Someone once said that "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." This means you have to take lots of pictures to get better in the craft. I don't agree with that. Improving your photography as well as videography skills is often compared to an athlete training. The athlete regularly repeats a number of exercises for certain muscles. Musicians are the same. They train their abilities to play musical instruments by repeating sound sequences and so do singers. All these disciplines repeat and repeat what they do. It has to be the same with photography, right?No. It's not.
Who Said That?
Henri Cartier-Bresson said the statement above. He used to practice candid photography and he was not practicing how a correct exposure is made. He was not practicing posing and directing on a daily basis. He practiced photographing the right moment, not pressing the shutter lots of times. That's why I don't agree with the wording of his statement. It's not training yourself to press the button, but rather training yourself when not to take a photograph.
How To Properly Train Yourself
I started photography as a business; it wasn't a hobby. I purposely decided I would learn the craft in order to make it my business. I learned the basic theory, then I bought a camera. In the beginning my practice was to just go out and take lots of pictures, as they advised. I shot plenty of garbage and had very few keepers. My main question was "What makes the better pictures that I happen to get sometimes, 'better'?", and also, "How can I repeat them?" The answer to that question was: "Stop taking pictures. Sit down and look at photographs and try to understand them."
Writers get better by reading, not by writing. They train their imagination by repeating the process of absorbing stories. They don't just write sentences every day. Their tool is their imagination and that's what they need to train. An athlete's tools are their muscles and they train them directly by repeating exercises. Writers train their imagination and then it flows through the pen; their tool.
After I understood that, I started looking at more and more photographs by professionals that I admired. I tried to understand why they lit them like they did or why they posed the people like they did, or why they chose that camera angle. Instead of taking lots of photographs I started to plan to take just one picture. I wanted to know the technical process ahead of time so I knew exactly how to execute it. Then I repeated the process of understanding photographs and re-creating them. And again. And again.
Having done that, many of my first 10,000 photographs are still in my portfolio.
365 Projects And Similar
Such projects are aimed towards the number of pictures being taken. They do not train the skills of a photographer to create masterpieces. They train them to press the shutter even if they don't know why. So, what's the point?
You are better off planning a project for one month and creating a single masterpiece than 30 mediocre snapshots. Nobody will notice your snapshots, but how about the masterpiece?
Conclusion
Improving your photography is not about the repetition of pressing the shutter regularly. It's about constantly training your mind to understand, visualize and plan the technical execution of every visual piece of art. Watch lots of visual stories and learn to read them; train your eyes and imagination.
Stop taking pictures on a regular basis.
Nowhere in my article or in the comments I say practice is to be neglected. The problem is "practice" to many aspiring photographers is to just photograph lots of pictures relying on the machine to make something special for them, or somehow unconsciously they become good photographers with time.
Practicing photogaphy is quite a lot of things. It's not going out and shooting lots of images at different directions with different settings. That's what most of the aspiring photographers do not understand.
Real world examples all around us show that photographers don't get better by shooting lots of images. That's not practicing photography. That's practicing pressing the shutter.
Painters in the past didn't become good by painting multiple pictures on their own. They went to a master to learn the craft from him. There they learned the basic techniques and understood light and how to represent it on canvas. Then they continued on their own. They were painting pictures when being with the master, but they were not painting random things. They have been guided.
Today it's not much different. People go to the masters whether through video tutorials, books, articles, or live workshops. People who bought a camera and went out to shoot regularly never became good. That's my observation no matter what people say. The results show it clearly. The only ones who became good are those who diligently sat down and took the time to understand the craft. Understanding the craft is practicing it. Practicing photography is not the amount of photographs taken. That's what I insist on clarifying. It's not that you don't have to press the shutter button. It's that you don't have to press it when you rely on the machine to do the job for you.
Again, I will give an example with the clerk who's writing down multiple words under the dictation of their boss. They do not become better writers by such writing. They write words, they practice, but they are not writers simply because they write. They can't tell stories.
