Growing Your Photography Skills in the Off Season

#127 I'm looking out my window right now and its snowing. It’s 27degrees. This isn’t prime time for weddings. The winter months offer a lot more time freedom for wedding photographers than the warm summer months. These winter months although you may not be shooting as much as you were when you could walk out the front door with your camera at a moments notice, can still prove to be a time of growth for the next year. I honestly love this time of year as a photographer. Too many times you go out to shoot with high expectations that this is going to be the day that you take the best shot of your life but quickly fall upon the same ole routine without even noticing you’re doing it. After a while, your photos start to feel stale and boring, and slowly you stagnate and lose that passion you once had for photography. Well luckily winter is here to help!

Since we are inside for winter, we have the perfect opportunity for reflection. Reflect on the previous year. You should be using some sort of photo organizational tool. For some its Lightroom or apple photos or google photos, whatever you use to store and organize your photos take a day, a whole day to go through the photos you have taken over the year and try to find patterns. Maybe you framed things a certain way, maybe you like the moodiness of a good underexposed photo, maybe you stuck with a telephoto lens for most of the year.

Once you recognize patterns you can easily make changes to achieve what you want. Look at your photo and try to figure out what worked. What photos do you love? Try to figure out why. look at some of your favorites from other photographers. Figure out why you love those photos. What could you do to close the gap between their photos and yours?

What do you shoot? Do you shoot portraits? Family portraits? Focus on interacting with children. Look online for some family photographer groups and ask what works for them when connecting with kids or getting them to laugh.

Wedding photographer? Maybe you’re happy with your posing but wish your reception shots were better, specifically the dancing photos, more specifically, getting focus in the near pitch black reception. Search youtube for tips and make a youtube watchlist.

Narrow down what you want to work on so you know if you are getting better. If you just want to get better at "photography" it won't work.

When you laser focus on what you want to get better at, it makes it easier to learn and practice.

What are you going to focus on this winter? For me, last year I focused on adding more emotion in my photos by making sessions more fun, it worked, now this year I will continue my quest towards more emotive photos by getting closer. Both with a tighter lens and by physically getting closer.

This year Im sure I will pick up a 70-200 which for a long time I felt was only for the ceremony now I want to use it for portraits too.

What are you going to work on this year? I want to know! Share it in the BPP FB group. Keep everyone accountable.

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Thanks for listening & keep shooting!