How to improve your photography with deliberate practice

Shooting more helps, but mostly it makes you better at the things you already do. Deliberate practice is how you get better at the rest, and it starts with giving each session one specific job.

11 August 20268 minute read

If you always reach for the same focal length, the same subjects and the same kind of light, another thousand shots will polish those habits and not add much else. So “shoot more” is rarely the answer to “how do I improve?”, even though it's the advice everyone gives. There are photographers with fifteen years of experience and photographers with one year of experience repeated fifteen times, and from the inside both feel like practice.

What deliberate practice looks like in photography

The whole thing fits on a sticky note:

Pick one thing to work on.
Make it difficult enough that some attempts fail.
Get something back that tells you what happened: a comparison, or somebody saying what they noticed.
Try the same problem again with that information.

Step four is the one everyone drops, and without it you're back to just shooting more. That's still worth doing (a Saturday walk with no plan is one of the best things going), it just isn't practice. Practice needs a chance of failing, or there's nothing to learn from it.

Pick one thing

“Get better at composition” is a wish. “Use foreground in every shot this week” is a plan, and on Friday you can look at the shots and answer yes or no. Anything you can't check on Friday tends to be forgotten by the following Thursday. Pick the version you can check, even if it feels a bit small, as the small version can start tomorrow.

Constraints help

Taking options away is the easiest way to make all four steps happen. Pick one restriction and stick to it for a week, properly. If you make an exception for the good light it's no longer a constraint (we've all done it). It only works if you can't wriggle out of it.

One focal length

Use a prime, or pick one focal length on a zoom and leave it there. You'll start walking, as zooming is no longer a way out of a bad position, and moving your feet does a lot for your composition. A zoom lets you fix the composition without ever changing where you're standing, which is why plenty of photographers have a decade of shots all taken from the footpath.

An airliner small in the middle of a blue gradient sky, with most of the shot left empty. — Mayank set a challenge to stay at one focal length and work on composition, and this A320 flew by. Put up as “Negative space” in the Aviation Freestyle Mission.

One subject

Shoot the same tree, junction, bird table or building several times over. The first visit gets the obvious shots and the second gets the ones you thought of on the way home. By the third, the obvious ones are done and you have to find something new. Most people stop after the first visit and decide the subject was boring.

Kāpiti Island on the horizon at sunset, with wet sand, pools and dark, mostly buried driftwood in the foreground. — Robin's second go at Kāpiti Island for the Foreground Focus Mission: same island, a different stretch of the beach and some mostly buried driftwood.

One technique

Panning, backlight, negative space, or any of the other ways to organise a photograph beyond the rule of thirds. Choose the one you avoid. You already know which one it is, and a poor hit rate is exactly why it's worth a week.

A shot limit

Ten shots for a session, then stop, even if something brilliant turns up on shot eleven (it will). With a card that holds thousands, the thinking happens later at the computer. With ten shots it has to happen before you press the shutter.

Why a brief works better than a vague goal

A goal is where you'd like to end up and a brief is what you're doing this afternoon. “One week of foreground” can start before lunch. “Improve composition” can't start at all, and by Wednesday you've no way of knowing whether anything happened. That's a big part of what Missions on Kōlab are for. Someone else has already picked the starting point, so all your attention goes on the shooting.

An F-16 pulling up through a display at Belgian Air Force Days at Florennes, afterburner lit and smoke trailing from its wingtips against a blue sky — Belgian Air Force Days at Florennes, at 600mm and 1/1600s. Decide numbers like these before the flying starts and all that's left to think about is where you stand.

Get somebody else to look at it

It's hard to see your own shots clearly. You remember the walk in, the cold, the waiting and the thing that happened just out of shot, and all of that comes with you every time you open the file. Somebody else just sees the shot. You don't need a full critique. If you're working on one thing, one specific question tells you whether it worked: “What did you look at first?” “Does the foreground help?” “Which of these two works better, and why?” There's a way of asking that gets you a real answer, and a way that gets you a row of compliments, and most of the difference is how narrow the question is.

Go back and try again

This is the step most of us skip: shoot it, edit it, put it up, move on. Musicians play the same passage until it's right and writers rewrite as a matter of course, but a second attempt at the same shot often feels like admitting the first one failed. Trying again costs nothing, and you walk into the second attempt knowing what went wrong the first time. Go back to the same place in different light. Re-edit the same raw file and put the two versions next to each other. Shoot the same subject at two focal lengths, change exactly one thing on purpose, and compare the results rather than your memory of them.

An F-35 flying low over the runway at Aero India, with a crowd of spectators and photographers in the foreground and tower blocks behind — Same Mission as the shot further up (Caught In Motion), this time at 287mm. A second go at the same problem teaches you something whether the first go was yours or somebody else's.

Copy something you admire, as an exercise

Find a shot you keep going back to and work out why it works: what focal length it was probably taken at, where the photographer was standing relative to the light, and what they left out (usually the harder bit to spot). Then go and make your own version, badly, and find out which part you can't do yet. Nobody's asking you to pass it off as your own. If the bit you can't do is the light rather than the lens, that's next month's practice sorted.

A grey Turkish Air Force F-4 Phantom II with a shark mouth on its nose, rolling along the runway with its drag chute behind it — This Phantom has its Shot Recipe showing, so the shutter speed and focal length are there for free (1/2000s at 500mm). Working out where they stood and what they left out is up to you.

A simple week

Monday

Pick one constraint and write it somewhere you'll physically see it, rather than in your phone with the shopping list. A sticky note on the camera bag does the job.

During the week

Shoot to it more than once, as a single session tells you more about the weather than about you. At some point, try the version you're fairly sure won't work.

Friday

Choose one shot that worked and one failure that's interesting rather than just bad, and put them next to each other. The failure usually has more to learn from.

Then

Ask one specific question about the pair, and let the answer choose next week's constraint rather than choosing it yourself.

The fair objection is that this sounds like homework, and photography is meant to be the part of the week that isn't. One week in four is plenty to keep you moving, and the rest of the time you can shoot whatever you like! It's also, not by accident, how a Kōlab Mission works.

Start this week

If you want a ready-made version, pick a Kōlab Mission you wouldn't normally choose: constraint first, subject second. The one that appeals most is usually the one closest to your defaults, so go for the slightly less appealing one.

Shoot itOpen

One Colour, Any Subject

One colour, any subject, any genre. Constraint first.

Or look at every open mission and take the one you'd normally scroll straight past. And if the camera hasn't been out of the bag since June, this isn't the article you need yet, as a slump works differently and needs a different fix.