TRANSFORM your PHOTOGRAPHY with these 4 simple, daily habits

so i'm a habits guy i think habits are a lovely way to start to build a system to get things done i think there's something special about putting in effort every single day and starting to build momentum and getting motivation out of that momentum and so i build systems and habits for everything in my life and especially when i was learning photography that's definitely no different so in this particular video i wanted to share four simple habits that transformed my photography and hopefully they transform your photography too but before we get started of course you know i said simple but that doesn't mean that they're easy right this particular video is not a you know a quick fix it's not a photography hack style video these tips that i'm about to share with you are boring they're not sexy and if you do them today if you do them tomorrow if you do them the next day they're probably not going to get you that many results in such a short period of time but if you do them every single day for an entire year i will promise you that when you look back on the year that was your photography will be completely different and so with that said let's get into the first habit so the first habit that i wanted to share with you is making 27 images every single day and i know that might sound like a lot to some people but your entire journey of acquiring the skill of photography is predicated on the amount of time you put in you know there's a popular theory by malcolm gladwell i'm sure you've heard of it the ten thousand hour rule in which he theorizes that ten thousand hours is what's required of world-class performance to get to that level right and i think whilst that's been proven and disproven all over the internet uh there's definitely a nugget of truth to that in that the amount of time you spend on something is equal to the amount of output or the amount of skill acquisition you get and for us as people trying to you know build a habit to work towards i think it's good as a goal but it could be better and so you might have heard of something a little bit more tactical like taking a photo every single day and you know coming away from an entire year with 365 photos and whilst that is a little bit better i think we can do even better than that because two minutes a day is not a lot to spend on learning a brand new skill right you know right now i'm trying to learn japanese and if you told me that i could only spend two minutes a day learning japanese i'd be pretty trashed by the end of the year and photography is a lot like that photography is a long multi-year endeavor there's so much to learn and so that's where this 27 images things comes from what we need as a goal as a habit as a daily habit is something that allows us to experiment and fail often and fail quickly specifically 27.4 images every single day is 10 000 images every single year you know that number you know it's not a magic number it's not a number proven by science it's just a number that based on my own experience having you know taught photography to a lot of beginners through my workshops and online classes that this number is a good aspirational goal it's something really good to work towards and obviously if you can go further than that then kudos to you that's great but i think for most people that's going to stretch people enough to be able to try and aspire towards that and so 27.4 images a day might sound like a lot still but you'll crush that in an hour and chances are you'll probably stay out for two hours or three hours or even longer than that while you're out shooting and you probably will come back with you know potentially even hundreds of images after a single shoot the trick here and the qualifier i guess is that burst fire shots don't really count towards your 10 000 images right a whole series of you holding down the shutter doesn't really count if it's the same composition i think these images need to be thoughtful they need to be deliberate you need to actually move your body and move your composition around in order to have them count the idea here is to push yourself to fail often and fail fast you know when i was starting photography i really wanted to learn street photography and so i forced myself to go out after work every single day for at least half an hour rain hail or shine and practice street photography oftentimes i would stay out for you know an hour or two hours every day and come back with hundreds of images so much so that you know i started in june and by the end of the year i had 40 000 deliberate images that i had made you know that's not to brag or anything i'm sure there's a bunch of other people that have shot way more than me and also that's not to say that those images were any good i probably only like one or two of them to be honest today um but that's just to say that if you have you know 39 998 chances to fail and experiment you're gonna learn a lot in that period of time and so what i want for you guys is to be able to make as many mistakes in a short period of time and to hold yourself accountable for getting out there and stretching yourselves every single day i think this is the main difference between someone who is just casually trying to do photography as a leisure activity versus someone who is like specifically trying to acquire the skill of photography and if that's what you're looking for i think this is a great number to strive towards [Music] so this next habit i want to share with you is breaking down skills weekly and working on them daily this goes hand in hand with the last habit this one is about deliberately spending time focusing on the craft of photography and mastering it right the idea here is to work on a skill and work on it up until the point to which tim ferriss calls the minimum effective dose and what the idea is here is that you want to work on a skill to be effective with it but you don't want to go so far as to like get into the weeds or like start to hit diminishing returns for your time versus effort this is important because you want to get good enough to understand something and then move on to the next thing and once you have enough of these things that you understand you