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3 Tips to start your Photography Dream…NOW!

Business, LATEST

6/30/20

So you bought a fancy camera…now what?! I’m certain that you’re excited, but also feeling all the fears that come with it. Feeling absolutely lost. Wondering if you made a huge mistake. The overwhelming sensation that now you have to prove something.

I will always be the first one cheering anyone on who decides to buy a camera in hopes that something great can come of it. But can I just stop you for a minute and say this…if you bought a camera with the intention of making money-tomorrow-you’re doing it wrong!

I believe that one of the most amazing advantage of my journey, was actually having no major expectation of a huge financial return. Sounds like I was aiming low, right? Yet, something about this approach took the pressure off and actually gave me wings to fly and a desire to navigate and get things very wrong so I can learn to make them right.

Ok…now what you really came here for! I feel like I get asked this question a lot “I bought a camera, I love photography so much, but…how do I start?!” Although there’s never going to be a cookie cutter way of approaching that, here are 3 tips, knowing what I know now, that I believe would be great first steps to setting you up for a great future in photography!

SHOOT RAW: Why wait?…I mean, if you’re going to start learning, I highly recommend you aim to learn the way pro photographers work. That’s to shoot in RAW. I won’t elaborate too much. I recommend you invest time, if not DAILY, weekly to learning how to shoot in RAW.
- RAW is a file format that captures all image data recorded by the sensor when you take a photo. … Because no information is compressed with RAW you’re able to produce higher quality images, as well as correct problem images that would be unrecoverable if shot in the JPEG format. [info found on google]
SHOOT EVERYDAY…PERIOD: If you want to grow your craft, you have to put in the work. There is no way around it. Here’s what I recommend so that you set yourself up to becoming a very amazing and skilled photographer:
- 1st week you will shoot in the daytime. Find a subject or try to mimic the type of work you want to be shooting. Shoot every day that week at around the same time of the day in the morning hours [9-11am]. You will encounter problems and then whatever problems you encounter….look them up on youtube and try to find the solutions to fixing those problems. The next day, you’ll reattempt the settings or changes and see if you’ve get a different outcome.
- 2nd week you will shoot during the daytime hours [12pm-3pm] and repeat what I mentioned on above.
- 3rd week you will shoot during pre-evening to evening hours [what us photographers refer to as “the golden hour”-the most desired, yummiest, easiest to shoot in lighting. 3-5pm in the fall months when the sun goes down earlier, 6-8pm in the summer months where there is more daylight]. You’ll do the same as I instructed on week 1. You’ll repeat it day after day for better results.
- Week 4 in that month, you will attempt night time photography [the trickiest lighting situation]. You’ll look up techniques on how to get better results. I challenge you to do this as many times of the week as possible for each type of lighting situation. I challenge you to shoot for weeks and weeks and weeks. You’ll grow so much just getting out there and trying it and FAILING and then attempting again!
EDITING SOFTWARE: The tricky thing about shooting in raw, is that you will have to support that with some type of editing software. I recommend looking into Lightroom. It is a user friendly system and it is the most popular within pro photographers at this current time. Lightroom has some really really tricky uploading and exporting ways-so-I can’t stress enough that before you dive in, you should watch a few Youtube videos on starting Lightroom for the first time.

My friends. It’s so complex, but SIMPLE. If you want to grow in Photography….if photography is a dream….you MUST begin now and the steps I gave you are things that will set you up for the future. I wish that someone would have given me this advice, but then, I don’t know that I was taking it as seriously. I know that you are-because otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I will be releasing more information on everything I listed here in the near future, so stay tuned.