this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Photography

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Heyoo guys. I have an soul roblem. I fell like i m still bad at photography. I took over 10k photos with a Sony a6000 in 1 year and only few of them are "good". I can t get out of this felling. I just began a photography course in my town, but i still don t think my photos are good enough. I allways wonder about time spent for over 10k, more precise 11 243 shots. And i look at other photographers having only 4-5k photos taken and their photos being so good. I just don t know what to do, i am stucked in this loop...Any advices?

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[–] jfriend00@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

First off, you don't get great photos by taking 10k shots and hoping you get a bunch of good ones.

Instead, you get great photos by learning and understanding what makes a great photo and then diligently working to learn how to create those conditions and capture that shot appropriately.

You generally need a combination of a bunch of things such as good/appropriate lighting, interesting composition, interesting subject, technically good focus, technically good exposure, appropriate post processing and so on.

I'd suggest you pick a day that you took a bunch of photos and just try to be your own critic. Go through each photo and evaluate each one. What is good about each photo and what is not so good about each photo? What do you wish was different? Can that be enhanced with post processing? What should you have done differently when capturing that shot?

For example, in your imgur link, I see three photos of airplanes. I don't really know what you were going for in each photo, but the first one is just a challenging angle to shoot at and contains overlapping foreground elements (plants of some kind that are blurred because they're so close). It appears you may have gotten the exposure and focus correct with a low sun angle, but the composition leaves me wondering what you were trying to capture, what story you were trying to tell or capture with that composition?

Then, there's a RyanAir plane shot with a side view. The lighting is challenging. It appears like it may either be backlit or there just isn't very much light - either way there isn't much light on the side of the plane you can see. You could probably work on it in post processing to enhance the visibility of the plane, but frankly you really just want to shoot planes in a direction that has better lighting. It appears to be decent focus.

Then, the third one is a plane going away from you and partly obscured by trees. It's just a missed composition. Planes going away from you are probably not all that interesting on their own unless there's some other interesting part of the composition, but partially obscured by the trees is just a shot you should probably avoid entirely. Like the previous RyanAir plane, this one also looks like its shot from an undesirable lighting angle. In real estate, the old saying was that only three things matter "location", "location" and "location". Well, in photography, it's "lighting", "lighting" and "lighting". The very first ingredient to making a great shot is setting yourself up with good lighting. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't occasionally take great shots with very challenging lighting. Some people can sometimes capture good shots in challenging lighting, but that requires either extra skill or really good creativity and often post processing. But, if you're going out somewhere to shoot planes around an airport, you should diligently plan to be shooting in a favorable lighting direction so you're shooting with the sun behind you so your subject is front lit by the sun.

When I go out to a local wildlife area to shoot birds, I only go when the primary shooting direction has the sun behind my back (which means early morning at this spot). And, I know that the magic time (best lighting) is from about 15 minutes before sunrise to about an hour after sunrise, though I can still get good shots for 3-4 hours after sunrise. I don't even bother going there in the afternoon or evening because it just won't be worth it due to the challenges of the lighting. And, I know that based on where the sun is, it's only really worth it to shoot certain directions.