I've seen discussions lately about the importance (or irrelevancy) of photographic equipment... mostly concerning cameras and lenses. Historically, photographers have been a fickle lot, and more often than not, equipment junkies. I fondly remember the days I was working in camera sales and two photographer customers (one Nikon, one Canon) were having a heated debate with each other concerning the length of their respective zoom lenses. Yes... you read that right... the length. Please feel free to insert any joke you may find relevant. Far be it from me to make any judgments regarding this discussion, but it does go to show how our obsession with equipment can cloud our vision of the bigger picture. (There are so many zingers I could be adding right now... but I digress). For most of my early career, I was not only an equipment junkie, but a brand snob. My first camera was a Nikon FM, and I would never accept Canon as a worthwhile contender (while Minolta wasn't even on the radar). Why? For no other reason than it seems to be in the nature of photographers to attach themselves to a brand and be fiercely loyal to it. As time progressed, my camera of choice became Hasselblad, and anything less was a toy camera meant for those just starting in the business. Arrogance, thy name is photographer. Many photographers argue that equipment is a vital component to photographic success and the best made equipment will result in the best made images. You can easily see how many times cheap materials give us terrible products. How often have we bemoaned accepting the "lowest bid" or regretted buying the off brand? It is logical to think this holds true for any endeavor, but is this necessarily so? I often sold expensive but also well crafted equipment to my customers (that was my job!). And yet, many of the resulting images were, shall we say, less than optimum. So what was wrong? How could superior equipment result in inferior quality? If you take some time to think about it, you have to wonder how much quality you get for your investment in dollars. I mean... does a $40,000 Hasselblad H6D really give 20 times the quality of a $2,000 Fuji X-T1? This kind of thinking led me to the conclusion equipment was at best marginally important, and if anything, could very well be detrimental to the whole process. Photographers are obsessed with finding the magic equipment that will make them the greatest success, either monetarily wealthy or immensely popular. They forget the essence of photography... its ability to communicate through the photographic image, and the resulting images demonstrate that lack of vision. If you browse some of my photographs, you will note I have an entire section devoted solely to smartphone images. Most of these images are created at the spur of the moment. I see something that catches my eye and I photograph it. I later go into my phone settings and tweak the image with the limited tools available. No exporting to Photoshop, no careful planning, no stressing out at the exact edits needed. This process is so casual, that some of the images were taken as I was driving down the highway! So does this mean equipment is nothing but a con, a deception by corporations that have run out of ideas to make the next best thing in camera tech? I have to admit, I was thinking this for the longest time. I came to believe the only thing that matters is your experience as a photographer, your personal vision and the techniques you have learned along the way. This is also a logical argument. Doesn't everyone want the plumber with the best experience to fix your bursting pipes? Would you want to fly with a pilot that got a "C" in landing planes? As I said, I've been using my smartphone as a camera, and have been seeing rather dramatic clouds in the sky of late. Most have been taken just outside my office at work, sometimes going to the top floor of the garage and pointing up. Not a lot of time needed and very little thinking required. After showing these to my coworkers, they would say how much they liked them, and I would invariably say something like "well... it's just a smartphone shot". I was belittling my work because I was still of a mind that equipment matters, no matter what I said I believed. So these comments got me thinking... was the image not important because it was taken with a phone? Why was I equating importance with equipment and not technique? Did I believe the steps used to arrive at the image were too simple and too automated, therefore inferior? At first, I thought I was just using the phone as a ready way to capture an image, mostly for my own amusement. I would then edit the image, somewhat haphazardly, with whatever was readily available in the phone software. But I showed these images to others and also posted them online. I must have thought more of them than just as amusing pastimes. The more I thought about it and the feedback I was given, I realized I was missing the point altogether. The phone was the tool I chose because of my photographic experiences. The way I used the phone... the angles, the lighting, the time of day, the subject matter... all of these things came about because of these experiences. One person actually told me (once I had said it was only a phone image) that they would not have thought of taking that photo at all, much less of taking it in just the way I did and editing it in just the way it had been edited. I realized this was the mark of experience, of a vision that they did not possess. The equipment in this case was the vehicle that created just the right image for what I was trying to capture and for what I wanted to say. If I had wanted to say something else, I might have used a different camera. So... is equipment important? Well, the right equipment for the job is important, but more so is the right experience. Without the right equipment, an inexperienced photographer may not know how to compensate, but with enough experience, great images can be the result (although they may be different that what was expected). Without experience to fall back on, even the greatest cameras and lenses will usually result in average shots (at best!). Success isn't based on the equipment you have nor is it based on the techniques you use. It is about the experiences, in other words, the right balance between your equipment choices and the techniques you have learned that results in something greater than either one could achieve on its own. The trick is to have the experience needed to choose the right equipment and use the proper techniques for successfully produce your personal vision. With that powerful combination, you will most certainly succeed. What would I suggest? Go out with whatever you have, be it smartphone, SLR or mirrorless camera, and put everything on automatic. Go out and practice vision. Capture communication. Come back and think about your experiences. Was there something lacking? Do you need different equipment to capture the image? Do you need a photo workshop or two or maybe just experience life so you have something to say? Then go out and get those things! Find the answers to these questions. Once you do, then, and only then, will you succeed.
