How I got started with photography

and how I got better

When I started out in photography, around 15 years ago, I was very bad. None of my family members or friends had the heart to tell me though.

This is an example

Digital cameras weren’t as popular yet. In fact, DSLR cameras (short for Digital Single Lens Reflex), started replacing SLR (non digital reflex cameras) during the 2000s.

I didn’t own one. Actually, I was rebelling against the digital revolution. My theory was, that if cameras were digital, nobody would need a dark room to develop the films and the copies anymore. This led to two major problems in my head:
The magic of developing would be gone.
If everybody had access to instant photos, photographers wouldn’t be needed anymore.

I have to say in my defense: I was in my teens, quite naive, and I didn’t think about the importance of one common factor that seemed to strange and incomprehensible for me to grasp, but would shift my understanding of photography as a concept, and the success of those who dedicated their life to developing it: having eye.

Now, this goes hand in hand with the fact that I wasn’t very good, although some pictures started to have a little thought behind it, and I was copying pictures I saw in magazines and rarely on websites (still rebelling against technology!). I started to experiment with different angels and viewpoints, and breaking the rules nobody had taught me yet.

My vision of photography changed completely with two events in my late teens, that happened very close in time but where not directly related to each other:

* In order for my photography to become better, I would spend hours in bookstores, sitting on the floor behind the shelves. I was pretending nobody would notice, but I later found out that the lady of the store knew what I was doing, and even told my mother where I was, and that I was okay in more than one occasion. I felt like I was hiding pretty well though: I was reading and looking at photography books I couldn’t afford to buy, hidden in a corner behind a shelf, next to the back window of the store.

I found this TV commercial:

and fell in love with Canon. It came to a point were, if the TV was on and I was in another room, I would get mad if I heard the commercial and I wasn’t quick enough to watch it. I would drop everything, just to see that commercial, and I would prefer those 32 seconds over any movie. Later, this commercial would be replaced by this other one:

. Now, the world was presented as a huge playground, and I couldn’t wait to start experimenting.

As a consequence of this, my mother bought me the Canon EOS 400D for my birthday. Some years later, she confessed that it was an attempt to stop me from wasting more money in developing films, while I wasn’t very good. But she didn’t say that.

She told me I reminded her of her father, because my passion for this one subject led me to neglect everything else. Instead of forcing me to focus on school, and learning what my grandfather had called “A real job”, instead of “wasting your time with a job that will be obsolete within your lifetime,” she pushed me to follow my dream, which in reality was her dream.
My thoughts about digital photography started shifting, into thinking that there was only one way for me not to be replaced by everybody’s access to photography: I had to become the best, and I had to be worth that title.

I took those commercials very seriously, and memorized my favorite sections in the photography books, and I started seeing a world I hadn’t seen before. It was magic in front of my eyes. I got better and better, and eventually my weakest point was the editing part, which I didn’t get fully into, until I stumbled across a book called “Searching for Light”, by Corry DeLaan (I can’t find the English version right now: https://www.amazon.ca/Auf-Suche-nach-dem-Licht/dp/3898645657).

It was my only wish for Christmas that year.
It taught the importance of light and image editing, which is the digital equivalent to the dark room, that I missed so much.

After sitting with that book in front of the computer for a very long time, and later watching video tutorials and learning in school (this last part was almost inexistent because my passion for photography made me know more about the subject than my teachers), I got to a point where I was confident enough to start showing some more serious work to friends and family.

My mother cried and filled the walls of the house with those pictures, big prints of the world I saw through the lens of that camera.
When I look back at those pictures, I have to laugh, because from my today’s standpoint, they had so much room for improvement. But it was the start, and I felt like I was walking in the right direction.

If you want to learn about how to take better pictures instantly, this is my personal guide (I apply it every day) for a better shot: click here.

If you prefer to download this guide, you can do this

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I hope this was helpful or entertaining, or even encouraging for somebody. If so, I'm glad.
If you've read until here, thank you for your attention.
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How I got started with photography... and how I got better

How I got started with photography

and how I got better

This is an example

FOR FREE HERE