Is Your Photography Improving?
Now that the first quarter of the year is over, I was thinking back on what I may have learned or improved upon in the last three months. While I didn’t sit down and write out specific goals, I do constantly think about my edits and how I can make them better. And of course, I always want to create more beautiful photographs. For me, it comes down to a few things:
Focus on the light
Take it slow
Careful with color
These may be obvious, but it’s also really easy to get into a routine when editing and not really think about all the things that I need to think about. Light is always first, and remains first throughout the entire edit. Whether it’s basic adjustments to the raw file, or more complicated masking to shift things a little, light is #1.
Slowing down, for me, pays big dividends. I used to race through my edits like it was a contest or something. I don’t know why, other than that I had limited free time and wanted to have a bunch of photos ready each week to share on the blog or socials. But now I go slower, have more intention, and get better results too.
And of course, I love lots of color, but even for me sometimes it can be too much. I pay a lot of attention to how the colors look together, and whether I should desaturate some of them in favor of others. It’s a balancing act but using masking tools can help quite a bit in this, along with tools like HSL.
Bottom line is that when you focus on improving, and put into practice the things you have learned, it does improve your photos, and often dramatically so.
