How do you know whether you are progressing at photography?
Well, There are many ways to look at this, it could be
- how successful you are with competitions in your local camera club
- or whether you get more likes and praise on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Flickr
- or more sales and new clients
But that’s all secondary really, and external factors like popularity and your own activity (marketing, “liking” others work) come into play.
The Cringe Factor
Now the best way of telling whether you’ve progressed is whether when you look back a year or two, or even 10, and see the work you were producing then, you are slightly embarrassed by it – there’s a cringe factor!
You know what you did wrong and how you would do it better now.
I saw an interview with Pink Floyd’s guitarist, Dave Gilmour, where he said he wished he’d done a better job of the intro to “Wish You Were Here” – something millions of guitarists have laboured over to copy exactly. I guess he has very high standards 🙂
A cringe factor is a sure sign of progress. It shows growth in:-
- how you compose an image,
- how you light it, if you use lighting,
- or increased location knowledge, when you walked to the perfect position for the perfect light on a sunset landscape image.
- Or maybe it’s how you organize your food and light that for a restaurant shoot
- how you process an image – did you use toning, or straight? High contrast or muted?
- techniques you used and abandoned or maintained
All these factors come into play photography, it’s not about how you click the button, but all the little details you learn from experience and especially from working with other people.
The Flaws are obvious to you
So when you take a look back 5 or 10 years, you should be able to point out lots of flaws in those photos, in 10 years you can go from a complete novice to professional.
But what about a year ago when you look back at a year at some work you were doing?
How do you feel when you go back just 12 months?
With my work realised that I made the rear “rim” lights on my portraits a bit too bright, so they burnt out on the back and sides of people’s heads. There would be no detail left. So now I’m very conscious now of lowering the power and keep checking it’s not too bright. People move and a random step back can easily blow out that rim light.
Oh, and I almost always use a grid on the backlight too – just to control flare and where the light falls.
When you look on the camera during the shoot, you don’t really notice it – but when you get back to Lightroom Photoshop, all of a sudden you realize that there’s no detail in the rim-lit areas, and you can’t do much about it.
So there are literally hundreds of little things which add up to your style today. Looking back is a great way of working out what you’ve changed, and why.
It’s also a great reason to update your portfolio, keep it current with your best work – to get rid of all the old stuff as frequently as you can. It’s ok to keep some of the old classics of course – think of it like a gig, if you went to see, say, Paul McCartney in concert, it’s fine for him to play a few Beatles tunes after all 🙂
