Lost Canadian
Expedition Leader
I found the receipt for my first DSLR yesterday, hidden in a drawer, and when I looked at the date of purchase I realized it has been almost exactly 1 year and 6 months to the day that I first placed my hands on a DSLR. I instantly reflected on those first images I took with that camera and where I am today and thought boy I took a lot of garbage images. So what's this huge post about you're asking. Nothing special really, but I'm sitting here in bed, sick at home, nothing I can do, and thought I'd share some of what I've learnt and what's helped me, photographically speaking, over the past year and a bit. And perhaps hear, if there are willing participants, what others have learnt and what's helped them improve.
So I'll get to the straight and skinny of the things that I've picked up and I'll try to provide shots to show what I mean.
1) I Squint. Seriously! You read about it, hear pro's talk about it, but trying to visualize and distinguish tone as a rank amateur is hard without having a trained eye or in many cases any idea as to what tone is. So I squint, or defocus my eyes. I may look like a little odd but it helps me visualize tone by removing the subject and seeing things only in terms of color, and tones from dark to light. Ever wonder why an object doesn't stand out like you thought it did when you were standing there looking at it? Our brains work differently then cameras, camera's simply capture light and they ain't picky about it. If I shoot a bright object surrounded by other bright objects my picture is a mash of bright objects with no defined flow or subject. Squint, and I can better distinguish the light and dark of things, which helps me compose my images.
2) Slow down and look. This applies to both looking for interesting images and composing them. For now though I'm simply talking about the later as this is where I think most amateurs falter. I was guilty of this for the longest time, and still am from time to time. What I see from most people just starting out is that they get so focused on the subject they want to shoot they don't stop and look around the viewfinder to see what else is in the frame. All those other elements that are in frame will either add or detract from the image, so when I slow down and actually look around the viewfinder at the elements sharing space with my subject, I often decide that I'm better served recomposing the shot.
My first water shot...junk, there's too much going on.
Edit: Sorry, broken link. Trust me it was no good.
2) Get high, go low. This one's kinda a no brainer, and a lot of photography books talk about it but so few amateurs actually do it, probably out of fear of looking odd. In practice though when I get down and crawl around on the ground changing my angle of view, or go above, I find it really does open up a whole new world of interesting images.
3) Get to know your lenses. A mistake I made right off the hop was assuming that 18mm and 200mm would look the same, only 200mm got me closer. How wrong I was. The following comment is a little cliche, but you have to zoom with your legs if you simply want to get closer to a subject, sans lions or course. Different lenses are all about perspective not distance. I use wides to exaggerate close to far relationships, and conversely I use tele lenses to compress a scene. If I want to get closer, I walk. Another critical item I found for better landscape pictures is knowing what my lenses hyper-focal distance is. I can't stress how absolutely key this is for landscape with digital, thankfully there are plenty of online write-ups out there on how to do this. I thought for the longest time that if I just chose small apertures and placed the focus point close to me I could get everything in sharp focus from far to near, I was wrong, again. What I've come to understand is that to get everything in sharp focus, where you place your focus point is just as important as the aperture you choose. If you're lazy and don't want to go to the trouble of figuring out your lenses hyper-focal distances there is a simple loose rule that says to place your focus point roughly one-third of the way between the camera and infinity.
4) Become a painter. Ok not to be taken seriously, but the best examples of great visual design, I've found anyway, can be seen in mainstream art and not in photography. In a way it's unfortunate that photography lends itself to virtually anyone, because the pool of great images is so diluted it makes it very hard for upstarts like myself, at first anyway, to distinguish truly exceptional visual design from that which is not. What's also unfortunate is that almost anyone who goes out and buys a (D)SLR camera thinks, or at least hopes they will be a good photographer with the right gear. I know that thought was what initially pushed me to buy a DSLR. How disappointing it was when that new shiny gear didn't turn me into an instant pro. My initial disappointment almost led to an expensive Photoshop CS purchase, but then I got serious with myself and thought, what the hell is Photoshop CS going to do for me, aside from help me make some fancy crap images? Needless to say I've passed on Photoshop CS. Surprisingly one day it just hit me, surprising because I'm rather brain dead most of the time, but I was reading about artist Gustav Klimt's schooling and I thought, what I need to get better as a photographer is a good understanding of visual design, and I'm talking about much more than a simple understanding of the rule of thirds. Things like certain colors will drain impact from other colors, texture and light will lead the eye, etc etc. Almost all of the great artists throughout history have studied under a mentor be it da Vinci or Munch, and what I've noticed is that photography is no different. What I have seen from reading photog bios and so forth, is that most great photographers have at some point, studied art and visual design. Take self taught photographer and Nikon/Hasselblad master Chase Jarvis for instance. He talks in his video bio about individuals who influenced him and what he studied in school. Surprisingly he never mentions photography or other photographers as sources of his learning and/or inspiration.
