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hello there if you're watching this video it's more than likely that you love photography but sometimes don't you just hate your photos that feeling where no matter how hard you try you just can't get it right and it leaves us feeling utterly frustrated in today's video we're going to get to the bottom of why this is happening and look at some changes we can make to fix the problem let's go the first point to make is there's actually really good chance that your photos are not rubbish at all this feeling of artistic anxiety and being unsure about how good your pictures are is a very natural process when you are creating something people that are into landscape photography for example often come from a very technical background where there's procedures and things are controlled and it's comfortable but then being creative is almost like the total opposite to that especially if you really want to create good work but i think it's actually very useful to embrace that creative anxiety because it's just such a natural part of being creative and we can use it as we question ourselves and we're self-aware about what we're actually producing it's also very natural to worry about what other people are going to think of our work and it's far too easy for people like me to sit here and say well don't worry about what anyone else thinks but it's not always as straightforward as that because i do i care about what people think so when i first started this channel and a bit before that i just decided that i was going to put absolutely everything i create out into the world now first this was very difficult but eventually it removed that anxiety of worrying about what everyone else was going to think of my work now i still do care what they think but i try not to always look and you can guarantee it if you do this that some people will love what you do and some people won't that's just a fact and by freeing ourselves of that concern it then just leaves it down to us to create the work that we want to create and dealing with our own feelings towards our work and ultimately that should make us better and anyway if everyone sees what you're creating as you improve and they see the pathway that you're on it's just a very compelling story that's utterly authentic [Music] now very recently up here in northern england we had quite a lot of snow so i took the opportunity during this lockdown to get out on foot to a woodland not far from where i live that's usually somewhere i don't go because there's often a lot of litter and stuff like that right now i live in a city but the snow obviously made it look much prettier so i went out to start shooting or practicing a photography project that i have thought of recently that is going to take me a few years to do and it's using some new gear and techniques that i've not used before and i was going to make a video about it and show you the final images but eventually i just completely mucked it up and i ended up absolutely hating the images i'd created now the reason i think this happened and by far the most the best tip i can give you to solve this feeling is to practice your workflow workflows just so important you know this if you've come from a technical background you know this if you drive a car where you go through the same procedures and it almost becomes like muscle memory it's the same for doing photography especially in the field and when i have clients i see them struggling with this and if you can get a practice workflow where you do the same things over and over again it leaves you free to just come up with the best possible image but this but recently when i was out there because i was faffing around with all this new gear trying to make it work i was so worried about the technical aspects to get the shot technically correct which i did in the end i forgot about the artistic part of what i was doing so even though i thought they were looking good on the back of the screen because i was thinking about the technical issues when i got back and put them on the computer i just hated them hated them and then genuinely weren't very good but workflow's just so key so if you can practice something like that setting your tripod putting the camera on top all that kind of thing and do it over and over again it will free you [Music] there is a commonly taught theory about how we learn a new artistic skill and that is the model of imitation integration and innovation basically if you're learning a new musical instrument i can play the guitar i know some of you want me to play it quite desperately and i will be far too long but not today but when you're learning a new instrument you initially start by learning a few scales and then imitating or playing songs that other people have played before you will then start to use some of the riffs from those songs maybe to make your own songs as you integrate things into your work and then eventually after a long time and a lot of practice you can go into the innovation stage where you genuinely coming up with something unique now i think the same process is true for photography but so often when people talk about this i find they don't often really give people any guidance about how you start to make that change towards innovation undoubtedly the thing that made the most difference to my work was exploring and indulging in other genres of work it doesn't always even have to be artistic looking at some stuff that sports people do just things that are going to inspire you will help you be more creative and come up with new ideas for your photographs especially with the projects but you can also draw on your own experience and start to tell your story through the visual images that you are creating this is exactly what i've been doing for the last few years drawing on the experiences i had as a police officer and using the philosophy that i developed during that time to create my work today i still have all these stories in my mind of things i went through during national tragedies or witnessing terrible acts of violence and it has an effect on you but i wanted to use those experiences and turn them into a positive so it made me stronger so i've put these stories and my pictures from the last few years into my very first book which i'm really really pleased to announce is now available for pre-order it's called illumination and i'm confident it will go beyond