Hack Photo

Inspired by a posting on PhotographyHack.com, I realized that I needed to make some New Years resolutions for my photography; in addition of course to the normal lose weight, be happier, manage my money type that I make every year.

With that said, here are my 12 resolutions to make myself a better photographer in 2006.

1 – Take More Pictures
This one is a no brainer. Just like a basketball player gets better by practicing basketball, a photographer gets better by taking photographs.

Even if it just running down to the local park to take pictures of trees and flowers, every image is practice that will ultimately make me better. And the more photographs I take, the more different situations I’m in which will help me to learn my cameras better.

2 – Learn to use my light meter
I photographed a wedding last summer that was in a fairly dark church, but the bride and groom were lit with spotlights from the back. I knew this would cause problems with my camera’s built in meter, so before the ceremony I took a reading with my Sekonic. But, I didn’t trust myself enough to use those readings and I let my camera decide on the metering. While the images weren’t bad, the exposure was slightly different between each shot and required me going back through and doing some slight adjustments to each before handing the images over the client. Had I trusted my meter I wouldn’t have had that issue.

3 – Get better at studio lighting
This one goes along with number 2. I got an Alien Bee strobe for Christmas and have spent the last few weeks learing to use it.

My first try at studio lighting was my Canon 550ex flashed into a Lumiquest pocket softbox. Obviously not an ideal setup, but it’s what I had at the time. That graduated into an umbrella mount, but still using the 550ex on auto. Needless to say, my exposures were all over the place.

With the Alien Bee I’m, of course, no longer able to use auto settings. This turns out to be a great thing for me. I’ve started trusting what my flash meter tells me, and I’m starting to nail exposures.

Now I just need to work on feathering and learning how to make the shadows do what I want. I’ve found it’s pretty easy to get a good image by just blasting enough light into the umbrella with a reflector on the other side of the person. But this does not make for interesting lighting.

4 – Get my images organized
I’ve been using iMatch for the past couple of years to organize my images; first the scans that I’ve done from slides and print film, and now the images coming from my digital body. It was easy to stay organized when I was only scanning a couple of dozen images a day. Now I may come back from an assignment with 1,000 plus images and need to get them organized. It’s a little harder to stay motivated for organization when it is on that kind of scale.

I’m trying to keep myself using IPTC data to store copyright information along with a short caption telling me what the image is. That way, even if my iMatch database gets lost (deleted, corrupted, whatever), I can still get the basic information I need from the file itself.

I’m also trying to keep up with categorizing my images. Unfortunately, right now my @Uncategorized category has about 2,500 images still waiting to be sorted.

5 – Use my tripod more often
A couple weeks ago I went down to Brazos Bend State Park to take pictures. Under the trees, and an overcast sky, it was fairly dark. So I did what I normally do – bump up the ISO and open up the lens. Well, y’all know what f/4.5 does to close ups. The center was in focus but the front and back was blurry. Had I used my tripod, I could have stayed at ISO 100 and had an f/16 of f/22 aperature to keep everything I wanted in focus. Worst part, my tripod was in the car about 1,000 feet away.

Last weekend I did better. I went down to Bear Creek Park in Houston and made myself leave the camera on tripod the entire time, which I needed to do anyway as dark as the trees made everything. And having it on the tripod forced me to slow down and think, which really helped the image quality. I’ll have to post some of those images when I get a chance to sort through them.

6 – Stop being confined by a 2×3 proportion
Digital makes it very easy to do custom crops. Couple that with a lab that will print any size I ask, and there is no reason that I should have to print everything as a normal print size. I think that we are so used to normal print sizes (4×6, 5×7, 8×10, etc) that photographs at these sizes lose effect, where a 12×36 inch print is more impressive just because it’s something we’re not used to. Right now I’m in to 12×24 inch prints. Something about that size just works for me.

7 – Think more
Too often I get locked into the mindset of ‘hey, that’d make a good picture, snap, done’. And you know they never come out as well as I thought.

I need to make myself pay attention to the shutter speed and f-stop, use manual mode more often, watch out for trees growing out of someones head and blades of blurry grass in the foreground, use the DOF preview button. I need to look at every corner of the viewfinder before I hit the shutter.

8 – Find somewhere new to photograph
I live in Houston. As big of a city as this is, there is bound to be places to photograph that I haven’t been to yet. I just need to find them.

9 – Go back and explore places I’ve already photographed
I spent about 4 hours at Brazos Bend. It’s a 4,500 acre park, so I certainly didn’t see that much of it. Plus I went in January. I need to go back and photograph it again.

Of course, this applies to every place I’ve ever been with a camera. There is always a new way to look at things, new techniques to try.

10 – Quit blaming the equipment
Sometimes I get a little too tied up in photographic forums and think that I need the latest and greatest equipment to be able to photograph properly. This is nonsense. Although I am happy with my photography, I know that it very rare for the camera to be the limiting factor, it’s usually me. Sure, more resolution would be nice; a bigger buffer, better lenses, all that would be great. But I rarely look at an image after getting home and think that it was an equipment issue.

11 – Keep posting to this blog
Sure, it’s a little bit of an ego thing posting photographs here. But it also helps keep me motivated to stay behind the camera. I think it is because I’m doing something with the photographs rather than just letting them sit on my hard drive.

12 – Take more photographs
Yeah, I know I’m cheating listing this one twice. But I think it’s that important.

I’m planning on forcing myself to take photographs at least once a week. Even if it’s simply photographs of my dogs, I need to keep practicing. Who knows, some of these practice shots may become some of my favorites. It’s happened before.

13 – Your turn
So, what are your photographic resolutions for this year? If you want to use this question just to get yourself thinking, that’s great. If you want to share your answers, there’s a comment form below.