look at which steps need to be different.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then you try those steps, so you're consciously doing something different and you know what you're doing, and you'll see a change, and it will either be an improvement or it won't be.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's an improvement, it means you can now adapt that particular way of doing things and go from there.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, what you're doing is you're remaining consistent, but the bar that you're working to has just jumped up a notch, and this is why taking things one at a time and really learning them is very important because after a while, as well, they become habit, they become self-conscious, uh subconscious.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not even thinking about something that maybe a month or two ago you didn't even know about, but through habit and through doing it repeatedly, it's just there.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's almost uh a muscle memory thing.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the other trap that it's so easy to fall into, particularly with the amount of information there is on the uh the internet, is to keep jumping from one piece of advice to another, and sometimes, and I don't watch a lot of photography YouTube things, but I do watch a few because I'm always interested to see what people are talking about, how they're teaching things, all that kind of thing.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes people will contradict each other, which is always entertaining.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you're trying to learn and you go from one person to another and they're telling you different things, it that that really is not that's going to keep you stuck, it's not gonna help you to move on.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it is really important to find somebody who whose advice you take, who knows what they're talking about and communicates how to make change in a way that you understand and you can apply, and then stay with them, just be consistently with them, work through their program from start to finish, and at the end of that, you'll reach a level of competence where you're feeling more confident about what you're doing, your results are demonstrating that you've put the work in, and maybe it's time for a different teacher because some teachers are great for taking you through the basics, but then you kind of outgrow them, and this is just perfectly normal.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I know in in the decades I've been doing photography, I I've learned from lots of different people over the years, and um, some are specialists in niche areas, some have like um like weddings and portraits, for example, top-end stuff.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've been on photojournalism courses because I I want to understand more about how pictures work as storytelling devices, so it comes down to really whatever floats your boat in that sense, but find somebody who is able to communicate their knowledge to you in a way that you can learn it and apply it.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the next thing to think about is though those situations where you got it wrong, and it's to be specific about what's gone on.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: What why is that photograph not working for you?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: What is it about it?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And to ask yourself what you could have done differently.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you could have chosen a different position.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it could be you just reacted too late, it could be that you were focused on the wrong thing, it could be that you became too obsessed with one of the settings and you missed what was going on, or it might be that you failed to notice something in the background.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the important thing isn't the technical side of it, it's simply to recognize why that photograph didn't work.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And again, that takes you back to what I was talking about earlier.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: That once you identify specific things that you're doing, so so don't don't ask general, I mean, ask general questions by all means, but then dive down into the specifics because that will point to an area that you can work on and you can improve.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, getting back to the difference between the two photographers I mentioned earlier, it comes down to the difference between just taking photographs and actually learning photography.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the ideas or one of the aspects of photography that I really enjoy is that I think you're always learning, or I find I'm always learning, and I've been doing this for 50 years now, which is a pretty scary thought, but there you go.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and the reason that I'm always learning is I put myself in different situations, my interests change.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I might spend a few years shooting one particular thing.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I used to like going to air shows quite a lot at one time, and I'd practice um photographing at a lower shutter speed, around one 125th of a second, so that I could capture the propeller on an aircraft as a disc rather than as a frozen propeller, which is what you get when you shoot in thousands.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if you slow it down a bit, it means you've actually got to pan with the aircraft very accurately to keep the aircraft sharp.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get it right, I used to find that really satisfying.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have a nice propeller disc, uh, or I'd have them going across me and I'd have a blurred background.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: If they were pretty low down over the runway, you might get trees and things in the background.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can blur them and have a perfectly sharp aircraft where you can even see the details of the pilot, but there's a lot of movement in that.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that that was one thing that I remember experimenting with it for quite a long time, and that was back in the days of film.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd be joting down in a notebook what settings I had because we had none of the the luxuries of having it all having it done for you, as well as we have now in digital photography.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there are all sorts of things.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: So lighting is another area to experiment with use of colour, black and white photography, portraits are a great one.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the thing about photography, though.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's it's something you can do where you're continuously learning.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So coming back to the kind of questions you can ask yourself, and this is definitely what I teach when I start talking about the uh visual storyteller, which is an approach I love to use when I'm taking photographs, but I because I think it makes you ask all the right questions as you're getting ready to press the shutter button.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one is when you're reviewing, is why did I take this photograph?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're in the moment, why do I want to take this photograph?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Get very clear about it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: What is it you're trying to capture, or what was it you were trying to capture when you took that image if you're reviewing?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And does the photograph actually show what you saw, or has it missed somehow?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And a really important thing to look at in the image is is there something distracting you from the main subject?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is something that I think trips up a lot of photographers.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: They and this is why I sort of lean on the visual storyteller so much.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you look at everything in that frame.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And because you're looking at everything, the whole frame, and not just the subject, you can immediately start to pick out the things that are distracting, uh, their points of exit.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you've heard me talk about composition, all that sort of thing.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you can recompose the image so that it's coherent, uh, the viewer is taken directly to the subject, or you take them on a deliberate path.