I’ve loved photography for as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, I wanted one of those Kodak 110 cameras that were long and skinny, remember those?
So old school...
I took a Black & White Photography class my senior year in college. I remember having to borrow a friend’s SLR camera since I didn’t have one. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and attending UC Santa Barbara (that’s a different post), and I would drive up the 101 every Tuesday for my photography lecture and then drive back up again on Thursday to use the dark room to develop my stuff. The days in the lab flew by. I would walk in there when they opened at 10:00 a.m. and the next thing I knew they were kicking me out because it was closing time!
After college, life got hectic and photography took a back seat. It wasn’t until I had my second son in 2007 that I got my first DSLR. I’d had a digital point-and-shoot for many years but was finding that I wasn’t able to get the type of images I wanted with it. I was starting to feel very limited by its…limitations. So I upgraded to a DSLR. A few months after that I bought these two DVD’s. Then I signed up for an amazing workshop in 2008 and another one earlier this year, and I haven’t really looked back.
I recently read a post on a message board that talked about the road to becoming a photographer. Here is part of it:
“Do NOT compare your work or where you are in your photography journey to someone else and where they are. Instead, compare yourself to where you were just a few weeks/months/years ago. That’s the true test of if you’re a good photographer. You should always see an improvement in your work. When I quit focusing on where I wasn’t and focused instead on how far I’d come since I started, I realized I wasn’t doing as bad as I thought I was.”
See, the thing with photographers is that we always have doubts. About whether we are good enough and whether people will like our work. After all, photography is very subjective. Some people still like the old-school studio look with the grey marbleized backdrop. And even if you didn’t ever really like it, that was your only choice (Exhibit A would be my high school senior pictures, and I’m NOT going to show you those!). I have doubts about whether or not I’m “good enough” almost every day. After reading the post above, I decided to take a look back through my pictures over the last year. And all I can say is wow. I have tons of pictures from last year where I have no idea what I was thinking with regards to my settings. I would be shooting outside, in bright light and have my ISO set to 800! Or I’d be inside my poorly lit house trying to take pictures of my fast-moving kids and my shutter speed was at 1/80, my aperture was at f8.0, my ISO was at 100 and I couldn’t figure out why they were all blurry and dark! Then I went through a phase where I shot wide-open all the time. Even when I had multiple subjects and they were on a swing. My rational? I wanted that blurred background. What I got instead was blurred everything! And while my images now are not always perfect, they are better. I know to set my shutter speed first if I have a fast moving subject that I want to freeze in motion followed by my aperture so I can get a correct exposure. And I know that I need to bump my ISO, or switch to a faster lens if I’m inside my (poorly lit) house and want to get images of my kids.
So I’m improving. Every time I push that shutter release button I learn something. Every time I mess up a shot I learn from it. So hopefully the next time I’m having doubts about whether or not I should do this (a.k.a. at some point tomorrow), I can think back to the me of last year and know that by this time next year, I will have learned at least 5,000 things.