That's why shooting lots of pictures, as well as writing many words, will not make someone a good photographer or a good storyteller.
Hey guess what?
I never used the word "practice." I never stated you claimed that "practice should be neglected."
Strawman again. You are getting good at this.
You can spend plenty of time arguing against things I haven't said: or you can take the time to actually read and understand the points that I did make.
Here's the thing. You are wrong about painters. You were wrong, earlier on, when you talked to me about musicians. You were wrong when you talked about writers. And you were hilariously wrong when you tried to lecture a stuntman how to do stunts.
You don't understand the creative process. You just don't. And the more you argue with people the more you reveal the gaps in your knowledge. I've just read what you wrote about painters and I literally rolled my eyes. Where are you learning this stuff? You stated that "people who bought a camera and went out to shoot regularly never became good." Are you serious? Because I may as well just throw out my camera now, because that is exactly what I did. It is what many photographers did. There are photographers out there making a living who never had a formal education, who shoot in one of the automated modes, and take pictures that blow my mind and put my work to shame.
I'm gonna be blunt, and I mean this with the greatest of respect.
You don't know what you are talking about.
You are a fantastic photographer. But you don't understand what makes creatives tick. You don't understand the history of art. You are hooked on this mantra: a mantra that almost no-one actually uses in real life, and you are convinced that this is a problem, when it really really isn't. You shouldn't run until you've learnt how to walk. And you shouldn't be lecturing creatives on how to be creatives until you understand how creatives (other than you) actually think.
Let me give an example with cooking. I like to cook but I can't cook well. Sometimes I try to mix different products, but in result the dish is not delicious. I don't know the basics of mixing foods. I'm just cooking what I've read in recipes. I can't "compose" recipes and thus I'm not a good cook. I don't know the essentials in cooking. I can make a dish or two, but that doesn't make me good in that. I may "cook, cook, cook", but other than spoiling products, it is just random efforts without any understanding of the principles in cooking. I don't plan to be a good cook yet, but if I want, I know what I should do.
I give examples with musicians, writers, painters, because these are things I also do in my work (composing music for vidoes, screenwriting, painting parts of my images). I know what I'm talking about, and I know the process.
It's always the same: You can't be good at something if you don't go deep in the details of the craft. There are no different paths in that. Going into the details may be different as someone may go deeper into landscapes, others in studio photography, or in portraiture, or posing. It is always the details that matter, not the repetition of random attempts. No matter if people say "that's not true", we have eyes to see that. There are lots of photographers around us, living examples. It's not just in the photography world. It's the same for every craft.
A lot of people are told to "shoot, shoot, shoot". The comments are showing that. Also some photographers sent me private messages they've been taught like that.
I'd rather tell people "Undestand, understand, understand". It's what makes the good craftsman in every type of art.
No. Please. Stop.
Don't talk about cooking. Just don't. I'm a veteran of the hospitality industry. I've run my own catering company. Don't even start that with me.
Did you really just claim that "you know what you are talking about" because you've made some music, you've done some writing, and because you've painted parts of your images?
How many photographers did you interview (prior to writing this article) to determine how big a problem "shooting lots" is in the industry? How did you determine how much shooting is too much? Did you interview many people who did "shoot lots"? How did it affect their development? Where are you getting your data from?
Did you base any of your article on anything outside of your own personal sphere of existence?
Private messages don't mean squat. You haven't given a single example of this "shoot shoot shoot" culture you are talking about. The comments here do not back you up. Most people are disagreeing with you. It isn't just me.
Not everyone learns the same way you do. There are visual learners. And kinesthetic learners and auditory learners. Some learn by reading and watching. Some learn by listening. And some learn by doing. Some learn by making mistakes. Some find their passion by doing the wrong thing over and over again. You need to understand that you have found a learning strategy that works really well for you. But it won't work well for everyone.
