[MBChamberlain]

@Click It And Stick It & @Malula

That not withstanding, announcing that there was no charge makes very little difference to me. What purpose is there for including that statement unless it was to deflect the harsh reviews that charging for substandard work produces? By making the statement the implication is that you don’t charge. I have been doing rather a lot of test shooting lately because my semi-retirement has afforded me a lot more time to get out and play. If I were to post my work on here, ask for critique, and say that I didn’t charge for those pictures, how would you interpret the statement. I expect you would assume I was posting as a student. The state of payment is irrelevant to the quality of your work, and therefore it is irrelevant to the content of the review. The state of payment is, however, one of the defining characteristics of what makes up a fauxtog, so if you want to know if you are a fauxtog, the difference is very great.

I do not know if this is true, and it is my hope that it is not, but you come across as someone who honestly believes their work is amazing with a capital BOO-Yah, and you came here to get your ego stroked. That isn’t what I’m about. If you, as a learner, come to me and ask for my opinion, you will be responded to as I did in my first post. An honest evaluation, encouragement, and simple advice for improving your work. I didn’t worry about the watermark on the images, because it is good practice to put a copyright notice on photos you take when you post them online. But, after IHF’s comment, I typed “melula photography” into Google and her Facebook page was the very first thing to come up. Now your request for evaluation is not for a student, it was for a pro, or more accurately, someone who has diluted herself into thinking she is a pro.

And people seeing your work and wanting to pay for it has no bearing on whether you should be in business or not. Pure and simple, your clients don’t know thing one about photography. There is no difference between taking advantage of a person who doesn’t know anything about photography by selling them bad photos when they can’t tell the difference and selling someone a bad car by putting sawdust in the transmission and hand turning the odometer. No different than someone who takes high school shop and then starts marking thing themselves as a contractor to people who don’t know the right end of a hammer. I don’t know about how it is in Wollongong, but here both of those things would get you put behind bars.

This is a simple matter of business ethics. When the client doesn’t know enough about whatever you are selling to make a fully informed decision, it is up to you to fill in their knowledge gap with a recommendation. If you take advantage of that and take their money, it is little more than outright theft.

I admit that I was very harsh, but I do not regret it, sometimes it takes a hard blow to the ego to get someone to take off their rose colored glasses and see their work for what it is. So I will now wipe the slate clean, and hope that you are listening good and hard to what I say next.

Kylie, at this point, you have a decision to make. It is a decision about what kind of person you want to be. You see, you have opened Pandora’s box and, to mix metaphors horribly, eaten from the tree of knowledge. You now know, without a doubt, from the mouth of someone who has been doing this longer than you have been alive, that you are not good enough to charge people in good conscience. I will give you the benefit of the doubt that were ignorant of this before today, and so everything you have done up to this point is moot. It is how you proceed that will define who you truly are. Will you, now that you know, go out tomorrow and steal from unsuspecting clients by lying to them about your skill? With the burden on knowledge you now hold, it could be construed in no other way if you did. Or will you accept this bitter pill, realize where you are, hunker down, and start doing the real work? That is a decision only you can make.

I will offer this one encouragement. Like Pandora, you still have one thing left in the box. The Spirit of Hope. One of the very great things about any part of the human condition is that all things are temporary. What you are today does not define what you are tomorrow, it informs it, but does not define it. Take a good deep look down inside yourself and ask yourself why you want to be a photographer. Is it about passion? Is it for the prestige of being an artist? Is it because of the compliments and the ego stroking? If it isn’t for the passion of the art, you’ll never make it, those other reasons can’t propel you beyond mediocrity. So, if you have the passion necessary to work (and pay) for YEARS without compensation to master your art, go for it. But know that it is a long and hard road and making it by honestly being great, does not come easy or fast.

Always remember, that true, lasting greatness only comes to those who are willing to toil in obscurity.

Good luck.

