The greatest photography upgrade

We often see articles on upgrading photogrpahically. We see loads of reviews on gear, We engage in conversations about new gear and upgrading gear. Each of these things is nice. We all love new stuff, but the absolute greatest upgrade you can make to your photography isn’t gear. The greatest upgrade to better photography is better knowledge and skill development!

A bit of a story to help explain. I recently read a post on social media where a photographer experienced some issues while taking photographs. The post started something like this, “I’ve been a photographer for 45 years and I went to take photographs as an indoor basketball game. All the photographs have a color cast”. It went on to talk about a few things he had attempted, mostly by adjusting the white balance setting on the camera. The resulting comments were even more telling, so far as one suggestion was to just convert the images to black and white. My whole point is this, in all of the 45 years, this photographer hadn’t ever ran into a color cast before? Or any of those who were commenting? Yes, color casts can be difficult, but the photographer that made the post included photographs from the very venue that gave him the problems and none had a color cast.

Some photogrpahers spend so much more time concerned about the technology and new gear than they do about learning and enhancing their skills. It has never been easier to learn. We can literally carry internet connected devices in our pockets that can access countless resources for learning. We have access in our pockets to both text based and audible books. There are countless tutorial, both video and text, on virtually any method/program to post-process our photographs. There is a multitude of schools teaching photographic techniques both remotely and in-person.

Don’t just sit back and believe you can’t learn something new, refresh your knowledge, or enhance your skills. Take advantage of the availability of resources to learn and enhance your skills. Spend a bit of your photographic budget on learning. You’ll be surprised at the value of that upgrade.