10 Signs You Might Be A Bad Photographer
Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved
(With a hat tip to Jeff Foxworthy!)
You might be a bad photographer if:
1. You think that merely owning a Leica means your images will hang in a museum.
2. You know nothing about and care nothing about your subject.
3. You need to get drunk or stoned before you think making pictures is fun.
4. You think that paying extra for the “PRO” account on Flickr makes you a professional photographer.
5. You spend more time explaining your photographs than you do making them.
6. You think that picking up your camera once a year during a national holiday means you’re avoiding getting rusty.
7. You spend more time on camera forums belittling other people’s photographs than you do trying to figure out how to make your own better.
8. You spend ANY time complaining that your pictures don’t get enough LIKES on Facebook or Flickr.
9. You’re more interested in making photographs that cause the cool kids to promote you on Google+ than you are telling stories with your camera that matter to your subjects.
10. You think that pixel-peeping and measure-beating will cause you to be a successful and famous artist – or – to get that girl you met in college to like you.
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Three Solutions for Working with a Resistant Photographic Subject.
Guest Post and Photo by Tamara Lackey – Follow Tamara on Twitter - twitter.com/tamaralackey
One of the more difficult things for a portrait photographer to do is start the shoot with a resistant subject. You can light them stunningly well, pose them beautifully, and place them against the most perfect backdrop ever – but if your subject is not choosing to engage in the experience of being photographed, it’s quite difficult to achieve your best portrait work.
What’s a ready-to-go shooter to do?
1. Get to the root of the resistance. Are they self-conscious? Have they had a bad / boring / harrowing previous experience?
With adults – and children – I ask them quite directly. I ask them to specifically tell me the details of their previous experience, and then I try to get to the root of why it was so detrimental. I will close the discussion by explaining, in exhausting and often humorous detail, just how this particular experience will not mirror any previous negative ones.
2. Are you automatically hearing from your subject that he or she never looks good in photographs?
Many people have a self-image that conflicts with how positively others view them. One of the perks of this job is to show another how you beautifully you see them – and how you can enhance that through great lighting and posing.
An excellent tool at your disposal is the act of mirroring. Show them how you think they’d look best – play with various expressions and engage them through your sincere interest in truly wanting to show off their best attributes. Tell them they need do nothing but mimic at first. As long as you’re willing to play along, that takes the pressure off of them – and, if shooting digitally, you can show them how you are actually getting attractive photographs of them, which does wonders to boost confidence.
3. Are they simply running in the opposite direction?
This applies frequently to children and pets. Hopefully not as much to brides – but there’s a lot of pressure out there, so you can’t really rule that possibility out in all cases.
With children and pets, I let them get it out of their system – often encouraging more running and activity right out of the gate, if I see that’s what they need. In terms of the photographer, this requires a good sense of perspective, a basic understanding of the sheer power of bottled-up energy, and an active willingness to wait for the right moment.
With brides, it’s a whole different issue and usually one best suited for a relationship counselor. And that’s pretty awesome because, every so often, it’s nice to know that we photographers don’t have to do everything.
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Photofocus Podcast Episode #100
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Photofocus Episode 100
Host: Scott Bourne (www.scottbourne.com or www.twitter.com/scottbourne)
Special Guest: Frederick Van Johnson (www.frederickvan.com or www.fvj.me/plus)
Show notes by Bruce Clarke (www.momentsindigital.com or www.twitter.com/bruceclarke)
Welcome to Episode Number 100 of Photofocus with Scott Bourne and special guest Frederick Van Johnson. Photofocus is the show devoted to your questions about anything photography related including gear, technique, locations, etc. Your questions will shape the direction of this show so be sure to send your questions to photofocus@me.com. We will try to answer as many as we can but we get a lot of questions so we’ll try to take a collection of questions that represent a particular topic and present them together. This week, Scott and Frederick talk about Kodak filing for bankruptcy, new cameras from Canon and Nikon, and they answer some listener questions.
Sponsor – Borrowlenses
Borrowlenses.com rents just about any piece of camera gear you need. Contact them today to rent the gear you need for your next shoot. Read more…
Come To Vegas To Learn How To Become A Professional Photographer
Guest Post by Skip Cohen
I recently saw an email blast from my buddy George Varanakis at Rangefinder/WPPI. He listed the top ten reasons not to miss WPPI. Personally, I’d drop a few and add a few, one of them being your ability to interact with vendor after vendor to help strengthen your business. I’d also add, one trip to Vegas gets you exposed to hundreds of new products and concepts, one of them being GoingPro Bootcamp.
