Hard Way #1

Keep doing what you’re currently doing. Keep following all the experts on YouTube and Instagram. That way you’ll get loads of conflicting opinions to confuse you.

There’s a lot of myths put out there to confuse you. To be a proper photographer, you must shoot in full manual mode.

To be a proper photographer, you must use prime lenses etc., etc. That works for the gurus because they’ve got 20, 30, even 40 years of experience. They know their way around their camera. They can grab a lens and know exactly what look it’s going to give them.

I’m just like you just a few months or a few years ahead. I used to take loads and loads of photos like this that were mostly flat and uninteresting, just like you’re probably struggling with.

And very occasionally, I’d get a half decent one thrown into tease me.

That is the hard way trying to figure out what works, what didn’t and why. But that’s not you yet. If it were, you wouldn’t be on this webinar.

And while they’re full of good information, they probably won’t work for you because they can’t help you when you get confused when you don’t understand something. You can’t find what you’re looking for, unless you know what to look for.

It’s like trying to Google where to buy a thingamajig to fix your whatjamacallit, when you don’t know the proper names for things. You can’t ask books questions. You can’t ask how do I whatever? Or why isn’t so and so working? They don’t know what you’re struggling with.

They show pictures of awesome locations you can’t access

Exotic insects from the tropics. 

They use expensive kit that you can’t afford. I get it. You want to know how to get images like these without traveling halfway around the world or investing in loads of kit.

Hard Way #4

Take hundreds, even thousands of images trying to figure it out by yourself.

And yes, okay, you’ll capture the occasional awesome image, and that’s what keeps us going. But you don’t really know what you did.

Maybe you’ve got your camera on auto, so it’s deciding some of the camera settings. And yet, these key settings make a big difference to how your images look. So you need to know and understand what they do for your photos.

You need to understand why the photo you took is much better than the one you took five minutes earlier, or five minutes later.

So there are hard ways to improve your photography and to try and battle through those things on your own.

There’s some kind of almost martyr element that there’s that badge of honour with the people trying to figure things out for themselves. They refuse all help and are like, “No, no, I’m fine. I’ll do it all by myself.” There’s that badge of honour.

But to me, that’s just a massive waste of time to try and figure that stuff out by yourself. Why not get help from people who spent years, thousands of hours, and thousands of pounds on learning, etc., investing in themselves. And you can take advantage of that. And once you get that help, that’s when you can get that incredible buzz when you look at your images, and they make you go, “Wow.”