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Becoming good at anything requires time and effort. You might be born with natural talent, and that might allow you to get better faster and achieve a higher level of competence, but the path will still be uphill. Musicians and singers, painters and poets, all that achieve success got there by making a significant investment in honing their skills.
So, how much effort does it take to become really good at something? Hours? Absolutely. Months, yes. Years, actually. There’s a rule of thumb kicking around (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Outliers: the Story of Success) that mastering something takes about 10,000 hours. If you have the typical full time job (40 hr week with some vacation time), you’ll spend about 2,000 hours a year at it. So, according to the 10,000 hour rule, mastering something will take about 5 years of full time effort. That’s a long time.
These days, anybody can pick up a nice little digital camera and take decent photos. But this doesn’t make you a photographer any more than being able to pick out a tune on an accordion makes you a musician. The digital camera has made it easy for anybody to take that first step into photography. But whether photography is your hobby or your profession, it is a craft and getting really good at it is going to take work and time. Certainly years.
Whether you want to become a professional dog photographer, or you just want to get better at dog photography as a hobby, make the best of time you invest by focusing on a few key things.
1) Shoot a lot of photos. How many? Thousands a months, at least. Try to aim for 1,000 a week. The goal here is not to shoot perfect pictures (because most certainly will not be), but to shoot mindfully. That is, pay attention to what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Go ahead and deliberately shoot some bad ones. Put the camera in manual or one of the creative program modes (aperture or shutter priority) and play around with settings. See how changing a setting affects the image. This is how you will learn.
2) Shoot a lot of the same thing. If you want to learn how to photograph dogs, find some place with a lot of dogs and go shooting. Look at the photos you take and analyze them. What makes the good ones good? What makes the duds uninteresting? Good photographers don’t shoot great photos, they create them. You need to learn how to identify the things that will give you the best chance of getting a great photo – the setting, the light and weather, the best camera and lens to use, the handling of the dog – all the things that need to come together to give you the best chance of creating a great image. You won’t get a beautifully lit photo if you go out at noon on a sunny day with no way to modify the light. You won’t have a handsome-looking dog to photograph if it’s 87 degrees outside and the dog’s tongue is dangling from the corner of its mouth.
3) Shoot a lot of different things. A lot of what you will learn about photography you will stumble upon by accident. If you only photograph dogs during nice light in the daytime, you’ll miss some really great lessons to be learned by shooting other types of things. Shoot at a high school football game at night under lights. Photograph flowers. Shoot some cars. Volunteer to do some shooting at a friend’s wedding. These all require different skills, and you will find that you need to learn new stuff if you want to get the kinds of photos you want. Spend time outside your familiar box.
4) Look at your photos. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people try to learn photography by shooting a bunch of photos that they never really look at. Digital cameras allow you to get some idea of what you’re getting from the viewer on the camera, but you need to look carefully at what you’re producing. Look at the meta data from the camera on the settings you were using while you study the images. Figure out what you like and don’t like in the photos you create. Look at composition. Evaluate the quality of the digital file – the amount of luminance and color noise, whether you’ve lost image information due to under- or over-exposure, whether the image is focused and sharp (or not, if you’re trying to produce a creative effect), and so on. Shooting 1,000 photos will take some time, but if you’re going to get anything out of your effort, you need to invest some serious time looking through them.
5) Train your eye. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to do this. I would go out and shoot a bunch of photos, only to find that they didn’t look nearly as good as I thought they were going to be when I shot them. I needed to learn that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way my eyes do. Cameras see contrast very differently than the human eye. What looked to me like a good photo through the viewfinder actually had ugly shadows, blown out highlights, and washed out colors when I looked at it on my computer. Similarly, the lens you use will change the composition of the shot (e.g., wide-angle vs telephoto), the settings you choose will affect the appearance of the image (e.g., aperture affects depth of field, shutter speed affects freezing or blurring motion). You will need to train your eye to see the way your camera does if you want to be able to create photos that look the way you want them to.
6) Master your camera. This also seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at the number of “professional” photographers who shoot in full program mode. The “P” mode doesn’t stand for “professional”. It means the camera is making all of what should be your decisions. These “P” for professional photographers might be able to get by because the modern digital camera can do a decent job of controlling settings to produce a properly-exposed, in-focus, photo – most of the time – but these photographers will never be great because there is no craft in their work. Go read my post SHOOT THE DOG: Fundamental tools, as well as the others in this series. If you’re too lazy to read the manual and to invest the time learning the fundamentals, you will never be more than an average photographer. Don’t try to convince yourself that natural talent will make up for not knowing how to use your tool. I promise you, it won’t. If this was so easy, everybody would be really good at it.
7) Use technology to your advantage. Cameras these days are amazing gadgets, a computer in a box actually. They can do some wonderful things – predictive and tracking autofocus, evaluative and centered metering, ISO’s unimaginable in the film days, meta data storage, ETTL flash – so many really cool things! Plus, most advanced hobby and professional cameras have a bunch of custom settings that allow you to control lots of very specific things to make your camera function exactly how you want. If you don’t know about this stuff, you can’t use it to your advantage. Take the time to really study these things in depth.
8) Become photography and computer literate. Gone are the days when a photographer could shoot a bunch of rolls of film, drop them at the lab in the evening, and pick up the processed photos in the morning. With digital photography, YOU are the lab. You need Photoshop, a computer powerful enough to use it, and you need to learn how to use both. You will never master Photoshop, not just because it’s a huge piece of software, but also because the technology for processing digital files is improving all the time. Photoshop comes out in a new edition every couple of years, with amazing new abilities that can allow you do things that you never dreamed of (CS5′s content-aware fill is truly remarkable!). Plus, there are dozens of companies producing third party plug-ins and stand-alone programs that provide even more tricks and functionalities. You’re going to have to invest time learning and keeping up with this stuff. The best way to do this is to follow the magazines and websites that keep up with the latest, and read their evaluations, watch their tutorial videos, read the user forums, and whatever else you feel provides you good value for time invested. You will have to do this forever. Likewise with cameras. They get better and better, with amazing new capabilities. If you’re going to make good use of the gear available, you need to know about it. You will have to do this forever, too.
9) Look at good photos and follow the work of the best photographers. One thing I was surprised to discover is that the world of the professional photographer really isn’t all that big. As I started digging around, the names of the same people kept coming up over and over. There are millions of photographers out there, and when you’re just getting started in photography you can learn a lot from most of them. But as you get better, they will have less and less to offer you, and following the work of the ones at the top will be what helps motivate you to stay on the learning curve. I follow the websites of photojournalists, as well as photographers specializing in wedding, fashion, wildlife, sports, and studio photography. Interestingly, the best of these know and follow the work of the others, creating a little community at the top of the pile that is a huge resource for the rest of us through their websites and blogs. I want to be able to shoot like them. I want to be able to create any image I can imagine. I can’t do either right now, but I’m going to learn everything I can from these people. Best part? It’s free.
10) Never stop learning. Realize that you will never master photography. You might view this as a source of frustration (“Damn, I’ll never figure out how to do this”). Or, you can realize that you will never, ever get bored with photography, no matter how much you learn and how long you’ve been shooting. There will always be more. There will always be something that can be done that nobody has tried to do before. If you love to learn, if you love to be mentally and creatively stimulated, there is no horizon. What could be more fun than that?
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