One of the hard parts about working to improve your photography is that the progress is often so slow and incremental that you can’t even really see it--it’s like watching grass grow.
Today I want to share with you a metric for helping see how far you’ve come. Take a photo from your portfolio--one you were really happy with at the time, really proud of. Then critique it and re-do it. Obviously you’ll want to choose a photo you reasonably could re-do rather than a one-in-a-million shot you took on a different continent. Bonus points if you re-do it using the same camera you used for the original (even if it’s not the camera you usually use now).
Remember you’re not trying to re-create the original photo so much as you are trying to revisit and improve on it. Your self-critique of the original should help you find ways in which you can improve on the photo. Maybe you have distracting elements in the background. Maybe the photo would be better served by different lighting. Maybe your composition wasn’t as strong as you thought at the time. Maybe changing the depth-of-field or angle or focal length would more clearly communicate your idea for the photo. Chances are you’ll have ideas about how better to post-process the photo as well. Whatever the case may be, go back to the same spot and photograph it again. But do better this time. And when you’re done putting the finishing touches on your new version of the photo, here’s the most important part of the exercise:
Take both photos and put them side by side. Have a good, long look at them together. Make a mental note or even write down what you did better, what things you know now that you didn’t know then. Bask in the knowledge that you have actually improved in visible, noticeable, quantifiable ways since you took the original. Feel motivated. Go take more photos.
Here’s a photo I took in 2010 at a beach in California, when I was 18. I was using my first ever DSLR, a Canon Rebel XSi (450D) at the time, and remember walking away from the location feeling like Ansel Adams would be appearing as a force ghost to congratulate me any minute.
He didn’t.
Years later, in 2013, I found myself at the same beach. Didn’t have the XSi with me, since I wasn’t necessarily intending to re-create the shot, but decided to do so in the moment with my 5D Mk II. I knew what I was doing a lot better this time, and I think the shot reflects that.
Still waiting on Ansel though.
Ironically, it’s now 2022 and I can compare these two photos side by side and see things I like better about the first one. The processing is less skilled and refined, but also moodier in a way that fits the photo better. The foreground is more emphasized, with a more complex leading lines that cause the eye to linger on the photo longer. In the second photo, I composited several exposures together so I could seamlessly clone out all the people on the pier. In the first one, the lone figure on the pier adds a feeling of melancholy that is absent from the second. They’re simply different photos, and while I would probably choose to print and hang the second over the first, there are things about the first that did not improve in the second. Maybe next time I’m in California, I’ll try for a third version.
So get out there and take another swing at a shot you really like from your portfolio. See how far you’ve come.