Tag: quality

We often see articles on upgrading photogrpahically. We see loads of reviews on gear, We engage in conversations about new gear and upgrading gear. Each of these things is nice. We all love new stuff, but the absolute greatest upgrade you can make to your photography isn’t gear. The greatest upgrade to better photography is better knowledge and skill development!

A bit of a story to help explain. I recently read a post on social media where a photographer experienced some issues while taking photographs. The post started something like this, “I’ve been a photographer for 45 years and I went to take photographs as an indoor basketball game. All the photographs have a color cast”. It went on to talk about a few things he had attempted, mostly by adjusting the white balance setting on the camera. The resulting comments were even more telling, so far as one suggestion was to just convert the images to black and white. My whole point is this, in all of the 45 years, this photographer hadn’t ever ran into a color cast before? Or any of those who were commenting? Yes, color casts can be difficult, but the photographer that made the post included photographs from the very venue that gave him the problems and none had a color cast.

Some photogrpahers spend so much more time concerned about the technology and new gear than they do about learning and enhancing their skills. It has never been easier to learn. We can literally carry internet connected devices in our pockets that can access countless resources for learning. We have access in our pockets to both text based and audible books. There are countless tutorial, both video and text, on virtually any method/program to post-process our photographs. There is a multitude of schools teaching photographic techniques both remotely and in-person.

Don’t just sit back and believe you can’t learn something new, refresh your knowledge, or enhance your skills. Take advantage of the availability of resources to learn and enhance your skills. Spend a bit of your photographic budget on learning. You’ll be surprised at the value of that upgrade.

Photographers are a tough crowd when it comes to viewing photographs, yet that is the group we cater to when we display our photographs. Photographers are seemingly always ready to give an opinion on the art piece with a “I would have”, even if it is silently thought. So why is it that are target audience is a group of other photographers, at least for the most part? Is it that we seek acceptance amongst our peers?

I never really considerted this thought before yesterday, the one where we set our target audience to other photographers, but as I think about it, even the big deal photographers target other photographers.

Maybe we should consider how to and where to market our works towards the general population. I know it would take a bit of work, finding a location to display the work, or setting up a website with good SEO to make it easily discovered by the general population, or do we just set up a Pintrest or Instagram account. How about Facebook but instead of posting our work to photography groups we post on our own page for everyone to find. Some things for me to consider, expanding my audience.

What makes a photographer good? Does making a good photograph from a beautiful subject make a photographer good or making a good photograph from a subject that is not beautiful?

I spent the morning I wrote this looking at a popular photography website. The photographs listed as “popular” as voted by the visitors almost entirely consisted of landscapes at sunrise/sunset, beautiful women in various stages of dress and undress, exotic locations, and wildlife closeups. There were very rarely photographs of mundane everyday things.

Years ago a person said to me, “Anyone can take a good photograph of a flower. It’s hard to make a flower look bad.” At the time I thought, “that’s not true” but think about it. You have to really work at making a flower look bad. Go and look at a bunch of landscape photographs and you will see lots and lots of photographs of landscaped at sunrise/sunset or otherwise great lighting. You will see oceans, moutains, lakes, waterfalls.

Here is what you won’t see, or won’t see a lot of. You won’t see wide open spaces at midday. The photograph above I shot at 1:50 PM on a bright sunny day. Standing there looking at this scene in person I was in awe. I felt like I could see forever. Wide open country.

A search of the keyword “plains” on this photography website brought about a very interesting return. Many of the photographs tagged as plains were not of plains. There were mountains, forests, and the desert. The images that were of the plains were African plains with elephans, lions, zebras, and other wildlife. There were truly only a handful of images I’d classify as plains.

Yes, all the photographs I saw today were awesome but just like the person told me years ago about the flowers, you would have to really try to muck up the photographs of beautiful landscapes and beautiful people.

Is it too hard to take good photographs of ordinary things and places? Do we just want to do what’s easy? My challenge to myself and hopefully others is to take make ordinary things and places look good. Let’s face it, so many of us live in ordinary places and are surrounded by ordinary things.

I’ve done photography the wrong way forever. I am a haphazard photographer. And even worse at organizing my photographs. I don’t mean I take bad photographs, I just don’t have a plan. I go out and hope for the best. I hope I find cool shit to photograph. Why is that wrong you may ask? There is no plan.

I’ve done photography with a plan. The featured photograph I took almost six years ago. The concept was 1960s. The session was planned and it took months to find each element in the photo.

We had a whole series of different settings.

Most of the items, I still have available.

This was one of the few where the entire session was a theme. Most of the time, I just get going and hope for the best. Even with models or portraits. I have decided, through careful review of my photographs that there is litte central theme to a session.

A number of years ago I started a project on rural grain mills, feed stores, and elevators.

The project is still ongoing but I have allowed it to cool so to speak.

When it comes to organizing, yikes! My orgainization of my catalog is horrendous. I’ve improved on keywording but as far a collections and grouping. It’s no wonder I can’t put together a photo project to publish.

