Fall Soft Water

There are so many different sources of material out there to help you improve your photography, but reading website after website and a book or twelve isn’t always the best way to improve your shots. While reading all these lessons, tips and tutorials, we tend to forget something that would help us much more. All the knowledge in the world is useless unless you know what to do with it, so here are 10 tips to help you learn how to improve your photography.

1. Learn Where You Need To Improve

Before getting better at anything, you need to work out what you actually need to work on. Write a list of things you don’t feel confident with, it can be as long or as short as you like but try to keep each one as narrow as possible. When you have your list, concentrate on just one item from it and spend time practising, researching and doing everything you can to improve that particular aspect of your photography. When you feel confident with it, cross it off and move onto the next one.

2. Be Critical

When you take a photograph that you’re not happy with, don’t just scrap it. Spend some time looking at it and work out what you don’t like about it. Write your thoughts down so you can look back over them later. You might start to find a pattern where it’s the same things that you aren’t happy with. If that’s the case, go back and add it to your list.

3. Set Yourself Assignments

A great way to improve your photography when you know what it is that needs improving, is to set yourself assignments. This gives you a challenge, something to aim towards and it helps keep you on the right path. Make it achievable though and preferably something that you will enjoy doing. If, for example, you want to improve your close up animal shots, don’t just take a thousand photographs of the dog, set yourself a challenge that will take you out of your comfort zone, like getting yourself a shot of a squirrel holding a nut.

4. Try New Things

The worst thing you can do is take shot after shot of the same things, with the same settings. Even if there’s something you’re brilliant at, it’s always good to make changes to make sure you don’t get complacent. You might learn something that will improve what you are already great at but it’s even more important for beginners, trying new things will definitely speed up the learning process.

5. Be Patient

I’m terrible for this one but it’s a really important trait to have! Don’t expect brilliant results instantly, becoming a great photographer takes time and isn’t something that can be learned overnight. It’s even more important when you are completing your smaller tasks to not give up at the first sign of failure.

6. Find Inspiration

When you are feeling confident with your camera and you want to experiment a little, it can be a challenge to come up with new ideas and it might be a good idea to take inspiration from other people’s work. Look around the internet, in magazines, even in shopping malls where there can be many promotional posters. Try taking ideas from the material rather than copying them, so you can develop your own unique style.

7. Learn From the Best

Following on from finding inspiration, take some of that inspiration and work out what makes it great. Critique the photographer’s work, look at why that particular shot is so good, what do their photographs have that yours don’t? This is a great way of improving your own photography, as you look closer at photographs rather than just thinking ‘that looks nice’ and moving on to the next.

8. Shoot, Shoot and Shoot Again

There’s no better way to learn than getting out there and experimenting. You can read a million books but you will still learn faster just by doing it and learnig from your own mistakes. Spend some time taking shots of the same subject over and over again in different ways. It could also be a good idea to record what settings you used for each photo so you can work out what worked the best when you look back over them later.

9. Listen to Feedback

When you are improving, get other opinions instead of just judging your own work. There are plenty of people out there willing to help your photography, even if they don’t realise it. Tell people you don’t just want to know if they like a shot or not, but you want to know what they like or don’t like about it. Also, it’s not just other photographer’s you want feedback from. People who have no idea about photography can still give an opinion that could make you realise something you could have done to improve the shot, so get feedback from as many different sources as possible.

10. Don’t Give Up

The final tip is the most important of them all. If you really want to become an amazing photographer, it takes time, dedication and commitment. Everyone has to start somewhere, and many people do give up when they get impatient or frustrated, but stick with it and you will get there. Here is a link where you can find some valuable training at a price anyone can afford. “Mastering Digital photography Made Easy”

PS: If managing and editing your photos is causing you problems, I think you’ll enjoy this Free CD containing 21 Video Tutorials for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. You can get your Free CD at “Photoshop Made Easy”

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Learn Photoshop Elements

“Learn Elements Now” Video Course Review Summary:

“Learn Elements Now” is a set of 30 tutorial videos on how to use Photoshop Elements. It covers the most basic tasks in Photoshop Elements to the more advanced. Here is a sample Video for your viewing pleasure.

Product Details:

The product consists of these 30 tutorials:

- Interface

- Opening an Image

- Guided Edit

- Quick Edit

- Full Edit

- Create Overview

- Share Overview

- Zoom and Pan

- Layers

- Blend Modes

- Undo History

- Brush Tool

- Selecting Colors

- Gradient Tool

- Creating Text

- Selection Tools

- Quick Selection Tools

- Refine Edges

- Effects

- Adjustment Layers

- Resizing Images

- Aligning Images

- Saving Your Photo

- Saving for the Web

- Remove Red Eye

- Remove Blemishes

- Remove Objects

- Convert to Black & White

- Color Curves

- Create a Panorama

The course also includes the following bonuses:

- Video tutorial images: All the images used in the video tutorials are provided in JPG format so the user can follow along with the very same images.

- “Absolute Beginners Guide to Photoshop Elements”: a 65-page easy-to-use guide to Photoshop Elements

- 30-day free trial of the latest version of Adobe Elements

Format:

The video tutorials are in Flash and Shockwave format, which can be either viewed online or downloaded into the user’s hard drive for local viewing. Downloading is not necessary, as the videos will always be available to those who purchase the course.

The tutorial images are in digital graphic JPG format.

The bonus, ?Absolute Beginners Guide to Photoshop Elements? is in PDF format.

 Thoughts on the Product:

“Learn Elements Now” is a good example of how to use video to teach skills. In this case, the video tutorials give step-by-step demonstrations of how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements. The instructions are clear and are easy to understand through both the voice-over and onscreen demos. The videos progress logically from the most basic to the more advanced operations that can be done in Elements.

Each video is only a few minutes long and clearly labeled, so the users can easily and quickly choose the video they need. I’m not sure the user will learn Photoshop Elements in 2 hours, as David Peters promises – especially if one follows along each step using the images provided – which is the best way to internalize the lessons in the videos. But it definitely will not take more than 2 hours to view all the tutorials.

With “Learn Elements Now,” even complete newbies to image editing will soon be able to create impressive digital photos using Photoshop Elements.

 Learn More Here:

If you’re new to Photoshop and looking for the easiest way to really get to grips with this exciting software (which can often be very frustrating and overwhelming for newbies)… then I strongly recommend you take a look at Photoshop expert David Peter’s fantastic video tutorials.

There’s just 2 hours worth of instantly accessible online video tutorials, which are designed to get the newbie user as competent as possible as fast as possible.

David claims anyone can master the basics of Adobe Photoshop in just a couple of hours if they follow his video tutorials. And I agree (and when you check out the website you’ll see feedback from a LOT of people who have tried them are are delighted with the results).

What I like most about his video learning system is the fact that you never need to look at a boring manual again. It’s the next best thing to having a personal coach!

If you want all the lowdown on David’s Video tutorials just go to Learn Photoshop Here.

If you have ever wanted to learn Photoshop, but didn’t want to wade through a 500 page type written manual, then these  Video Photoshop Lessons are for you. Photoshop Made Easy is going to open your world to a new level of creativity. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out youself. You have nothing to lose and everthing to gain. You can be retouching your digital photographs with Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements faster than you could ever imagine. Just go to Photoshop Made Easy and take a look.

Till next time, Terry @ The Photography Lesson Center