Practice With Intention

Ahh spring is just about here and we’re all grabbing our cameras and heading out a lot more often and snapping a lot more photos! The most common problem that I face and other photographers on my level who are still working on their image quality is breaking through the plateau. It’s different for everyone…maybe post processing for one person and capturing a different perspective for someone else.

There are several ways that I try to push myself to constantly move forward in my photography. One key one is to “feed the brain” as my mentor Bryan Allen likes to say. I didn’t think about this until the other day when a friend was over and as we sat around chatting, I had image upon image scrolling through on my monitor. I’m constantly looking at the work of other photographers and asking the question “what makes their image good or bad in my mind?” It’s easy to spot a good image. Sometimes you’re with a friend or two and you see an image that all of you agree on as being great. But what makes it great? If you sit and try to answer that question in your mind, that helps you then build the scene around how the image was captured. This activity along with simply scanning through tons of images is a great way to expand your mind. You may spot an image and that inspires you to go out there and make it your own.

Another key element for me is to go out and have both intention and meaning in every photo I take. The one thing that I try not to ever say is “well let’s see what happens”. If I can stop and think for a few minutes and truly compose an image rather than just point at something that I think looks good and snap away, then chances are I’ll come up with a better image. The same logic applies as above. “Hey that’s a cool building…” now I need to decide if I instantly stop and snap, or take a couple minutes, walk around, find a perspective on this building that makes it look good to me and then convey the essence of what I see to the viewer. It is better to spend the entire day and come away with just one solid image rather than 100 mediocre ones, which leads me into the next point.

Quality over quantity. I can log into any social network and see friends profiles with tons of photos. And I can’t count how many times I either see several images that all look the same or vary slightly. What’s the point of that? With digital cameras we can instantly see our results, so it’s not as though it’s necessary to capture that many images. It’s sort of like machine gun mentality…if I click the shutter enough times, one of these will be good. The quantity ties in heavily with intention and meaning. If you can stop, think through an image, shoot with intention and convey your message and meaning to the viewer, then there is no need to go for quantity. This doesn’t mean that you can’t capture more than one image of a subject…there are different perspectives, ideas, compositions, etc…that you can take. Fellow photographer Mark Robert Halper (http://studiomark.com/) can spend the hours upon hours thinking and composing just one single portrait shot. We spoke the other week and he told me that during his three day workshop that he teaches out in LA, his students come up with one final image for each day. That’s it…one final image per day. And if you visit his site and look at all of the portraits he’s shot, you can see all of the thought that has gone into each portrait. Have meaning behind the shot, look for the thing(s) that will bring the image to life, think about it, set it up…and then…

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~ by novophotography on April 8, 2010.