just being a nice hardback photo book contained within the stories are things that will shock you things that will entertain you but ultimately provide some level of comfort and inspiration i have poured my heart and soul into this thing so your support in pre-ordering your copy will be very much appreciated and if that's not enough all pre-orders will come signed and include two free months access to the raw room which will be delivered on your email when your pre-order is confirmed so you can get going straight away and it'll tide you over until the book starts shipping so hit the link down below or go to firstmanphotography.com books and pre-order your copy today [Music] [Applause] right composition is obviously an important thing when we want to create a nice photograph and it's a big subject i'm going to try and condense it down just to give you a few tips but i think it also falls somewhere between the artistic and the technical as well it becomes an artistic thing when we want to decide what to put inside the frame and i think it's important not to overthink this sometimes that's particularly the case with landscape photography as you enter a new landscape just allow your eye to be drawn towards the thing that you find interesting or beautiful and then try to make an image that focuses in on that once we do once we've decided that we then need to think what we want to include in the frame but also exclude from the frame imagine climbing a mountain and seeing another mountain over in the distance where something beautiful is happening and your eye is instantly drawn towards it we might want to think about excluding a lot of the area in front of us between us and that mountain because it doesn't really have any relevance to the image and will make our image worse essentially so that might mean putting a longer lens onto your camera to zoom in and get closer to the interesting thing that's going on and that's really what we want to make big in our frame and exclude the less interesting stuff underneath once we've decided what we're going to put within our frame though it's then trying to arrange the elements within our image to make it look interesting and this is where compositional rules can come in very very handy now sometimes for whatever reason they get a bad rap or people think that the compositional rules are cliche now i totally disagree with that partly because they just work now if you write stories or you're into writing you may know that there are technically only seven seven seven types of story plots but despite that there are new and interesting stories coming out all of the time i think it's very similar with composition and photography because there's more than just one compositional rule you've got the rule of thirds the golden ratio the golden triangle uh there's so many different ones that you can learn and practice and put to use to create virtually endless interesting and unique photography it is obviously possible to break the rules and that's cool but i think if you're going to break the rules i think it's important to know what rules you're actually breaking before you do that otherwise ignorance can so easily lead to naivety our compositions often also require balance and depth now the big subjects i'm not going to go into great detail but i want to give you a few tips because it could be creating this feeling now with balance particularly if an image just feels wrong it may well be because it lacks balance now things you can look for are particularly around the edge of your frame if there's a strong element in your image that's getting very close to the edge of the frame that can unbalance an image so maybe something like a tree but just by checking around the edges and then giving it a little bit of breathing room can instantly push the balance back in to the image also i think it's it's a good tip not to be dictated to by your camera as to what aspect ratio to use the crop tool within your camera is a very very useful tool and often it's non-destructive so when you go into post-processing you've still got the whole frame to play with but by going down to a square crop or an 8x10 can open up new creative possibilities if you've got a center part of your frame which is perfect and the edges aren't right then that's where a square square crop could come into use we often also want to create depth in our image because we're challenged by the fact that we're bringing the 3d world down into the 2d world now this can be achieved with leading lines is the classic example but also about the relationships between the elements in our image like a tree that's very close to you with distant mountains or you can use the light that's available to us to create contrast and draw us through the image and in fact it was the lack of depth that resulted in my recent bad images and it was because of the unpracticed workflow that i wasn't paying attention to this right a few more quick fire things now that may be causing this problem especially for landscape photographers is to slow down if you're in a beautiful landscape with lots going on it's really tempting to try and shoot everything at once now if you do want to create everything it may be better just to go on a camera walk have the camera in hand and do handheld photography and with some of the more recent cameras with ibis uh and this amazing image stabilization having really good quality landscape photographs handheld with a low shutter speed and low iso is becoming genuinely possible but if you're doing landscape photography on tripod just slow it down because just imagine like you are creating a print but imagining in your every single shot you take is going to be a final print and that should help you also to slow down so slow down try handheld camera walks and print now we also just need to be okay with failure i find this particularly difficult because i like to win but on the shoot the other day for example i learned a hell of a lot so it's just a case of dusting ourselves off taking the positives from it and then going again then once we repeat that and practice over and over and over again and there's no substitute for that it's then just so gratifying knowing that all your hard work has paid off when you nail a banger please hit the link down below and check out my new book and your support in pre-ordering a copy will be very much appreciated and i'll see you again very very soon [Music]