5) Be honest with yourself. Most certainly one of the hardest things for most people, because lets face it, we all have an ego, we all think we're great. It's ok though, because the dirty little secret of pro photography is that even the best photographers throw away the majority of their images. So I take lots of pictures and if a picture doesn't stand out on my cameras LCD it's probably junk, so I delete it when I get a chance. The way I look at it, there's no sense importing and processing a junk image because a crappy image that has been manipulated to death in an editing program is still just a crappy manipulated image. Fact remains, even the best manipulated images have good bones to build upon.
6) Flash. Gear junkies don't worry about new fancy camera bodies, if you want better pictures then you've been taking with your current camera get an off camera flash, 2 or 3 if you can afford it. Camera's capture light, shocking I know, so it only makes sense to help yourself by placing light where you want it. My images both indoor and out immediately improved when I started playing with off camera flash. I have a lot of learning to do here still.
7) Tripod. I read somewhere that bad landscape photographers talk about camera bodies, the better photographers will talk lenses, but the really good landscape guys and gals will talk tripods. Not really much to add to that but it makes sense to me now and I almost always shoot using a tripod. You could spend $10000+ on a camera but if you take that spendy camera landscape shooting, using small apertures and low light, which is typical for good landscape, you're never going to hand hold that camera still enough to get a quality shot. And don't skimp here. I bought a cheap aluminum tripod thinking a tripod is a tripod. Wrong again. If there is a theme to this thread it`s I've been wrong a lot, but I`m learning from those mistakes. Anyway that cheapy tripod showed it`s real usefulness the moment I stuck it in a stream and tried to take a long exposure. I would have had less shake in my image if I had hand held the shot. Needless to say I spent some coin on a good tripod and head which has probably been my best photographic purchase made to date, totally worth it!
8) Get funky. Who says you need photoshop to make interesting creative images. Experiment with camera movement, defocusing and light. For instance I've found Christmas lights and early morning frost looks pretty cool when viewed through a defocused lens at a wide aperture.
9) Filters. Use them! I have tried countless times to get the same results by stretching a RAW image to get a result I feel is on par with that of one taken using a split ND filter but no matter how much I work with an image, the best I can do, keeping IQ in mind, is usually a 1 stop improvement at best. With filters the sky is the limit, in terms of real high quality range.
10) Listen,... to photographers that ask questions that is, and ask questions yourself. Photographers claiming to know everything typically know very little. If you see an interesting image on a site like photo.net, One Exposure, or even here on ExPo ask the person how they created it.
11) The hard truth. Like anything I guess, the hardest lesson has been that I only get out of photography as much as I put in. The more I try to learn about visual design, technique etc, the more my images reflect that. When I get busy, and don't try to learn something new, my images become stagnant and I find myself repeating things I've already done and tried. To rely simply on equipment to improve my images would be a huge costly mistake. Sure they may be cleaner, or sharper, but I'll bet ya I can still take a junk picture with $50000 worth of camera equipment.
But hey, I'm just a random hack with a camera, what do I know....
So I'll get to the straight and skinny of the things that I've picked up and I'll try to provide shots to show what I mean.
1) I Squint. Seriously! You read about it, hear pro's talk about it, but trying to visualize and distinguish tone as a rank amateur is hard without having a trained eye or in many cases any idea as to what tone is. So I squint, or defocus my eyes. I may look like a little odd but it helps me visualize tone by removing the subject and seeing things only in terms of color, and tones from dark to light. Ever wonder why an object doesn't stand out like you thought it did when you were standing there looking at it? Our brains work differently then cameras, camera's simply capture light and they ain't picky about it. If I shoot a bright object surrounded by other bright objects my picture is a mash of bright objects with no defined flow or subject. Squint, and I can better distinguish the light and dark of things, which helps me compose my images.
2) Slow down and look. This applies to both looking for interesting images and composing them. For now though I'm simply talking about the later as this is where I think most amateurs falter. I was guilty of this for the longest time, and still am from time to time. What I see from most people just starting out is that they get so focused on the subject they want to shoot they don't stop and look around the viewfinder to see what else is in the frame. All those other elements that are in frame will either add or detract from the image, so when I slow down and actually look around the viewfinder at the elements sharing space with my subject, I often decide that I'm better served recomposing the shot.
My first water shot...junk, there's too much going on.
Edit: Sorry, broken link. Trust me it was no good.
2) Get high, go low. This one's kinda a no brainer, and a lot of photography books talk about it but so few amateurs actually do it, probably out of fear of looking odd. In practice though when I get down and crawl around on the ground changing my angle of view, or go above, I find it really does open up a whole new world of interesting images.
3) Get to know your lenses. A mistake I made right off the hop was assuming that 18mm and 200mm would look the same, only 200mm got me closer. How wrong I was. The following comment is a little cliche, but you have to zoom with your legs if you simply want to get closer to a subject, sans lions or course. Different lenses are all about perspective not distance. I use wides to exaggerate close to far relationships, and conversely I use tele lenses to compress a scene. If I want to get closer, I walk. Another critical item I found for better landscape pictures is knowing what my lenses hyper-focal distance is. I can't stress how absolutely key this is for landscape with digital, thankfully there are plenty of online write-ups out there on how to do this. I thought for the longest time that if I just chose small apertures and placed the focus point close to me I could get everything in sharp focus from far to near, I was wrong, again. What I've come to understand is that to get everything in sharp focus, where you place your focus point is just as important as the aperture you choose. If you're lazy and don't want to go to the trouble of figuring out your lenses hyper-focal distances there is a simple loose rule that says to place your focus point roughly one-third of the way between the camera and infinity.
