How Quickly We Rust

This summer I took a little break from work and shooting and used the time to catch up a bit on my personal life. In all I think it was about 3-4 weeks away from a camera in any serious sense. Towards the end of my break, I was starting to itch for my camera again. I set up a shoot with friend and model Diane Hope and got my friend Juan to come along and help out. It felt good to have the camera in hand again, but at the same time it felt really awkward. I felt kind of...lost. It's a good thing that I decided to do a "fun" shoot with friends after taking such a long time off instead of diving right in to something where I could really disappoint a paying client!

Well, it wasn't all bad. I was definitely rusty and took a while to get into the swing of things, but it eventually came back. After this shoot I was warmed up and ready to start clicking away again!

My Web of Photographic Knowledge

I often get asked how I come up with lighting ideas or where I learned about photography or where I get my inspiration from. The answer is not too difficult. I get most of it from the web. There is just so much information out there. You can learn from the best photographers in the world without having to set foot in a fancy art school, or take a high priced workshop. Don't get me wrong those are great places for learning and you will learn a lot there, I'm just saying you don't have to. Most top photographers these days have a website and a blog where they share their experiences, thought processes and sometimes even business plans and detailed accounts of how they went about a particular assignment. A great number of them will even post videos or podcasts to share their knowledge. All you have to do is log in and learn.

Today I'm going to share with you some of my favorite places on the web for learning and inspiration. Continue reading to get a quick insight into my most accessed bookmarks.

Learning from the Masters

I would say that about 90% of my knowledge of photography comes from content I find scattered on the web. There is just so much out there to learn from. So many great photographers willing to share their knowledge and experiences through blogs, websites, videos, podcasts, etc... The best part is that most of it is completely free! All you have to do is be willing to look for it and dive in and absorb it all.

You can go on line at any time, in any part of the world and be inspired by the likes of Joe McNally, a respected National Geographic photographer, or David Zeizer, a successful and talented wedding photographer whose blog is updated on a daily basis with priceless information about everything from the business side of photography to how to train your assistants. David's website is so thorough and full of content that I don't know when he finds time to shoot his weddings! Respected fashion photographer Melissa Rodwell has a fantastic blog with several behind the scenes videos where you can follow her thought process through a high end fashion shoot - see all the people who make a fashion shoot happen: models, stylist, hair, makeup, assistants, art directors just to name a few (warning: Melissa's site is not always safe for work). 

The point is that these days all you need to improve yourself is the desire to do so ( and a broadband connection).

Practice Makes Perfect

I was a competitive gymnast all through high school and college, so I'm no stranger to the saying "practice makes perfect". In fact, we athletes tend to take it as a sort of universal truth. It keeps us going to practice every day in the never ending quest for perfection.

My coach was more of a realist. He always told me that this particular universal truth was missing something. He would say: "practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect". I always dismissed this as just an attempt by my coach to be funny, but then one day I got the following piece of advice from my dad, which kind of made everything fall into place. My dad said to me: "stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Wow! It all makes sense now. My coach and my dad were really saying the same thing. Practice will not make you perfect unless you keep changing your approach. If you keep practicing doing something wrong, you'll just get really good a doing it wrong! You have to keep approaching the problem from different angles until you get it right. It's like evolution, if each creature born was exactly the same as their parents, nothing would evolve.

So what's all this got to do with photography anyway? Well, the same applies to photography. Practice makes perfect, but only if you keep changing things, trying new approaches to the same problem, experimenting. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you will get the same picture every time.