Practice makes perfect
It was October 2018 when I decided to follow and try a 30-day photography challenge to learn new techniques and improve my photography skills. One of the challenges I had to undertake was to capture a self-portrait, widely known as a selfie in today’s world. Part of the challenge was to post the outcome online, in an effort to push yourself to do your best work.
I’m quite self-conscious when it comes to being in-front of a lens, but I thought that the pictures I took were especially bad. Nevertheless, I did it and posted the best pictures I captured that day on my social accounts. But there was something off.
Make, learn, repeat
In the moths that followed I kept trying different styles, angles and even focal lengths on other people (mainly on my poor wife). You see the self-portraits I had captured earlier that year, I did so without a proper “portrait lens”, no studio lights or even a concept in mind. I soon realised that with the latter, your photos are bound to be boring and remain flat.
So I started experimenting with my subjects, aiming to add a touch of personality in their portraits. Every time I was trying a new approach or technique. I noted down on a piece of paper things that worked and things that didn’t work so well so I don’t repeat the same mistakes. I’ll never forget the time I tried a flash for my portraits and I got half lit half dark photos of my subject (in the same picture) and I thought I had just spent a few hundreds of dollars on a fake flashlight. I later found out that shutter speed plays a big role in this…
Like with any job in life, what makes perfect is practice, not textbooks and theory. Trying new things and seeing for yourself what works and what doesn’t, helps your learning process and ensure you don’t make the same mistakes again.
The selfie do-over
On April this year, I had just landed myself a new job and I needed to update my corporate profile with a couple of new headshots. The ones I was using were 3-year-old photos of me with quite a lot of hair still. Not an exact representation of who I am now. So I decided to do a selfie do-over and also take a few snaps for my social accounts.
This time I used all the learnings from previous photoshoots I did, so I made sure that I shot in a dark room (my bedroom) with a nice backdrop (my blackout greyish curtain), a proper light reflector, and the right shutter speed and light hardness settings on my camera and flashlight respectively.
My goal this time was to focus primarily on the theme and my expressions, to ensure the right stories would come out. There’s a different story your body tells when you want people to hire you for a job, and a different one to show your creative, more crazy, side.
I was actually quite happy with the results. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying these are perfect, but they’re clearly miles ahead of the ones I captured a year and a half ago and I can definitely see some progress.
As Matti Haapoja said, make-learn-repeat is the quickest way to improve anything in life. In other words, practice makes perfect, and I definitely stand by it.
Let me know if you like them or not. Just try to look past my ugly face and focus on the overall picture :).
Till next time…
Check out my portrait photography here.
