How to improve your photography skills

If there’s one truth about photography that almost each and every photographer out there, pro or amateur, will agree on- its this: You can always improve your photography skills. There’s always more to learn.

Over the past five years or so, I have taken myself from a totally I-know-nothing-but-will-try-whatever-might-work approach to a different place with photography. Today I’m getting more confident with my ability, friends ask me for advice, I enjoy results, I can plan an image ahead and then execute it and I even got to publish some images and brush up against some real professionals. Now, the point of this story isn’t to feel good about myself, but to emphasize the point that the more I progress, the more I fell I’ve got to learn and improve.

So, this post is dedicated to explain a few simple methods of improving your photography skills, regardless of where you “feel” you’re at. These methods, at least for me – are proven.

Two notes:

• This list isn’t in any order of priority, they are all just as good as the other. Except maybe for the last one.
• Whenever you see “unusual” – refer that to yourself and your own comfort zone, not to anything too bizarre…OK? let’s go.

Pick the unusual topic

We all have things we like to photograph and repeat. For me its mountain biking and landscape, someone else might prefer portraits. Make a habit of avoiding your habits, and pick a topic you’ve never tried photographing before, something like I’ve shown on my musical instruments post, or pull out your camera in the local coffee shop, you might find something interesting there.

Shoot an unusual setting or location

Different places require different perspective. Forget about the topics, find a setting or a location you’ve never been in, or that requires you to think differently. I recently hitched a ride with a friend that owns an ultralight airplane- sounds great forlandscapes right? I thought so too, but being strapped in a sit without too much movement ability, and with a limited field of view, had me taking into consideration restraints I’ve never dealt before. Can’t fly? go underwater, can’t do that? try shooting from inside a moving car (not while driving!), or climb a tree. You’ll find something if you look for it.

Photograph at a different time of the day

Sunrise and Sunset have the best lighting conditions for photography, usually. Try a different time, more challenging- how about a dark night in the desert, or high noon somewhere else which makes it difficult to get that nice and easy exposure.

Go out to photograph with friends that get what you’re doing

Practice makes perfect, not just in photography. The case with photography is that those not holding a camera may quickly run out of patience waiting for you to get that perfect shot in the middle of a hike. Especially when it’s the 20th in the last couple of hours. If you’re shooting outdoors, go out with friends who have the patient or even wish to cooperate with your attempts. Some of my mountain biking friends are happy to push themselves back up the hill just to get one nice shot- perfect partners for my practice.

Photograph fast moving objects

Find things that move fast, for me it’s not a problem since I’m a fan of mountain biking. You might need to look for the right setting- go to a local competition, race course, sports venue or just the highway. When your object moves fast- you need to react fast, compose fast and set your camera correctly ASAP. This is good practice in quick adjustments and finding the right tool at the right time, and you can also practice movement related techniques such as panning.

Get in Close

Try macro photography. When you need to get really close to a small object, composition changes. Take your time, use a tripod, find easy objects like flowers and plants. Don’t challenge yourself with the object, but try to be strict and original with your composition. Really invest in each shot, and see where that gets you.

Keep it open wide

Got a nice mid range zoom lens? great. Now try not using it. Pick a scene, perhaps a nice market, and go through a whole session with the lens set on its widest (if it’s a 28-70 for instance, keep it on 28). This means that if you want an object to appear larger in your frame, you simply need to walk up to it. It’s a great exercise to think differently about camera placement and the relation between you, your object and the surroundings.

Get rid of your gear

Take my previous tip a step forward and release yourself from any technical advantage your fancy equipment gives you. Go out for a session with your simple point and shoot, those can prove themselves if you don’t depend only on gear for quality. Take that even a step further and use an old film camera or buy one of those use&develop disposable film cameras, that will take even the screen preview we’re all so used to away from you. Deal with the results in an old school fashion. One of my point and shoot cameras sent an image to a cover!

Always be ready and spontaneous

There’s never a bad moment for photography. Have your camera with you always, even if its your point & shoot backup. You never know when you can bump into an interesting situation and what you can produce and learn from it. I never expected to find a drummer circle in the middle of a quiet Dutch city, but I did, and I had the camera- and that was a lot of fun.

Read and Learn

The best way to improve is to use your camera, but don’t dismiss theory at all. It might benefit you to take a course and refresh what you already forgot, or make sure you really know how to operate the shutter, aperture and get that perfect exposure out of your camera. Today there’s also tons of material for free online, just like thearticle section here, and on numerous other resources and forums. Do some reading, its good for you.

Get inspiration from others

See what other photographers do that you like, think about the composition they chose and why, try to figure out the technique behind the picture. Getting inspired by what other photographers do is a great way to learn and push yourself. It’s up to you to find that personal twist that gives you your own signature.