[MBChamberlain]

IFH, you and I seem destined to cross post 🙂

[MBChamberlain]

Ok, never mind… I took you at your word, my mistake. IHF and I cross posted, and after reading her post, I searched for you and found you on Facebook. You’ve been charging for over a year.

Since you ARE styling yourself a pro. I have a completely different evaluation for you.
UN……………..let it arrive……………….acceptable

I run a photography competition every year, last year we had a contestant enter who was 14 years old and taking her very first class in photography. I am not exaggerating when I say I’d recommend her over you any day of the week, based on skill alone. The fact that you out and out lied to me when asking for an evaluation tells me you KNOW your work sucks and you didn’t want us to call you on it. It also makes me suspect that you wouldn’t hesitate to be completely dishonest in your business dealings as well.

In my opinion, lying to people and telling them you’re a pro, then lying to them telling them they are going to get good pictures, then taking their money, then lying to them telling them their pictures turned out great so they will provide you with another unwitting victim is nothing short of fraud.

You are a fauxtog, the worst kind, the kind that knows it and charges anyway. You want my evaluation and advice? Quit, quit today, and never pick up a camera again. You disgrace us all.

[MBChamberlain]

Well, it looks like my post didn’t take, so I’ll type it all again.

As long as you aren’t charging people you’re fine by me. Your work has some glaring technical errors that would be unforgivable for a pro, but since you’re a student, it just means that you haven’t progressed that far yet.

The biggest thing I’d recommend working on is lighting. Learn everything you can about studio lighting and setups, even if you don’t have any studio equipment because the concepts all translate to available light photography. It’s a little harder because you can’t move them and you’ve got to think a little more, but you can use any single light setup outside with just a reflector and the big light source in the sky.

Your composition and consistency will come in time, so keep up the work on that.

One thing I will say is that if someone comes to ask you to shoot their wedding, remind them that you are not a professional yet, and encourage them that they should really hire a real professional photographer for such an important day. Then ask the photographer they hire to let you assist for the day (for free). You’ll spend a lot of the day  lugging equipment around and making adjustments to the lights for the photographer, but you’ll also learn a ton. And this way the client will be guaranteed good photos.

[MBChamberlain]

I will preface this with the hope that I am wrong about this, but from your presentation here, on mayhem, and on facebook, this is what you look like.

I don’t even have to look at your work and based on this post I have 3 letters for you, and a two words.

GWC. Please Stop.

But you wanted to know if you are a fauxtog, and the answer to that question is most definitely, and beyond that, you are the most reprehensible kind. You present yourself as a photographer, use that misdirection to get women to shoot with you, then you treat them like meat. The pictures don’t show respect for the women you shoot, and that makes my blood boil.

That isn’t to say that shooting nudes, or even shooting “sexy” photos is necessarily a bad thing, or that it makes you a creep. But no women who shoots with you would ever come out the other side looking like a stripper. It is very easy to get attention by shooting photos like this, but it detracts from you and from your work, plus, it teaches models that this is what it takes to get work. and I can’t stand that. Instead, the challenge of shooting a beautiful woman is to make her desirable and sexy without either compromising her femininity or tarnishing her image. The challenge is even greater when you shoot nudes, there is a very very narrow area where it is done well, and to one side is amateur porn and the other side is gratuitous nudity.

Again, I really really hope that you aren’t actually the guy that your work, posts, and websites make you look like you are. But don’t set out to shoot that type of work. If anything, doing it well takes even more skill than ordinary portraiture. When and if you’re good enough to pull it off, that type of work will come to you.

[MBChamberlain]

First off, you take criticism well, which is another important trait of a good photographer. In addition, it raises my level of respect for you greatly.

