So I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Halifax trying to work on a research paper next to a man who’s extensively photoshopping bad photos and I’m anxiously trying to resist giving him advice because that seems super rude so I’ll put it here instead for those of you who want it..
1. Learn how to use your camera. This sounds obvious, but the majority of people I see with DSLRs clearly have not. Nothing irks me more than people using DSLRs in their automatic settings. If you’re going to do that, you might as well just stick with a hi-res point and shoot. There’s really no difference aside from how ‘impressive’ you look to your friends. If you’re going to spend the money, learn how to use it and make it worthwhile. I haven’t shot in anything other than manual in over four years, even when I’m doing fast paced photojournalism shooting. I’ve learned so much more since getting my camera out of shutter/aperture priority mode (I was never the type to put it in automatic mode). The only time my camera ever goes into auto is if I’m handing it over to someone to take a quick snapshot of me. Seriously. Learn. Your. Camera. It’s not likely that you will ever excel if you don’t know what you’re doing.
2. Learn how to take photographs, not how to use photoshop. The guy sitting next to me right now is using photoshop tricks I don’t even understand to fix really poorly shot photos. Had he put as much time into figuring out how to balance exposure in camera as he has into fixing poorly exposed images in photoshop, he likely wouldn’t have to spend hours fixing a few images. I don’t use photoshop beyond simple colour/contrast corrections in the RAW workflow. If I’ve managed to blow a key shot I need for work, then I use the exposure/recovery sliders to fix it. None of these layers or anything.. just that.
3. No one can really tell you how to take a good photograph. It’s not a formula. People often ask me how to take “good” photos and I can’t tell them much beyond how to technically use their camera or rules of thirds/lines kind of stuff which is very basic and not always applicable. People have critiqued my images, but no one ever told me how to take a “good” photograph so I just don’t know what to say. Find photographs you like by other artists. Study them. What do you like about them? Beyond the content, what about the light or composition is pleasing to you? Now shoot. Shoot a lot and analyze your own images. Pick out the ones you like and figure out what you like about them, how you could have shot them more effectively, etc. I’m always happy to give feedback when I have the time and there are many forums online where you can post images for critique, along with many websites with step by step tutorials and technical advice.
4. You don’t need thousands of dollars worth of gear to take “good” photographs. Especially not with the price of DSLR gear these days. People are always saying to me “oh you have such a nice camera, you must be able to take such nice photos with that!” Yes, it helps, but that’s not it. If you put an expensive guitar in my hands I would not be able to immediately make beautiful music. It would take years. (Maybe more. I am really poorly coordinated and have no ear for music). Gear helps, but gear does not equal skill. I see so many people spending thousands of dollars thinking is they just have the latest camera body or the top of the line lenses they will automatically be able to take beautiful photographs. Save your money! Learn! And if you are going to invest, invest in good lenses, not the most expensive camera body you can afford. I think you’ll get better quality images out of an entry level camera with good glass than a mid-range camera with a bad kit lens. Lenses also tend to maintain their resale value where as the resale value of bodies declines dramatically almost immediately.
5. Respect people. The white guy sitting next to me is photoshopping blurry images of people in markets in the Middle East where some people clearly did not want their pictures taken and are attempting to hide their faces with their hands. Yes, you have the right to shoot photographs in public settings (at least in Canada), but if people are attempting to hide from your camera, put your camera down and leave them alone. And this should go without saying (but I see photos like this on local photography forums so apparently it doesn’t) - don’t shoot through the windows of people’s homes. You’re a creep and you’re breaking the law. Not cool.
6. One last thing, again with my minimal photoshop rule - stop making HDR images, selectively desaturated photos, and those crunchy over-sharpened photos. Just stop. Yeah, some people like them, but more often than not they’re done terribly.. and a lot of people (myself included) think they’re really tacky. If you’re into shooting landscapes and want to balance the exposure well between the sky and the ground, then get yourself a set of graduated neutral density filters and put the time that you would spend photoshopping the images into carefully shooting them. My friend Evan McMaster is a brilliant landscape photographer and was someone I shot with frequently when I was just getting into photography. I was that photographer who would snap a hundred photos and hope for something decent in there somewhere. Evan would pull out a tripod, spend 10 minutes stacking filters in front of his camera, wait for the sun to be in just the right spot and then might take two or three photos and then would pack everything up again. And he made brilliant photographs. He knew the tide schedule, he knew the position of the sun and where it would set. He knew how to use the length of exposure to change the appearance of the landscape.
I don’t get the chance to shoot landscapes often, but when I do graduated ND filters are all I use. You can find more info about those online, but basically they’re partially darkened pieces of glass that allow you to balance the exposure. Also, with HDR, eliminating all shadows and highlights to create an image in which everything is in the middle range just looks terrible and unnatural. Shadows are lovely! Leave em alone!
Anyway, that was ranty but I hope someone out there in internet land finds this helpful.
I find this helpful and I’m not a photographer.