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A lot of photography you can’t learn without experiencing it. You must put in the time and effort and make some mistakes along the way.
Lessons Learned is about personal development as a photographer and in a broader sense it's about visual literacy. Whether you make your living taking photos for clients, you make images to sell as art, you practice it as a hobby, or you are documenting and sharing your life with the camera in your phone; you are practicing visual literacy. You're sharing how you see the world.
The majority of education on photography is intimidating and only shows how to do something without explaining why you would want to - a professional photographer shows you the results they get after years of experience, and distills that into a 20 minute video. What they are showing you is how they do something but not why. A lot of photography you can’t learn without experiencing it. You must put in the time and effort and make some mistakes along the way. So this is my experience, and I trust that it is useful to the next person asking the same questions. I often learn the most from other people's mistakes and that's actually why I'm doing it this way. Leave comments or send a message if you have a question or topic you'd like me to talk about.
Photo Fails Crunchy Skies
When elements have large and hard edges that’s a sign you’ve overdone the clarity, sharpness, dehaze, contrast, or some combination of those. The giveaway is when you see angry “crunchy” skies in a photo. That treatment can be okay in some areas of the photo when applied properly – so how do we do that properly?
Wacom Tablet for Photo Editing
Originally posted January 2016 // Updated December 2020A Wacom to solve my problem? I believe encountering new problems means that you are growing and stretching yourself into new places. By taking on new challenges you are introduced to new problems that you haven’t solved before. Approaching and overcoming those problems means that you grow. So that’s all well and good …
Basic Photo Editing
This is for anyone who is learning to edit their digital photosIf you’re ready to move past filters and presets to take more creative control over editing your images then this is for you. I created this series of videos to demystify the components of an image and give you the ability to jump into any photo editing software and …
Tripods and Heads to Mount Your Camera – focus on travel photography
Are you new to photography or perhaps just new to travel photography? Maybe you have only used a camera hand held and now you’re ready to add a tripod to your photography gear. We all ask these questions at one point. The tripods and heads that I used for studio and architecture were less than ideal for travel photography. This …
What Camera Should I Buy
Buying your first or next serious cameraYou want to start thinking creatively and taking control over your photos. You’re ready to buy a serious camera. I would encourage you to make this purchase decision based on what you want to do with the camera and ignore the tech and hype around what’s popular today. When you read an article that …
Photography Essentials for Short Trips and for Long Trips
The long and the short of it 2018 Author: Andy Yee I’m frequently asked about what gear I use when photograph and what gear to take when traveling. Essentially there are two major factors which leads me to what gear I carry. The duration of the trip and if the equipment allows me to capture the most from the trip. …
How NOT To Organize Your Photos
I have learned how NOT to organize my photos after adopting systems from other photographers to organize my photo library. In this video I show what that has taught me, and the new method I am using now after my own trial and error. Will my current method change again? Probably. What I think is important is that you should determine …
Never Delete a Photo
Never delete a photo? Okay, I don’t mean that literally; just don’t do it before you have a VERY good grasp on what a good photo means to you. I have learned this the hard way after I deleted photos from an event or shoot only to wish later that I hadn’t. When you are starting out taking and managing …
Don’t Buy Your Followers
Followers on social media channels should not be purchased. Okay, there’s my synopsis and you know where I stand so you don’t need to read on unless you want to know why I feel that way. I can’t be the only person who believes and behaves this way right? I know that social media is heavily commercialized now and growing …
Developing the Travel Experience
Developing the experience of travel through photos isn’t all that difficult but it is something that has to be learned. I prefer to tell stories in photos and it’s just as easy to be lazy when composing a story with photos as when doing it with words. When I started sharing photos I had no plan other than to use …
Photo Management – Storage and Backups
While I don’t shoot a ton of images daily right now I am making several thousand photos a year that I want to keep safe from the point of capture through to working with them and then saving them to long term backups. These processes; and no doubt the hardware, will change over time. As of January 2016, this is …
Where the Heck are all Your Photos?
Own your media so you can streamline your workflow. This video covers is about my frustration with all of the backup services trying to own my cloud storage, and how I retrieve edits and originals from social services and online backups. Beginning Photo Management is something any photographer should get a handle on before taking thousands of photos. Modern cameras …
