How to Improve Your Photography at Home
Are you stuck at home? – You can use this time to improve your photography skills without leaving the house and today I will share with you how!
Here are 5 creative ways how you can improve your photography skills at home:
1. Revisit your old work and edit it again
We learn and improve every single day. Without knowing it, even our tastes change. Do you ever get that feeling when you finish an image you’ve been working on for hours and hours… “I love it! It’s my best work!” You tell yourself… But then you look at it a couple days later (maybe weeks), and it doesn’t seem so exciting anymore. Does this sound familiar?
Go back to your images from six month ago (of course if you kept the RAW files…). Chances are you will edit it differently (I personally can’t stand my old work haha). Compare the two edits against each other and see how much you have improved! Take time to analyse what has changed. Is it contrast and saturation levels, or different colour grading approach? There will definitely be progress somewhere!
2. Try food photography!
Food, products you consume, fashion accessories… Anything static you can get your hands on to photograph will do. Take photos of your meals, experiment with lighting and styling them creatively. It can be very therapeutic to plan, arrange the dish and other elements around and capture a simple but aesthetically pleasing image.
If you are like me, and not very artistic when it comes to food, you can photograph fruit or a cup of coffee on it’s own without over-the-top styling. You can also capture food preparation in action, for example coffee pouring into a cup, cutting an orange, sometimes the simpler, the better.
This way you will try a new photography genre as well as create a brand new portfolio. How cool is that!
3. Explore self-portraiture
I’m a portrait photographer and I’m drawn to faces and emotions. If you’re similar and feel like food and still photography is not that exciting, get creative with styling yourself with cool props and accessories.
Build your confidence on the other side of the camera. It’s a great exercise to experience what your models feel whilst being photographed. Embrace your awkwardness and shyness! There’s nobody watching! So, if the images are not good, treat it as a purely artistic experiment and delete them after. You never know, maybe you’ll grow to enjoy modelling and this experiment will start a new career.
If you’re struggling to get your self-portraits in focus, make sure to read How to nail the focus for your self-portraits every time.
4. Learn Photoshop
There are hundreds of thousands of free Youtube videos, blogs, online courses explaining the art of manipulating images. You can learn high-end skin retouch, composing fine art image, double exposure, and so much more. PIXimperfect for example has very well-explained and easy to follow tutorials on everything Photoshop, and they are FREE!
The best thing with Photoshop is that you can use your old work (no need to go out and shoot) and simply create something new and unique from what you already have.
5. Take photos of your pet
Similarly to taking photos of little children, pet photography is a great learning experience. It requires lots of patience (A LOT in my case) and good timing. You never know what your pet will do next! You can hold a treat right by the lens and tell them to ‘wait’ while you are taking a beautiful portrait, or have them play with a new toy and take some action shots.
This is it for today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this week’s post. If you know any other ways how to improve photography at home, please let me know in the comment section below!
