{"id":1755,"date":"2015-05-28T20:37:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T19:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/?p=1755"},"modified":"2015-06-02T08:03:58","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T07:03:58","slug":"enough-skill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/?p=1755","title":{"rendered":"Enough Skill"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Cath and Ian Humes<\/pre>\n
\"Elgol-Infrared\"<\/a><\/p>\n
Canon 1DS Mk1 Infrared Conversion, 70-200mm f2.8L IS at f8 at 1\/100, ISO 400, Raw, 16:58 October 17th<\/pre>\n
This is the tricky one.\u00a0 Skill, talent, ability, call it what you will, it takes time to learn and even more time to improve.\u00a0 To become \u201cSkilled\u201d requires practice, perseverance and patience and you need to be self-critical.\u00a0 Not the, \u201cOh I\u2019m useless I should give it up.\u201d variety, the tenacious type that says, \u201cI could have done better, I will do next time!\u201d.<\/p>\n
Work out what does and doesn\u2019t work, and if possible, why.\u00a0 It is easier (less painful and less expensive) to learn from other people mistakes.\u00a0 Take time to look through some online galleries\/forums and see how other people haven\u2019t quite got it right.\u00a0 See what does and doesn\u2019t work and learn from their mistakes.\u00a0 However, part of this process is being aware of your own failings too, accepting you did something wrong and working out how not to do it again.<\/p>\n
When I first started out as an amateur in the 1980\u2019s I was shooting 35mm film negatives.\u00a0 I would drop off an exposed roll, wait a few days for it to be sent away, get developed and come back.\u00a0 Then I would pick up the 6\u00d74 prints and negatives and get a new 35mm roll included as part of the developing costs (excellent marketing).\u00a0 This was one of the upsides of using film, I had time to separate from the experience of taking the image.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t get to see what had been captured till a week later and the \u201cexperience\u201d of shooting the image was in the past; it was part of memory now.<\/p>\n
Today you can see it immediately and work on it within minutes; it\u2019s still current and is therefore compared to the \u201clive\u201d experience.\u00a0 I like to wait a while before working on new images, just to give me some separation from the live experience.\u00a0 Back in the film days there was always the thrill of flicking through your 36 images, seeing which were good, bad and ugly.\u00a0 Did you have the dreaded developer\u2019s sticker attached to a picture telling you why it was your fault, not the developer\u2019s, that this image wasn\u2019t good enough?\u00a0 One of the best ways of improving as a photographer lay in these bad photographs.\u00a0 Today, we just delete them as soon as we take them and we are missing a trick.<\/p>\n
Failing to work out what is wrong with our images means we are failing to work out what we as photographers are doing wrong.\u00a0 When you had a hard 6\u00d74 print you took a moment to look at it.\u00a0 Then, if you wanted to improve, you looked harder and worked out what had gone wrong, or more accurately what you had done wrong.\u00a0 So I made stacks of bad photographs and by this I mean<\/em> I put them in stacks.\u00a0 This picture is very dark (flash didn\u2019t fire\/wrong sync speed), in this one my wristwatch was too heavy (sloping horizon), this is a picture of the tail of a squirrel (it moved), one of a very small bird in a big sky (too far away\/wrong lens).\u00a0 Then I started putting all the photos (even the good ones) into a stack.<\/p>\n
The reason I tried to file the good ones, as well as the bad ones, was because I was critiquing my work and that meant spending time really looking at the images.\u00a0 We all have our bad habits, if we aren\u2019t aware of them then how can we fix them.\u00a0 If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got<\/em>.<\/p>\n
After a while the stacks would settle down and I would have a clear leader; something I did wrong more often than everything else.\u00a0 I would look through the biggest stack and then spend a month where I focussed on not doing that one thing.\u00a0 Every shot I would be checking my posture working on my technique to offset that heavy wristwatch.\u00a0 Next month I would work on the next highest stacks, so on and so forth until developer\u2019s stickers stopped happening.\u00a0 This process taught me two things; how to stop doing the same stupid thing over and over again and how to look at images.\u00a0 It stopped the \u201cwishful seeing\u201d and replaced it with honest observation.<\/p>\n
When I looked at an image I looked<\/em> at it and saw what was and, just as importantly, was not there.\u00a0 This also influenced the moment of capture, I became more aware of what\u2019s really in the frame rather than what I wished was there.\u00a0 Be aware, if you use this technique it will change the way you take photographs and how you view images.\u00a0 The bad news is that your top ten personal photographs will change; the good news is that you will be a better photographer because of it.<\/p>\n
All Images Copyright \u00a9 2015 Cath and Ian Humes. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Cath and Ian Humes Canon 1DS Mk1 Infrared Conversion, 70-200mm f2.8L IS at f8 at 1\/100, ISO 400, Raw, 16:58 October 17th This is the tricky one.\u00a0 Skill, talent, ability, call it what you will, it takes time to learn and even more time to improve.\u00a0 To become \u201cSkilled\u201d requires practice, perseverance and patience …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1755"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1767,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1755\/revisions\/1767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.catherinehumes.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}