“My photos are not as good….”

So a student of mine came to me today and was asking if something was wrong with her camera. She just got a Nikon D3000 and is learning how to use it. This is one of the common complaints I hear from students just starting out in the photographic world. “My photos are not as good as….” or “why are my colors blah” or “I dont have thousands of dollars to buy the stuff I need to take good photos”.   I think this fustrates young photographers into not taking photos.  Very quickly I wanted to show her an example of what “Real Photographers shoot”….

1st- I reached into my desk pulled out a few pens from a recent staples purchase, then laid a white sheet of paper on the desk placing the pens on the paper. I arranged the pens so one had the “staples” logo facing us.

2nd- Using her camera with out a flash I shot the image. 1/25th @f5 iso:400.  I told her that I would have liked to place this on a tripod, but for demonstration sake we didn’t worry about it.

3rd- Uploaded the following image to my computer. 4th- Imported it into Aperture (Habit, what I use to manage my files), I made a few corrections and demonstrations in Aperture before exporting it to CS4 for editing. I quickly deleted some areas of the images, changed a few levels and tones. (in all honestly I would have spent more time with color on this project, but for what we were trying to do it didn’t matter) Within 6 minutes from taking the image or so this is the image I had…

5th- Now I explained to her how yes you do need some sort of editing program to do some of the tasks preformed. However, we took a really simplistic image and made it “better” for what she was wanting. Similar to all the pros out there, they take the image and then work it. There is nothing wrong with that. Even the Black & White photographers like Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon (see Chase Jarvis Post) or Alfred Stieglitz worked their images and photo manipulated them in the darkroom. Burning, dodging, cropping, manipulating the image till they got their final result.

I want her and other students to understand they can get good results with what they have right now. Just takes some time and practice. Don’t get frustrated because the images on the little LCD screen on your camera isn’t exactly like you envision. Some amazing mistakes have turned into beautiful photographs.

Side Note: Yes this image could have been shot a lot better, using a few strobes, better setting, tripod, seminar from Strobist or Zack Arias….  We just didn’t have time. This was for example purpose only. As you get better as a photographer you don’t have to spend as much time in post production.

-Brandon.