You use the word "craftsman." And here is the thing. You are a craftsman. You are a "trained technician in a particular skill." I'm a craftsman too. I'm a technician. A journeyman. I take photographs and turn them into money.
But I'm not an artist. As much as I'd love to be able to say I create works of art: that simply isn't true. I arrange people into interesting compositions, put light on them in interesting (but often predictable) ways, and I snap the shutter. You can be great at your craft and be an artist. You can be great at your craft and not be an artist. And you can be an great artist and be bad at the craft. There are artists out there that shoot in auto mode. And they produce fantastic work. Should I care about what settings they had on the camera?
Do you think you are a good craftsman? Do you think you create art?
I have been shooting for about 6 months, and I agree. I have seen images from those who have been shooting for 25 years + and can't understand why some look so average. And then I have seen images from those who have been shooting for 12 months, who are producing world class work. As with any art, vision is key, and it's up to us to understand the technology available to us to help achieve that vision. Understanding how to shape light, and utilise the tech is the stage I am at, because I know I need this to achieve my vision.
I'm glad you shared your observation. It is very true.
Those who shoot for 25+ years with little to no improvement likely have no desire or passion to become great photographers, nor do they shoot with the intention of getting experience and learning for the sake of improvement; they simply point the camera and snap, so no matter how much those people shoot they will not get better. Those who make great strides in as little as 12 months have a passion to be great, and work towards that goal. There is no doubt that they are getting experience by using their camera and shooting often, otherwise by "taking pictures on a regular basis". If they aren't shooting, they aren't improving.
I think that's absolutely fair, you can't be great by theory alone. But I believe it makes the whole 'repetition' a bit of a fallacy. And perhaps really it's just relative, yes someone who is passionate and has vision will have improved over 10k shots, and someone who doesn't have this will not have. So ultimately, what is the point we are making? That passion for what you do makes you great, not volume?
I'm a passionate cook but I don't cook well. I cook, cook, cook. I experiment, but the results are terrible. Why? Because I don't go into the details of mixing and using products. I don't need to be a good cook yet.
The article doesn't emphasize on the passion to do something like photography. It discusses the issue of being good in the craft. That doesn't happen with random photo walks, testing different camera settings, and that repeated 10,000 times.
Being better at something requires wisdom, not random attempts of using the tools. I know people who have painted pictures their whole life but yet their pictures of people (for example) lack the basic proportions of the male or female face, and thus portraits of "men" look like women and vice versa. But these people call themselves painters. The same with many photographers. If they want to be good, they need to know the craft. Not the history of the craft, no things like diffraction or angle of view, or what's the difference between 35mm and a 645 sensor. No, the light, the composition, and how the tool they currently have in hand can capture that light and composition ensemble. You can't capture that without pressing the button, but you can't capture a good image just by learning how the tool works. In general, the tool makes an image darker or lighter. Everything else is outside the camera and that's being neglected as an area of study.
Well I think a lot of that could be subjective. What is a terrible image to someone could be great to someone else, same with food and any Picasso painting. You end up reducing an image to formal critique, which can often miss the point of what the artist is expressing, especially if it purposely breaks convention.
I am on the same page, though, when speaking of repetition, trial and error. There is always some degree of that, but it will ultimately come down to the ability to produce the image you see in your mind. If you envision a blurry out of focus, poorly composed image, and can produce exactly that, perhaps you are a good photographer but a bad artist. Conversely, if you have great vision, but after 10,000 attempts cannot produce it, then perhaps you are a bad photographer.
Now, if you have great vision, and great skill, you will be able to produce that image without 'snapping away indefinitely', then you are both a great artist AND a great photographer.
P.S. I love your work btw!
If I am on an island and have a camera with me and I've never heard of photography, it makes sense to learn by trial and error.
If one needs to be really good at photography, they won't spend years to learn to make good exposure and nice composition by trial and error. Even the great painters learned from masters of the art. They didn't wonder why their composition looked off or why they can't paint natural light. They were taught that. They learned from the others and this made them to progress further. They didn't start from ground zero. They stood on the shoulders of others before them. That made them better and better.