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Photography has gone through quite a few changes in the last quarter of a century.
Back in 1992 I was teaching black and white photography at a community college. That means darkrooms, chemistry, and film for those that can't remember a time without the Internet. Back then, there were digital contraptions we laughed at because of their bulkiness, their expense, and the horrid images they produced. No way was digital even approaching what chemical photography could do. And we were right... at least in 1992. Jump five years to 1997 and there were now little digital cameras that we still laughed at because of their expense and the amateur images they produced. It would take decades before digital could be used for professional work... or so we thought. Jump just another five years to 2002. Who was laughing now? By this time, professional cameras like the Nikon D100 and the Canon EOS 1D were out and film was losing ground... and fast. These cameras were more than adequate to handle professional work, and did. By 2005... not even five years later... I saw the writing on the wall, slammed my head on that wall, and left both teaching and photography for a long time. Digital had taken over and I was not prepared for that change. For me, the magic of seeing a print appear from a blank sheet of paper was gone, turned into ones and zeros and a mess of digital gibberish. I could not see myself making students spending long hours in a darkroom when digital was obviously the future. Change for those entrenched in chemistry and film was slow, and it was time to let go. All of that said, I never hated digital imaging. It had, and still has, a lot of advantages to traditional film and chemical photography. There was no standing around bored as you processed film, no long hours in the dark printing, no chemical smell on your clothes when you got home. Slide presentations could now be created quickly and professionally with software -- gone were the days of tedious hours creating title slides for presentations that had to be shown on a screen in an unlit room. The greatest advantage to digital, at least with how I see the world, is its ability to show a visual representation of how people think, what goes through their mind, what kinds of things interest them. Because of the long hours it took to create images chemically, many images just didn't see the light of day. With the advent of the digital imaging and the vehicle of the Internet, it is now possible to see hundreds of images by the same person, and that allows us to see into that photographers mind and their view of reality. The ease of which one can create a photographic image to communicate with has great power, and this has allowed digital imaging to become one of the most interesting ways to see how a society reflects upon itself. But I also began to realize something more personal was going on. There was a shift on how I worked with my images, something that I would have never given up when I shot film, but now find somewhat redundant. But I'll get to that in the next post. By now you may have noticed I am more interested in why we do what we do rather than in the technical aspects of how we do what we do. There are a lot of places you can go on the Internet that have explanations of software and technique, but far fewer discussions on the meanings behind our images. This might be because writing a step-by-step process, although sometimes tedious, is not necessarily difficult. You have a starting point, a direction, a goal to complete. I know... I've written them before.
