Stop Trying To Be A “Better” Photographer

This is going to sound really weird, but one of the biggest mistakes I see with landscape photographers is that they’re constantly trying to get better. But this hand wavy, amorphous pursuit of “better” can actually kill your progress as a photographer and I’m here to tell you why.

Obviously I’m not against people progressing and trying to become more successful photographers. My problem is with the concept of “better”. And the reason that I really don’t like this concept is because “better” is not a destination. “Better” is not a place you can actually get to with your photography and, therefore, it’s impossible to create a plan or a system to get there.

How do you know with absolute certainty when you’ve become a better photographer? You might look at a photo from a year ago and a photo from yesterday and say, “Oh, well, the one from yesterday is better, so I’m a better photographer”, but how do you know for sure that it’s not just because you had really rad conditions yesterday, or you got lucky with your camera settings or your composition? Without pointing to something specific, you can’t actually know if you’ve achieved “better”. So what’s going on here?

What happens when photographers try to get better is that they attempt to digest all of the information out there about photography. They read every blog article they can find, and they watch every random YouTube video from every photographer who has a channel like me, and they absorb and absorb and absorb information. And you know what happens? They become overwhelmed and paralyzed by the amount of completely meaningless information they’re trying to digest, and the actual transformative learning process screeches to a halt. I know this because I did this for years.

Rather than getting bogged down by useless and overwhelming amounts of information in pursuit of your goal of being “better”, what you need to do is set clear and specific goals for your photography. Don’t try to learn astrophotography and abstract photography and macro photography and luminosity masking all at once–you’re just going to overload yourself and you’re not going to make any progress in any of those things. Instead, pick one thing that you would like to learn and work toward that one thing. For example: I want to learn how to shoot long exposure, or I want to learn how to shoot seascape photography. Pick one thing that’s most important to you right now, and even more critically, make the goal as specific as possible with a clear outcome that you can point to in order to decisively determine if your goal has been met.