Breakthrough Improvement in Your Photography

What are some of the occasions where you experienced breakthrough improvement in your photography? I hope we can share our experiences and learn from each other in this thread.

for me for 3 years i've had a rebel and was basically doing greenbox point and shoot, until a local concert promoter asked me to take photos of the concerts. i started reading up about iso and aperture, and got myself a 50mm f1.4 and a 100mm f2 and really start to get an understanding of the technicals.

and just looking at enough pictures on this forum. initially, i couldn't tell a good pic from a bad pic, good composition from a bad one. but eventually, just looking at enough pictures on this forum helped a lot.

and thirdly, recently i've had the opportunity to shoot every week, evaluating how i did and try to improve/ fix my mistakes the next week. also got a lighting kit and i'm following some photography blogs in lighting and doing some portrait sessions with friends.

i really wish my local bookstores and library has more henri cartier-bresson books

Mine was being forced into low light shooting where the ISO I would have loved wasn't really useful because of noise. That really was an exercise in hand holding (1/4, f/3.5, ISO 1600) which I had to underexpose by -2/3 to get. Different rooms had different levels of light so I was able to get different shutter speeds throughout the museum. Doing all that with the most basic of lenses, no flash and no tripod along with nothing to steady myself against really highlighted my needs more than anything up to that point. It was a real "oh, I could have used that!" experience.

off camera flash

My moment came many, many years ago when I was just starting out as a HS yearbook photographer. My yearbook monitor (teacher) had taken a nice picture of a young child squatting down at the water's edge of a stream and playing with some stick. The beach was really just thousands of small pebbles, but beyond the stream was a large sky scene of clouds, etc. He showed me (using a simple mask) what big difference there was in what the photo conveyed by masking out the horizon and clouds, and allowing the child to dominate the scene of the thousands of small pebbles. Then he masked out the waters edge, and the child suddenly became an insignificant object the the grand world-wide scene.

Same photo, different cropping. It taught me more in those few minutes about cropping and composure than many many years of self-teaching would have done.

My lesson? Other than the obvious knowledge on composure, I learned that we can learn so much from those wise individuals who come before us . . .

When it dawned on me that I need to start using flash almost always during bright daylight....

SYS wrote in post #10759575
When it dawned on me that I need to start using flash almost always during bright daylight....

+1. I didn't get into photography until about a year ago, before that it was just point and shoot. I can easily say that all of my epiphanies have come from reading books. The first was while reading "understanding exposure", that got me into really understanding the camera. The second was after reading "The Photographers Eye" which really opened my eyes to composition beyond the internet forum basics that are so often preached, the third was after reading "On Camera Flash" which has me now using my flash all of the time.
Granted I've read over a dozen books in the past year, but those three are the ones that gave me at least one "a'ha" moment.

A tripod.

Planning concert shoots. I shoot much less, got more variety in my images, and don't have to hang around as long.

Attention to detail. Paying a LOT more attention to what is behind the subject and around and anything on the subject that is out of place and/or distracting. It's always some small detail that ruins a shot. Looser framing.

That's about it, I think.

When I learned to ignore my Mom's advice to shoot people with the sun behind me!

When I visited Guatemala for three weeks this summer and went around shooting all the great architecture and landscapes. My best photography yet. It forced me to learn a lot about my camera.

only after I got in touch with my inner feelings...what a load of crap

Off camera light
Shooting RAW & understanding processing in Lightroom

PhotosGuy wrote in post #10766163
When I learned to ignore my Mom's advice to shoot people with the sun behind me!

Working with challenging lighting conditions has helped me the most.

PhotosGuy wrote in post #10766163
When I learned to ignore my Mom's advice to shoot people with the sun behind me!

It is strange how those photos that really look cool are the ones that break the conventional habits.

My breakthrough was to erase all fundamentals of photography I thought I knew beforehand and straighten them out to an SLR. That means trial and error, no book, no trainer, no class. You want a picture to look a certain way? Once I got the triangle of ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed idealized in my head, I can go up to a scene and get ballpark range of what I want. That really increased my number of "Ooooo, me likey."

PS - It was about 4 months before I understood what metering modes really did and how to use/abuse them in respect to the triangle of exposure. Still yet to read Understanding Exposure.

The really cool thing about living in the digital age is that we can play with this stuff and push all the buttons and try all the tricks and if it just doesn't work, it's just a load of 1's and 0's and who really cares?
My biggest breakthrough was realising that no matter how bad I fouled up, I hadn't wasted any film, and as long as I deleted the shots I hadn't even taken up any disc space or wasted any printer ink or paper. A little shutter wear and tear, and one more charge on a battery that still might outlast the camera.
Film was so much more unforgiving and the fear of wasted money was always a background inhibiter of being truly free and taking creative chances.
Digital is great, I can dive headfirst into techniques I know absolutely nothing about and have alot of fun doing it.