How To Get Better Fast

Not a day goes by without someone asking on FaceBook about how to become a better photographer.

The answer is simple: Shoot more and shoot more often.

It isn’t about equipment. It isn’t about location. It even isn’t about experience (although that’s the direction we’re heading).

Photography is an art form. You get better by doing the art. It’s that simple.

Sure you’ve got to understand your tools. Just like a painter comes to understand their medium, their brushes and their paints a photographer needs to understand their tools too.

But one thing we photographers have that painters don’t have is equipment that comes with things like automatic mode and there’s nothing wrong with using auto mode at least for awhile.

Auto mode lets the camera do the “thinking” for you while you concentrate on more important things like composition and the nature of the light. It’s the light that’s the most important thing when it comes to photography. And it’s in the definition of the word photography and that’s drawing with light. It’s one of the reasons I like to carry an external incident light meter even though I have working light meters in all my digital and film cameras.

If you spend all your time fretting over your selection of gear (and a lot of newcomers do this) and thinking there’s nothing to shoot in your hometown and how great it would be to shoot in New York City and how your piddly little camera isn’t good enough then you’re never going to improve as a photographer.

Photographers get better faster by shooting more images more often and not stopping shooting no matter what.

Here’s a link to another very good blog on photography. Peyton’s Blog offers a lot of really good technical and practical information on how to be a better photographer. Couldn’t have said it better myself.