Professional model Zara Watson at Sandon Studio. Shot at 1/60 second at f/4.5 with a 105mm lens, this is pushing the technical boundaries quite a lot. Being prepared to shoot under these conditions, and being confident of the results requires a good deal of practice. Then, when the picture is there, you can take it…

I’m going to be brave here. Most of my articles are constructed around a technique or a subject. This is going to be all about doing whatever you choose really, really well.

There is a very fine book that will take you through a very specific process to achieve improvement: if you have the dedication to go through a series of exercises, I unhesitatingly suggest that you buy the book and do exactly as it says. You cannot avoid becoming more aware of what you are doing in photography - and much better at it. The book is interesting for any thoughtful photographer and will be inspiring for a good few, at least.

But I want to give you just a taste of the ideas that the book addresses. I don’t have the deep knowledge of psychology and learning that inform Bob Ryan's The Master Photographer - the journey from good to great, but the conclusions and outcomes in the book chime well with my experience. (A psychology lecturer once refuted the idea that research was useless if it confirmed 'what everyone knows' - this is actually reassuring, and suggests that everyone is right on such occasions.) Ryan is a psychologist, and a good photographer, and knows it: you may have to remind yourself that he knows more about the subject than you do while reading.

One image can change us.

A picture, a moment can change the way we feel. Change how we see ourselves. Change our understanding and change the rules. Provoke and change history.

MPB puts photo and video kit into more hands, more sustainably. Every month, visual storytellers sell more than 20,000 cameras and lenses to MPB. Choose used and get affordable access to kit that doesn’t cost the earth. Sell the kit you’re not using to MPB. Trade in for the kit you need to create. Buy used, spend less and get more. Buy. Sell. Trade. Create.

Shaky start - from a known area of limited competence, for me: shot at Duxford air show, in poor lighting conditions, and with the wrong lens (a mirror lens). Add my lack of experience of shooting aircraft, and slow start-up of my thinking brain. 1/125 and 800 ISO with the f/8 aperture meant that camera shake was very likely, and it happened. I hope to return to an air show or two next year, with a more suitable lens and the intention of practising as much as I can in between shows. Don’t expect to be good at difficult stuff straight off!

I think, though, that if you work through the exercises in the book, you will emerge a much better and more insightful photographer, and that is not usually a bad thing. You’ll also have nothing to prove about your ability to work hard. Ryan is methodical and unsparing.

I am not trying to precis his method here - the essence of it is that it’s a whole, a complete approach, and dipping into different ways of doing anything, mixing and matching, is usually a recipe for confusion and wrong turnings.

I want to do something simpler and suggest a few things that you can do which may help you to improve. Just because an acronym is fun to devise, I’ll call it the DIPPER approach: Deliberation, Introspection, Purposefulness, Practice, Error rate, and Recapitulation.

'D' Is For Deliberation

Deliberation means that it’s worth sitting down and considering what you want to achieve in photography. It’s fine if it’s 'just a few snaps' - but if you want to sell pictures, win competitions, or have artistic aspirations, it’s worth being clear about what they are, and setting yourself specific goals. If you are a very organised person, you may want to define some milestones along the way, so that you can monitor progress and identify any mission creep or slacking! Write it down - it may be worth doing some simple mind mapping to get your thoughts in order, and then drawing up what business people call a Gantt chart - a graph of the steps along an axis showing time so that you can get a clear view of what depends on which previous steps, and how long the whole thing will take.

If you want to get good at stage work, take every opportunity you can get to shoot stage shows. Burlesque, dress rehearsals of amateur dramatic productions, folk singers of live bands at local gigs. Each time, think what you want to achieve, and assess how well you managed it when you review your pictures. Do this review as soon as you can.

So, for instance, if you decide that you want to put on an exhibition of your pictures, the milestones will be to decide on how many images you will use, find a venue, get prints done and mounted, and various other steps that you have got to take if it’s going to happen, sorting out a logical order, and setting yourself a timescale for doing it. It’s quite important to do this if you want to avoid the sudden discovery that you need to do something difficult and time-consuming before you can move the project any further forwards.