Here is one of the problems as I see it, you claim you totally 100% know how to use your camera. But you also say that you are still learning tons.  It can’t be both. And quite frankly, I’ve been shooting professionally for over 20 years, and I spend 12 years apprenticing and practicing before that, I can confidently say that I have forgotten more about photography than you know, and I would assess my knowledge of “how to use my camera” maybe at 10%. Not because my knowledge is lacking, but just because I’ve been around long enough to know just how much there is to know. I realize that you are overstating your position for emphasis, but it is symptomatic of a person who has yet to discover just how much they truly don’t know.

First off, I didn’t say you photos were over-edited. Your eye for editing is quite good and you do maintain a subtlety I rarely see in someone so new. What I said was, you NEED it. I challenged you to ask yourself if you thought you could sell your images without it? Your defensive reaction (i.e. overstating your knowledge) just serves to drive home the point. Like I said, there is nothing particularly wrong with using Photoshop, but you are walking a dangerous tightrope because to the untrained eye, Photoshop is easier and faster than learning the correct techniques.

Now, to my assessment of your editing, I fully understand that if it scaled down and that makes some of the things I’m going to discuss a little difficult to see for certain, but per your request I am going to point out exactly what I see. I have selected a recent photo at random for assessment.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/23870_469094219801854_1256599850_n.jpg

Let us begin, and I apologize that this will sound a little harsh, but you’ve got me in grading mode and, as I explain to my students, don’t take anything I say personally.

First, your shot was almost definitely underexposed. Judging by the apparent grain enhancement caused by push processing your files, I’m going to estimate 2/3 of a stop underexposed.
Second, you boosted the brightness about 15 points and increased the contrast about 30 points.
Third, you adjusted the tone curve to strong contrast.
I looks like you adjusted the color in Lightroom, but I’m not positive this isn’t a side effect of the lighting being slightly different temperatures, so I’ll give a pass on that one.
Then you opened it up in Photoshop you sharpened the image using USM (which isn’t a very good technique for sharpening) and I’ll bet you a quid to quai that you didn’t use a layer mask, you backed up the history and dragged out the history brush to paint it in because the edges of the USM areas aren’t smooth enough to be layer masks. While you were doing this, you missed both sides of the baby’s cheeks at the jawline and a couple of spots on his arm.
Next you decided you weren’t happy with the depth of field, this would have been corrected if that initial 2/3 stop had been corrected in camera at this distance, but there you go. So you Gaussian blurred the entire image, backed up and whipped out the history brush again (same problem as before with the edges) and painted in the areas you felt should have more blur, ignoring the fact that the focal plane wouldn’t allow things like, for example, the area where the baby’s hand meets his hair to be out of focus, as areas of the image both in front of and behind that plane are within the depth of field.
There are a couple of places where it looks like you might have heal scars, but I’m gonna attribute those to compression artifact and give you the benefit of the doubt on those.

Had all of those things been corrected in camera, the shot would have been salable with no editing whatsoever. But had you edited it, these would have been my recommendations. Fill light of +15, black value of +20, and a Vibrance of +28. This will compensate for the slightly flat nature of digital far better than brightness, contrast or tone curve and provide a fairly accurate representation of Kodak Portra VC, which is the preferred film for working with this type of work.
Then I would have recommended increasing the yellows in the magenta range slightly to compensate for the apparent light reflection aberrations, and dodged the area on his right cheek just a bit, then burned his shoulder and forearm slightly to eliminate those hotspots and packaged it up for sale. (Because it’s digital, you always need to do a slight sharpening to compensate for the interpolation of Beyer type sensors, but this should be done at size, never on the image before it has been sized to it’s final output.) This would have taken all of about 2 minutes to complete.

And this image is by no means unique in this regard.

Does this better explain my position?

This is why I so heavily discourage going pro too soon, when you shoot only for yourself, you learn photography, when you have to please a client, you learn damage control. This is also why trying to teach and mentor is so dangerous for you. Like it or not, you don’t actually know that much yet, and you have a lot of really bad habits that stem, not from ineptitude, but from simple lack of experience. To take on the task of teaching others means that you will transfer those bad habits to them and because you style yourself a pro when you are at the level of proficient amateur, they will not question it. You are doing them a disservice simply by letting them believe you are something you are not (yet).

