Lost my composing skill.

W

whiteflyer

Guest
I've not been talking "proper" photos for several years now, but yesterday I had a little trip out as part of my daily walk and took some photos of St Annes old pier .
When I got home I had a quick look on the web at other shot of the pier, and boy mine are rubbish, I binned the lot, now I was never very good at landscapes, but still I feel like I'm starting from scratch all over again. :(
:D
 
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I think it's often an idea not to delete pictures straight away. Maybe keep them a while and go back to them now and again over a period of days or even weeks and you might just begin to see what prompted you to take the picture in the first place. If not and after a time you're still not seeing anything in them you can then delete them. I do think making a snap judgement and binning them could be a mistake.

Anyway. Good luck with the next outing :D
 
woof woof said:
I think it's often an idea not to delete pictures straight away. Maybe keep them a while and go back to them now and again over a period of days or even weeks and you might just begin to see what prompted you to take the picture in the first place. If not and after a time you're still not seeing anything in them you can then delete them. I do think making a snap judgement and binning them could be a mistake.

Anyway. Good luck with the next outing :D
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This
You can’t ‘learn from your mistakes’ if you have no reminder of what mistakes you made.
 
But remember that even if composition isn't coming naturally, it can still be re/learned.

It can take time to get your 'eye' to see as the camera does, and to start seeing for the picture instead of the 3D view inside your head.
 
What made the other pics so much better? Does this help with things to practice again?
 
I find sometimes that I take lots of shots and then when I get home, I think "well, that's trash - what was I thinking?"

The difficulty I find is that I will use something as a subject, but when I get it home, it just doesn't work. Other times I look at an image when I get home and it pleasantly surprises me.

Best advice I can give is to go on Flickr and view and critique some photos. I always get lots of creative ideas by doing that.
 
The biggest thing you can do, I think, is stop competing. You are your own yardstick, not someone on Flickr. I look at some of the images on here and if I was measuring myself against them I might have problems too.
 
I struggle with this, too. I try and think of things like thirds, and leading lines, and repetition, and rhythm and all those things we're told about and sometimes (rarely) a composition works, and then I see other folk just lift their iPhone, click, and they have a great shot. Maybe they just have the eye!? But I'm a great believer that almost anything can be learned. This why I study books of the greats and have several (hopefully well chosen) Udemy courses that I'm working through and a couple of YouTube channels that I look at. In the end though. I think it's about practice and going out and just trying to make each session a tiny bit better than the previous one. Keep doing that and all those tiny improvements will add up.
 
Absolutely no point in comparing.

All you can ever do is shoot what was there in the best that you can, on the day, and in the conditions that prevailed
Another day another set of circumstances and another result.
 
delb0y said:
I struggle with this, too. I try and think of things like thirds, and leading lines, and repetition, and rhythm and all those things we're told about and sometimes (rarely) a composition works, and then I see other folk just lift their iPhone, click, and they have a great shot. Maybe they just have the eye!? But I'm a great believer that almost anything can be learned. This why I study books of the greats and have several (hopefully well chosen) Udemy courses that I'm working through and a couple of YouTube channels that I look at. In the end though. I think it's about practice and going out and just trying to make each session a tiny bit better than the previous one. Keep doing that and all those tiny improvements will add up.
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They might not be over thinking it. ;)
 
The thing that has worked for me is a tripod. Due to the "shake" I often get in my hands, I tend to use a tripod 90% of the time which tends to slow down the process and allows me to think more about what I'm shooting, what's encroaching into the shot, lead in lines etc. For me it helps; my images are still pants, just not as bad as they would have been......
 
delb0y said:
Ha! I'm sure you're right, Nev. Alas, when I fail to think about it, I get images that show, well, a lack of thought. :)
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It's a fine line, that's for sure.
 
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