Well, unfortunately for me, I have had a little bit of trial and error, simply because I haven't always had the direct guidance to hand. I think that argument works best when the type of shot you want to achieve has all known variables accounted for. No one need reinvent the wheel with photography, but plenty of unknown external factors may influence the result in ways you cannot always prepare for. I would love to think photography was totally formulaic and 'settings' driven but I haven't always found this to be the case. What I call trial and error, might be what you'd describe as tweaking, as it's never from the ground up, but rarely have I nailed a shot first time.
Yes, I'm talking about trial and error for achieving basic exposure and composition, not for tweaking something that's already "in the ballpark".
I am fairly new to this site. Thank you for the insightful article. In my opinion, learning to become a better photographer begins with the basics. That is understanding what photography means writing or drawing with light. It is this understanding of light which separates a snap shot from a photograph. Understanding composition and the rule of thirds. Understanding what the objective in the photograph and seeing it in your mind before you even pick up the camera to capture the image on film or disc. Understanding where photography came from will help you realize where and how we got to this point. In my opinion a good image does not require a complete computer alteration/enhancement. A good image tells a story before one starts to add any enhancements. Thank you for your article. I hope you will continue to do so.
Computer enhancement is just another part of the storytelling. Using post processing to save a bad image is not the way to go, unless it's a critical situation and you don't have any other option. Post processing is made to enhance the photograph. Enhancing is a subjective term but in general if it breaks the image and takes away from its emotion, it's bad.
I've learned quited a bit from watching tutorials and workshops and even interning for one of the greats, but none of that made me good right away. It's taken years of applying what I've learned into multiple shoots and in constantly shooting in order to actually ever see any improvement. "Taking more pictures" did in fact make me a better photographer.
For you "shooting" = applying certain knowledge when executing a photoshoot
For many beginners shooting = shooting with different settings to see if magic would happen. That's the shooting that I'm talking about being misunderstood.
How isn't it worthwhile for a beginner to try different settings in the hopes of said "magic" happening? That's how many of us learn.
Trying out of curiosity is OK, but trying for 6 months or 5 years is an utter idolatry bowing before the machine praying to it to make a good picture.
I say, regardless of any opinion that says otherwise, if you like doing it, keep shooting even if you supposedly aren't getting better. Chances are if they like what they're shooting and actually want to get better, they will get better simply by continuing to shoot even without the guidance of others.
"Someone once said that "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." This means you have to take lots of pictures to get better..."
I stopped reading right there. If that's what you got from that quote, I have no interest in your opinion because you completely missed the point.
I strongly disagree. No one, whether Mr. Cartier-Bresson, or any expert in any field, believes that simply clicking a shutter 10,000 times will make you an expert photographer, any more than sitting behind the wheel of a race car for 10,000 hours with the motor turned off will make you a driver.
Now, *making* 10,000 photos, though. That is a good start.
Nobody says it's just clicking the shutter 10,000 times.
Most of the time it's waiting for a "magical click" that will make the masterpiece. And it never comes just by trying different settings and pointing the camera at different directions. Even if it happens, the photographer doesn't know how. In other words praying and spraying 10,000 times won't make anybody a good photographer.
Understading the craft is the key to success. There are lots of amateur photographers who wilingly take thousands of photos but most of them never grow as photographers. It's not the desire to make good photos, it's not the passion to make good photos, it's not the variety of settings being fiddled, that make a good photogapher. It's digging deeper in the art. It's not measured by the number of photos being taken.
And how do you think you learn to "understand the craft"?
By experimenting with your camera and your equipment until you gain enough experience to make decent images on purpose.
A painter doesn't make random shapes with a brush but knows precisely what to do and how to achieve it. The painter practices refining of the knowledge they already have.
The same has to be with the photogapher, not clicking with different settings waiting for the masterpiece, but purposefully working towards the best composition and light.
