Photography Basics
By Mickey Rountree
Basic (and Beyond) Photography – Practice for Photographers
by Mickey Rountree
“Practice makes perfect.” Or as my late friend and fellow drummer and photographer put it: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” We’re told “repetition is the mother of skill.” We’ve heard these or similar expressions all of our lives. From childhood we hear “You learn from your mistakes.” Actually you only learn from your mistakes if you recognize them, analyze them, and fix them.
So, what is perfect practice, and why do some people improve faster than others with the same or even less amount of practice? And how many photographers actively practice at all? At a recent workshop at Photofest, our instructor Lisa Langell said that photography was one of the few pursuits where people don’t feel they have to practice. Photographers think nothing of going months without shooting or any kind of practice and then expect to go out cold and produce good images.
I’ve touched on practice in several articles in the past, but let’s take a much deeper look. I recently read (and re-read) “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle. It looks at the science and even neuroscience of how skills are developed. And he shows that what we often think of as “natural talent” is just effective practice. Most of his examples are from athletes or musicians, but the principles apply to almost any discipline including photography. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in improving a skill. And no medical background is required; he presents the neuroscience in an easy to understand way.
The short story is that repeated actions build neural pathways, and the more we practice, the more these pathways become wrapped and insulated by a myelin sheath. The thicker this sheath, the more the skill becomes ingrained in us. But there are different levels of practice, and the myelin sheath is built faster and thicker by what Coyle refers to as “deep practice”. Or as my friend said, “perfect practice”.
Deep practice is not just repeating an action over and over mindlessly. It is performing an act with intention, and looking for any mistake or shortcoming, and immediately breaking down that mistake into its component parts (chunks) and working through them step by step until they are perfect and only then moving on. It means constantly reviewing your performance for any weakness or errors and then working through them, fixing those errors step by step before moving on. Deep practice is not easy. It’s tiring, challenging and physically and/or mentally challenging. If you aren’t feeling challenged, you are not practicing or learning at your best.
To use a music analogy, you could play a song over and over, and even if you make a mistake you keep playing through the whole song. (And yes this is what sometimes happens and has to happen in a live performance.) But in deep practice you are constantly monitoring for errors, and when one happens you stop, analyze what went wrong, break it down to its component steps, practice the steps slowly until you feel that everything is right and then build up to tempo. Did you miss a note, hit the wrong note, was your timing wrong, or every note was right, but the phrasing didn’t feel right? Find and fix these errors throughout the song and your playing will improve. More importantly this type of practice builds stronger neural pathways, but it builds them faster and more efficiently than mindless repetition. We don’t like to admit or dwell on our mistakes, but deep practice forces us to constantly look for the smallest errors, analyze them, and fix them step by step.