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

'I' Means Introspection

Introspection is at the heart of almost all purposeful improvements. You need to see yourself and your abilities clearly and match them against the action you need to take to achieve what you want. In particular, it will involve finding out what you aren’t so good at, and deciding whether (and if so, how) you want to change things.

The bad news was that I’d just got home from an all-day shoot with another photographer and my favourite model, Joceline. The good news was that a band I’d photographed before was performing at a local venue, with a small audience expected. This gave me the freedom to move around in front of the stage, throughout the set. Having seen them before, I had some idea of their style and movement. And the lighting at Robin 2 in Bilston was outstanding. Steve Lewis of Venus Rising.

Some people introspect any topic to death and never get started because they are working out how to do it. Others fail to introspect at all and take numerous (sometimes costly) wrong turnings. So it's worth sitting down with a pen and paper (again) and considering your photographic strengths and weaknesses, writing on two pages, one for each. Divide your pages into two columns, and leave the right hand one blank in each case. Check this against feedback on your images on this site, especially if you’ve posted one or two in the Critique Gallery.

Then go through the two lists, and start to fill in the right-hand columns. For your strengths, write down why and how they help the project, or if they don’t affect it. For the weaknesses, think about what you need to do to stop them hindering the work. That may involve working hard on holding your camera steady, or understanding how to adjust images in editing without killing them or wasting time. Again, a visit to the Critique Gallery may be helpful, as can trawling web articles and forums. You could even ask for specific help in the forums here at ePHOTOzine.

Drill down! If you want to get really good at something, you need to understand it in depth. Don’t accept shallow views, but work hard at getting a full view of what you need to do, how to do it, and your present ability to achieve it. Work on filling in the gaps, not just doing the fun part! (Having mentioned Joceline, I had to include a picture of her…)

'P' Is For Purposefulness

Purposefulness takes a similarly clear-eyed look at all the things that you normally do in your photography. For instance, if you have limited time to spend on your photography, you could reconsider the amount of time you spend at camera club meetings compared with taking pictures.

I believe, very strongly, that everybody does the things they want to do most: if I find I’m prioritising playing solitaire on my laptop over reading a book, taking pictures or writing the next article for ePHOTOzine, it suggests that I’m either very tired or that I need to remind myself what I really want to achieve. There is life beyond Level 150…

A purposeful photographer will have a clear focus on the stuff they want to do, and won’t meander off into something else. They will, in particular, be aware of the 'diversionary activities' they perform to avoid getting on with something they find hard.

A good technique that I used at work in the office was to rate everything as either important or unimportant, and as urgent or non-urgent. It’s really easy to deal with urgent stuff all the time, and never do anything about the really important things that can wait until next week. The purposeful worker apologies, and leaves minor urgent stuff undone forever. Again, a sheet of paper and a pen, and a vertical and horizontal line through the middle. Write all the important and urgent things in the top right quadrant, the urgent but trivial bottom right. Unimportant and non-urgent bottom left, and important but not pressing top left.

Bare essentials - what do you need to focus on? Here, the pose, reasonably soft but directional light, and a plain background matter. For my home studio, a black cloth backdrop solves many problems and creates few. For portraits and art nudes, it’s vastly better than elaborate room sets. Model: Scarlet Lovat.

Make a conscious decision not to do the unimportant stuff if there’s actually no pressing need, and simply not to do the non-urgent trivia. Urgent and important clearly needs sorting, but it's important but not urgent that is the real gold.

This is the stuff that will develop you. It’s learning to use studio lights, or go to the gym so that you’ll be fit enough to hike searching for landscapes when you’re on holiday. Ignore it and it will creep up on you, mug you, and leave you regretting lost opportunities.

'P' Is Also For Practice 

'Practice' makes perfect - we all know that. It’s not actually true, of course. Practice, providing that you reflect on what happens when you do something, leads to a gradual increase in success, in reality.

A musician once said that if he missed practice for one day, he noticed. A week and his manager noticed. A month and the audience noticed. We fool ourselves if we believe that we stay at peak performance without keeping on doing what we do. You never forget how to cycle, maybe - but if a Tour de France cyclist didn’t get on a bike for a few weeks, he’d not be doing well in a race.

