Share Your photos, even if they’re not great

This is just going to be a short one as there is not that much to cover but I want to keep the momentum of posting going rather than perfecting something and then waiting weeks to publish it.

I was just flicking through my Lightroom catalog recently and I had some pictures that I hadn't edited from a couple of months ago. They were from a photo shoot that I didn't really plan, I was just accompanying someone else on a walk and I ended up taking some pictures.

The photo walk started around the late afternoon, so the light conditions ended up changing from daylight to sunset and then to night time. It was challenging to get used to the quickly changing light but it also made it fun and exciting. The pictures I took were nothing special, some turned out great but most were just average and some were quite poor, but I thought I'd share them all anyway and give myself permission to show work that is not to my high standard. I think by showing all sorts of images, from bad to good, you can learn to see better and also begin to learn from your mistakes.

There are a few lessons I learnt from this activity, particularly how tricky the edit phase can be if you are dealing with changing light. I couldn’t just apply one of my one size fits all presets. I had to fiddle more and understand how light changes and how that affects white balance and exposure. Looking back at the daylight versus sunset versus night images I got to also see how different the light quality was and how the mood of the images changed as the light changed.

Towards the end of the photo walk, I started to really focus on capturing some night scenes. I focused on finding spots where lights were shining against a backdrop of darkness like a house porch light or a street lamp with a dark background. I realised going through these images that my exposure could have been a bit better. In some of the photos the highlights were overexposed and in others there was way too much darkness. I guess the lesson to learn here is to take more time to get the exposure right in camera and perhaps to take a couple of bracketed shots and look at them in post to see what metering works best in these scenarios.

So the take away I took from this shoot is to try to continue to share my work, despite the quality, as there is so much to be learnt just by going over bad photos and seeing how they can be improved.

I hope you found something useful in this short post. I’ll chat to you in the next one, speak soon.

Olga.

P.S. All the pictures from the shoot are scattered throughout this blog, let me know your favourite and least favourite and why. Also, I’m curious, do you only post your best photos online or do you publish all of your images?