Look for feedback

Feedback is important, and today is easy to obtain. There are serious and talented photographers on various forums, mega photo sites like Flickr and photo blogs just like this one here. Our photos are sometimes a bit personal, we’re attached to them and think the best of them since they usually accompany a memory from a time and place we’ve visited. Let an unbiased eye look at your photos in an objective way, and always accept their opinion- later you can decide what to implement, and what not.

Learn to criticize your own work

OK, here’s the tough one. As mentioned before, there’s a lot more into a photo you took than a photo you just look at. We remember what caught our eye, what was the scene and that something pulled us to take out the camera and compose a frame. It’s hard to later judge our own work, but very important to do so. Look back at pictures you took a year ago, or two, or five… See where you improved over time, and try to recognize it now. Try to build an objective method to look at your own photos, and understand what can be better about them. Get yourself to delete the ones you don’t think are very good- if you manage to do that, you’re on the right way.

scrawl | Street Writing

China - Armenia Wins World Team Championship

The Chess Olympiad, which was first held in 1924, is the most elite national team event in the world. But the World Team Championship is in some ways more competitive because it includes only 10 squads, so there are no easy matches.
This year, Armenia, the No. 4 seed, was the runaway winner at the event, which ended on Tuesday in Ningbo, China. It was hardly an upset; the Armenians, behind Levon Aronian, have won two of the last three Olympiads, which are held every two years.
China, the No. 6 seed, finished second, and Ukraine lived up to its seeding by winning the bronze medal. Russia, which was the top seed and had won the last two Team Championships, finished in a tie for fourth with Hungary and the United States.
China was led by Wang Yue, who was the competition’s top scorer. Wang rose to No. 8 in the world in May 2010, but he has struggled recently and is now ranked 35th. He is not a naturally aggressive player, preferring to counterpunch or use finesse.
One of his best games of the tournament was a victory in Round 8 over Krishnan Sasikiran of India, in which Wang sidestepped an attack and then overwhelmed his opponent’s overextended forces.
It would have been dangerous for Wang to win a pawn by playing 10 ... Bc3 11 bc3 Ne4 because after 12 Ba3, his king would have been trapped in the center.
It is a measure of how heavily researched some openings have become that the position after 21 ... Bd8 had been played many times before.
Sasikiran organized a methodical attack against Wang’s king, but he built a stout defensive position. Chances were equal after 32 ... h6.
It would have been a mistake for Wang to take Sasikiran’s knight by playing 33 ... hg5 because after 34 hg5, White would have had a dangerous attack.
It was a strategic error for Sasikiran to press ahead with 34 f5; 34 Re1 would have been safer. Wang took advantage by launching a counterattack beginning with the pawn sacrifice 37 ... e3.
Sasikiran could not play 39 Rf3 because he would have been annihilated after 39 ... Re3 40 Re3 Qb1 41 Kf2 Rf5 42 Rf3 Qc2 43 Ke3 Bf4 44 Rf4 Qc3. He should have played 40 Rf3; 40 Re2 was a blunder.
Wang’s 42 ... Qc2 was too; 42 ... Rg8 would have been easily winning. But Sasikiran stumbled again by playing 43 Kf3, when 43 Kh1 was necessary. Down a piece, he resigned.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• Directed by: David Yates
• Rating: PG-13 (Violence/Scary Moments)

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4.5 rating, 189 votes

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Review Summary

Childhood ends with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series. A pop cultural happening extraordinaire, the Potter movies took uncertain flight in 2001 with Harry, then an orphan of 11, home alone with his grotesquely unloving relatives. Times were grim, at least offscreen — the first opened in November of that year — but Chris Columbus’s touch was insistently light as Harry was initiated into a world alive with odd doings, strange creatures and the evil that would almost consume it. A decade later, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint), have become powerful adult wizards while the actors are now stars. Look closely and you can see the beard inching along Harry’s or rather Mr. Radcliffe’s pale chin. Meanwhile, Ms. Watson, smoldering in bruising dark lipstick on the cover of the July Vogue, has her own hair and makeup artist now and the director, David Yates, even trains the camera on her generous peek-a-boo cleavage. Just as startling is the transformation of Mr. Grint who, in one early, anxious scene wears a goatee and a panicked look that together suggests a junior Paul Giamatti. My, how the children have grown — and the movies too. It’s taken two of them to translate J. K. Rowling’s last, exhausting tome. A long windup to the new one’s big-bang finale, “Part 1” was memorable for the death of the house elf Dobby and less so for the draggy scenes of Harry, Hermione and Ron hiding and quarreling in the wild. There’s no time for adolescent angst in war. Now, when a student (he who shall not be named so as not to ruin the fun) declares his affection for another — the air electric with fire, frenzy and young love (if never lust) — it’s because both may soon be dead. Fans of the books know how it turns out, and moviegoers can guess. Meanwhile, this sweet sentiment, especially given the casualties to come, may give you pause and also make you cry. — Manohla Dargis

