I was having a conversation on-line today about workshops. I was extolling their virtues for improving your photography, and the other person wasn’t buying it. They said that because of the instant feedback that modern digital cameras provide, you could be your own teacher at least as effectively as learning from someone else. We debated, and in the end agreed to disagree.
An hour later I had an on-line guitar lesson. My instructor pointed out two things that I was doing wrong that should be corrected. I hadn’t noticed either of them. So that’s a case where the instant feedback I was receiving by listening to myself play was insufficient. A few years ago, I was taking a course from John Sexton, and he was looking at my portfolio. He pulled up a print and said, “You used potassium ferricyanide on this, didn’t you?” I asked him how he knew. He said that it gave the highlights a faint yellow tinge. I had to look really hard, but I finally saw what he was talking about.
After my guitar lesson, I went to a physical therapy session. My physical therapist several times noticed that I wasn’t doing an exercise quite right, pointed that out, and gave be feedback when I tried to make it better.
Sometimes, the opinion of an expert can yield insights you can’t get all by yourself. Or, if you could eventually get there by yourself, you can get there a lot faster by listening to an expert.
Another thing to consider is bad habits. It’s better to find out you’re doing something wrong early, so you don’t ingrain the error into your practice.
Made me think.
Great points, thank you.
Having said that, it’s really a question of `both and`, I think. Yes the instant feedback can be helpful, if we’re honest and critical enough. But even more useful is feedback from others, particularly if t they posses superior knowledge.
Yes. I certainly didn’t mean to exclude learning from experience.
Feedback from others can be quite helpful so long as one is aware of the source biases. Good teachers adapt their standards to the student. They will likely be more demanding of those whose skills are better and more tolerant of minor issues with those at a different level. Great teachers, such as John Sexton, from whom I’ve also taken workshops, seem to see things, both technical and artistic that the photographer misses because many of us are so in love with our own images. The ultimate comeback to a criticism with which one does not agree… “I like it that way!”
As far as “instant” feedback is concerned, it takes me a while, sometimes several prints before I see problems with an image. This may sound unbelievable, but once I made a wide angle photo of the inside of a railway car, it was not until I had made a 13×20 print that I saw that I had left my camera pack in the image, blinders?
We often see the parts we like and overlook the rest. Others see everything and give us instant feedback. We may reject that feedback, because at this point we’re still seeing only the parts we like.
To discover the rest of the photograph, we may have to keep it out of sight until we’ve had a chance to “forgetaboutit”. At that point we can see it more as others do, and we might even ask ourselves “What was I even thinking?”.