Ten Ways to Improve Your Photography

If you are little adamant about your photography, if you want to become a better photographer, and if you want to learn more about how to make your photographs more engaging, there is a vast resource of information you may draw upon. I am thinking about a place called Craft&Vision. It’s something the Canadian photographer David duChemin started as a «publishing house» for his eBooks about photography. Over the years it’s grown, new photographers and authors have been added to the curriculum, and today the list of eBooks is extensive and comprehensive. The best thing; the books are inexpensive and full of inspiration.

Some of them are even free. A couple of weeks ago the eBook Ten More was released for free. It’s actually an older book, a follow-up of duChemin’s very first eBook, Ten, published some years ago, but only now has it been made available for free downloading.

Ten More is exactly what the title indicates: Ten ideas on how you can improve your photography. It’s not ten simple tricks that promise you to become a master photographer over night, but really useful ways of thinking about the photographic process and even with exercises accompanying each section. If you try to take up on the suggestion and implement the ideas in your photography it will surely improve the final result, your images – over time. duChemin is quite clear about it himself, that there are no easy ways to master photography. It takes work, it takes effort and it takes time. As he says in Ten More there aren’t any shortcuts, but the longer path will in the end make you a better photographer. The ten suggestion (and there is actually an eleventh bonus tip added at the end) are down to earth and in many ways very basic, such as getting closer, simplify, taking risks and shoot with the heart – to mention a few. But they work. They are a collection of ten (+1) ways in which you can work on your craft. According to duChemin «they are steps I think we need to return to once in a while, to return us to the basics, or to re-calibrate ourselves. There’s nothing magic here, [the goal is] to bring us back to the most important stuff, which in turn will free us from the endless tips and tricks and how-to stuff and set us on our own path of artistic discovery.»

David duChemin is an excellent educator, he writes in a language that everybody can understand and relate to, with flair and an inspiring voice. He doesn’t pretend, but as one of the ten steps suggest, speaks from the heart, with honesty and integrity. For him the technical part of photography is only a means to the end, he is more concerned with the creative side of the process and the actually making of photographs. duChemin is an experience photograph and popular workshop-teacher, and he draws upon this experience when he extracts the essence of what is important in the shooting process. Even skilled photographers would benefit from practicing these ten (and one more) tips. Throughout the Ten More, duChemin uses example of his eminent work to illustrate his points.

As mentioned in the beginning Ten More is a follow-up of Ten, with equally down-to-earth tips and also available for free downloading, along with the eBooks Craft & Vision 1 and Craft & Vision 2. If you need some inspiration, download one of this plain eBooks – or try one of the other inexpensive books available at Craft&Vision.