How to become a better photographer quickly ?

How to become a better photographer quickly ?

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
read more photography quotes here

The above quote is saying something. It is true for anything. You need lots of practice to be particularly good at anything. So how to become a better photographer quickly? Let’s simplify the thing to one photo. Try to make a kind of best photo.

The thing is that one usually cannot make the best photo by chance. You choose something to be good at, ideally what you interests you the most. Portraits, landscapes, wildlife, macro, wedding etc.

I mostly do wildlife, portrait, landscapes, just to choose three.

For wildlife the key for the best quality photos is a hide. The other option is a very good, very long (usually very expensive) lens which I don’t have. The alternative would be a very much time outside with the not so long lens, which I don’t have either.

I can make very good quality shots at 280mm. For this I need bigger birds or animals, or smaller birds at close distances (3-6m). To combine this with a good light, the equation ends in the hide.

Occasionally I capture good photos without the hide, but it is not very easy to find good situations and to manage to get close enough.

For portraits the key is the moment you can capture. For this you need to be very good with people, to communicate with them, make jokes, help them to be relaxed, explain what to do, not at photography.

What is difficult to capture the people smiling, wondering, etc. Most people is not very good posing in front of the camera. Other option is to use longer lenses and make candid photos.

The photography part is to set the aperture preferably with a bright prime lens, proper distance and shoot. Other thing is perhaps to find interesting people and interesting clothes and other thing which you can see on the picture.

When we change aperture we can control how the background look, with bigger brighter apertures the background can be more blurred, with smaller apertures we can show more from the background.

For landscapes the situation is not so easy. In Hungary where I live, I rarely see things like green sea, huge snow covered hills, mountain springs, waterfalls, red cliffs, deserts and other picturesque things. In the neighboring Austria there are better possibilities though.

I mostly can make pictures of water, sky and such in landscapes.

Technical knowledge

Technical knowledge is the first we need to get. Without understanding the basics we doomed to failure. Understanding aperture and iso, shutter speed and exposure we can hardly be really good photographers.

I recently checked my photographs on the computer, searching for the best ones. I thought about what is the best ones distinguish apart from the rest of the others.

1. Light

Interesting light situations, can result interesting pictures. Sunset, sunrise, storm, fog, light from all kinds of direction and any others. The other aspect of light, that good light is usually needed for very good quality photograps, there are no miracles, with strobes and street light cannot reproduce a picture which is make in good lighting situations.

2. Colours

Colorful things are usually more interesting if we make colored photographs.

3. Subject

To find good objects definitely helps. Find something interesting, extraordinary, beautiful, colorful, fascinating.

4. Unique action

What is interesting in photography that with high shutter speeds we can freeze action, and can make pictures we otherwise cannot see.

5. Bokeh

This is one step that you can make sharp photographs. After some time your sharp rate can be very high. It is time to go forward and make more interesting photos with shallow depth of field. With bright, long lenses it is possibly to blur the background totally, but perhaps it is more interesting if it is not totally blurred, but see something in the background as well.

6. Equipment

In most cases not the equipment is the weak part of the story. But some cases simply you cannot make better photographs without a proper equipment. Each equipment there is a limitation. Lenses like the Canon 200mm f/2.8 L can make a huge impact on your photography. Such pictures you simply cannot produce with other inferior types of equipment. No post processing helps to create such quality.

 Other thing we can do to check other people’s photographs and learn from them

A good place to check photos is the Flickr.com. Here it is possible to find all kinds of photographs, and it is possible to check what separates to good ones from the not so good ones. There are groups dedicated to themes, like portraits, birds, landscapes anything, even for lenses and cameras. If we find a photo which we like, we can think about what we like in it. How to make such a photo. Equipments (cameras, lenses) and image parameters like aperture or shutter speed also can be checked.