100 Things Abang Dome Learned About Photography
- Never do photography to become a rock-star.
- Enjoy what you are shooting.
- Prepare well for your shooting, realizing that your battery isn’t charge when you’re setting up for that sunrise shoot is too late!
- Always take one warm garment more than you actually need with you
- Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions while you are shooting
- Set goals you can achieve
- Write tips about photography, because writing is also learning
- Never go shooting without a tripod
- Be pleased with the little prosperities
- Build relationships with potential photo buddies
- Watch the place you want to shoot first with your heart then with the camera
- Always stay calm
- Know that you tend to overestimate yourself
- Perspective is the killer
- Dedicate yourself to photography, but never browbeat yourself too much
- Take part in a photography community
- Keep your camera clean
- Never compare yourself to others in a better or worse context
- Find your own style of photography
- Try to compose more and to hit the shutter less
- Seek out and learn to accept critique on your images
- Do something different to recover creativity
- Get inspiration from the work of other photographers
- Criticize honestly but respectfully
- Get feedback from your lady
- Don’t copy other photographer’s style
- Be bold
- Take care of the golden ratio
- 10mm rocks!
- Take selfportraits
- Read books about photography
- To give a landscapephotograph the extra boost, integrate a person (maybe yourself)
- Every shooting situation is different than you expect
- Pay attention to s-curves and lines
- Always shoot in RAW
- Keep your sensor clean, so you can save some work cleaning your image in post production
- Discover the things you think are beautiful
- It takes time to become a good photographer
- The best equipment is that what you have now
- You can’t take photographs of everything
- Break the rules of photography knowingly, but not your camera
- Pay attention to the different way that light falls on different parts of your scene
- The eye moves to the point of contrast
- Clouds increase the atmosphere of a landscape
- Start a photoblog
- Accept praise and say “thank you”
- ‘Nice Shot’ is not a very useful comment to write
- ‘Amazing!’ isn’t useful either. Try to describe specifically what you like or don’t like about an image.
- You are not your camera
- Ask a question at the end of your comment on a photo to get a ping-pong conversation with the photographer
- Do a review of your archives on a regular basis, the longer you photograph - the more diamonds are hidden there
- Always clarify what the eyecatcher (focal point) will be in your image
- No image is better than a bad one
- Everyone has to start little
- Your opinion about photography is important!
- Leave a funny but thoughtful comment
- Speak about your experiences with your photo buddies
- Limit your photograph to the substance
- Participate in Photocontests
- Post processing = Optimizing your image to the best result
- Shoot exposure latitudes as often as possible
- Use photomatix as seldom as possible, HDR’s always have a synthetic flavor
- Always remember what brought you to photography
- Never shoot a person who doensn’t want to be photographed
- Always turn arround, sometimes the better image is behind you
- It’s who’s behind the camera, not the camera
- Mistakes are allowed! The more mistakes you make, the more you learn!
- If you have an idea and immediately you think : No, this is not going to work - Do it anyway. When in doubt - always shoot.
- Understand and look to your histogramm while shooting. It delivers very important information about your image
- Know your camera, because searching the menu button in the night is time you don’t want to waste
- Shoot as often as possible
- Believe in yourself
- Don’t be afraid of getting dirty
- Pay attention to qualitiy in your image
- Your photographs are a personal map of your psyche
- Re-check your ISO-Settings. It’s aweful to detect the wrong settings on your screen.
- Be thankful for long and thoughtful comments on your images
- Never trust your LCD. Normally it is brighter and sharper as the original image.
- Provide for enough disc space, because it’s cheap and you will need it.
- Learn to enjoy beautful moments when you don’t have a camera with you.
- Always arrive at least half an hour earlier before sunrise / sundown, composing in a hurry is a bad thing.
- Try to amplify your mental and physical limits. Takes some extra shots when you think “it’s enough”
- Pay attention to structures in the sky and wait until they fit into structures in the foreground
- Visit the same place as often as possible. Light never shows the same mountain.
- Print your images in big size. You will love it.
- Calibrate your monitor. Working with a monitor that is not accurate is like being together with someone you can’t trust. It always ends badly.
- Don’t think about what others may say about your image. If you like it, it’s worth publishing.
- Never address reproaches to yourself. Learn from your mistakes and look forward, not backward.
- Fight your laziness ! Creativitiy comes after discipline.
- Ask yourself : What do you want to express in your images ?
- Always try to think outside the box, collect new ideas about photographs you could do and ask yourself : Why not?
- Search for a mentor.
- Photography is never a waste of time.
- Every community has it’s downsides. Don’t leave it out of an emotional response.
- There will always be people who will not like what you are doing.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson was right when he said that “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
- A better camera doesn’t guarantee better images.
- Always have printing in mind when you postprocess your images.
- Photography is fair : You gain publicity with the quality of your images. Unless the images are stolen, there is no way of cheating yourself higher.
- Write a 100 things list