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the photograph becomes more of an experience, it feels balanced, it feels right.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're looking at those photographs, just ask if you had the opportunity again, what might you do differently?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: What's the takeaway from that particular photograph?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where you start to get your list of things to work on.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said earlier, don't try and do them all at once, just work through one at a time.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the danger, and I've already mentioned this, is that you get into information overload.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there's lots and lots of information on the internet for free.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's things like this podcast for free, um, there's free workshops, all sorts of things.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very easy to come across all sorts of um information on YouTube, YouTube, on blog, social media, photography groups, camera manuals, whatever it might be.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's basically there's no shortage shortage of information.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: The real problem is knowing what matters, when it matters, and how it all fits together.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in turn, that tells you what you need to focus on next.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why I'm a big believer in doing some sort of structured training, especially if you're beginning subject uh something, whether it's photography or something else.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you do some sort of formal structured training, it will take you through the basics.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've gone through the basics properly, then you can move on to the more advanced stuff.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with just grabbing things at random off the internet is that yeah, you're gonna go through some of the basics at least, but if you miss something, if you miss something important, then the later stuff might feel like it sort of makes sense, but there's something missing, and you're not getting the results that you're expecting.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a big believer in doing structured training.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, as I said, I've I've invested quite a lot over the years in different types of training, and this is one of the reasons I offer a um a structured training course.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, really summarizing what I've been talking about in this podcast, if we go back to our two photographers and that five years of experience, the people who improve aren't necessarily the people with the most expensive cameras, or even the people who take the most photographs.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an easy trap to fall into that you're taking thousands.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you think, well, you know, I must be getting better because I've taken all of these photographs.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's uh absolutely no rule that says that.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you can be you know firing away and taking thousands and thousands and thousands of really ordinary photographs.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the people who improve are the people who gradually develop a better understanding of what they're doing, why they're doing it, and also what they want as an outcome.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: What is the ideal photograph for you?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the very first um little processes that we do in my DSLara Muralist course.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's to actually identify what a good picture when someone says they've got a good picture, what does that mean for you?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: What is your expectation?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually dive down into the detail of that.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: We start getting really specific, and I think that's um very important.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's definitely the purpose behind the training that I offer.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it is with other people too.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, there's lots out there.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: The important thing is to take away the confusion, it's to deliver some structure to you, which I think is really important, particularly early on, when you really there's a lot of stuff you know you don't know, but there's also the things you don't know you don't know, and they're the ones that are gonna trip you up.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So by going through a structured process, you learn the things that you already know you don't know and you need to learn, but also you begin to see there are other things there that you hadn't even thought about, and it's really important to get those nailed down if you're gonna improve your photography, if you're gonna be shooting the kind of photographs that you love.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So taking more photographs will definitely give you more experience, but whether it's a useful experience is something else, and I think it's definitely the case that when you understand what you're doing, that uh is what really turns that experience of taking consistently taking photographs into obvious improvement.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can measure the improvement almost, you can look at a photograph you took a year ago and look at all the things that were wrong in it, and then you look at something you took yesterday and you've corrected those mistakes.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there might be new ones, this is part of it, but you are moving forward, and it is there is a very obvious difference between the older photograph and the current one.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: There is a definite improvement there, and honestly, that's a really nice place to be.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the other thing with that is it encourages you to try more things because you know that you've got a baseline, you know that you're consistent at a good level now, so you can experiment with other things.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can always come back again to where you were and try something different, but it is really important that you go through that process of evaluating, you don't get drawn into taking on too much at one time, and you don't get overwhelmed with the amount of information that there's out there on the uh on the internet at the moment.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So um, I hope that's useful.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, um the final thing I'll say actually is on the on my website, if you jump on there, there are some free things you can do as well.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a couple of the a couple of them are there's a PDF you can download with 10.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've to be honest, I've forgotten the title now, but it's basically 10 things you can do straight away to improve your photography today.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um the other thing you can do is sign up for the 14-day challenge.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's again, it's a free thing.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just get um an email every day for two weeks, and it has a photography challenge on it.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just to get you to try different things.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: So one of them is rule of thirds.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if so, if you're not doing that, then it's just an opportunity to try that out.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's designed to push you a little bit, though.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the things you'll definitely be doing right now and you'll be quite comfortable with, others might be more difficult.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where that it pushes you out of your comfort zone a little bit, which is where we grow, obviously.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um, that's the idea of doing a challenge like that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many other photography challenges you can do.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it from me for uh this week.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you found that useful.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I'll speak to you again in the next podcast, which will be out on Friday.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So bye for now.