can then start to make associations and connections with one another and then you'll have tremendous carryover when you're trying to do other things so a good example of this is mastering focus continuous or continuous autofocus so for those who don't know continuous autofocus is on every camera it's a focusing mode where you pick a point and that point will always the camera will always pull that point for focus so this is extremely beneficial for you know multiple things and this is where the associations come in say for example in street photography if you're focusing on a human and they're walking away from you if you have your auto focus continuous points on that person the camera will always make sure that that point is in focus even though they're walking away the same thing is applicable in portrait photography where you're shooting faces and people move all the time and so you know we need a setting we need a you know a tactical way to be able to make sure that those images are always in focus and that's where auto focus continuous comes in and so this understanding of these skills and how they fit into the overall spectrum of photography is in my opinion really important to learn as like the very first thing that you try and aspire towards so the next thing is we need a way to be able to break down the skills of photography and pick them apart so that we can start learning them and the way i teach it is that i break photography down into five main parts so there's craft vision art gear and post processing and each one of those has a separate sub skill that you can start to learn and start to piece together so the first one craft is really about the technical execution of how to shoot images well so this is very tactical it's very much about like the exposure triangle and shutter speeds it's about like depth of field and focus but it's also about things like you know specific category based skills like how to shoot astro or how to hip fire in street photography or how to pose your models in portraiture the next one is about vision and this is about visual comprehension and visual language this for me as a photographer is in my opinion like the most important thing to learn it's about building a visual language things like using lines things like using frames and juxtaposition things like using color theory and those kind of things it's about understanding these visual components and then being able to see them in the field so that you can replicate them and use them to your benefit in your images the next one is about art and this is about finding meaning and purpose behind your work it's a little bit more metaphorical and a little bit more philosophical in terms of the ideologies behind it but it's very important nonetheless it's about storytelling and how to storytell and why it's a story tell you know it's about how to use photography to evoke emotion it's about being intentional with our images and how we can use photography as a means to express ourselves the next one is about gear this is probably something you know a lot about already it's about picking the right tools for the right purpose or more tactical things like focal lengths and sensor sizes and f-stops and all that kind of stuff the last one is about post-processing and this specifically is about the final touches on our images and you know going the extra mile it's also about learning specific skills that are based in post-processing like you know what the difference is between the tone curve and the basic exposure is in lightroom or how to use the hsl sliders for example or if you're using photoshop maybe it's about how to remove objects or how to do frequency separation when we're editing portraiture shoots so all of these different categories these five main categories have sub skills that go for ages there's so much to learn in these different things which i'll start to cover a lot more in the future videos on this channel to come but the idea coming back to the whole daily practice and the daily habit thing is that you know using your 27 images every single day and tying that into trying to develop a skill at the same time is a really efficient method to starting to get a really good picture to master photography if you do that every day in conjunction with taking photos every day you know you're going to be well on the way to building a really cohesive mental map about how photography works and then you'll be able to articulate it you'll be able to bend it to your will you'll be able to you know do a lot of the things that a lot of people aspire to in the future when it comes to photography and storytelling this next habit is iterate every single day and this particular habit is really around getting to know ourselves and getting to know our work and then going through a cycle of progression towards a place that makes us better as photographers when i was doing product design we would subscribe to this idea of this like build measure learn loop and essentially what we would do is we would build something really quickly and then we would get it out into the world and then measure it and then from there we would then learn from those measurements and then build something brand new based off of those learnings and i think as photographers or anyone in the creative field really i think there's a lot of merit to that and we could potentially do the same thing rather than build measure learn it could be like create measure learn where we create something an image and then we get it out into the world somehow we get feedback we learn from that feedback and then we make new images i think the measurement part is potentially the most like interesting part it's about putting your creations out into the world and testing your ideas and you know tweaking yourselves so that you are moving in the right direction and you have the confidence that you're moving in the right direction and this is crucial especially when you're first starting out in photography for the first couple of years it's very difficult to understand what good really looks like that's why we need to get our work out there because just because you think your work is good doesn't actually make it so we need consensus we need other people to let