You're Making Photography Harder Than It Needs to Be

I feel like we're at a place where pretty much all the photography advice anyone can give has been given before many many many times. But I've actually found that going against the grain and doing less ended up being more beneficial than following every single thing I heard. And that's what this video is. It's taking some of the biggest bits of photo advice, doing less with them and having them work better. First thing I suggest, which sounds totally counterproductive, is to stop learning. Information is so ridiculously readily available now and most of us will get our information from YouTube and there's always another tutorial, always some more tips, always some more advice. And I get that that's what this is. But I'm trying to rail against that a little bit because I think when we're just taking on information all the time none of it goes in, well some of it goes in, but it just overwhelms us and it leaves us feeling like we don't really know what to focus on. Especially if that learning isn't necessarily structured and with YouTube it often isn't structured because you see something and you have that kind of impulse to click it there and then rather than that being part of a wider thought process. Usually you need time for learnings to settle and for them to have any kind of impact and to actually put them into practice. Instead I'd suggest just taking your camera out and taking photos and wait until you actually run into a problem or stumble across something that you don't know the answer to. That's when learning should be actioned and that's when we should look for those answers and then work on them and then implement that and then repeat the cycle the next time you run into a problem rather than trying to take everything on at the same time because it feels like too many of us have outsourced our learning curriculums to YouTube and AI and I get why. Knowledge feels like you're making progress it feels like you're getting somewhere the more you know but over time I've just realized that that's not the case it just confuses and overwhelms us and prevents us from focusing on actually doing the photography. I'm guessing it's not a good look is it photographing in a kids park. There's a traffic cone now so you know I mean in fairness to me there are no kids here they're probably all at school or nursery. We're avoiding the 32 degree midday sun. Thankfully there's no one else here either because I grant you it does look a little weird just please don't report me. I'm resting quite a lot today given that I am on my bike and it's quite hot but this is about photography and it's not bikes but the same thing goes because creativity isn't something most people can call on all the time and it kind of comes and goes and people describe it as being like waves or like seasons and sometimes there's a season for you know in the sun and others there is a season for being inside. I'm not sure that makes sense but I'm running with it. I've heard of quite a lot of people recently talking about burnout myself included and it can be burnout to do with well creative burnout people put it as but I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I felt burnt out making videos and thankfully I'm through that now but what I did when I felt like that is I did more photography that's what I wanted to do that was what I was pulled towards and I think you can be burnt out by a particular creative activity and what I found really works is almost like filling the gap with another one so that you're still being creative you're still working that part of your brain you're just doing something else for a lot of people suggest that you need to just push your way through it and just keep doing it and eventually that'll work and I've found through practice that it doesn't it actually makes it worse and the best artists in the world they know this because if you look at their output on average a lot of them spend quite a lot of time at rest saving themselves for those kind of bigger periods of being creative although counterintuitive taking time away can be incredibly beneficial and if you just kind of carry on eventually I think that's just going to mean that you need more time away from it or worst case scenario you end up killing it completely what's hard about doing it is it goes against every single productivity thing that I feel is constantly drilled into us but when you're forcing it and you're not enjoying it that's not what it's about I'm probably not going to take a photo here because it's not very exciting so I'll show you some I've taken on my way to here and a bit later I'll explain exactly what I'm doing as well I'd love to know if you've got any similar counterintuitive photography advice and if you have let me know in the comments so that other people can benefit from it as well the next one is to have zero expectations every single time you go out with your camera because I found that too many people have expectations to take a good photo most of the time if not every time they take their camera out the house and this can lead to all manner of problems after a while because you just over time if those expectations aren't met you end up avoiding actually going out with your camera because you feel like it's not going to be worth your time you feel like you're not going to get a good photo based on experience so what's the point and that's really sad a lot of my better photos were taken when I went out with zero expectations I didn't know what I was going to find I didn't know what I was going to see they weren't taken when I was watching Netflix or sat on a sofa scrolling on my phone but conversely to that when I have had expectations when I've been somewhere incredible and wanted to try and execute a certain photo it's not come off and that can be really really disappointing and if it happens continually frustrating as well and it can actually have a really negative impact on your photography as a whole because you will stop going out because you don't want to experience that disappointment when that happens you stop enjoying it and then you need to probably pay attention to point number two shooting in this way and having this expectation just isn't fun and fun is why most of us got into this in the first place so lose yourself in that creative flow and be curious and experiment and see where that takes you and just don't expect anything because then you can't be disappointed and frustrated I don't believe that anyone needs to shoot on manual mode with their cameras and certainly for those who are newer