Coronavirus & How To Keep Your Photography Fresh
With many countries recommending social distancing or not going out, what can we do during this testing time to keep out photography fresh?
The first thing I’m going to suggest is tabletop photography. And if you’ve never had a go at tabletop photography, it can be quite fun. It can be challenging, it can be creative, and you can come up with something that perhaps you haven’t done before. If you’re looking for ideas, Google tabletop photography ideas, there’s loads of them. Literally hundreds of ideas.
If you’ve never done any tabletop photography, you don’t really need any sophisticated equipment. You might need a closeup lens that fits over your standard lens so you can get them a bit closer to your subjects, but you can use window lighting, you can make up your own backgrounds. You perhaps a tripod might help you. But even that’s not essential. I’m not going to go into detail about how to do the photography today. I’ll save that for another video. But go out there, get a few ideas and have a go.
The second thing you can do is tidy up Lightroom. Now I don’t know how good you are with Lightroom. I store all my images in there, but I’m not that rigorous about one or two particular aspects of Lightroom. In my Lightroom catalogue I’ve got 86,722 photos and a lot of them are really not very good photos, but I’m not very good deleting them. I don’t know about you. I always think maybe they should be there for a rainy day. So if I put a filter on of one star photos and the numbers of photos has gone down from 86,000 to 34,000 so there’s 50,000 photos there that I haven’t rated.
And there’s a number of ways you can rate your images in Lightroom. You can use the star system, which I can use. You can use flags or you can use colours here. These are your rating tools, and again, I’m not going to go into that today, but that’s another thing you could do is look at the photos that you haven’t rated. You can select a folder, here’s a shooter client shoot for example. And if you go down and select and click on the little symbol here,next to the rating filter you can select that rating equal to. So if you set rating equal to no stars, so I’ve got 65 out of 114, so 50% of the photos in this shoot, I didn’t think were good enough. And realistically, I could go ahead and delete them. Go through your folders, make your selections, tidy them up, and then select at a high level, select all the no star photos. Just delete them en mass.
Another thing you can look at, and again it depends on how rigorous you are, is keywording. I’ve got a collection of a few photos here and you’ll see this particular one that’s selected, I’ve got no keywords. Now keywords are really useful for helping you find images. So I’m not consistent about it. I have keyworded this one with Snowdon in Wales, but I’ve not keyworded some of the others. So looking at your keywords and there are ways you can use keywords so that if you add one keyword, it will automatically add other keywords. So for example, if you added daffodil, it could automatically add yellow and plant for you. And again, I’m not going to talk about how are we doing that today, but that’s perhaps something for another day. So that’s keywording in Lightroom.
The third thing you can do is expand your knowledge, expand your learning on all topics of photography and there’s loads and loads of videos in YouTube on photography, on Lightroom, on Photoshop. Whether you want to do model photography, whether you want to do landscape photography, macro photography, whatever you want to do, there are videos out there. The issue with YouTube is while there’s a lot of good advice out there, some of it is not so good. Some of it, they don’t really explain it that well and so forth, but by all means go and have a look.
How to Capture Great Photos – Made Simple
For me, one of the key aspects of improving your photography is getting it right in camera. And to help you do that, I’ve created a course called How To Capture Great Photos Made -Simple. It’s a course on Udemy, there’s 23 modules, & it runs for about two and a half hours. There’s assignments in there to go and practice what you’ve learned, and at the end of it, I guarantee that you will be able to take better photos. They will be better in the camera and they will need less post-processing and altogether it’ll make your photography more fun. I’ll put a special link down below.
This course normally retails at full price at £199. I’ll be putting a code down below for you so you can get it today for just £17. So that’s something else you can do while you are not able to get out and about.
How to Capture Great Photos – Made Simple – £17/$17
So three things you can do. You can have a look at tabletop photography and everything in my course will help you with that. You can tidy up Lightroom and you can look at your learning. Three things there, you can do to keep your photography going if you can’t get out and about. I hope that’s been helpful. Look out for future posts as well where I’ll expand on some of these topics.