Single-Serving Photo

Thanks to a surge in “community” features being implemented on practically every website, it’s now easier to solicit feedback about your photographs than it is to fall out of a boat and hit water. In other words, pretty damn easy!

Fantastic, you might think, the more feedback the better! Well, true, except that a lot of people calling themselves “serious hobbyists” or “beginning professionals” simply seek out the most positive feedback they can get and live in a world totally isolated from how completely awful their work really is. Paul Indigo asks a question on his blog, Beyond the Obvious: do photo enthusiasts really want to learn? In his article, Paul wonders about the true intentions of people who demonstrate fundamental misunderstanding of the art concepts of photography and blame it on insufficient equipment or software. If these people want to learn, shouldn’t they be more open to feedback? (more…)

There are three major ways to grow as an artist; to strengthen your aesthetic senses and the quality of your work:

1. Emulate the work of artists you admire,
2. Experiment on your own, exploring the subject matter that interests you, and
3. Participate in critique

Emulation is very common, especially when getting started in art, and exploring subject matter of interest to you essentially describes doing art, so I’m sure you do that already. Critique, however, is where many artists are weakest. (more…)