 Getting feedback as a photographer is vital to improving your own photographic skills, both as a beginner and as an accomplished photographer. So often, especially in this day of being online, we put our images out looking for feedback and help and getting nothing really in return. No doubt you found it extremely frustrating. Well, I'm here to show you today how you can actually rephrase everything so you're gonna be able to get proper, meaningful feedback from your images and help move your photography forward. How's it, how's it? One of the major things, obviously, about improving your photography is not creating in a vacuum, it's getting some feedback and helpful advice about where you're kind of going wrong, where you're making missteps and how you can, most importantly, improve your photography. This is especially true for beginner photographers or somebody who's got decades of experience. So often online, I see people who are asking for help with their photography. They put up an image and they say, can you give me feedback? Can you critique this, please? And nothing really substantial comes back. And I think there are three reasons that this happens. And I'm gonna share with you these today so you don't fall into the same trap of looking for help online and just getting nothing really meaningful back in return. The difference between trying to create photography to please other people and improving your own photography, because they're two very different things. And I think a lot of new photographers fall into this trap of trying to create photography that pleases somebody else. And we're not looking to do this, we're looking to improve your own photography, to give your own photographic voice, a polish and an improvement in the direction that you want to take, not somebody else. Please bear that in mind and we'll come back to that point. So the first and most important thing, and I'm sure we've all seen this at some point, is somebody goes onto a photographic group online and they put up a picture and they say, can you give me feedback? And nothing comes back. And of course, the problem with that is they're being too airy-fairy, they're not being specific about the sort of feedback that they're looking for. A good example might be like a waterfall photograph. So if somebody wants to have that blurred effect with the water, it's gonna be like a sheet of just kind of clear glass going down there. And they take a photograph and they say, look, this is what I was trying to achieve but I didn't quite achieve it. Then somebody can give you proper feedback because then they can talk about things like shutter speed and how that could be helped and how to help with that. Now, of course, if you ask for just general feedback, you kind of miss that whole point entirely. And it means that people are not really able to give you anything meaningful. So they won't give you anything. Or at the very worst, what they will do is say, I don't like it or I like it. Now that's not feedback. Saying I like this or I don't like it isn't really feedback. It doesn't help you, does it? So next time that you want some sort of feedback on your photographs, ask a specific question. If you want to photograph a traditional style portrait using a traditional style portrait lens and you photograph it with maybe like a 35mm or a 28mm or something like that, then people could sort of say, look, okay, your lens choice is incorrect for what you were trying to achieve. But if you don't tell people what you're trying to achieve, they can't help you. So laser down into this idea of what it is exactly that you want help with in your photograph. The nature of what you want improving will obviously change over time. And I would certainly suggest that in the beginning you focus on one thing at a time. Beginner photographers tend to want to do everything all at once. And it's so important for you to kind of separate out the concepts that you want to work on. So if you want to work in composition, do so. If you want to work on focusing and trying to work on depth of field, do that. Exposures, F stops, all these things. Do them individually and ask for feedback on those things individually. Have a purpose to photographs that you're trying to use to improve your skills. And that will make getting feedback from people so much easier. When you go online and ask for help with your photography, there are going to be people who basically are just trying to use whatever platform you're on as a showboat for how much they think they know, right? They want to be the person who knows everything. So all they will do is use your photographs as a method of trying to inflate their own egos by saying that you were wrong with things. Do your best to push those people away, to forget about them. They are not helping your photography. This is the point that I was alluding to earlier that you need to be mindful about the sort of people who you are taking advice from. Now how long they've been taking photographs is a really, very little consequence with this. What you ultimately want to find are people who will help you develop your photography, not people who will take you and shape them into them, okay? It would be very easy for someone to sit there and go, look, this is what you need to do to photograph like me. And if that's what you want to do, then that's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who would like to photograph like some other famous photographer. And that's okay. In fact, it's a very useful learning tool. But don't confuse the two. Be mindful and be very choosy about whom you listen to. You want people who are going to give you advice that is helping you improve the photography. So rather than saying like, oh, I would have done it this way, they want to be able to look at your photography and go based on what you've told them to say how you could improve that. So have you considered doing this? Have you kind of moved that? Everything wants to be from the perspective of improving your photography, not like I would have done this or I would have done that or this is what I would have changed. Because that's a very, that's somebody trying to push themselves onto you. Find people who will help you develop your photography. The third part of getting honest and good feedback and critique for your photography is giving honest and meaningful critique to other people. Now, even if you're a beginner photographer or you've had decades of experience, you can do this. And so I think so many photographers, especially new photographers, feel that they're not in a position to do so. Like somehow you need to kind of earn your wings to giving critique. And that's certainly not the case. Sometimes the best perspectives, the freshest perspectives can come through the eyes of people who are not hindered and held down by years or decades of their own way of doing things. This fresh perspective can be so liberating. That's why it's so enjoyable to talk to new photographers, to people who are just learning the ropes because the way that they look at things, the way that you may be looking at your own photography is so new. And that's a fantastic thing. So don't ever think that you're not able to give advice and give feedback to other people. Of course, these are all examples. And indeed, going back to that first point once more, if you are specific, if you are careful about who you take advice from and you offer it in a spirit of giving and back and forth, it's gonna so much help your own growth and your journey as a photographer. And you're also gonna develop relationships with people. And the more that people know you, the more that they are inclined to give you a bit more feedback, to have a bit more of a discussion, to be a bit more open with you and say things that sometimes can be somewhat difficult to hear, especially as you get to a level where the differences between what you consider to be a good photograph and a great photograph become quite subtle. And that's a discussion for a whole another day. But sometimes you need to hear that that didn't work or that what you were trying to do, you kind of, you missed and you went off on a tangent. This idea of a creative hub about this exchange of ideas, a wonderful breeding ground for creativity is very similar to my experiences at photo school where the lecturers gave us assignments and then obviously we had to complete them. And then we had a group critique at the end of the assignment where all our photographs were up on the wall. And that experience was extremely beneficial. I think that was probably the most beneficial thing from being at photo school was having this feedback where A, you were trying to compete with your peers because the nature of the beast means that you want to be good, you want to be better than the people next year. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that because you all encourage each other to be better through this whole circle of one-upmanship if you want to call it that. But also you are getting feedback from people the whole time. This is what I want you to encourage is to not just go online and jump into the first place that you can find and expect people to give you solid feedback. It can be a scary thing to go online and ask for feedback because you think that people are gonna go, ah, you suck, all right? If somebody says your pictures suck, just go thanks ever so much and just dismiss them. They're not for them. They're not for them, they're for you. Through everything that you do with your photographer, I want you to bear that in mind that everything you do is for you. If you're a new photographer or you're interested in discovering more about the art of photography, how to see and the more the why rather than the how, I put up a playlist on the screen for you right here which has got some fantastic videos that are gonna enable you to develop your own photography. Thanks ever so much for being here today and I look forward to seeing you again soon.