Oh, one more thing, please don’t use the black and white adjustment anymore. It is a very bad tool (desaturates and modulates the result) and I’ve had words with a couple of people I know at Adobe about removing it as the default recommendation when you change to grayscale mode. Learn to use the channel mixer instead, it produces a result that has neither desaturation or frequency modulation, and doesn’t fall victim to the pitfalls of not being able to modify low-saturation areas of the image.

[MBChamberlain]

I think you’re right, you’re definitely not a fauxtog. You’ve got a wonderful eye and a good artistic sensibility.

That being said, you may have rushed into the business a little bit too quickly. You have some really good foundations in your work, but it is just a bit amateurish from a production standpoint. I feel that by running headlong into the business side of things you really haven’t had a chance to experiment, to branch out and develop your own style. The biggest problem I see is that I have seen every shot in your portfolio before, most hundreds of timed. They are good, but I can’t tell how much of that is you, and how much of that is your ability to reproduce things  you’ve seen.

The other thing I see is that you are very Photoshop dependent. I’ve been using Photoshop almost from day one, and over the years I have seen what should be a pole-vault used as a crutch. Special effects not withstanding (like things where you intend to use Photoshop, especially for the baby’s safety), how many of your photos could you really just print and sell right out of the camera? I’m seeing Photoshop used to correct for lighting problems, exposure problems, focusing problems, depth of field issues, ad nauseum. As it is, you are spending far, far more time than you need to on your shots.

I would also advise you to take down your video tutorials. If you really want to teach people, load them up to Blip and get a per-watch advertising bonus. The Total Training tutorial dvd series for Photoshop, which is 18 hours long, is only $109. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but you just haven’t reached the level of skill to teach yet. It’s like the joke about the first grade kid who told his mother that he was gonna quit school, and when queried about what he would do with a first grade education answered “teach kindergarten.”

Now, all that being said. You are far better than most and particularly for only having been in it two years. Study and work hard and you’ll do very very well.

[MBChamberlain]

IHF, I do want to correct you on one minor point. You don’t need lighting equipment to use the Rembrandt pattern. It’s a single light source pattern, so you can do it with the big light source in the sky. So everything on that list CAN be done without additional equipment, that is why I picked THAT listof 20. (though high key is a devilishly tricky job without a four light setup, it can be done, and I’d expect anyone styling themselves a pro to at least know what it is)

Of all the seminars I teach one of my favorites is a 2 day seminar on available light portraiture. It’s just great to see young photographers realize that anything you can do in a studio with one light, you can do outside with the BLS and a reflector.

I’ve actually used practically every reflector known to man, but I’ll tell you which one I love most and use today… It’s a piece of R-Max foam insulation (from Lowes) with the matte silver side, cut into thirds, then cut in half, each half edged with duct tape, and then taped together. Use a little of that reflective silver tape to cover up the seam where the dull duct tape is and, to quote Emeril “BAM.” 3 reflectors for 12 bucks, works great, and no big deal if the wind grabs one and slams it into a tree. Maybe a little bulky, but I can’t count how many of the $50 collapsible ones have been destroyed on location in my career.

I actually usually made a small one with one of the three pieces and take the other two and make one large one.

But really, I want to thank you for your kind words. If you ever need someone to look at your work, just get in touch with me, I’ll be happy to help you in any way I can.

As a side note, given the kind of work you have in your portfolio, have you ever played with cross polarization? If not, check it out, plus if you already have a CPL, it’s very inexpensive to get what you need to experiment with the effect.

