I want to crawl in a hole.

[wildmaven]

Thank you, everyone. You put a smile back on this gal's face just in time for bedtime. :heart:

Well, you have people here to pat you on the back to make you feel better and if that is what you need, you probably will say my critisizum isn't constructive either.

Actually, yours is EXACTLY what I want and need. :hug:: Without any constructive criticism, there is no learning involved. I appreciate you taking the time to go into detail. As for covering the butterflies, if I can maintain a calm appearance when I have just seen that my patient's body is filled with cancer, I think I can fool a 4 year old into thinking I'm not nervous. :mrgreen: (I work in nuclear medicine until the golden day when I can do photography full time)

Marian

 

[zaramuni]

I know exactly how you feel - esp. the nervousness. One of my friends was very harsh when I first started shooting and this caused me to lose my confidence and hold off on properly charging customers for the first two years. But what everyone else says is right.....if your customers are happy that's all that matters. I finally have customers that are willing to pay me properly and they love my work. I will never do pictures for my friend - who by the way still thinks my work is crap, but then again her opinion is a lot less important to me now. What other people say about looking back at your shots a year from now is true too. Sometimes I find myself reworking old shots when I've learnt a new technique or wishing that I took shots from a different angle.

 

[bellacat]

I'm a little late responding but what more can i add that has already been said. Keep a chin up and with time I know you will have amazing shots. We all at some point have been in the exact place you have.

Recently I was a second shooter for a picnic function for a local organization I'm in. After the picnic was over and many people were getting ready to leave I got permission from the organization founder to set up a concept shot. The main photographer for that shoot yelled at me in front of everyone saying the shot i was setting up was going to turn out horrible and not to take it. I know the lighting was off and there was no way I could even think about using the photo in color but after some PP work it turned into a nice (not great) shot that every really enjoyed including the organization founder. While I hated the embarrassment and humiliation this person did I know she meant well and was just trying to offer advise but in the wrong way.

I didn't mean to hijack your thread but basically what I'm trying to say is that not everyone is going to like your photos. this is why there are many photographers with many styles. And we all have to start somewhere and learn from our mistakes. Just keep moving forward and try and hold your chin up. What matters most is what the client thinks and if they like or love the photo then you succeeded.

 

[Mike Jordan]

Thank you, everyone. You put a smile back on this gal's face just in time for bedtime. :heart:



Actually, yours is EXACTLY what I want and need. :hug:: Without any constructive criticism, there is no learning involved. I appreciate you taking the time to go into detail. As for covering the butterflies, if I can maintain a calm appearance when I have just seen that my patient's body is filled with cancer, I think I can fool a 4 year old into thinking I'm not nervous. :mrgreen: (I work in nuclear medicine until the golden day when I can do photography full time)

Marian

You are welcome, Marian. I don't know about the 4 year old... sometimes they can strike terror in the strongest person.

Mike

 

[wildmaven]

You are welcome, Marian. I don't know about the 4 year old... sometimes they can strike terror in the strongest person.

Mike

Hahahha...true. Luckily, today I only have adults. Tomorrow, though, I have the following: 3 year old, 4 year old, 9 year old twins, 11 year old, 7 year old, 10 year old, 12 year old, and 2 more with unspecified ages.

While shooting today, I really tried to watch where I was cutting off the person (no cutting at wrists, elbows, etc., like you said). I also rethought my lighting and used my white backdrop instead of the black one. Can't wait to go home and process! :goodvibe:

 

[schuylercat]

Gawd - that stinks, huh? About 15 years ago I was invited to shoot a practice session for a racing driver named Bobby Rahal. Rahal was very well known, a winning driver. This was a way to get into the racing scene for me, since I was too chicken to drive.

Thing was...I didn't own a camera yet.

So...I bought a little Rebel (this was film days, you know) and a cheap lens and another cheap long zoom lens (because my friend told me I needed one) and I bought about 50 rolls of film and just pushed the button for two days. Took hundreds of shots. Good lord were they terrible.

The guy who asked me to go sifted through the shots (I shot reversal, not chrome, and made prints like an idiot) and his exact words were "Jesus! These really suck! Did you look through the viewfinder? What am I supposed to do with this crap?"

He printed two of them in On Track magazine, not because they were good, but because they were all he had. I got paid $40, and that was the beginning of a career. Not a good one, either.

Some of your shots are decent, and some are not. Hear that, believe it or don't then shrug and pick the camera back up and shoot a thousand more. Advice? Push the button. Take pictures. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. Shoot landscapes, flowers, pets, the beach, garbage dumps, dog poop, and whatever ou see. Crop it, burn it, dodge it, and throw most of it in the garbage then go...do...it...again! You have the eye: your photos show that. You have the touch, the gift the "whatever", now you need the experience.

