[AroundTokyo]

Today, I came up with this characterization: you look at your photos and think they all suck. All you see is what you should have done to make it better.

Maybe that's harsh, but in the course of my loonnnng academic career, I learned that it is necessary that the harshest critic of your work be yourself. That's really the only path to mastery.

I started a blog nearly 4 years ago, and it is only over the last few months that I've got some nice comments about my photos which makes me feel like I've progressed somewhat. As I'm doing a blog, I'm not really shooting for myself, but for my readers, so their opinion about my shots is important.

[derekkite]

I'm finding that I can get a serviceable photo when I go out. The hard realization that planning like a military campaign makes for great wildlife and landscape photos. Hardware and technique are important, but when I'm shooting I'm not fighting but working with what I have.

I'm also becoming more patient, waiting for perfect light or action to happen, my contribution is being in the right place.

As well I'm becoming more intuitively connected to the scene and able to capture a frame that expresses the feel of the place. This is my goal; I've had a few shots where people react emotionally in some way to seeing it, usually the same reaction I had when shooting it. It is a bit of a challenge, in some ways you have to turn yourself off to be able to execute technically, all the while being open to and expressing the feelings of the scene or action.

[magkelly]

One of my design teachers years ago pretty much decided I wasn't going to do very well at it. She was a painter so her classroom assignments and the stuff she made us do it was all based in that. I spent more time painting color strips in the right order and painting set shapes on white board than I ever did really learning about design in her class. I wasnt allowed to do my assignments on a computer with software I was familiar with and well, let's just say that with arthritis as bad as I have that I'm not exactly Rembrandt. It was very frustrating for me because going into that class I knew a lot about design from reading. I was already making jewelry and applying a lot of standard design techniques and on a computer with a tablet I was very capable of doing every single assignment she gave us. I just couldn't paint worth a damn. She made it pretty obvious after a while that she thought my being in the program was a waste of time, that I had absolutely no talent for design whatsoever.

Near the end of the Design I class we finally get to the point where we can use a computer so much relieved I do the current assignment in Illustrator and Photoshop and turn it in sans signature as required. Now this teacher she has this thing she does where puts them all up around the room, sans signature so she can critique them all and not be biased. So she never really knows until the end who's submitted what. She gets to my submission and she's GUSHING, tells the whole class that it's exactly right, gorgeously done in fact then asks who did it. Everybody looks at me and they're all grinning becuase this is ME after all, the class dunce that's she's praising to the skies.

I've never seen a person's jaw drop so hard. She looked back at it, then at me several times and it was clear that she just didn't believe it was done by me. I shrugged and said "I told you on a computer I'm f- Picasso." She asked me if I had more examples of my computer work and I pulled out my portfolio and I showed her, also showed her photos of several of my jewelry designs and some sketches for fashion designs that I was working on. She just shook her head and said "Never have I been more wrong about someone and their talent." After that she treated me a lot better.

So why did I tell that tale? Well, it's because of people like her that I never thought I had any artistic talent at all and when I first started photography I don't think I trusted myself to judge my own work objectively. I think if anything I felt like I really had to prove something be more critical of myself so I could become better. From the beginning I was pretty ruthless about throwing out bad shots. Looking back now I realize I was probably better than I thought I was. Even back then I still had a pretty high keeper rate. I look back and I see the beginnings of where I am now. I see pretty decent understanding of light, composition, great use of color and line. Most of the shots I messed up it was simply because I couldn't hold steady and blurred or chose the wrong shutter speed and blurred. I can see myself getting better with that kind of thing, the technical stuff, learning what iso, aperture, shutter speed to use for what, learning what poses work and which don't and why. But the bones of my talent were there, from the beginning. I just needed to learn how to direct things, how to set it up properly.

That same teacher she later told me I had a painter's eye but unfortunately not a painter's hands. She was right in a way, but not completely. Taking up a camera, becoming a kind of jeweler, that's also made me a kind of painter. I do paint. I paint with light, color, form, with metal, glass, with clay, with memory cards or with film, just not with paint and canvas. Like any painter I can see where I began while looking at my old photos. I can see my mistakes, oh yeah, but I don't disdain those mistakes because that's how I learned not to make them and sometimes I am even glad that I did. Sometimes a mistake it can be a happy accident too.