Once we need to discuss how we feel about something, things get murky and more personal. Think about the last time someone asked you why you shot in black and white, or why you shot that dead bird or crack in the wall (after 30 years, my wife still asks me that). Not so easy to come up with an answer, is it? How do you explain how you feel, how you experience? Our images hint towards our innermost sentiments and how we think the world works. They are not to be taken lightly, and as such, can be difficult to explain. Our assumptions about the world move us towards making certain kinds of images, and our feelings change how that world appears. To communicate photographically, we need to see how these assumptions change our images in the process. If I am uncomfortable (let's say its really cold outside while I'm trying to take a landscape shot), I tend to rush so I can get somewhere warm, and end up with less than stellar results. That in turn gets me upset, and things just go from bad to worse. But if I'm wearing a warmer coat and the cold isn't affecting me as much, I tend to enjoy what I'm doing and the exact same scene ends up as a magical moment. My perception of cold altered my view and in turn altered my photography. How do we control our perceptions in such a way as to not color our world? In short, we don't. We will always perceive the world is some fashion... that's what makes our images different from all the other images out there. If we didn't view the world differently, we would see nothing but the exact same portrait angles, the same snowscapes, the same product shots. Sure, sometimes it does feel we are seeing the same images again and again (especially in the age of "look what I'm eating today"), but for the most part we really do see some amazing images out there. And if we look at their backstory, the reasoning behind making the images, we realize they are a view into the mind of the photographer that created them. The problem, as I see it, is the number of images taking up our precious time. Social media -- advertising on multiple cable channels -- the ease of which images may be produced -- all have contributed to our need to walk away from studying what we are looking at. We look at an image for a split second, decide if it is worth our time, then walk away. This isn't really new, of course. I read somewhere that the average time someone looks at a painting in a museum is something under 30 seconds. For some viewers, that might be a generous estimate. Because we are all rushing about, we miss a great deal of the communication going on around us. By slowing down our viewing time, we can connect with the photographer and see how their mind works, how their perceptions color the world. A photograph is not to be viewed in a moment just because it was captured in a moment. Thought and emotion was put into its creation, and those qualities can be transmitted to the viewer if they take the time to let it happen. So what do we do when we take the time to look? We could, for instance, consider the compositional features of a photograph, but I find I tend to stop at that if I don't like what I see. The way I compose an image may not be the way another photographer does, and that jars with my sense of reality, so I ignore everything else. Instead, I would suggest thinking about what emotional responses we have to an image, and by an image, I mean ANY image. We often do not realize we are having a response to an image unless it is something like "oh that's a beautiful landscape / portrait / wedding shot (insert whatever image you happen to really like here)". If the image is something other than that, something we don't get an immediate response to, we fail to realize there is an emotion there, just not as strong or obvious. By taking some time to focus on our emotional response, we can lead ourselves down a path towards appreciating the art we see. That crack in the wall might be a statement of the decay of society; the dead bird becomes a view into the fragility of life; clouds become wild horses, the play of light and shadow the mysteries of things yet to come. Take time to perceive the world through another's eyes. You may be surprised at what you find. If you are a photojournalist, you are concerned with conveying the message that what you photograph is a real event and happening in the moment. Adding crowds at a rally to make it seem more populist or changing the relative position of items in an image would be unacceptable, but minor color corrections would probably not be a problem (unless the color cast is an integral part of the scene). Wedding or product photographers, on the other hand, have a lot more freedom to move and edit items as necessary, as long as it supports their clients needs.
Things start getting a little trickier when photographing landscapes or working with street photography. It isn't photojournalism, per se, so would some editing be acceptable or is any editing too much editing? To answer this question, we need to think about how editing will affect the final presentation of the image. What exactly are we trying to communicate with our photograph? Are we there to accentuate the scene or record it faithfully? The colors of a sunset on a snowcapped mountainside may not need color enhancement as the whole point is to see the amazing view that the photographer recorded. But what if there was a heavy shadow with a cold blue color cast that detracted from the scene? If a viewer's eye keeps going to the shadow and not the mountain, should it be color corrected? What if a tree was distracting? If removing it completely would strengthen the composition, is that be acceptable? Although many may disagree, if I am at a location to communicate what I experienced, and that experience doesn't include a cold blue cast or a distracting tree, then I can guarantee I'll be busy color correcting and removing distractions from my images! I am there to experience, and I want the viewer to experience the same. My objective isn't faithfulness to reality, but faithfulness to the feelings and emotions I had when viewing the scene. In the end, a two-dimensional image is never real, even if you are a photojournalist. The very act of positioning your camera at a certain angle or at a specific place and time will change the meaning of the image, however unintentional. But it is understood that photojournalists are taking images of events that shape history, be they war or political rally, and by their very nature should be photographed as neutrally as possible on their part. A wedding, the landscape, a street view, however important, do not have that constraint. If editing is necessary to convey the experience, the image will be edited. How much editing is acceptable is really up to the photographer, since it is their image in the first place, and the viewer, because their opinion on the matter may decide if they find the image acceptable. I am not a photojournalist so I have no problems editing an image, as long as I am creating the qualities and emotions I'm trying to convey in that image. Painters add or subtract whatever they need, modify their color palette for effect or completely ignored reality in their attempts to imagine the abstract through their art. There is no reason to think photography can't do the same and it is high time photographers realize the freedom they have to do so. Even so, I do not heavily edit my images by adding a more interesting sky or shifting colors dramatically. It just isn't in me to do so. But that doesn't mean it isn't in you. To edit or not to edit, that is the question. Well, maybe not the only question, but it is a fair question to ask.
