Pixiq

Have you ever been frustrated by not "getting the shot"? I know this is true for many of the photographers I work with around the country. So how do you improve your odds on getting that shot?

I think this comes largely from shooting a lot of photos. Think back about how you learned photography. Did you really understand how to use depth of field or to choose shutter speed properly after only shooting 100 photos? Does anyone learn good composition without shooting a lot of images?

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, notes that research says that true masters of their field typically have over 10,000 hours of experience before they are truly at the top of their field. The photographer Edward Steichen, who was a commercial photographer in the first half of the 20th century, is said to have photographed a single white egg on a white plate 1000 different ways so he would understand light. Now that seems a bit extreme, but then again, Steichen was an extremely successful photographer in his time. 

And anyway, taking extra photos with digital is cheap and you get to see instant results! Neither was possible when we shot film. I remember learning photography and waiting impatiently to see my results. You could experiment by trying different things while photographing with film, but you had no idea of the results until the film was processed. And you also got a big bill for that processing. 

Once you have your camera and memory card, it costs nothing to take extra photos. So check that LCD and if a shot doesn't work, try it again. Experiment with a different shutter speed, a different angle to the subject, a different background, a different ambient exposure and so forth. You can actually do a lot of such experimenting very quickly, and the cool thing is, you see the results immediately. And that can be a lot of fun, too!

Flower photography is a great place to experiment because you have an attractive as well as non-moving subject. And over the next couple of months, flowers will be coming up all over the country. I love this time of year. I will be doing a workshop at the Light Photographic Workshops in California next month where we will be going out into wonderful landscapes filled with wildflowers. They are offering a special rate for this workshop, too. You can see more at the Light Workshops blog.