Movie Details

• NYT Critics' Pick
• Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
• Running Time: 130 Minutes
• Status: Released
• Country: United Kingdom, United States
• Genre: Adaptation, Adventure, Fantasy

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

• Directed by: John Requa , Glenn Ficarra
• Rating: PG-13 (Profanity/Sexual Situations/Scatological Humor)

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2 rating, 2 votes

Review Summary

“Crazy, Stupid, Love” is, on balance, remarkably sane and reasonably smart. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, this movie, packed with appealing stars, is a smooth blend of modern comic genres with a surprising undercurrent of dark, difficult emotion. Essentially a study in the varieties of masculine sexual confusion, it travels the circuit from bromance to a kind of Y-chromosome weepie that might be called male-odrama, with a detour into the briar patch of adolescent awkwardness. Steve Carell, who on the big screen often impersonates sweet, anxious guys dutifully holding their inner Michael Scott firmly in check, plays Cal Weaver, an everyman with a family, a nice suburban house and an office job. He also has a bad haircut and terrible fashion sense, as he will be told by Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a pickup artist who volunteers his services as coach in the game of seduction. Cal accepts the offer because his wife of more than two decades, Emily (Julianne Moore), has told him that she wants a divorce, and that she has cheated on him with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) only slightly less nebbishy than Cal himself. Nursing his self-pity at a sleek local bar, Cal meets Jacob, who tries to do for him something like what Will Smith did for Kevin James in “Hitch.” (The movie analogy Jacob proposes is Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid.”) In a determined, half-pathetic attempt to even the score with Emily, Cal sets out to score with as many women as he can. Complications, as the saying goes, ensue, but they are not necessarily the ones you might expect. The script (by Dan Fogelman, whose other credits include “Bolt” and “Cars”) follows what seem to be tangential threads of plot. These are eventually spun together in a chaotic climax that manages to be astonishing without destroying the film’s hard-won credibility. — A. O. Scott

Movie Details

• Title: Crazy, Stupid, Love
• Running Time: 117 Minutes
• Status: Awaiting Release
• Country: United States
• Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

The Future (2011)

• Directed by: Miranda July
• Rating: R (Sexual Situations)

Average Reader Rating

4 rating, 3 votes

Review Summary

To appreciate “The Future,” Miranda July’s ingeniously constructed wonder cabinet of a movie, you may first have to pass through a stage of mild annoyance or even something more intense. A recent profile in The New York Times Magazine depicted Ms. July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of “The Future” seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response. Are you curious? Enchanted? Frustrated? All of the above? The two main characters, Sophie and Jason, a Los Angeles couple played by Ms. July and Hamish Linklater, are sweet and sincere, but also maddeningly passive, and their tentative, timid approach to their own lives might inspire equal measures of protectiveness and impatience. We first see them on the couch of their modest, bohemian apartment, each with a laptop, looking more like twins or a shaggy, bony, two-headed creature than like romantic cohabitants. Sophie and Jason dwell in a state of becalmed, bemused anxiety. Though they are well into their 30s and measure the span of their relationship in years, they seem as shy and unworldly as children, passive-aggressively resisting the demands and enticements of adulthood. Sophie teaches dance classes for toddlers, Jason has a low-level tech job helping confused consumers troubleshoot over the phone, and the two of them, individually and as a pair, occasionally glance at a vague and receding horizon of ambition, artistic and otherwise. But “The Future” is much more than a precise, deadpan portrait of a sensibility likely to be recognizable to the Sophies and the Jasons in the audience (or to anyone who has run into them at the local coffee shop, organic bakery or artisanal ice cream truck). Ms. July’s gift as a filmmaker, very much evident in her first feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” lies in her ability to will the prosaic facts of the world into a condition of wonder. The anti-literal aspects of “The Future” might be described as surrealism, magic realism or Jabberwockian nonsense, but none of these terms quite capture her ability to blend whimsy and difficult emotion. — A. O. Scott

Movie Details

• NYT Critics' Pick
• Title: The Future
• Running Time: 91 Minutes
• Status: Awaiting Release
• Country: Germany, United States
• Genre: Comedy, Drama

