Practice makes …
Perfect? Maybe not, but to improve, to keep on incrementally upping your skills, takes practice, whatever level of performance you are at.
I was out doing a photo walk a few weeks back and was showing my group how to shoot light trails on O’Connell Street Bridge. For those who’ve never done this before, even the simplest streaks of light running through their photo make for “wow” moments, so it’s always a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Mount the camera on a tripod, use a shutter speed of anywhere between 5 and 10 seconds - voila - a shot like the one above!
When you’ve been doing this kind of shot for a while though, there’s a more advanced technique where you take multiple shots with your camera rock steady on a tripod, and then later on in PhotoShop, combine them all to get a whole set of light trails - typically giving a far more impactful image than just a single vehicle’s lights. The shot below is the one I produced from that night’s walk, and I was quite pleased with it, and it got a lot of positive attention on social media.
But this shot would fail miserably were it to be entered into any kind of photo contest, whether this is at local club level or in an international salon competition. Why?
Blown highlights.
In most competition these days, one of the big no-no’s is blowing out the brightest areas of an image so they become completely white - it’s known as blowing the highlights.
In the image above, the Londis shop sign on the right has blown out, becoming a white glaring blotch which would get the image marked down severely. Most people wouldn’t even notice it when viewing the photo - certainly no-one has ever mentioned it to me after seeing it.
And yet, this is one of the reasons I’ve recently joined a local photo club, apart from the social aspect of linking up with other photography enthusiasts. Competition forces you to be critical, to scrutinize your output, to measure yourself against others. Competition is Darwinian, brutal, taking no account of feelings or emotional attachment to what you’ve created. But competition is also great for making you really look, reflect, and analyze weaknesses in technique, approach or delivery.
Sitting listening to a judge who is simply assessing your images in a set of submissions, not knowing who took which, and so being as objective as they can be, can be a very uncomfortable experience. Many times I’ve had a very defensive internal mental dialogue as I’ve listened to their comments on my masterpieces, pointing out flaws and weaknesses which I’d overlooked or simply not seen.
So often, we are the worst people to judge our own work, and yet how often do we pro-actively seek out constructive critique, feedback, and advice on how to make what we do better? I know that this is best practice, but is it really common practice? Do those feedback forms actually get read and acted on, or are they just a form to be filled, may be briefly scanned and then consigned to the files, never to be used for their real purpose of focussing us on change for the better?
My brother is a professional musician. Years of practice went into his skill and mastery of his instruments (I remember the early years of his screeching violin with distress even now!), and to a lesser degree, the same goes for my camera craft. But even though I can take a good shot most of the time, I still take time out to just go and practice, to try new things, make mistakes, and revisit scenes to do better than previously.
In my photography, my teaching and my consulting, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities for feedback, critique and honest appraisal of how I might improve. This year I signed up for a postgrad diploma in Entrepreneurial Learning with the UCD Innovation Academy as a way to inform my teaching and training and give me some new perspectives. At Smurfit, I ask my MSc Project Management students to complete end-of-module reflections where part of the brief is to suggest something I should change to make the next run of the module better for the students, and I regularly implement these suggestions. But often it makes for uncomfortable or difficult reading - but that’s good. It keeps me from getting too complacent, safe, cosy in my little bubble, and more focussed on the customer - be that a college student, company executive or even a photo competition judge!
So how have I applied the practice makes perfect adage to my light trails photography? Well this past Sunday was Storm Atiyah. I had scheduled my annual Christmas Lights walk in the city centre, but everyone who was supposed to be coming cried off, so I ended up on my own in the rain and wind as evening fell over a very cold and wet Dublin. So what! I was dressed for the weather, and tripod in hand spent a very happy 4 hours wandering the streets capturing the festive lights, and revisiting my O’Connell Street stand to re-shoot the light trails shot. Same basic approach as before, but now with one key difference - time to think and really pre-visualize exactly what I needed to assemble my final image based on my reflections from the last shot.
To achieve this I made sure to shoot a set of underexposed images to ensure that the bright lights of Londis were rendered as visible, as well as the brighter light trail exposures, knowing that I could then mask that section of the image in PhotoShop and make sure there were no blown highlights in the final composite image. So what do you think - here’s the result - a composite of some 20 separate images shot over about half an hour:
Which image do you prefer - this one or the earlier one - do let me know!
An online album of the other shots from my evening can be seen at https://adobe.ly/2YLb601 and prints etc. are available if you like any of them!
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Further listening :
A great podcast episode I recently heard from the Tim Ferris Show was episode 399 - Adam Grant - The Man Who Does Everything - listen to it at https://tim.blog/2019/12/05/adam-grant/ where Adam explains how he uses constant critique to up his game…
Connect with me at the following places depending on which aspect of my activities interest you :
Mobile +353 86 384 3670 : Email joe.houghton@gmail.com : LinkedIn : Facebook : UCD Smurfit : Houghton Consulting : Houghton Photography : 2into3 :