Improving Your Photography: Quality and Quantity

In my first post, I mentioned I'm new to both blogging and DSLRs - guess which one has been occupying more of my free time in the past few months? For a hint, look at the date since my last post...

Anyhow, continuing on: the purchase of a new camera is almost always driven by the hope it will improve your future pictures. That doesn't necessarily mean technical quality. There's lots of people out there who are picking up very technologically simple cameras because some other quality of the images appeals to them. It's probably the very rare person who buys a new camera, hoping it will make their pictures look worse. If that's your goal, don't worry. There's already plenty of ways to quickly, easily, make your pictures look terrible.

So will it? Make your pictures better? The answer: a firm maybe. To start with, think about what aspect of your photographs you'd like to improve. Then, you can think about what you'll need to do (or buy) to improve. For me, I had two big goals: I wanted to improve both the quality and quantity of my photos. Yup, those are big ones. Big categories of improvement that contain myriad smaller sub-categories. If you already have more pictures than you know what to do with, maybe you should stop now and come back later... Let's start with quantity:


Quantity

I've always enjoyed taking pictures when I was in photogenic situations: traveling, special events, holidays, etc. Yet I rarely touched my camera from day-to-day. I might take hundreds of pictures while traveling, and then leave my camera in its case for months after getting home. Taking pictures is an inherently enjoyable experience, yet was something I rarely did.

Naturally, the first solution to come to mind was... a new camera. That would fix the problem of quantity. With a new camera, I would be inspired to go capture wonderful photographs of the world around me! Of course, that's ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous. Initially, new cameras probably result in more sepia tone pictures of their owners' feet and pets than anything else. After all, what else are you going to take pictures of while flipping through the new manual, learning the buttons, and playing with settings.

The only thing stopping me from going out and taking more pictures was my own ideas of when it was appropriate to do so. Local people/landscapes/sunsets/flowers/buildings/toast are no less photogenic than their foreign counterparts. They're just local, thus familiar, thus boring. That's the challenge though - making interesting photos with what you've got. There was no reason not to just take more pictures. That might seem like a perfectly obvious stream of logic, but I hadn't fully thought it through before then.

Voila! Take more pictures! There's not reason not to! Quantity!


So I went out and took pictures. I brought my old camera (a smallish point & shoot that was a couple years old) with me while walking the dogs, going out on the town, or just walking around. I took pictures of my niece and nephew in the park, my wife, abandoned buildings, graffiti, just to name a few. I was happy with this, I was enjoying taking pictures, life is good. This was a hobby-epiphany to me: the enjoyment of taking a picture is separate from the object of the photography, and equally separate from the resultant photograph.*

I can hear the non-existent readers out there: "Were any of the pictures any good?" To start with, I don't think it really matters. The real question is: "Do I enjoy the photographs?" And I did. Not all of them -- there were lots of boring, uninteresting pictures. There were a few I liked enough to show to the family. Would someone else enjoy them? I have no idea. And I don't think that really matters either, to start with. If you start with trying to take pictures that other people will like, I think you're in for a frustrating experience.

With no quantity, you have no quality. If you have no pictures at all, you have exactly no quality pictures. You have to start with taking pictures: quantity.



Next up: Quality









*At an extreme, I've heard of people strolling with empty cameras (no film or memory), just practicing framing without actually taking pictures. Sort of training the eye to see things through a viewfinder. Not something I'm interested in doing though - I want to be able to look at them when I get home.

Welcome

Howdy, Welcome, Hello there. This is one of those new-all-around ventures. I'm new to blogging , and here I am writing about being new to digital photography. That might a little too much novice-ness to go around, we'll see.

I'm guessing many camera purchases are based on hope - hope that this new camera/gadget/accessory will improve your photography. That's certainly the case for me (hence the title). I've been enjoyably snapping pictures for years, with occasional success.

For me and most people behind a camera, success isn't selling a photograph in a gallery or seeing a photo in print (not that I'd refuse either one). In my terms, a successful picture is one I like enough to frame and hang. However, my occasional successes would often be followed by the thought, "I bet my pictures would look even better, if only my camera was better". There's lots of variants on that theme:

• This shot looks pretty good, but it'd be really nice if I could print it out even bigger; a couple more megapixels should do the trick...
• Maybe if I had a really small camera I could take everywhere, I'd take more pictures...
  
• If I bought a tripod, then my evening shots would look even better...
• Maybe I need a couple more flashes...
• This lens is ok, but what I really need is something faster... maybe longer too...
  
• This would have looked really cool as a panorama... I should get one of those "Advantix" cameras I've seen on TV, They can take panoramas...
  

If some of those don't even make sense and some of them sound familiar, you're might be where I was a little while ago: the proud (or not-so-proud) owner of a decent point and shoot camera who's thinking about upgrading to a DSLR (if you're not sure what that is, Wikipedia knows everything). After a lot of reading, both online and off, hope won. I'm now the proud owner of an entry-level DSLR.

I'm hoping this blog will be a place to share what I've learned so far, learn more from other folks out there, and a motivation to get out there and take more pictures. Hopefully.






Thanks to the excellent advice (and example) over on Strobist.com, encouraging aspiring photographers to blog their progress (we'll see if it works).