us know whether it is or it is not we need an average of those opinions so that we can have a level of confidence to move forward in the knowledge that our tweaks are you know the correct things that we're working on the correct things every single day an easy way to do that is getting online putting your work on instagram getting yourself out there putting your work in front of your friends and family and you know anyone who will bother to see your images right anyone will do really because the moment that someone sees your images is the moment that you can take those opinions and start to tweak your own work in a positive direction as much as i don't like instagram that much for like a barometer of what good looks like because i think there's a lot of you know average photography out on instagram if your direction is to make popular images right then you know the likes and the comments and all those kind of things could be a valid source of feedback but just remember to take a lot of that with a grain of salt i think what's even more useful than that is to set up like a group of people that you can trust a group of people that will bother to give you feedback more than like the traditional this is great or this is not so great people that will give you suggestions on how to improve your work later on cultivating this kind of group is difficult but it's definitely worth it in the long run so the general idea here is that we make these cycles of creating measuring and learning so that we can move forward in the most efficient way and make sure that the skills that we're learning and the photos that we're taking every single day are moving in the right direction towards mastery [Music] so this last habit that i want to share with you is exposing yourself to inspiration every single day and this is really about hacking how creativity works such that we can continually be inspired and continually infuse new ideas and theories and concepts into our work so creativity how it works is that we're constantly absorbing things right ideas theories images video and they become baked into our subconscious and so what happens is we eventually in the things that we create connect two seemingly unrelated things together and the output of that is you know the evolution of something or something that's seemingly unique and i'm a big believer in thoughtful quality input equals thoughtful quality output and so if you're consuming things haphazardly potentially you might have you know less quality output than you potentially could conversely if you are very cognizant about what you consume and the things that you consume are related to the direction that you want to take your work into then we can start to to craft the more specific inspirations that get fused into your work on a day-to-day basis now this habit is about being thoughtful about the things that you consume and you don't have to put a lot of effort into it you can do something simple as launching a you know new start page on a web browser so that every single time you open it it might open like a behance page of like an artist that you're really inspired by or it might open like a pinterest board of all these different pins of where you want to direct your work to and what influences your work and so for me i am hugely inspired by japanese culture but specifically anime i love you know the soft lines and the hazy feel and the simplified color palettes i love the odd compositions and you know the different techniques that they use to tell stories and make you a vocal motion and so in my photography i try and bake all those in if i can consciously but also at a subconscious level you know i'm making sure that i'm working on exposing myself to that every day so i watch anime every single day partially because i'm a huge weeb but also because i'm trying to infuse these things into my photography um but how that helps is that in the real world when i'm out on the field and i'm trying to set up a composition for example i will shoot it in a way that feels natural to me but this way that feels natural to me is baked into my subconscious and the moment-to-moment decisions of like how i choose to compose a shot or the timing that i choose to make that shot at can be and often will be influenced by the types of inspirations that you have and so by exposing yourself a lot to the direction you want to head and the inspirations that you want to infuse into your work you can then start to hack your creativity and direct it into a place that is more aligned to where you want to take your work [Music] okay so to recap we covered a lot of things even though there were four seemingly simple things i like to go deep and you know i hope you appreciate that as well but to recap the first one was make 27 images every single day and this is about aiming for 10 000 images in a year but you know if you go over that kudos to you that's great the second one was break down skills weekly and then practice them daily so for craft vision art gear post processing think of it like the theory portion of photography iterate every single day create measure and learn as many times as you can in a day because we get our best learnings when our work is out in the world finally seek new inspiration every day thoughtful quality input equals thoughtful quality output our work becomes unique by the combinations of things that we're inspired by so let them seep into your subconscious okay that's it these are the things that transformed my photography when i was first starting out and i really hope that they transform yours as well so if you like this video give it a thumbs up make sure to subscribe and i will see you guys on the next one [Music] peace you

Channel: Pat Kay

Views: 113,561

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, how to get better at photography, get better at photography, transform photography, how to learn photography, how to master photography, photography tips, photography tricks, photography tips and tricks, photography habits, photography hacks, landscape photography, urban photography, learn travel photography, learn portraiture, portrait photography, street photography

Id: QMWbZC8SUX8

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020