Unlike most media, photography is perceived as being a record of reality, and as such, should not be messed with. Many photographers believe their images are untouchable and editing somehow removes the immediacy and reality of the image. And I get that. The reason I love photography is because I feel I'm somehow capturing reality on film... or on a digital media card, as the case may be! Traditionally, photography has been very different from the other arts. A painter, for instance, can decide to ignore an object if it doesn't fit the composition or the idea they are trying to convey. Sculptors create from a block of material, many times without anything to go by. Michelangelo is credited with saying: "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." I wish I had great quotes like that! A photographer, at least from the days of film, was limited by what they saw and could capture on film. They had some options as to color bias or even removing color altogether by shooting in black and white, but the scene itself was what it was. Burning and dodging areas was acceptable since it was difficult to record the great contrast ranges of the natural environment, but it was a herculean task to remove a distracting branch or fill in a blank space in the sky with a cloud. When artists like Ansel Adams began created majestic views of the landscape, seemingly pristine and unspoiled, the idea of editing became more and more frowned upon. It just wasn't done. With the advent of digital imaging, it became possible to edit to an extraordinary degree. Movies became special effects wonders (sometimes to the detriment of the story line); photographs could be manipulated to show long dead celebrities in contemporary settings (sometimes to the detriment of history); objects were removed or replaced, lighting effects changed, colors manipulated to show sunsets where there had been none. In many ways, editing is seen as something done for drama but not for "real" images, as it makes them more and more disconnected from the reality associated with the taking of a photograph. So the question is one of degree -- It isn't if we should edit, but how much editing is acceptable. It boils down to understanding what are we doing when we edit an image. For various technical reasons, digital images need sharpening and color balancing. Most would accept this as needed editing since the technology requires it to faithfully record a scene. But what of specific types of photography? What editing is acceptable in these instances? In Part 2, I try to answer this question! I was just reading an interesting post by Valérie Jardin (What's the Deal With Mindfulness) and wrote a response, which I have copied below...
I think one of the mistakes people often make about mindfulness or "being mindful" is they think it is being aloof or set apart from the world, which is really the exact opposite of what it is all about. Mindfulness is about accepting the moment for what it is instead of trying to apply what you want the moment to be. It isn't "living" in the moment, it is "accepting" the moment, allowing it to be whatever it is. We all tend to try to make things our way, and that is the part that is unrealistic. We either try to avoid moments we don't like, sometimes trying to forcibly change it, or try to grasp at moments we really love, demanding we never have to let them go. Both ways just lead to unsatisfactory results. In photography, we should always be looking (or better yet SEEING), but allow for the possibility that we won't necessarily find what we are looking for. In that way, maybe we will find that which we were not looking for... and who knows... it might be that much more magical. Yes, there is always meditation and focusing your mind and not being a monkey mind and blah blah blah, but I find wandering to be a lot of fun... and if that is what is in the moment, why not run with it? :-D If we were constantly wandering, we may very well get lost. I mean, I sure don't want my mind wandering when I'm concentrating on driving... that could be dangerous, but wandering in and of itself isn't an issue or a problem. It just has its place as does concentrating. So how does mindfulness relate to photography? I did mention we should always be seeing rather than looking, but I always say that. So what? How does photography have anything to do with mindfulness? Is it a part of it, an integral connection, or just something we should think about? When we speak of mindfulness, we are purposefully tuning ourselves to our environment in such a way as to realize we are a part of that environment, not a separate entity disassociated and disconnected like we usually think of things being. We are "in the moment" when we accept the way things are and are not trying to force our perceptions on it. When we do this, we allow ourselves to see the world as it is and create a connection. Once this connection is made, we are able to, as photographers, create images that reflect that connection. A connection is what makes the photographic image successful, and by successful I don't mean more "likes" or more money or more fame. I mean the image is more than just a record of an event or scene or studio setup. It holds within itself the connection we have made and communicates something that is more meaningful than what is contained on the surface of the image, something that is greater than the image itself. How we reach such a state of mindfulness is not really the point. I happen to sit and stare at something for a while and think about it abstractly, then think about composition, and only then think about the light and how I am going to interpret this something I see photographically. This tends to drive my spouse batty... there he goes again, she says... I'm off to get coffee. Let me know when your free again! Other photographers might be bouncing ideas up and down and all around their heads while shooting images of quickly changing scenes, and still other photographers may be working for hours just to get the right angle, set up the right shot, choose the studio lights that best reflect the subject and concept. I have no idea how their spouses feel. All of these methods are perfectly fine. What path you choose may be very different from the one I would choose, but it doesn't make it any less mindful. As long as our wanderings aren't leading us astray (either emotionally or physically down a deep pit!) we should be fine and be successful in our image making. |
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