Ask HN: Do you struggle taking good pics?

Given my level (or lack thereof), my only advice is to stop worrying. As long as you take pictures, some of them will be great and some of them will be shitty. Experience and luck will merely improve your odds of making a great picture instead of a shitty one.

The biggest problem I had with taking pictures was dealing with them after the fact. I made a few python scripts to build folders of the formula photos/yyyy/yyyymmdd/ to put the days results into, which helped.

I used to love Picassa, until it got killed, and unfortunately, the last version has a bug where it swaps face tags randomly, corrupting otherwise well chosen tags.

I've been a DSLR user for a long time, and ever since I realized the net cost of a photo was zero, I love taking photos. The key to getting better is just to get out there and keep taking pictures, throw most of them away. You will get better over time.

All that said... my Bride is much, MUCH better than I am at framing... I try to get too clever all the time, she's a natural.

It took me a long time to internalize “fitting the whole subject in the frame”, which sounds simple in theory but often isn’t once you get away from just taking portraits of people. And also, just cause you can shoot a shallow depth of field doesn’t mean you can stop paying attention to what’s behind your subject, it still takes work and thought.

Colouring, and I guess editing in general, has been a lot of trying different tools, being generally unsatisfied, and eventually ending up with Lightroom even though it has its own problems. You’d think straightening and cropping an image would be a solved problem at this point, but all (yes, all) of the free or cheap options have serious shortcomings that make them anywhere from quirky to completely unusable. Even more so with colouring. The most powerful options are the least intuitive. rawtherapee has the worst curve editing widgets ever in history. Darktable has the most nonsensical organizing and naming of its panels.

The market desperately needs an alternative to Lightroom that isn’t Adobe, with halfway usable library management baked in. I guess this turned into a bit of a software rant, but that’s been my experience so far trying to learn how to take photos I’m really happy with.

Last summer I took a lot of flower pictures and posted them to Mastodon because people liked them. I thought it was easy to do but a little boring. I found though that other people were making photos where all the parts of the flower were "tack sharp" but even when I was around f/7.0 or so I found the depth of field was small enough that the disc and ray flowers of a composite usually weren't both as sharp as the CCD could show.

I found other the other guys were using this technique

https://digital-photography-school.com/a-beginners-guide-to-...

I got the equipment to do it but never really got started because the project that took over for me was this: I made a picture of a field of flowers that a friend wanted to print on fabric and make a dress out of, that got me thinking "gee, what if I never had any problems with repeats and seams?" and figured it would be possible to photograph 50 or so flowers, cut them out, and then have the computer put them together to fill whatever space I want. So now I am setting up a studio to do this and will be improving my software that emulates Disney's multiplane camera for this project.

I got into sports photography last year and also had times when I came back from a game defeated, particularly when it was volleyball or basketball or something played in doors. In those cases I would go to dpreview and ask my photog friends for help and usually get good advice.

One area where I feel like I'm on my own is in mastering stereo photography which I do with this little guy

https://us.kandaovr.com/products/qoocam-ego

and the problem has so many dimensions from "how do I undo the pincushion distortion?" to "what kind of scene has colors that will do well with a red-cyan anaglyph on paper?", "what makes a good stereo composition?", "how could I sell group stereograms taken against a striking backdrop?" etc. When the going gets tough the tough get going.

For me, learning photography at a local community college was a lot of fun, not just in acquiring technical skills but also learning from seasoned professionals on topics like subject matter, time of day, lighting, focus, composition, color, etc.

You can probably get a lot of that through videos today, but it's better when someone experienced can review your actual work and offer real time feedback.

Yes, as in that I do struggle, and ~98-99.9% of my photos are junk. Solution here is saturation: take 50-1000 photos to get a good one, and also plan.

No, as in I take photos separately for documentation purposes (I want a photo of something as record), and for artistic purposes ( The personal and social satisfaction of taking a good photo of wildlife is very large). I don't expect my documentation smartphone photo of a cool building to be award winning, but I will also go out of my way to be in the right place and time to get good lighting and angle for decent composition with a tripod and mirrorless camera.

The camera software is really good - it captures the face looking at the camera when the person is moving which makes it so much easier to take good pics of the kid.

The only issue when taking pics of people would be to make sure they are all smiling and have their eyes open and are looking at the camera. I take many pics in sequence.

If a photo comes out bad I go along with my day.

I understand how the camera works but suck at finding exactly what to point it at.