4) Become a painter. Ok not to be taken seriously, but the best examples of great visual design, I've found anyway, can be seen in mainstream art and not in photography. In a way it's unfortunate that photography lends itself to virtually anyone, because the pool of great images is so diluted it makes it very hard for upstarts like myself, at first anyway, to distinguish truly exceptional visual design from that which is not. What's also unfortunate is that almost anyone who goes out and buys a (D)SLR camera thinks, or at least hopes they will be a good photographer with the right gear. I know that thought was what initially pushed me to buy a DSLR. How disappointing it was when that new shiny gear didn't turn me into an instant pro. My initial disappointment almost led to an expensive Photoshop CS purchase, but then I got serious with myself and thought, what the hell is Photoshop CS going to do for me, aside from help me make some fancy crap images? Needless to say I've passed on Photoshop CS. Surprisingly one day it just hit me, surprising because I'm rather brain dead most of the time, but I was reading about artist Gustav Klimt's schooling and I thought, what I need to get better as a photographer is a good understanding of visual design, and I'm talking about much more than a simple understanding of the rule of thirds. Things like certain colors will drain impact from other colors, texture and light will lead the eye, etc etc. Almost all of the great artists throughout history have studied under a mentor be it da Vinci or Munch, and what I've noticed is that photography is no different. What I have seen from reading photog bios and so forth, is that most great photographers have at some point, studied art and visual design. Take self taught photographer and Nikon/Hasselblad master Chase Jarvis for instance. He talks in his video bio about individuals who influenced him and what he studied in school. Surprisingly he never mentions photography or other photographers as sources of his learning and/or inspiration.
5) Be honest with yourself. Most certainly one of the hardest things for most people, because lets face it, we all have an ego, we all think we're great. It's ok though, because the dirty little secret of pro photography is that even the best photographers throw away the majority of their images. So I take lots of pictures and if a picture doesn't stand out on my cameras LCD it's probably junk, so I delete it when I get a chance. The way I look at it, there's no sense importing and processing a junk image because a crappy image that has been manipulated to death in an editing program is still just a crappy manipulated image. Fact remains, even the best manipulated images have good bones to build upon.
6) Flash. Gear junkies don't worry about new fancy camera bodies, if you want better pictures then you've been taking with your current camera get an off camera flash, 2 or 3 if you can afford it. Camera's capture light, shocking I know, so it only makes sense to help yourself by placing light where you want it. My images both indoor and out immediately improved when I started playing with off camera flash. I have a lot of learning to do here still.
7) Tripod. I read somewhere that bad landscape photographers talk about camera bodies, the better photographers will talk lenses, but the really good landscape guys and gals will talk tripods. Not really much to add to that but it makes sense to me now and I almost always shoot using a tripod. You could spend $10000+ on a camera but if you take that spendy camera landscape shooting, using small apertures and low light, which is typical for good landscape, you're never going to hand hold that camera still enough to get a quality shot. And don't skimp here. I bought a cheap aluminum tripod thinking a tripod is a tripod. Wrong again. If there is a theme to this thread it`s I've been wrong a lot, but I`m learning from those mistakes. Anyway that cheapy tripod showed it`s real usefulness the moment I stuck it in a stream and tried to take a long exposure. I would have had less shake in my image if I had hand held the shot. Needless to say I spent some coin on a good tripod and head which has probably been my best photographic purchase made to date, totally worth it!
8) Get funky. Who says you need photoshop to make interesting creative images. Experiment with camera movement, defocusing and light. For instance I've found Christmas lights and early morning frost looks pretty cool when viewed through a defocused lens at a wide aperture.
9) Filters. Use them! I have tried countless times to get the same results by stretching a RAW image to get a result I feel is on par with that of one taken using a split ND filter but no matter how much I work with an image, the best I can do, keeping IQ in mind, is usually a 1 stop improvement at best. With filters the sky is the limit, in terms of real high quality range.
10) Listen,... to photographers that ask questions that is, and ask questions yourself. Photographers claiming to know everything typically know very little. If you see an interesting image on a site like photo.net, One Exposure, or even here on ExPo ask the person how they created it.
11) The hard truth. Like anything I guess, the hardest lesson has been that I only get out of photography as much as I put in. The more I try to learn about visual design, technique etc, the more my images reflect that. When I get busy, and don't try to learn something new, my images become stagnant and I find myself repeating things I've already done and tried. To rely simply on equipment to improve my images would be a huge costly mistake. Sure they may be cleaner, or sharper, but I'll bet ya I can still take a junk picture with $50000 worth of camera equipment.
But hey, I'm just a random hack with a camera, what do I know....
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