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I've been taking photos of people for about 8 years now, and I've learned a few things slowly along the last few years. Mostly studying faces at a range of angles. I've read over and over about certain rules of body language and posing, and I can see when someone obviously looks hunched or tensed most of the time, or when a joint seems very unnaturally positioned, and sometimes even when there's a lack of balance in a photo.
And then there are the hundreds of vague compositional flaws that will tell me the photo is OK but not great, without me understanding why.
I can see that something needs changing...but I don't know how to fix it.
I can see my own posed, planned photos continuing to follow a very narrow range of effects, angles and positions, rather than spreading out and expanding.
When viewing someone's website, I can more clearly distinguish (more than a few years ago) a few things that a photographer would probably know to adjust or make sure is correct, like extremity positions, nose angle, light angle, facial expression and direction of gaze, etc...but even though I see these as generally effective or not in the viewed images (depending on how they look to me), I don't know how to make them better.
I often wonder if I have certain metaphorical switches turned off in my brain and I can't turn them on. Ones dealing with creativity; expanding upon ideas; recognizing pinpoint causes, effects and solutions.
And then of course I have the memory blanks all the time during shoots. The things I do understand when not in the fray go out the window as soon as I start working. I end up working mostly on combination of impulse and a few rote ideas I've been using for years.
It sucks, I want more.
I've had my photos given some critiquing from some of the great photographers on this forum, and they tear my stuff apart very easily. They see things I would never identify, perceive consequence I don't notice, understand perspective I'm oblivious to at my best. It's depressing and makes me feel like I should just leave everything to those who can actually do it.
But right now, I can't do that. I have too much stake in the role of photographer at this stage in my life.
I have a few plans, but there are limits to what I have access to (because of finance mostly). There are specific people who I believe see and understand certain things to such a degree as to be able to communicate them to me, and I'd like to have access to those persons and their understanding. Money is a great tool for obtaining knowledge sometimes, but so is proximity - many of the people I would call upon for knowledge are far away from me. There are lots of photographers in Vegas where I live of course, but I could only consider a handful of them to have some definite mastery of things I want to learn. Mentors, I really like mentors. I wish I had a few great ones.
I haven't posted like this in a LONG time. It's because wedding season is resuming, I'm about to shoot another one today, and every year I go back and realize how small and limited my skillset is in this field and how I really, desperately need to learn better how to control and use the elements of composition and human form.
In this mess of thoughts, has anyone found something that has worked for them? Really, deep-down learning of the finer points of composing, framing, and posing? Imitating is shallow and like being given a fish without being taught to fish. I can imitate, but it falls short of the original intent by a mile because I don't understand all of the reasons a photo looks good.
Anything that works for you?
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