Improving your skills as a photographer takes time and effort. You need to study your craft and learn the key principles, as well as practice a lot. However, one aspect that’s often overlooked is confidence. No matter what skill you’re learning or perfecting, confidence plays a significant role in your progression. This post looks at five ways in which you can improve your skills as a photographer through increasing your confidence.

Plan Properly

As with any skill, you need to properly plan for your excursions. Although part of the joy of photography is that it can be organic and spontaneous if you’re going out on a shoot, you need to be prepared. It gives you the security and confidence to walk onto your location or meet with your model and know you have everything under control.

Make sure that you have all your equipment organised, including having your cameras and lenses ready to go, and your batteries charged. You’ll also want to take a spare battery and memory cards if you know you’ll be on a long shoot. Take an ideas book with you, so that you have a sense of the kinds of shots you want to take on a pre-planned shoot.

Practice. A Lot.

Regardless of what level your photography skill is at, you’re going to need to practice a lot to get better. The more time you spend doing something, the better you’ll get. You can learn from your mistakes, refine your skills, and understand the principles that are key to the art.

Take your camera with you wherever you go, and use it whenever is appropriate. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see instant results, your confidence will grow each time you practice a specific technique or type of shot.

Know Your Kit

Ideally, you want your camera and lenses to be an extension of your hands. It takes a lot of effort to get to this stage, but even just familiarising yourself with your equipment can help raise your confidence levels.

When you’re out in the field, conditions can change rapidly. You need to be able to react to these changes and make necessary adjustments. In order to do so, you need to spend time getting to know your kit and what it can do. The same applies to elements such as how lighting affects a scene and how to compose a picture.

Share Your Work

It can be daunting to share your creative work at first. Quite often, people put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect right away. However, this is rarely the case. In order to build confidence and get some constructive feedback, you need to share your work.

Whether you enter photography contests, show your compositions to friends and family, or share them on social media, it’s a good idea to get your work out there.

Learn from Positive and Negative Feedback

This point is very much linked to the idea above of sharing your work. Hopefully, in doing so, you will receive some positive feedback on it. You may also receive pointers on how you can improve your photography. It’s important that you take your criticism on board and learn from it.