to photography I think it's one of the biggest traps that there is I don't think it's as widely pressed upon people as it used to be but so many people are still making mistakes when they're out shooting because they're forcing themselves to use manual mode when they just don't need to be photography is about light composition timing color and seeing none of it's around picking the right settings yes you need to use some settings to take a photo and capture all those things but let the camera that you've spent thousands of pounds on let that do the work until you master the main elements there's no point trying to shoot on manual because it's such a small percentage of what is really needed in photography so what is an easier way to shoot well firstly put your camera on auto iso setting an upper and a lower iso limit on full frame cameras you can push this pretty high but with noise removal in software now you can even push cameras with smaller sensors more than most people think you can then pick a minimum shutter speed that you're comfortable shooting at that will prevent any kind of camera shake and maintain sharpness and then just play with the aperture and see how that impacts things let the camera do the work and the thinking so that you don't have to and you can concentrate on all those other things that are going to make your photography better there's a really cool digger in a field here and i'm going to go for f8 on this one which is what my x100 is set to most of the time just because i'm comfortable with it and i know everything in the scene is going to be in focus assuming i focus correctly there's a lorry up here so i need to do this quickly now what i should have said here is that i typically use the exposure compensation wheel to alter my exposure paying attention to the histogram making sure that i don't crush the blacks or blow the highlights when i don't want to if you want to know more about how i set that up i have linked a video right here because it's black and it's been outside for so long i've got a message on this that i've never seen on it before which is that it's approaching its temperature limit and i think i am too because i'm out of water so i'm going to come back out in the morning because it should be nice and cooler and i can't say that script on my phone anymore either because that is also too hot and the last one is not to take a trip but to take the time most of us live for these photo trips me included i love getting away somewhere new with my camera having those new experiences getting a chance to shoot somewhere exciting recreate a photo you've seen before it's all really cool but aside from having the disappointment of missing that expectation that i talked about earlier there's something else that we're quite often missing out on when we take these trips and that is shooting things that are truly meaningful to you now these trips can be meaningful quite a lot of the time but i feel often that truly meaningful places are the ones closest to home recently i think some of my favorite photos have been taken within one hour if not 30 minutes of where i live which is exactly why i've been walking around close to home the last few days taking random photos of different things near home i've not mentioned it yet but i'm doing a bit of an ongoing project at the moment all about shooting really close to where i live and the main reason i'm talking about this now is to make a bit more of a commitment because it's kind of just been loosely happening for quite a few months now and i've started to want to pay a bit more attention to it so i'm giving myself i'm going to say a year to cover all the seasons adequately and the general premise is that i want to discover everything there is about the place i live and take as many photos as that as possible obviously there'll be a video about this at some point in the future maybe more than one but that's going to be what i spend a lot of time working on i say over the next few months whilst making this video i was exploring my local area trying to find compositions that would work at different times of day and potentially in different seasons as well basically places to come back to this is the perfect example with photography of going out and doing something without any expectation because it was the middle of the day so there wasn't really an expectation to make anything really good when i say expectation i mean in terms of photographic output the only expectation i had with this was to learn something to have fun and to enjoy myself and they're the expectations that i put on my photography at the moment because if i'm not doing those things then why am i doing it it's the time spent concentrating on these elements that will in turn make our photos better in the long term a lot of us think that we want these big photography trips but when we really pick that apart the thing we really want is time to spend on our photography when we do get a big chunk of time then going somewhere amazing seems like the right thing to do but what we forget is all these shorter periods of time in between where we can't do things like that maybe it's an afternoon maybe it's an hour maybe it is just 20 minutes it feels like the best way of using time like that is to take this local approach to photography without the expectation it fits in around our lives it adds to that long-term improvement and it contributes to the fun and the enjoyment that we initially got into photography for before expectation started to rear its head i'd love to know which of these points feel most useful to you because any of them really could have been their own video whilst the instinct is always to look for quick tips and fixes in our photography the way we really improve it over the years is by looking for the things that go into it on a daily a weekly and a monthly basis thankfully i've got through the video creation burnout that i mentioned earlier in this video and i'm really looking forward to getting back to weekly videos now as i used to do if this resonated please consider subscribing liking the video and making a comment below because doing that helps push it to other people who can then benefit from it as well i'll be back next week in the meantime enjoy your photography and make sure the only expectation you have of it is that it's fun i should have really bought sandwiches but i didn't think i'd be out this long which is often the way that's what i really enjoy about doing stuff like this is that it is just good fun and there's no expectation which keeps it being fun which means you lose hours at a time