{"id":5603,"date":"2026-06-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=5603"},"modified":"2026-03-19T17:35:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T16:35:52","slug":"become-a-good-photographer-part-six-dont-learn-from-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/06\/19\/become-a-good-photographer-part-six-dont-learn-from-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"Become a Good Photographer, Part Six: Don’t Learn From Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There is no shortage of people eager to tech you photography online these days. There are probably many tens of thousands of videos on YT. Maybe millions of tutorials about everything touching photography. But the vast majority will be useless to you and won’t better your photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A tiny rock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The algorithm keeps suggesting photography tutorials. Ten tips for better composition. Five mistakes beginners make. The secret to sharp images every time. All presented by someone with immaculate lighting, professional graphics, and absolutely nothing useful to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These people don’t want to teach you photography. They want your attention, your clicks, your subscription. The content is optimised for engagement, not education. Ten percent information stretched across ten minutes of filler, hook, and call to action. They’re teaching to an imaginary average photographer with generic problems, offering recipes and formulas that might work for someone but probably won’t work for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stop watching those videos. And while you’re at it, stop reading those articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, read what photographers say about their own work. Not how-to content, but descriptions of process, explanations of decisions, accounts of why they work the way they do. This is harder to find because it’s not optimised for discovery. It lives in interviews, artist statements, photo book essays, the occasional honest blog post. But it’s infinitely more valuable because it’s specific, contextual, and true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a photographer explains their process, they’re showing you how one person solved particular problems in service of particular goals. You’re not supposed to copy it. You’re supposed to understand it, evaluate whether it’s relevant to you, extract what’s useful, and discard the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned more about light from reading how Bill Brandt described his approach to shadow than from any tutorial on lighting ratios. He wasn’t teaching technique, he was explaining his aesthetic priorities and how technical choices served them. Understanding his thinking gave me a framework for evaluating my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of what you read won’t resonate. You’ll encounter photographers whose methods feel completely wrong for you. That’s valuable too. When I read about large format photographers who spend hours setting up a single shot, I recognise that’s not my temperament. I understand what they get out of it, but I know it’s not for me. Understanding that helps me stop fighting my own instincts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other photographers will resonate immediately. Their priorities align with yours, their struggles feel familiar. That’s when you dig deeper. Sometimes that investigation confirms the initial connection. Often it reveals complications. You agree with their goals but not their methods, or you admire their work but realise you’re trying to do something different. Both outcomes are productive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This process develops discernment: the ability to evaluate approaches critically rather than accepting or rejecting them wholesale. That critical sense is what actually makes you better. Not following formulas, but learning to judge what serves your work and what doesn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of photographers never develop that. They accumulate tips without understanding when to use them or why. They try things because someone told them to, not because those things serve their work. Their practice becomes borrowed approaches that don’t quite fit together because they were designed to get clicks, not create coherence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you learn from photographers describing their own practice, you’re learning to think like a photographer rather than follow instructions. You see how choices connect to intentions, how constraints shape solutions, how individual photographers develop methods specific to their goals. That understanding is transferable. Not the specific methods, but the logic underlying them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started photography, I spent a few years learning technique, understanding the cameras, the gear, optics, and all the rules. At the time, YouTube tutorials and online articles barely existed, so I had to find other routes. But that technical grounding didn’t make me a photographer. It made me a competent technician. What helped becoming a photographer was reading interviews with photographers whose work intrigued me, trying to understand how they thought about photography rather than just how they executed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some worked in ways that seemed impossible for me. Too slow, too technical, too dependent on conditions I couldn’t create. But understanding their priorities still mattered. It showed me different ways of valuing images, different criteria for success. Even when I disagreed, the disagreement was productive. It forced me to articulate what I did value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That active gathering of perspectives develops your critical sense. You can’t judge your own work well until you’ve internalised a wide range of approaches and learned to evaluate them. See what they’re trying to accomplish, assess whether they succeed on their own terms, decide whether those terms are relevant to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tutorial merchants profit from your uncertainty, so they keep you uncertain with solutions that don’t quite work and explanations that don’t quite explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Real learning happens when you engage with photographers as practitioners, not as teachers. When you read what they say about their work, look at their images, try to understand the connection between intention and execution. Some will be useful, much won’t, all of it will expand your understanding of what’s possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don’t learn from people who want to teach you. Learn from people willing to explain what they do and why. The difference is everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Theory #PhotographyTheory<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no shortage of people eager to tech you photography online these days. There are probably many tens of thousands of videos on YT. Maybe millions of tutorials about everything touching photography. But the vast majority will be useless to you and won’t better your photography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5603"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6982,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5603\/revisions\/6982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}