madskier Loc: North Jersey

I like to ski... No, I LOVE to ski.
My first 5 years I skied the same blue( medium difficult) trails every time. Then I joined a ski club and found myself with better skiers who introduced me to different hills and soon, black diamond trails.
The lesson here is obvious... Keep doing the same thing and you will get the same results. It's the same with cameras too. Keep shooting the same thing every day and you never advance.

RWR Loc: La Mesa, CA

Sharp focus and good exposure is the easy part, lighting, composition and perspective make the photograph, and cannot be overstressed. Shoot and practice with this in mind, one cannot help but improve.

Spirckle

Some of us have acronymn/initial blindness. So yeah, I was also wondering who/what HCB was, too. It's considered non-rude to use initials like this ...photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) said.... yada yada yada... even HCB smoked crack.

turp77 Loc: Connecticut, Plainfield

A great tool to see your progress is pull some of your early photos and judge them with now photos. You should never stop learning! Always move forward and most of all have fun and keep that Child's eye. ( give a child a camera and see what they shoot... Every thing)

Jakebrake Loc: Broomfield, Colorado

Thanks, I didn't know the answer either. I'm pretty sure he was serious!

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

SSS/PPP is of limited value unless you learn to look at your work critically. An important part of this is routinely revisiting some of those 10,000 photos and either reprocess them or look to see what you did and what you might have done differently. It helps to find a mentor that you can interact with to get feedback. One of the best ways to become a better photographer today is to be better than the photographer you were last year.

tomcat

Practice does not make you perfect! All practice does is make you consistent. You can be consistently bad. You need training and education to be a good photographer, just as the others have commented. Join your local PPA affiliate (PPA.com)

DaveHam Loc: Reading UK

After ten years as an amateur and fifteen years earning my living as a photographer I still find that constant working and constant practice teaches me and I am still learning.

However shooting in the same style and manner will do no good at all - you have to learn from your work. Critique each shoot, learn what could have been done better, the different approach you could have tried.

I don't think any pro I know would describe themselves as having reached a nirvana like state of perfection; though I have met one or two amateurs in workshops who insist that they have when quite clearly they have not.

lighthouse Loc: No Fixed Abode

Yes it will make you better.
But to ask- Can we actually get better by just sss/ppp without actually changing something in order to improve, and can we do that on our own without outside trained input? - is an oxymoron.
I can answer yes to that, and I can answer no to that, and justify both answers.

But its probably easier to split hairs on the question and call it oxymoronic, and answer a slightly different question instead.

If you do not change something, you are not doing anything differently and cannot improve. So for it to improve your photography then you must change, you must learn.
It does not necessarily mean that you have changed your processes, you may just get better at the ones you use.
You may get less blurry shots because you get stronger and/or your handholding technique gets better.
You may get better at anticipating the moment, purely from experience.
Or you may have gotten better at sneaking up on wildlife.
So technically, you have not changed anything, you have just gotten better at, or refined the processes you were already using.

But from experimentation, your photos will also have improved by noticing what improves when you change certain settings, and what goes wrong when you forget that you didn't change the settings after your last shoot.
You may discover things your camera does that you hadn't used before, such as a histogram, or "the blinkies". You may discover a certain look you get from a certain lens, or a certain setting.
You may discover that a certain lens is crap at F/3.5 but wonderful at F/8.
You will discover that noise is ugly and that it doesn't occur anywhere near as bad at base ISO.
You may discover that cameras don't like falling over and going under water.

If you read your manual and discover how to use live view and review, you will learn that you can immediately see when your shot just bombed, and that you can learn from why it did, and readjust your settings or technique or angle, and retake it.

All of these things and more, can be learnt on your own, in a veritable vacuum.
And the more shots you take, the better you will get at it.
Like anything else, the more times you do something the more you will learn, the more second nature it will become, the more information you will have to work with to improve.
The harder you are on yourself, the more incentive you will have to improve.