I don't equate being better with being perfect. As a photographer I am always learning and one of the things I have learned is that there is often more than one way to do things and that technical perfection isn't everything. I don't want to be too perfect. To me that kind of work can also be mechanical. One of the reasons I don't particularly want a FF or medium format camera or the most expensive lenses out there is because I don't want to be able to see every single dot or pore on a subject's face. I actually kind of loathe high resolution portraits/video because they expose every single flaw to the point where that's all you see, unless you Photoshop it all out, which looks even worse to me. I would rather my work be less precise sometimes and more aesthetically pleasing to me. I'm the same with some of my older work. Technically speaking I'm so much better now but some of those older photos that are not so perfect I like them better because they aren't. I guess I'm a little strange that way, but it's true... ;p

[MadMathMind]

I started a blog nearly 4 years ago, and it is only over the last few months that I've got some nice comments about my photos which makes me feel like I've progressed somewhat. As I'm doing a blog, I'm not really shooting for myself, but for my readers, so their opinion about my shots is important.

It's really hard to get attention for one's photos, it seems. I've noticed that unless you're already famous or have somehow already got a reputation for taking amazing photos, what matters more is the subject. You can go out in your local town and take some superb shots, but you'll get limited attention because no one relates to them. I've noticed that on the forums here. Some really great shots get little notice while others strike a chord with the audience: a half out of focus image of a dog with a story reminds people of their own pet and gets tons of replies.

I've recently started shooting cosplay photos. I did just a bit of promotion work and I've gotten more views on that one album on Flickr than all my others combined. The photos people fave are good (I'm proud of them), but I've got others I consider my much better work--no one really seems to notice them. It tells me that, for the most part, what people really like is the subject.

[AroundTokyo]

It's really hard to get attention for one's photos, it seems. I've noticed that unless you're already famous or have somehow already got a reputation for taking amazing photos, what matters more is the subject. You can go out in your local town and take some superb shots, but you'll get limited attention because no one relates to them. I've noticed that on the forums here. Some really great shots get little notice while others strike a chord with the audience: a half out of focus image of a dog with a story reminds people of their own pet and gets tons of replies.

I've recently started shooting cosplay photos. I did just a bit of promotion work and I've gotten more views on that one album on Flickr than all my others combined. The photos people fave are good (I'm proud of them), but I've got others I consider my much better work--no one really seems to notice them. It tells me that, for the most part, what people really like is the subject.

I couldn't agree more. It is all about the subject, how many people are interested in that subject and how well you can work social media. I'm sure we've all seen stuff on social media and wondered how on earth it got so many likes, favs or shares. If you want to make it in the public world surely you have shoot what is popular to appeal to the larger group, or have a group behind you that will help make your work popular. However, we also need to remember that what might be popular doesn't necessarily mean good.

[redcat]

AroundTokyo where can we find your blog, I'm interested ^^

[AroundTokyo]

AroundTokyo where can we find your blog, I'm interested ^^

Don't expect big things from it Redcat as my own photography is not that great. The blog is located at AROUND TOKYO or you can just Google, "Around Tokyo".

[Culture]

For these exact reasons I don't participate in competitions.

[redcat]

Don't expect big things from it Redcat as my own photography is not that great. The blog is located at AROUND TOKYO or you can just Google, "Around Tokyo".

nice blog I bookmarked it in case I go to Japan ^^

[AroundTokyo]

nice blog I bookmarked it in case I go to Japan ^^

Thanks redcat! Currently reshooting a lot of it, as a part of my "growing" process. A lot of the older photos were really silly and so I'm in the process of redoing a lot of them. And I hope you get to visit Tokyo one day as there is a lot to see here especially for those of us who love photography.

