It’s a Dangerous Thing

Posted on this Friday, June 13, 2008 21:51 by caw
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment

There is a dangerous aspect to being an avid, amature photographer: falling in love with your own work. It won’t get you hurt or anything but it can keep you from advancing your technique and ability, your vision. You get in a rut, photographs start looking the same and then – blah.

Family and friends are great. They encourage you and tell you how wonderful your photographs are. They bolster you self-confidence and that’s a good thing, right? The problem of course is that sometimes you really need someone to tell you it looks like crap. (Which is also why many writers don’t let friends and family look at drafts of their work.)

I’m in the process of importing my photos in to Aperture. As an aside, I had been using Adobe’s Lightroom but the Aperture interface just draws you in. Lightroom is a great product and there are advantages to using it (integration with Photoshop, for instance) but Aperture is just silky. Aperture 2 is even better.

Anyway, I was looking at stuff I shot a year ago and I thought "Wow! I’m really good." How much of that was an accident? I dunno. Some of them  are great shots but there are others that are crap yet I still think they’re good. Part of it is I get caught up in one small part of the photograph and ignore the rest. And I’m sure part of it is I know what was happening and I super-impose that on the image. Call it assumed knowledge.

Certainly the cameras I’m using are better (D200 and D300 vs my D70s). Lenses are better. Better flash. I know a better camera won’t necessarily make you a better photographer. Ansel Adams had "primitive" cameras and yet he made images that were just incredible. I think my technique has improved over the last few years. Well… I hope it has gotten better. Sometimes it’s hard to be objective about your own stuff.

I wonder if professional photographers suffer from this?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

Leave a Reply