Ok, that’s a bit of an open ended question. I really mean, Where do I want to go with photography? That’s a very good question, and one I’m struggling to answer right now. I know I’m not alone, or at least I sure hope other budding photographers have asked themselves the same question. I’ve blogged a little on this before, but my renewal in photography came when I bought my first DSLR in 2010, the Nikon D5000. Was it the best camera to buy at the time? I’ve heard from some it was and others say no, but it doesn’t really matter and I don’t regret buying it, the one thing is that it’s really kicked me in the butt to get back to loving photography, and I do.
So, back to the question, where do I want to go with it… Ideally, I’d like to make some money at it, in the perfect world I’d love to quite IT, or at least make IT my hobby and make photography my job. That’s a long way off however. I’ve been taking some courses to help improve my skills (or at least I hope it is haha).
I’ve just signed up for a 10 week Digital photography: creating and sharing better images course that will start in May. I’m don’t really know what to expect from the course but I do know I will certainly learn a few things. At the very least, the course comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, and we’ll learn how to use that. I’ve not used it myself only played with a trial of the full Photoshop, I didn’t get much from playing with the trial as I didn’t have anything I needed to use it for so it’s hard to learn when you have no targets or goals to work towards. So, if nothing else I hope I can learn some basic photo editing and knowing what looks good and what doesn’t. Another aspect of the course will be to “teach you how to critically evaluate your own and others’ work in the spirit of continuous technical and artistic improvement”. I know what I think looks good to me, but is it good in general or only good to me? If it’s only good to me then that’s fine if I never want people to see it, or if I never want to sell the work to make a couple quid from it.
Back at the end of Feb I did a lighting course in a studio with a local model, that was a completely new experience to me on every level, and I loved it. I’d like to do more of that, but with it comes a cost, so there really needs to be something to help help offset the cost, ie: selling a few photos to help cover the studio/model costs. That’s something I am still trying to figure out, how do you make money from shooting models. Well, one way is to get some commercial work, such as shooting products (food, clothing, cars, houses, weddings?, etc). I really don’t see myself shooting weddings. That seems like a hell of a lot of work and your photos could either really make to totally destroy someone’s special day. Right now at my skill level, that is the furthest thing from my mind haha.
The one thing I know for certain is I like shooting people so I’ll keep going down that road for the time being… What this space for more updates…
