What helped you grow the most?

What helped you grow the most?

  • Class (taking or teaching)

    Votes: 68 13.9%

  • Having a mentor

    Votes: 51 10.4%

  • Belonging to a photography club

    Votes: 17 3.5%

  • Reading books/magazines

    Votes: 123 25.1%

  • The internet/Participating in a forum (RFF)

    Votes: 133 27.1%

  • Working on a project

    Votes: 77 15.7%

  • Trial & Error (& reflection)

    Votes: 286 58.4%

  • Viewing artwork

    Votes: 152 31.0%

  • Other

    Votes: 54 11.0%
  • Total voters
    490
J

Jack917

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Oct 3, 2009
Messages
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Hi Everyone,

What has helped you (most) to grow as a photographer?

- Class (taking or teaching)
- Having a mentor
- Belonging to a photography club
- Reading books/magazines
- The internet/Participating in a forum (RFF)
- Working on a project
- Trial & Error (& reflection)
- Viewing artwork
- Other

Personally trial and error with some reflection has helped me most. But I have to say reflection is influenced by readings from books and the internet.

Jack
 
1) forcing myself to edit very critically. Deciding which image to keep and which 99 to do away with causes me to really analyze what works (in my mind) and what does not.

2) learning to ignore the opinions of those I do not know any more than they posted to the same websites that I did. I think this did a lot to keep me from being subconsciously guided to the middle of the road.

3) seeking the honest opinion of a small handful of people whose talent I have great confidence in.
 
Trial & Error...then learning from that...What really helps is developing the film and then printing the negs...you can learn about your shooting by printing your own negs...
 
I picked taking a class. It if wasn't for my absolutely ruthless photojournalism instructor I never would have learned to edit before and after pressing the shutter.
She' still in the back of my head after all these years, whispering at me: "That looks like crap! Why are you wasting anyone's time with that! I've already seen that shot a million times!"
 
This year I decided to experiment with infrared film (Efke IR820 and Rollei). There's a whole lot of trial and error, and more error, with that stuff, but it can be very fun.
 
Shooting enough to be able to just relax while taking photos. It took me a while to be able to do this.

That, and a class I took with Mr. Charles Harbutt. It changed my life! :)
 
Before the Internet. before I had my own typewriter. Before I had my own phone line. Hell, only shortly after I got my first tricycle. A friend of the family, obviously into photography, drops by for a chat, sometime around 1960-61. I somehow discover his bag of Interesting Stuff, including something that said Nikon on it. Might've been an S something, might've been an F. I think I'd figured out how to look through and focus the thing (haphazardly) before my mother snatched it from me.

At least, that's how I recall it now...

I suffered through off-brand Instamatics, then the real thing, then Polaroids (loved those for a while, from my first Swinger through a Big Shot or two), then my first 35 (Yashica 5000e Lynx, which, as I've written about here before, broke one hell of a lot), then an eye-opening (and -altering) sophomore high-school photography class, during which I got hold of an Electro 35 GTN kit, and I was a goner.

That high-school photo class was my only "formal" education in the field. THe rest was seat-of-the-pants, aided by employment at various labs, agencies and studios along the way, meeting and working with wonderful, insightful, crazy and scary people. (Some are dead, and some are living...)

There was hanging out with the Magnum gang, in what some wags might call The Good Ol' Days. If I had to pick one seemingly dysfunctional family to be part of, it would be them, hands-down.

I suppose, at the risk of sounding a tad pretentious, that the thing that helped me the most in terms of my photography, was life itself, mine and the people I worked, laughed, loved, and argued like hell with in the field. The rest was just getting the technical stuff right :)


- Barrett
 
Printing my work with the goal of creating an exhibition quality portfolio was the thing that most profoundly influenced my work. The process of constant evaluation for both technical and aesthetic refinement was invaluable.

Having the input of other respected working photographers as part of that process was key as well.
 
Rolleiflex 3.5f -- having a square to compose makes you reevaluate how you shoot rectangles. It also makes you slow down greatly. Having to slow down forces you to compose more, making better photographs. Not to mention they're way cool.
 
Definitely a mentor for me! She openly expressed her opinions on my photographs, gave me encouragement and subsequently got me some professional work shooting gallery openings for the educational arts organisation she curates for.
 
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