I went to a seminar once. A guy in the audience asked the photographer "how do you capture such wonderfully beautiful shots?" The photographer said "you want to be a photgrapher too?" The guys said "Yes!"

The photographer said "what the f%$# are you doing here, then? Go get your f$%#ing camera and take some f%$#ing pictures!!!"

Good luck!!!

 

[Mike Jordan]

I have to wonder why someone that is already well known and could probably get any number of people to photograph them if they asked, asked someone that didn't even have a camera or know photography to shoot his race? It sounds like the guy that asked you to shoot learned more from that session than you did. Then again, if he didn't learn to check out his photographer first, maybe you are the one that came out ahead on it.

While your suggestion of shooting a lot of pictures is good but saying to just go out and shoot a thousand more is not. Just the mear fact of shooting thousands of pictures is not going to make someone a photographer.

Someone can shoot a thousand, 10 thousand or a 100 thousand and if they just keep shooting them the same way, they are all going to look the same way... with maybe 2 in a thousand being keepers.

When a person is learning photography, the key part is the word "learning". You take some pictures and you find out what you did right or wrong. The right things you find out why it's right and keep doing them. The wrong things you find out why and correct them. You find out by reading, and going to classes and talking to other people. Experience alone will not a photographer make. Some people are lucky and get good shots. Some people have talent and seem to know how to select good composition, pick out the less obvious angles that make a good shot. Some have a natural ability to judge light, just like some people have hearing that is perfect for music or nerves that are perfectly steady and make a good surgon. But just having these talents will not always be enough. For a few people, yes. But not for the majority of us.

While some parts of photography all have a common ground, each type of photography (flowers, pets, landscapes,portraits, weddings, sports, race car driving, etc., etc., etc.) can be very different and require different skills and a different knowleage set. When someone is learning photography, to try and learn it all is just going to confuse everything. What works in portraits won't work with pets. What works in weddings won't be the same as shooting landscapes. Shooting race cars won't be the same as shooting baseball. It's all got it's own differences. So the best advice that can be given to someone working their way up in photography... learn the basics, then learn more of an area or two until you have it down pretty good. Then learn another area and so on. It might take someone months, it might take them years. The more they learn the easier and faster it will be to learn. But to just go out and shoot anything and everything is not the way to go.

It sounds like the photographer doing the seminar shouldn't have been teaching if he was telling people they shouldn't be taking classes to help them learn.

Mike

 

[wildmaven]

While some parts of photography all have a common ground, each type of photography (flowers, pets, landscapes,portraits, weddings, sports, race car driving, etc., etc., etc.) can be very different and require different skills and a different knowleage set.

That is soooooooooooooo true! I successfully sell my landscape/wildlife photography, yet portrait photography, ESPECIALLY indoors with studio lighting, is so different!

You take some pictures and you find out what you did right or wrong. The right things you find out why it's right and keep doing them. The wrong things you find out why and correct them.

Exactly! Your suggestions in this thread really helped me on yesterdays photo shoot. And I'm sure you'll have suggestions about those as well, LOL, which will help me on the next one.

 

[schuylercat]

Mike - Yours is the voice of experience - all true. My post was meant as a "dust yourself off, eat up the criticism, and git on out there!" sort of post. If I'd listened to the jerk who dissed my first shoot, I'd have quit right there, before I invested my kids' college fund. It takes a cheerleader sometimes...

And if I’d listened to the guy at the seminar, I’d have burned ten thousand frames and never sold a shot.

Meanwhile, given my current situation I gladly defer to you here. Advice is cheap, but it’s amazing how much those little “hey, try this!” hints helped me along, and the best hints come from voices like yours, not a hand’s shaking, panicked step dad hoping to get a good shot at his boy’s wedding next May.

Oh: that editor who hired me? He was an acquaintance who was both too cheap and utterly ignorant of the peculiarities of shooting objects that move at 200 miles per hour. He was a writer, and the best thing I learned from his is this: If classical wisdom is true, it takes a thousand words to make one picture, doesn’t it?

Wildmaven - Your post was titled “I want to crawl in hole.” Please don’t. More moping: There was nothing I liked more than shooting motorsports. I got to eat lunch with my heroes, guys named Unser and Andretti and Penske. I got to walk on famous race tracks – these were like my hallowed ground. When I transitioned to consumer automotive I got to drive Ferraris and Corvettes and Vipers and all kinds of expensive, exotic cars (total guy thing!). It was the finest several years of my live. I quit. Never made money, and I left because in the end too many editors said things like:

The focus isn't sharp at all.
The lighting isn't proper (too many shadows)
The colors are bland ...
Looks like a basic racing picture ... no wow factor

Just want you to know you have a cheerleader who felt once like you did and finally threw in the towel. Don’t give up. Go tear ‘em up!