Have You Checked in with Your Camera Roll Today?
How to shoot like a pro photographer in 4 easy steps.
Photo by author.
What professional photographers don’t tell you is how bad they really are. Even the best of them fail most of the time. Which is to say that the images they show are only a fraction of the images they create. The rest? Just digital debris. So success, ironically, is largely a matter of hiding their mistakes.
What a great lesson for us all.
It’s not really a comment on the photographer’s skill, of course, but about the process of photography itself. And as amateur photographers, we can learn from the pros and use it to make our own photography experience much more efficient and satisfying.
At its heart, photography is all about making choices - like what image to take in the first place, how to compose it, and when to trip the shutter. Filters? Exposure? Motion or still? We eventually learn to make those choices semi-automatically, but they are choices nonetheless.
The hardest choice of all, though, is what to keep. The pro’s paradox.
Photography is a unique task in that we take everything home and then we sort it out. Other tasks we decide as we go. We just buy the groceries we need. Only one pair (mostly) of new shoes, thank you. I’ll take that puppy.
But photography in the age of smartphones is all about safety in numbers. If we take enough shots, there ought to be a good one.
And that’s not wrong. It’s just that we have to take the time - just like pro photographers do - to declutter, remove the also-rans, and expose the hidden nuggets.
It’s no wonder, then, that we’re all buried in pictures and feel like we’re frantically burrowing just to see the light of day. Photos, arguably the single most valuable item we create, can also be the most overwhelming.
Here are 4 simple actions you can take to have fun and treat your photography experience more like a pro.
Edit your photos daily. Any day you take photos - even one - take a minute or two to decide what’s worth keeping, while it’s fresh in your mind. Editing is not so overwhelming when you do it as you go.
Choose the photos you react to. It’s not about logic, it’s about feelings. You should keep the photos that will still move you 20 years from now. Perfection is over-rated. Reactions are not. A picture that makes you smile trumps one where everyone’s eyes are open any day.
Move your “utility” photos (i.e. furniture, labels, dented fender, clothes, screen shots, etc.) to Notes or to a device folder and delete them from your Apple Photos Library. Call it photo feng shui.
Think of the photos you capture like words in the first draft of your life story. At the rate we take pictures these days, even the most critical editing won’t damage the narrative. In fact, it will improve it. For every good picture you delete there are 2 great ones waiting to take its place.
The payback for this daily exercise is that the more you edit your photos, the better a photographer you become. You begin to anticipate your inner critic and become more thoughtful about the images you create.
Yes, there are still plenty of tests, trials, seconds, clunkers, whatever you call them, but when you sift them out to extract the gold nuggets, you’ll feel like a pro.