I will be the first one to admit that I’m a planner, whether it be my meals for the week, my daily itinerary or a photo trip, I simply love to plan. This trait can have its benefits, but can also be a hindrance. It’s great when things go to plan, which we all know rarely happens, so when it doesn’t, I’m left feeling frustrated. Naturally, throughout my journey in photography, I have done everything I could do to plan shoots, trips, and hikes. Over time I have learned making detailed plans for my photography wasn’t always beneficial. I learned there was a time and place for trying to plan, and a time when I should be spontaneous. In this blog post, I want to share my experiences and share what I have learned about when to plan and when to be spontaneous as it pertains to photography trips. My hope is whoever reading this can learn from my mistakes and experiences to better utilize planning for their photography trips.
Read MoreLessons From the Field | My 5 Most Important Nature Photography Lessons Learned
I have taken some time to reflect on the many lessons I have learned throughout my photography journey and landed on what I feel are the most important lessons I’ve learned so far. The purpose of me writing this blog is to share my experiences with these lessons and how I implemented them into my photography. I hope by doing so I can inspire others to reflect on their own photography or even learn a thing or two from what I have to share. Photography is a very personal creative pursuit and because of that these lessons can be used in many different ways with many different results depending on who learns them. So without dragging this intro on for too long, let's get into the most important lessons I’ve learned so far.
Read MoreRetrospective of 2019 | A Year of Failure, Success, and Discovery
I sit here at the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2019 reflecting on a year of failures, successes, and discoveries. The last 12 months flew by in the blink of an eye, but as I look back I remember all the awesome and not so awesome things from the year. I was faced with a lot of good, bad, and scary situations, both photographically and personally, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Through the many experiences I had, I have slowly begun to learn to roll with the punches and take challenges head-on. I plan to take this mentality into 2020 to continue what I feel is an upward trend in my photography.
During the last year, I took a lot of good, bad, and ugly photos. I want to take some time to walk through a few photos I believe me or any one reading can learn from. Either that be from the mistakes I made or hammer home what elements make a great photograph truly great. I will start off with some photos I consider to be failures.
Read MoreLessons From the Field | Two Years, Two Compositions, Two Results
Roughly two years ago I took the above two photos on two separate trips. The first photo was taken in a rushed shoot during a peak autumn afternoon very far north in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The second photo was taken up on the northwest coast of Michigan during a very cold and windy morning on the dunes. I love how I composed both of the photos I took on these separate occasions, but as time has passed I started to ask myself these questions. How can I make the photos better? What time of year would better suit these scenes? What type of light would work best? What can I do to make the photos print-worthy?
I feel I have learned a lot and improved many of my photography skills since taking these photos. I learned how to better compose a shot, how to expose a photo with post-processing in mind, how to pre-visualize the light interacting with a scene, and how to slow down. Besides learning skills and techniques I also learned a lot about myself as a photographer. I learned what my favorite type of light is, what my favorite time of the year to shoot is, and what emotions and feelings I want to convey in my photos. All of these factors combined to help me take the following two photos.
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