Cameron and I were discussing the other night about how people don’t understand why we tend to be very critical of anything we produce. “That photo/drawing/whatever is amazing! You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.” they say. “No,” you say, “this photo/drawing/whatever is awful.” I have to hold myself to a higher standard than the people around me, anyway. If I wasn’t so down on myself all the time, I would have been in cruise control from the first time I tried to shoot anything other than a snapshot and somebody told me it was really good. If I’m not satisfied with anything I do, I keep working at it until I’ve met whatever arbitrary, impossible-to-reach standard I’ve set for myself (which is never). And so it goes that I’ve been taking pictures for nearly four years now, and have produced countless thousands of photos that I absolutely cannot stand. It’s a blast. You should try it sometime.

I like that photography is a hobby similar to, say, playing guitar. Any dimwit can sit down with a guitar and eventually make it produce something resembling a song. This same dimwit can sit down with a book and really get into all the little technicalities of playing music/guitar and get pretty good at it. But even if this guy devotes his whole life to playing music/guitar, he can always get better, and though it may peak after several years of practice, he’s generally going to constantly be learning. You’re never done learning how to play an instrument the same way you’re never done learning how to use a camera; there’s just too many variables. Even though I know what all the little knobs, buttons and menu settings do on my camera, I’m still “practicing” every time I decide to go shoot with it. It’s both exhilarating and overwhelming.

Anyway, I don’t know where the fuck I’m going with that (I’m still learning how to write); I was trying to preface the announcement that I’ve made a bit of a breakthrough in the “development” of my photos. I’ve been using Photoshop for years (another one you never stop learning). I know my around the program pretty well, but I guess I don’t have that innate sense of what could make my photos look good. If I had a feel for that, I could probably come up with a way to make it happen in Photoshop, but I don’t. Lightroom came out around the same time my camera did, and I was on that bandwagon pretty quickly. I watched a seminar on using Lightroom, so again, I know my way around it pretty well, but the end result (i.e., a processed photo) is always missing something. I like a lot of photographers and I’ve seen a lot of photos, but I never really absorb what I like about them, or what makes them “good” to me. In fact, just since I got my SB-600, it’s been fun going back through my skate magazines with the lighting in mind. “Where did he place the flash? How many flashes did he use?” You never think of this stuff until you’re trying to replicate it. My new favorite part of skate videos is when the videographer is pulled out enough that you can see where the photographer set up his equipment — I slow-mo that shit. Even advertising — fashion, product, etc — something I normally tune out, is fun to look at now that I have lighting on my mind. So I started looking around on photographers’ sites/Flickrs, etc and really looking at photos. “Using the same equipment, why do this guy’s photos pop while mine are flat and static?”

Turns out I was in cruise control in Lightroom. I basically processed all my photos identically, which normally amounted to rotating/cropping, maybe adjusting the temperature, sharpness and curves a bit, maybe mess with vibrance or saturation and call it good. I had learned just enough to get myself into a rut almost right off the bat. The results were rarely much different than what comes straight out of the camera, which isn’t so hot; a straight-from-the-camera RAW file is pretty boring, unless you’re working with some really good light. So I’m trying going above and beyond what I normally think is an acceptable finished product and tweaking until, at the very least, my picture looks like it was shot on film instead of an electronic sensor. So far, I really like the direction I’m headed, although in a couple weeks I’m sure I’ll hate the example I have here.

First photo: The picture exactly as captured by my camera. Second photo: The amount to which I punched it up in Lightroom when I first posted this photo almost two years ago. I really don’t know why I thought that looked good, but everybody I showed it to sure did. Third photo: A quick development I did today, which looks more like film, with much more vibrant colors without looking fake. I don’t consider this the absolute best this photo could look, but at least at this point I can say “Hey, not bad.”

I can’t believe how lazy I was about making my photos presentable. The tricky part now is getting to the point where I used to consider a photo “finished” and saying “Okay, we’re about 25% done.” Oh, the other tricky part is now deciding when to stop tweaking. Just since posting that, there’s a lot of things I want to change in that photo, but I have to call it “good enough” at some point, right?

So anyway, blah blah blah. I’m just excited for this breakthrough, when I was really feeling like my photography had been stagnating for four years.