Cheers

[MBChamberlain]

Allow me to clarify my statement about your passion. When I read your bio, you talked about your passion for photography, but most of your bio talked about  your other roles in life, your dad, etc. When I said it seems like an afterthought, I was saying that if you’re going to talk about yourself on a bio page, talk about yourself as a photographer. Don’t talk about yourself and then say “oh, and by the way, I’m passionate about photography.” It just didn’t read like someone who would like nothing more than to take my photos. And as I said, I’m not saying that you don’t have passion, but if you want to be successful, it has to be in your pictures.

When it comes to charging for photos, and I know this is blunt, but neither of you two should be charging. If you can afford a wedding, you can afford a photographer. On your site I seem to remember that you were charging $100 per hour. I don’t charge by the hour, I charge by the package, but when all is said and done, that’s barely less than I charge. In the off season, I’ll shoot just the ceremony, portraits, plus cake, bouquet, and getaway for only $500. That takes me about four hours. My packages then go up from there, and I’ve designed packages as high as $25,000 (5 day Indian wedding in India with 3 assistant shooters). You are not doing them a favor by encouraging them to hire you so they can spend a little more on the decorations, the invitations, or the band. You are robbing them of having a quality record of the most important day of their lives.

Besides, you have to remember that your clients don’t know any better. If you tell them you are a photographer, then show them bad photos, they will assume that those are good photos. By teaching people that bad photography is good, you cheapen it, and not just for yourself, for all of us. The same applies to giving them a CD, you give them that and they will think that is what professionals do, after all, you are a “professional” you have a web site. When potential clients ask if I will give them a CD, which thanks to the fauxtog habit of handing them out like candy, I calmly say no to a print ready CD, but I supply a low res (500 pixel long edge 4×5 crop) set of images for them to post on Facebook or blogs, if they question me, I show them prints I keep from my supplier and the major photo chains in the area, all of which have been exposed to 5 years of UV light. I ask them how long they want their prints to last, and they can see exactly why I insist of providing all prints myself.

Usually no pro would ever do what I’m about to do. We tell these stories to each other, because to have the common frame of reference to understand it. We know that if we say what I’m about to say to a non-pro, it sounds like we’re just bragging, or playing the victim, or any number of other generally reprehensible things. But since I’m trying to explain what it means to us to be a pro in a world where the term pro has become distorted, I hesitantly move forward. Here is a brief explanation of my early years as a photographer.

I didn’t pick up a camera and start shooting gold at the age of 5. But I did the long hard work, just like very other real pro right up to today. My parents were not well off, but they bought me a toy camera when I was young and I loved it so much that I mowed 150 acres of lawn with a push mower and shoveled almost 20 miles of driveway in Michigan to buy my first real camera (a Pentax K-1000) and some decent glass, just so I could start to learn and my dad who had done a little photography taught me some of the basics. I volunteered with a master photographer 20 hours a week almost the entire four years of high school just to have the opportunity to observe someone of that caliber and learn from him, and that doesn’t count as time I was shooting, back then, I was learning. For the next five years, I read dozens of books on photography and thousands of magazine articles, I logged 5,000 hours shooting and 10,000 in the darkroom, shot and developed 45,000 frames of film at $.50 per frame. Then, finally, after 7 years of learning, 5 years of shooting, and $50,000 of personal financial investment, I finally got my very first client, a senior portrait shoot that I made $150 profit on.

That is what it meant for me to call myself a pro, and that means more to my identity as a photographer to this very day than how many countless millions of times my images have been printed or what clients and jobs I’ve completed.

In short, it is a demonstration of my passion for photography. I hope that now you can understand that this means to us, and that should hopefully help you understand just why we look at inexperienced photographers trying to “break into the biz” and are insulted by the gall they have to charge for their work when they have barely even begun to learn. It is tantamount to hiring a personal chef and having them make hamburger helper or hiring a pianist who shows up and plays chopsticks.

And before you ask, “isn’t my time worth something?” The simple answer is, no, no it isn’t. Your time will not be worth anything until you have INVESTED in yourself. It takes every bit as much work to become a great photographer today as it did 20 years ago and in some ways, it takes  more, because the knowledge base has grown since then. So are you in for the long haul?

