I get asked a lot on how I started photography, usually from beginner photographers. This is quite a common question and I myself used to go around asking about that as well as I was starting out.
As I progress through the years though, what I suspect to be the real point of interest is not how I got interested in photography initially (frankly, we all are interested at some point in our lives, and to varying extents) but rather, how I stayed motivated.
I am by no means saying I never lost motivation. This is precisely how I came up with this blog post series - THREE common reasons why beginner photographers give up, and THREE effective ways each to grow out of your circumstances.
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Here goes the FIRST REASON of the series —
Your work seems ‘off’
Somehow, your shots just look ‘off’. You can’t really pinpoint what it is exactly but the photos just don’t have the looks that you intended them to have.
You would see other people’s work out there, wondering how the hell did they create those photos. Then, you come to conclude that you just aren’t gifted enough to join the party.
In reality —
What beginner photographers don’t realise, is that cameras capture data VERY DIFFERENTLY from the human eye. For as long as you have been alive, you have been trained to see the world through your own eyes. And now you are starting to document the world through an entirely different system that gives you different focal lengths, colour rendering and what not.
Do you realise how drastic a change that is?
You should, because if you don’t, these misconceptions would be eating into your motivation to create.
And therefore, every photographer goes through the initial stage of learning how to see things through the camera.
Pay attention to —
The effect of focal length
One of the critical elements that determine how a photo ‘looks’ is the visual sense of ‘width’ - how far away do you, as the viewer, feel that you are from the subject? How distorted are the edges?
If you did attempt to research on this as a beginner, the mass of information that you have at your disposal probably leaves more questions than answers. Let me point you to some resources that I personally found helpful.
When it comes to complex and technical matters like these, seeing heaps of wordy articles is a surefire way to kill the budding motivation in you. A better way, to me personally, is to watch videos instead.
Jessica Whitaker’s video on experimenting portraits on Canon 35mm, 50mm and 85mm lenses.
Jessica Whitaker is a youtuber/ New York based photographer. I always take ideas from her videos. She does amazing work and gets her point across without being too technical.
This was exactly the video I watched to understand why my portraits were looking strange - check it out here.
At this point, you don’t need to know the specifics about focal lengths. All you need is to acknowledge that the focal length of a lens changes how things look. FYI, the focal length of the human eye is somewhere between 35mm and 50mm.
What you can do —
Just buy more lenses of different focal lengths!
Jokes, don’t do that (yet).
Get used to the focal length you are shooting on, and train yourself to imagine in your head what the final image would look like when you see something you want to shoot. As you tune your vision, you will start to see things that you know would look good on your camera; similarly, you avoid things that seem nice at first sight but are going to look not as good on camera.
Summary
To wrap things up, here is what we talked about:
Beginner photographers lose motivation often because their work looks ‘off’
One culprit of this phenomenon is the difference of focal lengths between the human eye and the camera lens
Get better by getting accustomed to how your camera sees things
More sharing coming soon!
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Keep shooting, keep creating!
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