I love Lensbaby optics and own a large selection. I particularly love the diffuse effects that the two Velvet lenses give: at wide apertures, they don’t give sharp focus in a plane – objects in different parts of the frame and at the same distance from the camera are not equally sharp. They also give a diffuse glow to highlights. Regular use means that I have a decent idea of the conditions that will bring out the best from them, which aperture to use, and how to set about focusing.

So take pictures daily if you can, even if they are of the car park at work, or the platform waiting for the train. Instead of playing a game on your mobile, engage with the world as you pass it on the daily commute. (Tough luck if you drive all the way to work. But be aware of all the pictures you can’t take because you can’t stop!)

I’ve always prided myself on being an eccentric, so I have carried a camera all the time since I was about 14: at one point, it was an Instamatic in my school blazer pocket - these days, it’s usually an Olympus MFT outfit if I’m not doing anything serious, photographically. I tool up seriously if I know I am going out to take pictures - if it’s a studio session, there will be at least one backup body, probably some additional lenses, and very likely a film camera or two. Given that, I see no reason why everyone shouldn’t carry a camera with decent performance and a reasonable-size sensor!

Given that, I see no reason why everyone shouldn’t carry a camera with decent performance and a reasonable-size sensor!

A visit to a hire studio requires your best game: the cost isn’t trivial, though there will be the opportunity to take a good number of excellent images. If you go to a workshop or group shoot, sharing time with others, you can also have the benefit of advice on how to improve. The model here is Black Beauty - and yes, she is dressed in warning tape for a workshop I ran at Click Away Studio.

Your error rate should be falling if you do these things. Don’t get discouraged if you have dry patches, or days, or even weeks when you simply don’t feel too good about things - maybe, even, a series of things go wrong. You’re in this for the long haul, and you don’t have a trend until things get consistently worse (or better) for several successive weeks. Think in terms of a graph of quality: and remember that you sometimes take big risks to get major success. Rally driver Jimmy Mcrae said that if you never have any ‘moments’ you’re not going fast enough. It’s the same with photography. Take a few risks from time to time, and see if you can excel yourself.

Risky light? I photographed Pippa Doll at her hotel in Birmingham. Room lights and one Rotolight Neo 2 meant that levels were extremely low - here, with the light only six feet from Pippa and at full power I was working at 1/200s and f/3.5 with the camera set to 3200 ISO. This was the brightest illumination I had at any point… I’ve worked a lot at these sorts of brightness, and it doesn’t frighten me any more…

If you have a period when it’s not going well, step back and take a rest. Maybe try something completely different… Stephen R Covey included 'sharpening the saw' in his ‘Seven habits of highly effective people’ - when things start slowing down, it’s often a sign that you are blundering on with more persistence than intelligence. Take a little time to nourish your creativity and recharge your batteries, so that you can go back to work with renewed vigour and effectiveness. While there are some times when you have to be stubborn and battering to achieve things, most of the time it’s better to be like the SAS - train hard, fight easy.

So, if you’re feeling a dry patch robbing you of the will to take pictures, ring a friend and suggest a walk with your cameras, or go along to some sort of photographic meet-up: you could even start a group yourself. Book a place on a workshop or a studio day or a course: the best courses are costly, but there are usually some local opportunities at a reasonable cost.

'R' Means Recapitulation

Recapitulation is a part of improving things. Look back. Consider what you did and what you want to do. Reprocess some old images. Go back a year and evaluate your own posts here on ePHOTOzine critically. Would you do anything differently now?

This is the oldest shot in the article, taken back in 2008 with a 12mp Sony Alpha 700. AT that stage, I didn’t shoot RAW files regularly and tended to underexpose everything to avoid blown highlights. This compromised shadow detail and I often lost the highlights anyway… Plantation house near Atlanta, Georgia.

Refresh your memory by getting out kit or images you haven’t used recently. Maybe go out and shoot in a style you have neglected for years.

And then sit down with your images and introspect again. Revisit your lists and diagrams. Add stuff to them, or annotate them, or even tick them off if you’ve got there. Tick, not cross. You want to keep things positive and remember that you will need to keep refreshing everything.