As I stated in my last post. Don’t measure your passion by how much you like photography or how much you enjoy doing it, measure it by whether you are willing to put in the kind of work I’ve described here. It’s hard, working without pay is hard, shooting the same things over and over until you get it right is hard, shooting a hundred pictures you’re proud of and having someone who’s been doing it a long time sit there and rip every single one of them to shreds is very hard. There are no shortcuts, there is no way to excel without doing the work, and what point is there in doing it if you’re only gonna be average?

[MBChamberlain]

All in all, you’re off to a great start. There are a few things that you should work on and half a dozen shots that detract from your portfolio. For example, I disagree with notaphotographer. I think the picture of the kissing couple is the worst in the bunch, it’s out of focus AND has motion blur, the angle and fisheye is disconcerting and the HDR makes it seriously over-processed.

By way of moving forward, a couple of things to remember, fish-eyes work best when the warp is visible and used for effect. A lot of your shots it doesn’t add, it just bends the trees, walls, etc. in uncomfortable ways. Hard rock works great, depot works OK and hallway makes me feel like I’m in a bad horror film.

There are 3 rules to HDR, nothing that moves, always use a tripod, and always bracket with either the flash or shutter speed, never ISO or aperture. Things that move include water, oceans, stars, clouds, the sun, the moon, trees in the wind, traffic, etc, etc, etc. All your shots must be identical in every way but exposure.

It looks like you’ve invested in some good glass at the very least. And in answer to your question, you are DEFINITELY on the right track. The reality is that none of your shots are good enough to be salable as artwork, but I see a lot of meticulousness and attention to detail in your work. You have a lot of real raw talent there especially with landscapes, and with 2 or 3 more years of practice and learning and tone down the HDR a bit, I think you’ll be great at it. What I would suggest is practice with your digital, then, when you’re ready to move up, buy a 4×5 rail camera. The type of work you are doing will work best if you shoot it on chrome, you won’t need to HDR them that way, and you will absolutely love what a tilt/shift lens can do for architectural photography, particularly in  perspective control and the Scheimpflug principle.

[MBChamberlain]

All good advice so far. And it is very good that you are not charging anyone, which increases my respect of you because it takes you from fauxtog (which is not OK) to student (which is great). One additional thing that is a real pet peeve of mine, don’t play music at me when I visit your web site. I’m sitting at my computer, I’ve already looked at half of your page, I’ve already got my music running, and now your music stars, so I have to stop looking at your pictures and figure out where to turn off your music. Then I have to keep stopping your music on every page because I’d rather keep listening to what I was listening.

You are in the phase I like to call the “I’m being artistic” phase. You’re stretching your legs and experimenting, which is very good. Your instincts are serving you well because when you pick your images, there are good things in them. 8-15 has goodish balance for a still life, 6-12 has emotional impact, 5-15 has niceish framing. The problem is that, while you subconsciously recognize good aspects of a photo, you don’t understand why you like said photo.

So now for the not-so-fun part of being a photographer. You have to put the camera down and pick up the books, figuratively speaking. Read everything. First, learn everything you can about your camera, the technical nitty gritty of shooting, even do a little dark room work if possible. Learn about color theory (which is extremely important in black and white photography), learn about contrast, learn about exposure, learn about depth of field and how to manipulate it, composition, image balance, black and white conversion. Then learn about people, emotion, body language, non-verbal cues. Study great photos and read commentaries on what makes them great. Watch great character movies, look at how the greats frame shots, watch Stanley Kubrick, Lazlo Kovacs, Orson Welles, even Baz Luhrmann. If you wanna shoot people, get books of portraits and attempt to recreate them on your own (for practice, don’t copy when you’re working).

Experimenting is great, but if you do you will only progress as far as one lifetime can last. There is 185 years worth of photographic knowledge out there. Don’t re-invent the wheel, learn from those who have come before you and then step out and innovate beyond that.

