LowriderS10 wrote in post #11379942
I want at least some of my pictures to turn out sort of alright
Short answer: my goal is for my photography to improve.
Longer answer: Right now I'm mostly concerned about composition and lighting. I'm also very much concerned with symbolism and themes and that kind of crap.
Like, my Photo 1 teacher flat out told me that I have a really strong eye for design after I showed him my first 2 contact sheets. I don't agree AT ALL, and that's frankly sort of a jerk move to pull on a student who's only two weeks into the course. I mean, it'd be sort of unfair for the dude to like be my personal mentor and ****, so he didn't really give me all that much input on the work that I was putting in. I'd ask him how he thought a certain project of mine was progressing, and he'd say something, like, "what do you think?" Then I'd just be like, "okay..." and then walk away to just do whatever the hell I wanted to, not remotely knowing if what I was doing was working at all.
I actually think that started me on a bad habit. Now when I ask my Photo II teacher for advice, she invariably tells me that what I'm doing isn't working. Sometimes I'll agree with small details, but generally I just ignore her advice and do whatever the hell I want to do anyway. Which is fine for class, since I'm still getting decent scores, but that's not really the issue. So far I've had two photography teachers. The first told me that my stuff was awesome without giving me any reason why, or what I need to work on. The second constantly tells me that my work is ****, but she's often just plain WRONG and gives me A's regardless.
So I'm stuck in this weird sort of situation in which I have no freaking clue what I'm doing right and doing wrong, and am basically paying teachers to educate me by letting me sit back and do whatever the hell I feel like. And it's like...I'm still getting A's, but I don't feel like my work is improving one single bit.
Anyway, I guess I sort of digressed there. But anyway, my first goal is to just make my pictures more "pretty". To actually gain a better understanding of what kind of composition makes a photograph visually appealing. Second is lighting. Not necessarily professional lighting or anything like that, but just understanding lighting in general. I mean, I pay a little attention to lighting, as far as making sure to shoot when the light is good, trying to make shadows an important element in the photograph, that kind of thing. But aside from simply having a concern for lighting, I don't really know anything about lighting. And again, not even necessarily artificial light sources, but just getting thew most out of natural light from the sun. I often pay attention to that kind of stuff, but I don't really know what I'm doing. And thirdly, all the symbolism and themes and stuff. You know, the actual "artsy" stuff in which someone looks at a picture of a toothpick and actually draws MEANING from it. Like, it being a symbol of this or that, even though it's just a toothpick. I've been trying hard to think from that sort of perspective for many of my pictures, but no one ever seems to "get it", which indicates that I'm "doing it wrong" in the first place.
) around goals we might set for photography.
