No one is born knowing, you will have heard this statement hundreds (or thousands) of times. And it is true. Any activity (photographic too) requires a learning and even more so the more complex it is. All learning causes moments of frustration, because when it seems that you have taken a step forward, you take two steps back and, of course, that is very frustrating. So much so that there are many people who end up throwing in the towel. This can have two readings, if you limit yourself to taking one step forward and two steps back, you will not advance and will inevitably end up giving up.
However, if those steps back serve to take you on a run, your evolution will be increasingly firm and satisfactory. And how do you achieve that? Well, analyzing the problems, breaking down the errors and learning to solve them. Obstacles should help you grow, always. You can’t stay lamenting, crying because you can’t have better equipment, because you can’t find the photos you’re looking for, because you don’t have perfect settings or ideal models or because your photos aren’t perfect. Everything has a solution and problems can make you stronger (photographically speaking) if you find out how to deal with them.
It is important to know that the frustration of the amateur photographer is normal, that we all go through it. If you know this, it will help you not to give up. Another thing that can help you is knowing what problems others have encountered before you and how they have solved them.
That is why in today’s article I am going to tell you about the three that have caused me the most headaches that I have encountered along the way: the first was that my photographs were empty, then they were turned off, dirty, dark… and, the third, having a huge number of photographs on the computer waiting to be retouched and with a lot (very lucky) to be printed.
1) Empty photos
The first and main problem that I encountered in this photographic ocean in which I immersed myself a few years ago, was that of taking photographs of subjects that seemed interesting or attractive to me but that resulted in an empty image, without a soul. . Some might have some aesthetic appeal, but generally they tended to appear very unattractive in the eyes of the rest. As much as I thought about it and wondered why my photos were so “dull”, I couldn’t find the answer. Over time I understood. It was a double problem. On the one hand, the composition failed, on the other, my way of understanding photography. Based on seeing many photographs of other authors, recognized or not but that were very attractive to my eyes, I understood that I was attempting the impossible. I was trying to capture a reality that seemed beautiful to me between the four edges of my frame, without further ado. Big mistake. That reality has innumerable variables that make it beautiful and that cannot be reproduced as such through a camera. To see “as is” better, we look directly with our eyes (and the rest of our senses awake) and not through a viewfinder or on a piece of paper in a square or rectangular format. As a photographer I had to go one step further and contribute my grain of sand to the scene, my artistic part, my emotions, my feelings… Everything that exists inside me and that struggles to express itself. Photography consists of interpreting that reality through your camera adding your essence to it, and that is achieved by playing with the composition. I have learned a lot, as I have already mentioned, by looking at other people’s photographs, but also by reading about composition rules. Knowing them is essential and as much as it is not mandatory to use them, it should be knowing them by heart because even if you do not believe it, the difference between an image that intentionally breaks the rules and another that does it by ignorance is noticeable. In the blog there are a lot of articles that can help you if you have this same problem, for example to play with the lines, the rhythm or the perspective, even to master the center of interest.
Observe the difference between these two photographs taken by me, the first is a landscape that at that time seemed beautiful to me (I am not very used to seeing snow on my land) however the resulting photograph has zero interest. The second is from such an everyday scene that at the moment you may think there is no reason to shoot, but I think that with a good composition (and raising the contrast a bit when switching to black and white) I achieved an interesting result:
The other part of the problem was that they lacked soul, yes, yes, you read that right, soul. Photographs should have a soul, tell a story, provoke a feeling or make you feel emotional. It cannot be so cold to your eyes that they pass you by when they meet you in front of you. Until you understand this, your images can be very perfect but you will be too far from being “great” in photography.
No matter how perfect you make them be, they will be of no interest to others. Here I make a point to emphasize that we speak from the point of view of photography as entertainment, from a more artistic point of view, not as a profession. If you dedicate yourself professionally to this and you have to make, for example, a product catalog, then the discourse is completely different 😉
Returning to the photographs “with soul”, I must confess that it was very difficult for me to see it at first, but once I learned the lesson, I realized that it is like a drug, when I go with my camera I look with different eyes, I go looking for messages , emotions in the air, visual stories… I don’t always get it, I still have a lot to learn, but I know I’m on the way 😉 If you want to know some tricks or ways to achieve it, you can take a look at these blog articles:
2) Photographs “off”
Another problem that has given me more than one headache has been seeing my photos that are very dull, lifeless, dark, sad… I used to see other photos and think: “Wow! What clarity… » And sometimes I got frustrated thinking that it was because they used better equipment than me, until I found that there were even those who took better photos with a camera like mine. So the problem must have been me and not the equipment (yes, the best equipment helps, but it doesn’t always solve it) so I started to analyze my photos and realized that it was a light management problem (among others). If you do not control the light in photography you are lost (or lost) but completely. Photography is light, in theory and in practice, technically and artistically.
The only possible solution in this case was to control the light, for which I had to practice with spot, center-weighted and matrix metering… (sometimes this still makes me dizzy 😉 ), learn to expose well and use the external flash when the occasion required it (the one integrated in the camera is useless), differentiate between hard light and soft light, know the high and low key, use the contrast well… In addition to all this, I discovered that it was not necessary to know how to use the light only on a technical level, but it could also be a perfect creative element, take a look at this example:
Here you have the link to some articles that can help you with the subject of light:
3) Hard drive jam
I think we all have had this problem sooner or later. You have a bunch of photos on your hard drive waiting to be retouched or printed, or both. Then you want to look for one and you can’t find it, or you get pissed off because you have a hundred similar photos and you’re embarrassed to delete them but the only thing you get is to saturate the memory and one day you have to start deleting like crazy because your computer is giving you problems or you have to buy another device to continue downloading the images from your camera… The fact is that when we start shooting, there is no one to stop us and on many occasions we do it more impulsively than with our heads. For this I had to get serious with myself and do things like these:
- Download the photos from the camera only when I have time to select the ones I want to keep and delete the rest, not at the last minute when I want to go out with my team and realize that the memory card is almost full or full.
- Print every two months, at most, my favorite photos.
- Cleaning “empty photos” from time to time (better to do it periodically but I recognize that the lack of consistency loses me 😉 )
- Organize my folders by dates and name them with the subject of the photos.
- Delete photos that have been waiting a long time for you to improve them with an editing program. In the end I have learned that photos are not taken with Photoshop (which I don’t even know how to use) but rather with the camera. Since then, unless it is a photograph to remember, if it needs a lot of retouching, I delete it and try (if possible) to repeat it another time to improve it from the camera.
- When I go out with the camera I try to avoid elements that bother me because I know that in the end I won’t be able to eliminate them with an editor and if they mess up the photo too much it will end up in the trash, so I save work from the beginning. If I can’t remove them by changing the perspective I try to blur them.
- Use a photo management program like Lightroom. There are also other free ones: PicasaXnView…
These have been my problems, they do not have to be yours, but if you feel identified, I hope that my experience has helped you and if you share it, it may be useful to someone else. Thanks for reading this far and until next time!