This blog post had been on my “brain dump” list (where everything single idea I’ve ever had for a blog post goes!) for a while. I figured now, when the challenges of homeschooling, working with home AND looking after your family means you probably have less time to yourself than normal. (Not that you probably had a ton of free time before!)

As I strongly believe that it is SO important that we continue to find time for ourselves and our hobbies (even if it may feel frivolous for some right now) during this lockdown period, I wanted to give you some tips on how you can continue to practice and learn photography, and make the most of the time you DO have, even if it’s not as much as you would like!

Short on time? This post will help you learn photography faster with 3 time saving hacks for learning photography!

1) Focus on learning in STEPS by creating a learning curriculum

One of the things I see a lot of is people trying to learn photography by jumping about from one topic to another, and then trying to hack it that random information together like some kind of photography Frankenstein.

Of course, it’s wonderful to be able to pick up all this pieces of knowledge, but from a learning prospective, it is a really time-consuming and frustrating way of doing it! (Can you imagine trying to learn anything else in the same way?!)

Worse, it’s also rarely successful, because you often end up missing out on the nuggets of information that actually tie it all together, and have it make sense. (I had this problem for years: lots and lots and lots of information in my head, but I still couldn’t get the camera to take the photos I wanted!)

A much easier, quicker and more successful way of learning photography is to follow a logical learning path, where everything is learnt in the correct order. That way you never miss out on anything, and everything is easier to understand because it’s so methodical.

Which is why I recommend that in some way or another, you follow a learning curriculum.

There are two ways to do this. The first is obviously to take a course, as the good ones will have spent a great deal of time making sure that everything flows in the right order, and every lesson connects to the last (Like my Auto to Awesome course 😉)

I’m a huge fan of online courses, and will take courses on everything and everything, because they save me so much time and have allowed me to get where I want to be faster, but you can also create your OWN learning curriculum. I suggest you check out this blog post “5 Areas to Focus On When Just Starting Out” where you can see what you should be learning first, and in what order.

The key thing is that if you take a bit of time upfront to know what you need to learn, and in what order, when you do get some time to yourself, you’ll know what exactly you need to focus on next, and can get right to it without wasting time randomly searching for tips and tricks, and being thrown down the rabbit warren that is the internet (only to pop back up an hour later with a new dress and no knowledge of aperture)

I do have an extra special freebie that will totally help with this: my FREE 90 Day Photography Learning Blueprint.It’s a complete roadmap for you to follow that shows you exactly what you need learn to get great photos, and has links to further reading in each one. This little PDF is worth its weight in gold, so go grab it now (you’ll kick yourself in about a week if you don’t!)

2) Watch instead of read!

One of my favourite ways to learn something is to watch instead of read, because that means that I can get on with something else at the same time!

My favourite way to learn anything when I’m short on time is to get the training set up on my iPad, press play, and then I get on with loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, peeling potatoes etc, all whilst learning at the same time.

Sure, I sometimes need to go back and watch a bit again because I wasn’t fully paying attention, but on the whole, I have a learnt a LOT of new stuff this way, because it’s filled what I consider to be “wasted” time productively.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to read too, and I find that I can usually read something faster than I can watch it, (which is why I still love blogs) but being able to watch something whilst getting on with a task that doesn’t require any brainpower (let’s face it, we could fold socks in our sleep) means I can fit in a lesson each day that might otherwise have been written off.

(Want something to watch? Check out our YouTube channel!)

3) Incorporate photography practice into your daily life

Of course, photography is not an armchair sport - we need to get our cameras out and actually practice what we are learning, otherwise it just doesn’t stick in the same way.

So for this, I recommend that you try to incorporate this into your everyday life as much as possible, rather than designating a particular time to practice.

For example, I may take my camera with me on a walk (at the moment, we’re only allowed out once for exercise, and only with a certain distance of our homes, but I can take my camera along with me), but mostly I’ll simply photograph our day to day lives.

These days I will only do this when I actually want to specifically capture the moment, but back when I was learning my camera, I photographed EVERYTHING, whether it was record-keeping worthy or not.

Here’s why this is such a good thing.

As you photograph your day, you’re building in muscle memory of where everything in your camera is, so that it becomes quicker to change your settings, and you can stop missing moments fumbling with buttons and dials.

You’ll also be cementing new concepts that you are learning, for example about aperture, shooting in manual mode or incorporating leading lines. (plus practicing when you’re not worried about missing the moment means that you’re able to focus more on your settings anyway, as you won’t be panicking about missing anything)

As you photograph throughout your day, you’ll be photographing in different lighting conditions and learning how to do all those things in different types of light, which is invaluable!

There you go, my three favourite hacks for learning photography when you only get a small amount of time to yourself each day.

Over to you!

Tell me in the comments below - what are your days looking like at the moment? How do you find time to do things for yourself like learning photography? We have hundreds of people visit the blog each week, and your comment may just inspire someone else!

Don’t forget to download your FREE 90 Day Photography Learning Blueprint before you go too: there is so much goodness in this little PDF that you’ll definitely want this with you on your photography journey. Grab it here:

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