Cheers

[MBChamberlain]

First off, seeking constructive criticism is always good, but around here, you will get a healthy dose of people who will just plain criticize.

Now, since advice is only relevant when you know where it’s coming from, a little about my credentials. I’ve been shooting for 25 years, 20 of which as a working professional. I’ve worked both here and abroad, been published countless times including a healthy number of magazine covers. My specialties are portrait, fashion, and editorial photography. I’m now semi-retired and running a small independent studio in North Carolina.

First of all, never listen to the complements of friends and family. They will love your work because they love you, and are not reliable for honest advice.

My first impression of your work is that it is very lack luster. There are pictures there, they show people… but that’s about it. You talk in your bio about the passion you hold for photography, but even there, it seems like it is an after-thought in your life. Passion is an all consuming force. If a person wants to make photography their life’s work, they must live and breath it. It is like your love for another person, waking up in the morning and giving all the love you have to them is not passion. Passion is being so full of love for that person that the OVERFLOW of that passion washes over them endlessly and without effort.

So it is with photography, if you pour everything you have into your work, it isn’t passion. Passion is allowing your desire and love for the visual poetry fill you to the point that you overflow, and when you pick up your camera your work is drenched in that endless stream of love, of art, of simple and pure joy.

If you are overflowing with that joy, it isn’t translating into your images… they are just images.

Secondly, I see a distinct lack of technical expertise. Take this little test, here are a list of twenty fairly basic photography techniques. Take a moment and ask yourself how many could you explain without googling or picking up a book?

bokeh
short lighting
depth of field
dutch angle
Rembrandt pattern
burning
color temperature
high key
ambient balance
bracketing
dodging
diffusion
track focusing
angle of view
lens compression
golden hour
focal length
law of inverse squares
merger
exposure value

How many did you get? This may sound harsh, but if your answer was not “all of them” you should not be marketing your services as a photographer. This is all Photography 101 stuff.

But there is good news, all of this is learnable, and if you do indeed have a passion for photography, I encourage you to stop asking people to pay you for sub-standard work and get out there and learn now to produce superior work. It will be hard, it will be grueling, it will test your passion, but you WILL come out the other side a much better photographer than you are now.

The value of photography is not in equipment, editing software, or how much passion you have (though passion is essential to doing the massive amount of work it takes to become proficient) it is in knowledge and skill. That is the main difference between a photographer who shouldn’t be charging $50 for a shoot and another who wouldn’t even consider a shoot that pays less than $50,000.

Now, should to choose to ignore this and continue on, here are a couple of practical pointers:

For the sake of all that is holy and good in this world, stop selective coloring your photos, I do not care what my three year old’s shirt looks like, or about my wife’s bouquet, so PLEASE stop making the photos about things I don’t care about. It’s tacky, it’s overdone, it looks like crap.

Stop trying to save bad photos with Photoshop, just throw them away and use the good ones.

And stop loading your pictures onto a CD and giving them to the client. It is your work, and you should take enough pride in it to make sure that it is printed correctly, there is a distinct difference between how photos look on the screen and how they look when printed, and you should make sure that your clients get good prints, it  is a matter of professionalism. Do you really want to trust your reputation to the Walmart photo center and the “auto enhance” option?

If photography is your true passion, whatever you do don’t stop, take this to heart and use it to make yourself better.

Cheers

[MBChamberlain]

There is a very practical answer to this question.

five words: four hundred dollars an hour

But for a more philosophical one, it is very simply a question of what you are trying to photograph. Some of the ugliest people I have ever photographed have been size two models. Vapid, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, bundles of unpleasantness wrapped up in a body that is a 10. It is very hard to shoot someone in a way that you can’t see the rotting cesspool that is their soul. I’d rather shoot an overweight person with a good attitude and a modicum of humility about themselves. Real photographers capture more than the body, we get the distinct honor of capturing a glimpse into the soul. If you can’t see past that, it is a sad loss indeed.

