Improve Your Photography by Getting the Reps In

As photographers looking to improve our craft, we watch YouTube videos, buy online training, read articles, and maybe even take a class or two. We can pursue our quest for information and consume all of these trainings and never see a marked improvement. The key to getting better? Get those reps in.

About a year ago, a landscape photography workshop client noted that I helped him “get the volume of reps” he needed on his camera to improve his camera skills. This comment gave me pause at first, but then I remembered he was a former college athlete, and reps was his way of saying the volume of practice he needed.

As any athlete knows, you can watch your sport of choice on TV and replays online, but you will not get better simply by watching your sport. You won’t even get better by reading books on your sport. You have to get the practice in to make the improvements. Without practicing what you’ve watched, read, or even what your coach has told you, you aren’t going to improve.

Photography is the same way. Not only do you need to consume information on the skills you are looking to learn, but you also have to actively practice them and get the reps in. That is how you see improvement and begin to build a strong foundation.

Portrait Photography

While most of my work is landscape photography oriented today, I have done a fair amount of portrait photography ranging from fashion to senior portraits to corporate headshots. When I was new to the genre, I would watch YouTube videos on how to light people with strobes, buy online tutorials, and even attend workshops that focused on off-camera flash.

But what made the difference was practicing what I learned as I learned it. I would set up a single strobe in the living room and bribe my kid just to stand there while I practiced with the light close to them, moving it back from them and adjusting the strobe's power. This was me getting the reps in to practice what I had watched or read.

From there, I could watch more videos and push my growth further. Then, I’d head into the studio to get more reps in. I would add lights and continue to play with the size of modifiers, the strength of strobes, the distance from light to the subject, and so on. I continued to get the reps in to reinforce the skills. This helped build a foundation of the basics and opened the door to learning more advanced lighting concepts.

Landscape Photography

As I invested more time in landscape photography, I followed a similar process. I would watch videos, buy online tutorials, and then head out to get the reps in. I would practice using the histogram to get a proper exposure. I would make changes to camera settings until I was confident about how each setting affected the exposure and the histogram.

Again, as I got the reps in, this would build my basic foundation of fieldcraft and camera usage and open the door to learning more advanced techniques, such as exposure bracketing, focus stacking, panorama, and others.

The real growth in my pursuit of photography has always come from the practice, the getting the reps in. Yes, the information I consumed helped inform my practice, but the information alone would not have been enough to develop my skills.

One Word of Caution

One element of caution is to be sure you are practicing good form as you get your reps in. Continuing to practice poor technique builds a weak rather than a strong foundation.

For this reason, I recommend heading out, getting some practice in, and when back home, consuming more information on the topic through videos and online articles or reinforcing through workshops. Having practiced, things you might have missed the first time through will seem more obvious to you now and possibly correct poor form you had during your practice. Or maybe the practice made you realize you were weaker in an area than you had thought, and you will be able to be more deliberate in searching for information to close that gap.

Consuming information about the craft and getting the reps in goes hand-in-hand with making foundational improvements in your skill set. Now, get out there and start practicing!