Monday, January 24, 2011

A New Concept: Critique Journal

So this time of year I see all the photographers around me doing photo-a-day blogs.  I tried that once, didn't work out, like most New Years resolutions.  In my mind, they dont help you become a photographer.  They pressure you into finding an interesting subject each day to photograph and eventually you just start taking pictures of whatever you see and you make it artistic.  This is what I call a productive way of bettering yourself as a photographer.



When I first started out, I took pictures of EVERYTHING hoping that I would make every photograph look awesome.  I would show people the pictures and they would just get bored with it.  Just because you have limitless memory and options available to you because of digital technology, doesn't mean you should use it with the first idea that comes to you.

I do want to do something to make myself a better photographer however.  Last night I was proofing out that day's 4-hour photo shoot.  With all of these photos (610 in all) there are going to be so me bad shots.  It happens.  However, I was unhappy with more than I thought and I started to make mental notes about what I could have done differently so I wouldn't do that again next time.  However, I usually forget so why not write a journal with each photograph that you didn't like and critique it there?

Yeah!  Thats what I will do!  Since we are our worst critics, we can use that to our benefit by always propelling ourselves further and further.  Some do it with tutorials and some do with with shooting large quantities of photographs that will just take up space on your hard drive.  I have over 44,000 images in my library, and I have gone through on two occasions and deleted over 40,000 images that were just utterly worthless.  So yeah, I've been there.  This what I honestly feel is a good productive step.  You don't do the same methods that you did once before when you started do you?  We upgrade to different things that help us along the way.





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