hey guys,
Just bought my first DSLR, a Pentax KR 2 weeks ago. I'm not sure if I posted in the right section..
Want to ask fellow photographers how do you guys know if you all are on the right track when you all first started out? as in how do you know which areas you must improve on etc?
I took some photos and asked some of my friends but i guess they are not really interested in photography so could not give me any constructive feedbacks. also noticed that CS need a min of 50 posts before we can post links to our photos.
So would like to find out the different sources you guys learn from... thanks in advance.
You are your best and worst critic. Be hard on yourself , not to the extent of making photography a chore.
How to improve - always have an open mind, and take constructive advice well. Think every comment through, and you can thank people for their well-meaning advice, but not everyone is good at giving comments. Just because someone has shot for 20 years doesn't mean that he's very good at photography. He would just have had a lot of experience with cameras.
What do you like? Where do you want to go? Why do you shoot? These are questions you have to ask yourself, and before long, if you can't be clear on all these and have to keep relying on external parties to define yourself, what you do, what you shoot, then there's something wrong. You should always feel happy to shoot, always feel happy to process, and you should never be too content with what you get.
Like it or not, photography needs an audience. You have to decide what sort of audience you want, there's the general appeal sort of photo, there's the artistic type that targets a niche audience... And of course for the "artistic" type it is easy to get confused with the arty-farty variety where only YOU and your bunch of inner circle buddies understand what's going on, and then all of you just carry out some sort of circle jerk and tell each other that you're up and coming and you will be the next photography Picasso.
At the end of the day, it's up to you. Everyone has their style of learning, everyone has their likings, and everyone is better at some things more than others.
You can try to start off by looking at what is termed as "good", and decide for yourself, which ones you like more (and you will have preferences, for sure). Then you can always begin by emulating. Read, digest, internalise, and put everything you've learnt into solid practice until it becomes a habit, so much that you don't even think - that you know what you want, roughly how to get it the moment you look at a scene, or when you're planning a themed portrait shoot, etc. Before long, the style will come, and if it doesn't, what does it matter?
This isn't really a straight answer, I suppose, but there are no straight answers for this sort of thing.
Just a lot of questions, that you have to answer yourself.