Understand The Potential Of Your Photos As A Beginner, Self-taught Photographer

This blog post is about understanding the potential of your digital photography skills and knowing what you can achieve in your editing process with a photo you’ve taken with your digital camera.

If you’re a beginner and have embarked on a journey of teaching yourself photography, for whatever reason, whether it’s a hobby or a requirement for your lifestyle, then keep reading because you are about to hear one of my biggest tips for improving your photography.

In this blog post, you will see how valuable it is to understand the relationship between the photos you capture with your digital camera and the output you can achieve with them later in your editing process.

My Top Tip For Beginner, Self-Taught Photographers

One of my biggest tips and advice for a fellow beginner, self-taught photographers is to:

• Complete your digital photography cycle as often as possible, and
• Pay attention to what your photo ‘was’ and what it is ‘now’.

Complete Your Digital Photography Cycle As Often As Possible

Going through your entire digital photography process of capture and editing will allow you to better understand what you can and can’t achieve, at any point in your self-taught photographer journey.

Depending on what post-processing software you use, will expand or restrict the editing functionalities you have available to you. It will also allow you to explore, repeatedly (hence get better with practice), those functions within the software you use for post-processing your digital photos.

So understanding the potential of your digital photography skills and resources is key here.

Pay Attention To What Your Photo ‘was’ and What It Is ‘now’.

You may not realise it immediately but your mind will start to learn what ‘was’ and is ‘now’. It will begin to accumulate a bank of association of ‘before and after’ photos. And you will soon begin to find yourself in the field seeing things that you know you can make work better on the computer. You will begin to capture photos based on their composition and visual interest because you will have a ‘plan’ for the colours when you are at the post-processing stage.

Why Should You Follow This Advice

Completing your digital photography cycle as often as possible, whilst paying close attention to the what your photo was at first and what you have transformed it into will do wonders for your potential success in photography. I promise you, you will gain so much value from following this advice. I know I have.

• It will make you a better photographer because you will begin to understand straight away whether the photo you’ve taken has good potential.
• It will make you a better self-taught photographer. You will be able to see things you can capture because you know how much you can edit it later, whilst another photographer may just walk straight past that opportunity.
• You will be able to create a photo opportunity where others will see nothing.
• It will make you more efficient as a photographer. Whilst others dismiss and move onto the next location, you will see so many things to capture that you know will transition to something much more beautiful than you see at that moment, that you’ll be done with your capture process whilst others are still wasting time looking for more photo opportunities.
• It will allow you to know when you’ve taken ‘enough’ photos for your project, rather than blindly spending hours and hours out taking photos.
• You will no longer hope, but know that you have enough ‘good’ photos to work with for your project.

My Experience As A Self-taught Photographer

I’m a self-taught photographer and I’m still learning. This is one of my biggest tips to anyone who feels they could do with some help in their self-taught photographer journey. So it’s just some useful advice from one self-taught photographer to another.

Invest in this process of building up a bank of memory in your mind of before and after photos. It will save you time, it will expand your photo opportunities, and it will allow you to enjoy photography more because you will become more successful in capturing photos.

So, what results have I been able to achieve you may ask? I mentioned that one of the values of this process was that you will be able to see things where others don’t, and how you will begin to take photos based on composition. This is a photo I took last Winter at the beach (don’t ask why I was at a beach in Winter…), that I later transformed in Adobe Lightroom.

For someone who needs a lot of photo footage for my blog, blog posts, photography prints, social media posts, knowing that I can capture twice as many photos as the next photographer in one setting, is a huge advantage for me. And it also helps because sometimes I can have a short attention span, and sometimes I can find myself whining too much about not having something functional to do with myself, so being constantly kept busy works just swell for my personality.

Keep safe & make peace.