68 - AsianPhotography - http://www.asianphotographyindia.com
If you’re happy with it, show it to them and it will give them
confidence too, as they’re probably just as nervous as you are.
If you’re not happy with it, adjust what you need to, do another
test, and repeat. Then just take a few more shots and have fun
with it. Buy them a coffee, or give them the a couple of printed
out images later as a thank you. Professionals do this, they
never just start shooting the moment their clients arrive for a
portrait session. They chat a bit, take a test shot or two, adjust
as needed, show it to them quickly, and then shoot.Fear of ruining your photos by post-processing them
If you haven’t gotten to the stage of processing your images
yet, don’t worry about it too much at the moment. But, if you
are avoiding it for fear of messing it up, that’s a different story.
There are a couple of things you can do to make sure you
never ruin your photos in processing:- Always shoot in RAW format (any editing you do never
applies to the original file so it’s impossible to ruin it unless
you delete it by mistake) - Never work directly on, and save over your original camera
JPGs. Make a copy, use adjustment layers in Photoshop, or
use Lightroom. Always make a copy, work on that version,
and save as a new file. That will ensure that in the worst
case scenario, if do make a mess of your image, you can
always make another copy of the original and start over.
Having said that, if you follow those two pieces of advice
you’ve got nothing to lose by trying.
The program of choice if you are new to photo editing is
Adobe Lightroom. By the nature of the program it does what
is called non-destructive editing, meaning it never alters your
original file. It saves all the edits you make inside a database
(called the catalog) and only when you export your files (Save
As) does it apply those changes, and makes a brand new file
for you. So, if you’re a control freak, and you want to have more
power over the look of your images (if you shoot JPG files, the
camera adds: contrast, sharpening, and color saturation for
you, which is impossible to change later) then eventually you’ll
want to do some hard core post-processing. You can choose
to keep it natural, or get really artistic – just know you can’t go
wrong with editing, and take the steps above to make sure that
you can always revert back to the original.
Fear of sharing your images or getting feedback
If you have been plugging along doing your own thing
with your photography, you won’t get used to sharing your
work, especially not with the intention of having it critiqued or
getting feedback on it. So it can be intimidating to do that for
the first time. We all have a fear of not being “good enough”
and not being accepted by our peers, that’s pretty universal.
So placing yourself and your photographs out there on display
for the world to comment on is a scary outlook. How, and
where, you choose to do so can make a big difference in your
experience though.
Here are a few ways that may get you undesirable results or
potentially even a bad experience:- Randomly posting in a Facebook group of photographers
- you may get unwanted feedback that could possible
even be harsh. Choose what you post, and which groups
you participate in carefully. Surf the group for a while to
see what they comment on other people’s images – is it
positive and helpful, or just mean and unconstructive?
- you may get unwanted feedback that could possible
- Not asking for specific comments on your image. By just
posting an image and saying, “What do you think of this
photo”? you could get all sorts of comments completely
unrelated to what you want help with, or worse yet get
your image ripped apart. Sometimes, in a closely knit
group, people will also be polite just for the sake of it and
no one will give you the constructive criticism you need to
improve. - Only asking family and friends – This will likely get you lots