Keep looking, keep reading: there’s as much value in subscribing to one or two good paper publications (mine are Amateur Photographer, Black and White Photography, and the French Photo) as in surfing the web, and it’s really good for you to read real books as well. There’s a list of the ones I’d suggest below, for various levels of depth and readability.

Go to see photo shows at galleries, and also visit art galleries: you can learn from the Pre-Raphaelites as well as David Bailey.

Professional models Celia and Amethyst, posing in the front room of Celia’s shared, rented house. My approach was influenced by television and film, with quick cuts of parts of a scene building up an impression. I was also, perhaps, reacting against the Taylor Wessing portrait competition’s favoured style, of having formally posed subjects looking directly at the camera. A single hand, hair, glimpses of limbs and another hand, a vague sense of bare boards convey a feeling of tenderness and an inward world.

Diary-date things - put a reminder into your mobile, your computer, or onto the calendar in the kitchen for actions, shows, anything that will be in the future, and that you may forget otherwise. Once it’s written down and you have established the habit of looking at the thing, you lift the burden of remembering everything!

As an internal auditor, I always aimed to triangulate evidence. It’s not enough to hear something in one place - you need to check that the view from another perspective shows the same facts and the same interpretation. So check your thoughts on your photography with what others say. Ask open questions, as well as specific ones. The answer that you most need maybe to a question you haven’t even thought of yet…

Beware, though, of grazing bits and pieces from different sources. If you mix single parts of different workflow mechanisms, the results may be wonderful - or you may find that you’ve undercut both systems, and produced a mess. For instance, one person may recommend shooting RAW files with auto white balance, and always correcting in processing. Another may suggest shooting only JPG files and throwing away images that don’t look good without processing. If you shoot only JPG files with AWB and don’t process at all, you may find you have a disturbingly high rate of discarding images.

John is 90, and a canny and experienced woodworker. His deep knowledge and careful workmanship inspire me to aim for the same level of familiarity with my tools and materials. Shot with an SLR Magic 50mm f/0.95 Hyperprime lens at full aperture. It’s worth taking risks!

And Repeat

To close, a reminder that you need to Deliberate, Introspect, be Purposeful, Practice, notice your Error rate, and Recapitulate. Go back to the beginning, and think again. Maybe adjust and refine your purpose. Practice the new skills you now know you need, and watch your images improve.

Then, begin again…

Commitment to one’s art matters. Tinkerbella is one of the most heavily-tattooed people I’ve met (yes – that is a crescent moon on her forehead), and is as dedicated to making beautiful images as I am to using the first Lensbaby optic I bought, a Muse. This is a two-element f/2 plastic lens mounted on a flexible plastic tube: you focus (and move the area of sharpest focus around the frame) by pulling and angling the lens. For a photographer who has sought high-quality lenses for 50 years, it’s utterly liberating. Think too hard, and you lose it: rely on instinct, and there’s a ‘flow’ that is a wonderful experience.

Books that you may find helpful:

Read This If You Want To Take Great Photographs by Henry Carroll. Slim, quick and accessible to read, and a really great start - or a good refresher when you think you know it all.

The Master Photographer - the journey from good to great by Bob Ryan. A meticulous and informed educational approach to photographic excellence. A fine book for those in this hobby for the long haul!

For any given specific areas of photography, Michael Freeman's series of books is unmatched. Freeman knows his subject in great depth and expresses himself very clearly.

And for a bit of old-school inspiration, look round secondhand bookshelves for the late John Hedgecoe’s original The Book of Photography. This was the first book to combine serious technical information with vibrant pictures, each explained in sufficient detail for you to go out and do the same thing. Hedgecoe was a professor of Photography at the Royal College of Arts, and his pictures are excellent - but not so wonderful that you feel you can never match them.

Back around 7 years, and my portrait of Victoria Wang’s spectacular makeup is slightly less good than I thought - the focus is on the eyelashes of her right (camera left) eye, not the iris. Does this matter? Maybe not, but having seen it, I’m thinking hard about my focussing technique - both in relation to the Sony Alpha 900 I shot with then, and the Alpha 7R III that I currently use.

Most of the models named here have portfolios on purpleport.com and can be booked through that website.

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