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Review Summary

Galloping across the desert, his inscrutable baby blues fixed on the horizon, Daniel Craig makes for a surprisingly convincing cowboy. Some actors, including a few in his new movie, “Cowboys & Aliens,” look too modern for old-timey roles. There isn’t enough grit, suffering and poor nutrition in their faces, and their gestures and gaits are timed to the impatient rhythms of the information age. But Mr. Craig, with his brutally handsome face and coiled physicality, looks like a rawhide whip that’s just itching to get cracking. — Manohla Dargis He does, eventually, though it takes the director, Jon Favreau, a long time to wake up his movie, giving it a good kick about a half-hour in. Maybe it’s all the western clichés he had to line up, including the dusty town, the gun-toting preacher, the mild-mannered doctor, the trigger-happy scion of a powerful cattleman adored by the American Indian orphan who would make him a better son. Don’t forget the surrogate for this PG-13 picture’s presumptive audience, a wide-eyed boy whom you half expect to cry out for Shane. And then there’s the faithful pooch that in one scene yelps when (finally!) he encounters a genre-hopping extraterrestrial with razored lobster claws that looks like a cousin of the monsters from the “Alien” films. That these new beasties even evoke the nightmarish creatures that the artist H. R. Giger created for the first “Alien” film is a testament to his genius and to this movie’s lack of imagination. It’s too bad. Mr. Favreau, who directed the “Iron Man” films, isn’t an innovator, but he can have a nice, light touch, and his actors always seem as if they were happy to be there, which is true here too.

Yao Ming's Retirement

As Towering Star Retires, China Is Unprepared to Replace Him

BEIJING — Nine seasons after Yao Ming walked onto a basketball court in Texas and inspired a generation of young Chinese to learn to dribble — or at least to watch until the final buzzer — his looming exit from professional basketball is being accompanied by nostalgia for the man who became a national hero. It is also triggering frustration over why no one in China, which has tens of millions of basketball players, appears capable of replacing him as an N.B.A. star.
For nearly a decade, China has been enthralled by the cult of Yao spun by Communist Party propagandists and corporate sponsors: the winner, the gentle giant, the favorite son. His image was ubiquitous here, and the public basked in his glow even as other Chinese players in the N.B.A. sputtered.
Yet his retirement is forcing many Chinese to acknowledge that their country has relied on Yao alone for victory and national pride, ignoring shortcomings in the state sports system that leave China facing a future bereft of N.B.A. and Olympic basketball glory.
“We can either choose to blame the gods and whine about our misfortune or we can step up to the plate and train the next generation of basketball talent,” Zhang Weiping, a basketball commentator and former national team member, wrote in an editorial last week.
Yi Jianlian, who Time magazine once predicted would be the next Yao, is now an unrestricted free agent after being dropped by the Washington Wizards. Sun Yue, the only Chinese national to play point guard in the N.B.A., was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers but played 10 games, averaging a mere 0.6 points, before his demotion to the Development League. He has returned to the Chinese Basketball Association.
China, Zhang wrote in Basketball Pioneers magazine, must develop smaller, faster and more skilled players like the ones who thrive in the West.
“China has no shortage of this kind of talent,” he said. “We simply have coaching and systemic problems that prevent us from discovering and developing these players.”
While the United States develops players through an almost Darwinian process of natural selection in youth leagues, high school teams and colleges, China has a rigid, Soviet-inspired state network of athletic schools, coaches and bureaucrats that selects players as early as age 4.
Yao, the son of exceptionally tall basketball players, was a 5-foot-7 third grader when he was plucked by a local sports school for a life of endless drills geared entirely toward molding him into Olympic material. Every professional Chinese player has a similar body and biography. And yet, before and during the 30-year-old Yao’s N.B.A. career, China has managed to reach only the Olympic quarterfinals.
The state recruiting strategy is rife with problems. Officials choose children from across the country based solely on how tall they are. “If height were the determining factor, we would be the best team in the world,” said Li Nan, 32, who works for a Beijing advertising agency and plays basketball in his free time, noting that every member of the national team is 6-9 or taller.
But youth and height, as any N.B.A. fan knows, do not alone predict victory on the court.
“At age 10, you can’t identify the next Allen Iverson,” Bob Donewald Jr., the American coach of China’s national team, said in a phone interview. Nor the next Derrick Rose, the N.B.A.’s most valuable player last season, who stands 6-3.
As the coach of the national team and before that the Shanghai Sharks, Yao’s former team, Donewald sees the structural problems plaguing Chinese basketball up close. The system’s failures, he said, directly affect the quality of his players.
“What’s amazing is that in a country of 1.3 billion I can’t find a point guard,” he said.
A case in point is Shanghai, population 22 million, which picks a maximum of 30 people for its club team. “If you’re not selected, there is no coaching, no practices and no training,” Donewald said. “China is filtering through guys and cutting them off so early there’s no way for them to get better.”

Best Places to Retire Overseas

U.S. Wins in China

The United States won the new 5-kilometer open water team event at the world aquatic championships in Jinshan City, China. Ashley Twichell, Andrew Gemmell and Sean Ryan finished in 57 minutes 0.6 seconds.

GRAFFITI WRITING