Advice from a total amateur

I’ve long felt that a lot of what I read online about photography – and I’ve spent quite a good amount of time reading a variety of sources – is written by and geared towards working professionals, or those who aspire to become working professionals.

By contrast, I tend to believe that most of the friends and family that I discuss photography with – and probably most of the broader set of people that are out there – tend to look a lot more like me, which is to say, they care to some extent about taking decent pictures, but their goal isn’t to sell their work, or to optimize something that is their daily job.

As an example, when you read a lot of the debate about shooting in RAW vs. JPEG, you see comments about getting maximum image quality out of a capture, versus simplifying workflow and spending more time out shooting additional images.  For me, neither of these points of view capture what it’s all about; I choose to shoot RAW so I have the most room to fix my many amateur mistakes, which are inevitable given that the subject I shoot the most – my kids who are under 3 – don’t pose and give me a few seconds to get a picture of them.  Did I check to make sure I had the right white balance setting and picture controls before clicking the shutter?  Absolutely not!

So, I hope to capture some of my thoughts and experiences as a dedicated amateur.  This might save others from making the numerous, sometimes expensive mistakes that I made in picking things up over the past three years or so.  And it might allow someone smarter than me to point out the errors in my current thinking, so that I can improve further.  I started with the first step in the process – the shooting itself – and put this on a page you can find here.