A trip to Las Vegas in February isn’t just about WPPI anymore. It’s about adding new building blocks to your business and some of them are outside WPPI programming. For two years I’ve started every marketing presentation with the same statement.
Just because the media says it’s going to be a bad year, doesn’t mean it has to be!
That’s a big part of the GoingPro theme and the GoingPro Bootcamp. We started the project because there are so many aspiring photographers interested in going pro and missing the boat on the right way to get started. Frustrated, they jump into the market with lousy quality and low-ball pricing. Instead of building a business on a solid foundation, they try and build it on the word “professional”, having no understanding of the importance of how to sustain a business.
Well, it’s been two years since we started GoingPro, which originally was just a book with Random House. Now it’s a blog with an estimated 50,000 followers and sixty-four podcasts, resulting in 120-150,000 downloads a month. Last but not least, it’s our second Bootcamp, an all day event helping you with everything, but photography.
George missed the last GoingPro Bootcamp, but we didn’t and neither did about 100 aspiring professional photographers. He’s got another chance and so do you. With the combination of Michele Celentano, Scott Bourne and me we’ll help you with ideas on marketing, pricing, building your business, insurance, social media, community involvement and local networking, just to name a few. Most important of all, we’ll help you figure out how to promote yourself and your work so you can get your second customer.
Anybody can get their first customer. The trick of building a solid business is getting your second customer and even better, getting the first customer to come back a second time. You know how to focus your camera. Well, we’re going to help you focus on concepts like quality, value, integrity and the ability to exceed customer expectations. Those are the key attributes of any business that brings customers back!
And speaking of exceeding expectations – that’s just what we intend to do on February 18. It’s only $99 for the day. So, whether you’re just getting ready to take the plunge into the pro side of the business or you’ve been out there for a few years and need some help – we intend to exceed your expectations.
See you in Vegas! Signing up for GoingPro Bootcamp is just a click away.
Five Things You Can Do To Improve Your Photography In A Week
Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved
1. Learn to use your flash – Read the flash manual. Read the camera manual pages that talk about using flash. Practice making a photo of a person, place and a thing with the flash. Then get (or make) a 3′x3′ white bounce card and practice making those same images by pointing the flash at the bounce card and the bounce card at the subject. Note the difference.
2. Get small! Well not small in size – small in details. Make pictures of your usual favorite subjects but instead of your usual approach, drill down on to details. If you usually shoot pictures of horses, try just making some shots of their faces, or their eyes, or their tails or someone’s foot in the stirrup.
3. Practice photographing birds – gulls to be exact. Now hold on – I’ll explain. This isn’t advice I am giving because I am a bird photographer. It’s advice related to the fact that it’s just good practice. Photographing fast moving objects improves your aim if you will. And most people reading this live somewhere the common “sea gull” can be found. Try it – you might just have fun and it works.
4. Practice the big three – if you follow me regularly you’ve heard this advice but I share it over and over for a reason. It helps. EVERY DAY you should read a page of your manual, make at LEAST one photograph and look at as many published, professional photographs as you can. This will improve your photography every day you do it.
5. Think background/foreground. Try making pictures that START with an interesting background. Reverse the typical process. THEN find something interesting in the foreground to complete the picture. This vision exercise will help you “see” better right away.
Improving your photography almost always just starts with a camera in your hand, so stop reading this post and go shoot. And have fun too!
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Guest Post by Rich Harrington - Follow Rich on Twitter
Watch the video tutorial demonstrating the Content Aware Scale command in Adobe Photoshop.
DISCLAIMER: This post isn’t intended to be definitive – we’re not claiming this is the ONLY way or even the BEST way to accomplish this task in Photoshop. We’re merely offering it as A way you might accomplish this task. These tips are free, offered only because they might be helpful to someone.
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This Post Sponsored by:
Viewbug - Fun Photo Contests - Animoto - Great animated slide shows from your photos / BorrowLenses.com - Renting Canon, Nikon, Olympus & Sony, bodies, lenses, etc. / SmugMug - Professional Photo Sharing / Digital SLR Store - Cameras, lenses, accessories and everything else.