[Dieterson]

It's really hard to get attention for one's photos, it seems. I've noticed that unless you're already famous or have somehow already got a reputation for taking amazing photos, what matters more is the subject. You can go out in your local town and take some superb shots, but you'll get limited attention because no one relates to them. I've noticed that on the forums here. Some really great shots get little notice while others strike a chord with the audience: a half out of focus image of a dog with a story reminds people of their own pet and gets tons of replies.

I've recently started shooting cosplay photos. I did just a bit of promotion work and I've gotten more views on that one album on Flickr than all my others combined. The photos people fave are good (I'm proud of them), but I've got others I consider my much better work--no one really seems to notice them. It tells me that, for the most part, what people really like is the subject.

When you want to know if you are a good at photography, the first thing you have to do is to make yourself clear what is "good" for you. "Good" can mean a lot of things, and every person will see it a little bit different. Cosplay or puppy pictures are very popular, and in that they are good because they give a lot of people a happy feeling. Then again, visit a museum of modern art and have a look at the exhibitions. Many people would say these pictures are childish crap. But are they not good just because they are not appreciated by the masses? And many of the greatest painters in history died poor and disdained. Good/bad and popular/not popular are two different things!

If I had to come up with what a good picture is for me, than I would say good pictures are those that somehow get stuck in my mind. Because these pictures triggered something, a feeling. That made them obviously worth to be remembered out of all the pictures I see. By the way, I do remember two of your pictures: one photo of a historical room, a table with chairs, and a small sign reading "President" on the back of one chair. It has a great atmosphere. And another photo of a worn down memorial (right English expression?) of Martin Luther King on the foreground, tourists in the background, a very expressive picture in my opinion.

So, to give you another answer to your original question of how do you know you are growing as a photographer? People tend to remember your pictures!

[officiousbystander]

I've recently started shooting cosplay photos. I did just a bit of promotion work and I've gotten more views on that one album on Flickr than all my others combined.

Just as an experiment I added the tag <cosplay> to one of my photos and had a sudden spike in views. It's not really cheating. The photo is of a shop mannequin in a Superman suit. My guess is some searches might be for slight Asian girls in revealing Manga outfits so there will be inevitable disappointment. Nevertheless I had no idea this genre of performance art existed and was so popular. What can't you learn from Pentax Forums?

[Tonytee]

Today, I came up with this characterization: you look at your photos and think they all suck. All you see is what you should have done to make it better.

Maybe that's harsh, but in the course of my loonnnng academic career, I learned that it is necessary that the harshest critic of your work be yourself. That's really the only path to mastery.

I believe you sense that you are doing well is when someone who is well grounded in photography offers a suggestion like this: Hey, Tony you really should seriously consider putting together a calendar. Now this is not a boost for my ego in any way, however it is a tremendous reassurance that I am not a screw up. It does admittedly get my juices flowing to get out there and shoot, shoot and shoot a lot more. This site has so many talented and gifted photographers that I always felt that my work paled in comparison to theirs. I believe that encouragement is so crucial to survive in this world. Thanks for the topic and for the opportunity to post here.

Regards,

Tonytee

[jacamar]

It's really hard to get attention for one's photos, it seems. I've noticed that unless you're already famous or have somehow already got a reputation for taking amazing photos, what matters more is the subject. You can go out in your local town and take some superb shots, but you'll get limited attention because no one relates to them. I've noticed that on the forums here. Some really great shots get little notice while others strike a chord with the audience: a half out of focus image of a dog with a story reminds people of their own pet and gets tons of replies.

I've recently started shooting cosplay photos. I did just a bit of promotion work and I've gotten more views on that one album on Flickr than all my others combined. The photos people fave are good (I'm proud of them), but I've got others I consider my much better work--no one really seems to notice them. It tells me that, for the most part, what people really like is the subject.

So you're telling me I should give up on my quest to produce the perfect slime mould photo?

[TER-OR]

This year chasing insects in the field my keeper rate was substantially higher than last year. That's growth, right? At least it's improving technique. Same equipment, too. It's satisfying.

I've been sharing my images on a few outlets, trying to educate people about the native insects and flowers - all the while learning about these species myself. It's great to share the images and knowledge and hopefully get people to start noticing things themselves - and hopefully treat the environment better for everyone.