There have been a lot of interesting comments made on the point of shooting for the sake of shooting or not.
Someone down the way pointed out that Adams had once mentioned (this is loosely paraphrased) that you go out and shoot and shoot don't worry about the cost. It is a very true statement. And during the days of film only, we did that if we were developing the film ourselves or sending the film in.
Here is the difference between shooting with film no matter how many rolls, damn the cost and shooting with digital and just shooting. When we shot with film, damn the cost: we still shot with purpose. We always knew in the back of our minds that it was going to cost us something so we were always shooting with exposure, content, framing, shadows, light, etc... in mind. When we went out with the idea of shooting 10-15 rolls of 36 exposures, we didn't just shoot to waste film and take "pictures". We shot with the idea of we were going to get something, but we were still shooting.
With Digital, you can still go out and say you are going to shoot with purpose even though you are going out to just shoot, but honestly; how many people can go out without the thought of "this is free, I'll just delete it" in their mind?
There is a total disconnect in the way photographers think about shooting everyday. It isn't about taking the camera out and shooting. If you are taking your camera out and are shooting in an automatic setting of any type, just take your point and shoot out. There is absolutely no difference. I'm not being a nose in the air photographer here, but if you think about it, if you are a professional or serious amateur and are still shooting in any auto mode with a DSLR, ask yourself what the difference is in the actual modes? There isn't anything.
So when you are going out to shoot to improve your photography, you need to be challenging yourself. You need to be constantly improving your knowledge of your camera. Can you shoot in manual mode as fast as you can in an auto mode? If not, why not? You should know your camera so well that your fingers automatically know what to do and where to go to move your ISO, F-stop, etc... without a 2nd thought. You should be able to find that spot you are going to shoot, find your exposure, manually focus, etc... as fast as your camera can on auto. It isn't hard, you just have to know your camera. I'm no super photographer, but unless I'm taking pictures of my family and fun things like that, my camera never comes off of manual. Come to think of it, it never comes out of RAW either, but that's a different story.
Someone else mentioned that they learned from studying the classic painters and such... They learned proper lighting and it sounded like since they shoot primarily studio they are not having to shoot as much. That is often the case. Studio lighting is a whole different animal. If you study lighting you understand that it is a creature unto its own. There are so many different types of lighting to produce so many looks. However, at the same time there is nothing wrong with practicing lighting to develop your own look. So even then continuing to shoot on a daily basis is a good thing.
Before I started to write this I had just come in from taking my dog out. There is a brick retaining wall in my front yard around a small garden area. Just looking at the area I could have spent about 30 minutes taking images. The sun casting shadows all over the place. I had never really noticed it before, but having read the article then reading a lot of the responses made me realize how simple it could have been to go out and shot with purpose right out my front door. I wouldn't have needed to have shot 500 images, or 200 images. I could have shot maybe 30 images, but taken 30 minutes or more to have done it. Maybe in a 100 sf space. No rush, just enjoyed what was in front of me. But it would have been practicing, shooting and keeping my knowledge of the camera in my mind and hands, keeping my eyes open to light and shadows (remember that photography is actually writing with light), and noticing the small things around us actually helps with noticing more about the larger things when the time comes.
That's a comment I agree with. However, to me it's a little unclear on the part with the studio lighting and what was the relation to the classic painters.
When we learned studio lighting (as an example) one style of lighting is called Rembrandt lighting. The reason for the name is that the lighting in the photography sense is literally patterned from the lighting that you will find on Rembrandt paintings. There is a little triangle of light that strikes the face just to the side of the nose. It is a very striking and dramatic style. However, if you study classic paintings (portraits) and the lighting techniques they used, you will find some of the greatest lighting techniques we can still use in the studio today. We just need to use studio lights and/or natural light to produce them with. Remember at the very beginning of photography if you did not have some degree of art background you were considered a hack. There was no way you were ever going to be taken seriously as a photographer.
Ah, I see.