I really like the way you viewing thing. All your photo are good. Can teach me or when you go out for shoot can I join??
Haha thanks, you're too kind. For me, a lot of things are learnt without going out.
1. Books, magazines, internet - started borrowing books, then building own collection
2. Checking out the good photos from forum and trying to learn from them how they did it. Some of the really good and helpful forumers include night86mare, Kit, J-chan, Danny Santos, to name a few when I started. Later I started stalking the APAD, then Streets and Landscape forums, expanding list of photographers to soulFLY, riotvan, Leong23, Draken413o, tungtong... a lot more people. Lately there are a group of photographers who came in later than me who are even better than me and I started stalking their photo threads too.
3. Build a group of peers to continuously improve. r00kie is my twinnie coz in my earlier days, we found out our styles are quite the same (we'd get left behind trying to keep catching up in groups, or put our tripods scarily close to edges, etc) and then went out for more outings and build up group of common friends like Kit, those in SunChasers group like NNB, ZCA, CT, etc.
4. Take your time. Don't try to learn everything at the same time. Find one shortcoming, working on it, master till you're satisfied, then move on. e.g. I first learnt to shoot to ensure my horizons are straight, then later vertically correct perspectives, then even later horizontally correct perspectives (I only did about 3 horizontally correction for photos but at least I know I can). There's tonnes of writeups in Clubsnap written by photographers like night86mare, daredevil123, Kit.
5. Don't feel shy to put up your own photos. This is where I learnt the most and other newbies who put up their photos. Have your own photos put up for critique and criticism not necessarily in Critique section - just here in Landscape, and you can see there's a lot of people offering their advise. Criticism about how bad your photos is best coz you learn most from these, but good praise also lets you know you're moving in the right direction - I don't mind giving lots of good praises but I generally reserve criticism until I'm more adept. If I have a particular criticism of a photo, I keep that to myself and if a number of people whom I trust can give good advise also think the same, then I know I'm on the right track and after a while, I find I can start giving off bit of criticism.
You need to differentiate between good advise and bad advise, not everyone telling your photo is wrong, is right, and neither is everyone telling your photo is good, is right either. But evaluate all criticism coz there's an element of truth even for bad advise.
All the best! Yeah, sure, we can go out shooting one of these days. I normally head out with r00kie (when he's not working), Kit's archi and Sun Chasers outings, other Sun Chasers like NNB looking for new shoot locations, some who stay near me like Prime and Kurniled, some non-CS friends... keep your options open
