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taking my landscapes to the next level


scottstevens

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Hello! I've been shooting landscape and nature photos for about 3 years and have definitely seen an improvement in my skills with schooling and practice.

 

However, lately I feel my photos give off an "amateurish" look. I do use an entry level dslr but have invested in lenses such as 35 1.8 and an ultra wide angle from tamron. I have been told time and time again that it's the person behind the camera that counts, not the equipment.

 

I guess the question i am asking is what can I do to really get that WOW factor and get my photography to a proffesional level? What changes did you make to help you achieve this as well? Below is a link to my Flickr page.

 

scott stevens

 

scott stevens

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keep doing what you do.

Don’t do that! You obviously want something different or you wouldn’t be asking the question. Don’t let anyone talk you into complacency. Your gut is telling you to challenge yourself and that’s a great and rewarding thing to do. Most photographers find a comfort zone and wallow in it. You want more. That’s a good thing. By the way, there doesn’t necessarily have to be something wrong with your current work in order for you to move on and grow. But there’s also nothing wrong with finding things wrong with your current work that you’d like to change. Both critique and self-critique are powerful tools.

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First, I’m hoping I never attain a level of skill I’m satisfied with because then I’d have to give up the exhilaration and challenge of trying to achieve it. So consider these to be ideas from someone traveling the same road as you, who also hasn’t reached their desired destination.

 

1. One of things that has helped my photography the most is a background in watercolor painting, because in that medium one must pre-think all the compositional elements in the image before beginning to create the image, and that means that one needs to have a very clear idea of what effect one is trying to achieve. As a result, I’m examining all parts of the image in my mind before I even take out the camera, and I’m making very conscious decisions about what aspects of the scene are most critical and am modifying the point of view and composition and exposure to emphasize those aspects.

 

2. When I started seriously working on improving my photography, I gave myself a challenge: each week for 6 months I needed to shoot 7 photos that I liked well enough to post online. That got me out with a camera every day, and really provoked me to see the photographic potential around me.

 

3. I worked hard to wrap my mind around the potentials that Photoshop and Lightroom provide, and once I’d climbed the steepest part of the learning curve, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying post-processing as a creative tool in its own right. A major aid to this learning process was participating in Photonet’s weekly post-processing challenge.

 

4. I often mentally visualize scenes in black and white before settling in on a composition, and I often convert images to black and white, even if they don’t end up staying there—that’s been a major aid to improving my compositions.

 

5. I live in an area that has some iconic views that get photographed a lot. When I’m in need of a challenge, I’ll go to one of those sites and spend a few hours with the goal of making photos I’ve never seen before. The equivalent in the Bay Area might be: can you photograph the Golden Gate Bridge in a way that you’ve never seen done before? That translates into a more general goal I aim for: I don’t want to make photos that people have seen before. I rarely fully achieve that, but it sure is fun when I do.

 

6. Another “game” I play when I need a challenge is to take a scene or object and photograph it in as many entirely different ways as I can think of—that gets back to the goal of making images that no one has seen before.

 

7. A modification of that game is to take a random object—like a salt shaker, for example—and to figure out a way to make a really interesting photograph of it.

 

8. Yet another game I often indulge in is to go for a walk with my camera with the intention of just finding something interesting to photograph—on several days I never made it off my front porch, and it once took me two hours to walk from my back porch to my back fence, a distance of about 50 yd.

 

9. I participated for a long time on Photonet’s critique forum, both as a critiquee and as a critiquer. At that time, there weren’t a lot of substantive critiques offered, but it turns out that giving a critique to someone else may actually teach you more about how to achieve your photographic goals than receiving critiques from others. This is because when you stick your neck out and critique someone else’s work, you need to spend a lot of time with their image, figuring out what it is that made you react to it like you did (positive or negative), and then figuring out how the image might be modified to better achieve what you’re guessing is the photographer’s goal.

 

10. In a lot of respects, it doesn’t really matter what the photographic subject is, since the skills and artistry gained from shooting in one genre are largely transferrable to whatever photographic genre one prefers to work in. So I tried everything I could—I even shot events, street, and stage during that 6 months of 7 photos a week [i realize that wouldn’t seem strange to a lot of photographers who specialize in such genres, but I’m an introvert, so there was a certain amount of agony involved]. In each case, I learned techniques that were instantly applicable to my preferred genres, and I had a lot of fun trying new things.

 

I suppose the most important thing to me is that the process of challenging myself, learning, and trying new things is a heck of a lot of fun, and maybe that’s the best goal of all.

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Moderator Note:

THIS THREAD IS CLOSED.

 

Intending respondents please refer to this thread here: LINK

 

Scott - please do not post the same question in multiple Forums. Doing so contravenes the terms of use - but - more importantly doing so only causes confusion and disruption for members who want to respond and or follow the conversation.

 

William

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