Between 2008 and late 2016, I took tens of thousands of pictures and proudly vomited the vast majority of them online. While I’d toyed around with things like depth of field and long exposures, I didn’t understand anything about photography, so my camera rarely left ‘auto’. I’d checked out an online tutorial or two, but as far as I was concerned, ‘exposure compensation’ was something victims got after winning a public indecency lawsuit.
People, they’re literally everywhere. At least that’s how it feels when you live in a country as densely populated as Japan. For the longest time, I was incredibly fussy about having people in my frame.
As we all know, there are many things that can make or break a photograph. While technical aspects might immediately jump to mind and the light may grab our attention, one word that tends to pop up a lot in my feedback is “intent”.
I recently wrote a pair of pieces about giving and responding to critiques of photography with a certain level of decorum. As many of you already know, criticism is best given when actually asked for.
Photography, like every art form, is subjective. As such, anything we create is open to criticism, whether we like it or not. When criticism is given with the best of intentions, it can lead to growth.
I’d like to start by saying that I feel the word ‘criticism’ is interpreted by some as inherently negative, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Throughout this article, I’ve used the words ‘critique’, ‘criticism', and ‘feedback’, interchangeably, because I consider them to be more or less the same in this particular context.
For anyone who isn’t interested in this wonderful art form we call photography, it might seem pretty straightforward: using a camera to capture an image. However, as many of us know, photography is so much more, once you go beyond the surface level.
As a photographer, there are many things that we feel may be holding us back. For some, it’s gear. For many, it might be limited free time. For others, there might be a lack of interesting locations to shoot.
Photography, like all art, is subjective. However, one of the most common questions I see from people starting their photography journey is "how do I know when I’m getting better?" While the idea of ‘better’ is also partly subjective, improvement is still something every photographer strives for, and there are many different ways we can assess our own growth.