Gear:
Your equipment doesn't matter, except when it does. Your gear doesn't
affect the artistic quality of the photos that you take, it only affects
what photos you can take with it.
One of the most common discussion threads is about what gear to buy.
Before spending money on gear you should know what photographs you want
to take, why the gear you have doesn't work, and what gear you need to
get those photos.
In order to know those things you need to intimately know your gear. The
first thing you should do is to RTFM, Read The Fotographers Manaul.
Actually read the manual that came with your camera, spend some time
practicing using each of the functions, so that you understand what they
are for, and what their limitations are.
Similarly, when you have time while taking a shot, try taking it at a
wide variety of settings, different sensitivities and shutter speeds.
Bracket your exposures. And, when you are processing the photos, not
only see what did and didn't work, but understand why.
One area where it makes sense to invest in better gear sooner is tripods
and tripod heads. Almost everyone starts off with a cheap tripod, goes
through a series of progressively more expensive tripods, shooting for a
while with Manfroto RC2 quick releases, then finally dropping the money
on a decent Arca-Swiss based system.
You might as well just start out with an Arca-Swiss based system so that
you can at least reuse your quick release plates and some of your heads,
rather than investing in a lot of tripods and heads that you'll never
use again once you realize that they were crap and you need to change
systems.
Workflow:
Understand the full workflow of your photos. I often see people bragging
that a particular photo was "Straight out of the camera". Straight out
of the camera wasn't good enough for photographers like Ansel Adams, I'm
not as good a photographer as he was, and if you are reading my advice
chances are that you aren't either.
Just using the JPEGS that your camera produces is either like taking
your film to the drugstore and throwing away your negatives after you
get the 4x6 prints, or alternatively mixing up all the ingredients for
your dinner, then giving them to someone else to cook.
Shoot raw files, or possibly raw+jpeg, learn how to process them into
the final image you want, and keep that whole process in mind when you
are taking photos in the first place.
One important aspect of workflow is how to organize your photos on your
hard drive. The processing software that you use today might keep track
of all of that for you, but for various reasons you are likely to change
the software at least once, and you want to be able to find those photos.
Another important aspect is culling out everything but the very best
photos. I have found that the most time efficient way of doing this is
many fast passes, where I just weed out a few photos each time until
I've narrowed them down to a more reasonable group to select. At that
point, I will often ask someone else to go through and rate them as to
which ones they like the best to the worst.
Keep a diary:
As you progress on your journey as a photographer, you will learn a
tremendous number of things, and probably forget many of them. Take
notes about what you learned, things that you tried, things that you
want to try, and occasionally go back and review them.
Summary (TL;DR):
Books have been written about every topic that I mention. The important
takeaway it to think of photography (or any skillset) as a life long
opportunity for improving your skills, to think about what each of those
skills might be, and how to work at each of the smaller skills that go
into the full skillset.
--
Larry Colen [email protected] http://red4est.com/lrc
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157612824732477/
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