But, I don’t expect you to change your mind today, in fact I wish you luck that you might find a gorgeous person to be with you who is shallow enough not to be detoured by your view on life. I even wish you eternal youth and boundless wealth, so that your world view never need be shattered by the reality that you will one day shrivel up and die, ugly and alone.

And for the record, so you don’t need to make assumptions on my appearance, YES, I am getting old (I’ve been a professional photographer for over 20 years) and YES, I’m not in as good a shape as I used to be (about 30 lbs overweight). But here is the funny thing, I have the personal cell numbers of over a thousand actresses, actors, models, and musicians who I have shot over the years, and when I text or call one of them, they not only remember who i am, but they are excited to hear from me, and it might just be because I am far more interested in who they are than what they look like. So, all in all, it seems like living life by my ideals has also netted me the benefits you hope to achieve by clinging to yours.

[MBChamberlain]

You are off to a good start. Not a photographer yet, but not a fauxtog either. I see a good eye and a lot of potential.

Good art is 10% creativity and 90% knowing how to hold a brush, which if course is the hard part. If you’d like to eventually have a career in photography, I’ll warn you now, it’s hard, very hard. And the fauxtogs only make it harder by exploiting the ignorance of the general public. In order to compete, you must take the time now to learn the craft. In fact, the lack of equipment can work to your advantage. For example, contrary to popular belief, shooting outside with the big light source in the sky is not easier than shooting in the studio. You CAN get studio results with nothing but the sun and a reflector IF and only if you understand studio lighting better than a lot of studio photographers. So if you don’t have lights, you HAVE to learn to work without them. Taking things you do now by instinct and learning why and how they work so that you can make what you want to happen happen when you want it to happen and not by chance.

Here is a quick list of topics you need to master for starters:

The balance (ISO, Shutter, and Aperture and how each affects to other)
Don’t shoot on railroad tracks (not only tacky, but VERY illegal, as in I know a photographer serving time for it)
Single source lighting patterns and their uses
Difference between broad and short lighting (and use short almost all the time)
Framing and composition (rule of thirds, golden spiral, positive and negative space, etc)
Posing and body language
Non-verbal communication (take a mime class if you can find one)
Spend time working with models and focus on getting
Learn the dark room (I know you shoot digital, but understanding the dark room will make your digital work a thousand times better because you can really experiment with exposure, filters, and all kinds of other techniques that will help you)
Shoot everything in camera (my motto is, if it isn’t good enough to sell AS IS, it isn’t good enough to even consider dropping into the computer). If you need Photoshop, it is your worst enemy, if you do not need it, it is your best friend.
Learn to connect emotion to style. Black and white, antique finishes, textures, even the level of contrast and saturation have an emotional component. Don’t choose effects because they look cool, pick them because they either enhance the emotional impact of the photo, or highlight the emotion by offering a counterpoint.
Before you attempt black and white, look at a lot of real black and white photography, and read this. It is one of the hardest thing to do in digital photography (I spent almost 5 years working out a system that gives me consistent and reliable results).

Above all, practice and be your own worst critic. Don’t ask if you’re any good, realize that you suck. And you will continue to suck as long as you are working. Throw away 90% of your work and explain to yourself exactly why you are throwing it away. Identifying why you don’t like one photo and you do like another teaches you do the good things and not do the bad ones.

Now, this isn’t to say that you actually suck, or that you can’t be proud of your work. As long as you are improving over yourself, you’re doing well. I look at my work that I put into my portfolio 5 years ago and am a little embarrassed because I wouldn’t even show that to a client today. But the day you look at your work and say “I’ve arrived” is the day you become complacent and start to stagnate into oblivion.

Sorry for the length of my response, but I hope it will be helpful for you, feel free to contact me if you’ve got any specific questions and I’ll try to answer them for you.

Cheers,
Michael

[Author]

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