But none of us do work in a vacuum.
We all are influenced by the images we see.
We read magazines, we watch moving media.
We see wonderful photography on TV, in movies, online, in advertisements, in any manner of publication.
It all influences us.
It influences us to take images like that, to go places, to learn techniques enabling us to do that, to learn what tools are needed to capture images like that.
To learn how to process like that.
To learn to see.

Or we may even go to an art or photography school of some sort.
Some of us have formal training, some don't.
Some of the worlds best photographers have had formal training, some haven't.
Some of us are self taught purely by pressing the button.
Some are self taught by pressing the button and being a sponge, soaking up every single bit of information that they can about their aspect of photography.

I do not have formal training.
I am totally self taught.
I took negative and positive 35mm film for about 25 years.
I slowly improved and the more shots I took, the better I got.
But the cost was prohibitive.
I could not afford to work a scene as often or as thoroughly as I wished, or take all the shots that i wished to take. To take sporting sequences like you saw in the magazines cost a veritable fortune.

Then digital came along and with it, the era of immediate feedback.
And the fact that once you had paid for the camera, it did not cost anything to click the shutter.
Some people recently on this site blamed this costless clicking as the single biggest obstacle to improving your photography.
I totally disagree.
It is how you get to 10,000 shot for no cost, or 100,000 shots at virtually no cost.
This costless clicking allows people to take thousands of shots, to experiment with angles, lenses, light, time, compositions and anything else associated with picture taking.
To learn. And to learn faster.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

OF COURSE sss ppp will make a difference - if only so that using the camera and all it's controls becomes automatic - for any circumstance - which will allow for more concentrated effort on creating better pics.
You CAN now make a silk purse out of a sow's ear - isn't that what PS and LR are for?? Having said that - you cannot teach a pig to sing!

Serious neophyte

The best educational tool for me was joining a photography club and entering print competitions. There you can see what skills win contests and where you have to improve.

HowardPepper Loc: Palm Coast, FL

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

Notorious T.O.D. Loc: Harrisburg, North Carolina

I believe that people are born with natural talents and abilities that put them far ahead of most others attempting to do the same thing. If those talents can be recognized and developed you have the potential for greatness. My oldest son has these talents for driving racecars and working on them. My other son is challenged to change his own oil, but he has talents in other areas. My daughter has taken some awesome photos with an iPhone. We probably note this in sports as much as anywhere. Dion Sanders, Dan Marino, and many others are proof to me of this natural talent.

I watched the GOAT Ricky Charmichael dominate Motocross for 10 years, yet when he tried to move to NASCAR he was not very good and didn't make it. He had a talent and developed skill for racing dirt bikes but it didn't translate to NASCAR style racing.

So, practice and training can certainly help. But I believe there will always be people who just have a natural talent for something, even photography.

HowardPepper Loc: Palm Coast, FL

Back when I was actively studying martial arts, the founder of my art famously stated "Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.", meaning that just doing something over and over again will not necessarily make you better at it.

You only get better through practice if you continually fine-tune your practice by incorporating what you learn from studies and others.

Ralloh Loc: Ohio

I am definitely improving all the time with my photos. For me, it's not so much the number of shots I take or the amount of time I spend, it's being critical of what I do shoot.

I analyse each photo to see how I could have done better. This could be composition, exposure, or other techniques. Also, experimenting has been a huge plus for me.

As to training. No, I have never taken a class. I do watch a lot of video tutorials online and read some books. Those always spark new ways of doing something or trying something I've never done before. I am looking at things much deferentially now as far as light, shadows and composition. I now see something that others may think nothing of, and find a close-up makes a very interesting photo. The attached photo is a good example. Although not technically perfect, I think it turned out so interesting.

I posted it on Facebook and asked people to guess how it was done. No one got it right. It's a reflection on the rusted lid of a 55 gallon oil drum with a thin film of water on it. The leaves were actually green on the trees but came out like this because of the rust. As I say, there are interesting shots everywhere. You just have to look, but more important, you have to see.

I guess the bottom line, though, is to be very critical of yourself. Family and friends will usually tell you even your worst shot is great, so, you can not rely on them. You have to be willing to look at a shot you made and say, "that sucks", but, figure out why and how to improve.