Why am I confessing this to you all? I suspect I’m not alone. Keywording, building collections, planning projects and keeping track of them is boring and tedious. Once you have tens of thousands of photographs in this haphazard manner it is laborious to correct.

Moving forward, start today to plan projects, collect assests to use in those projects, orgainze your assests to help put together your collections. I am, I’m starting today. I’m going to build my photo project list and stop shooting hapharzardly hoping to find that “perfect” image. I’ve decided that images standing alone may be nice, what makes photography best is projects and collections. As photographic artists we are in a much better position to tell stories and convey concepts through collections rather than merely invdividual pieces of work.

Are we stuck in the past in photography? Not just you, but we collectively as photographers. We have lots and lots of advances the technology and features of cameras, lenses, lighting, software, and all our other accessories such as lightning triggers, GPS tagging, Wifi capatiblies. But, our photographs look just like they did before. Are we really using the new improved technology?

We have the capability to shoot photographs in extremely low light and high ISO ratings but I see so many photographs shot in low light with long exposures and lower ISO’s to “reduce” noise. Yes, 102,400 ISO can be a bit noisy but think about this for a moment. Remember the grain shoot of films like the Konica Centuria 1600 or Fuji 1600 film? Loads of grain. I know I know. I’ve heard it all before but, but the grain of film has a different look than digital noise. My opinion, so what!

Here is another thing a few years ago there were a variety of styles of photography that were big. HDR, Orton, soft focus, double exposures, selective color, etc. Now, we have shallow depth of field. I love sites like 500px where you can find a lot of very good photography but a quick look of “popular photographs” the styles are all very similar. We may see the occasional black and white but the basic styles are all the same across all the genres.

I’m starting to think maybe I just start to stand out and dare to be different. I may not appeal to everyone, I may not become famous or popular but I can be unique and different.

My greatest photographic challenge is to create something meaningful. When I first transitioned to digital photography I could snap off hundreds of photographs, most of which were pure garbage. A lot of that was a learning experience. What works, what doesn’t work. Nowadays, I can take a camera out, walk about and not take a single, or very few photographs. Once I get back and take a look at them on the computer screen I’m thoroughly unimpressed. Of course, I am probably my own worst critic. For example, after uploading the feature image above I noticed some stray strings ( or as a friend would say, ropes and one was a repelling rope). I admit it, I’m often a pixel peeper. There, I said it. Hi, my name is Clay and I’m a pixel peeper.

Why is this my greatest challenge? I figure if my photograph doesn’t create something meaningful to me it is not likely to be meaningful to others. The whole purpose of creating photographs and photographic art is to share them with the world. While I don’t ever expect to be regarded as a household name in photography I don’t want to be a Vivian Maier either. I also understand that my photographs may not be everyone’s “cup of tea”.

When I did the photographic session where the featured photo was taken my intent was to photograph the dancer in locations where you typically wouldn’t think to find her. After this session, I photographed a model in an elegant evening gown in various locations such as an alleyway and fire escapes. To me, it was meaningful. The sessions were meant to get me and the viewers to look for the extraordinary in ordinary or unusual locations. This is what we want to do, at least in my mind. We photograph the ordinary and make it meaningful.

Digital photography has been available to the consumer market for over 30 years, however, I still see the debate of film photography versus digital photography. I listened to a podcast just yesterday and the podcaster talked about digital as if it isn’t really photography. I really don’t get it. Why, after 30 plus years are still having this discussion? Does it really matter that much? To me, I don’t care. Shoot the medium you like but don’t try to make your choice better than that of others. Is it that these photographers feel so threatened by newer technology? Is it that they don’t believe that those who shoot digital have “paid their dues”? I do miss some things about film photography, but there are a lot of things I don’t miss.

I’m all for keeping the old film techniques and processes alive. I enjoy seeing photographs using methods from long ago. I applaud those that can still do photographs using those methods but I also like seeing photographs made with digital cameras and edited using computer software. To me, the medium used doesn’t matter as long as the resulting image captures my attention. In fact, I love the older technology so much that I collect a number of old cameras. The oldest one I have currently is a No. 3 folding Hawkeye which is about 115 years old, but I prefer to shoot digital.

Let the debate die and enjoy photography for photography’s sake. Let’s create art and use whatever medium we want to use without making one better than the other.

The two greatest advances in photography since its discovery are Kodak Brownie and digital photography. Why these two?

The Kodak Brownie

The Kodak Brownie was introduced by Eastman Kodak company in 1900. The camera sold for $1 in 1900, While $1 was still expensive (the average salary in 1900 was just over $8 per week) it brought the ability of photography to the masses. The Kodak Brownie allowed the common people a chance to photograph their families, events, and the world around them. 150,000 Kodak Brownie cameras were shipped the first year. The Kodak Brownie existed in various models from 1900 through 1986 with millions of units sold.

Digital Photography

Digital photography is my next choice for the greatest advancement in photography. Digital photography had early beginnings starting in 1957. The CCD image sensor was invented in 1969. The first self-contained digital camera was invented in 1975. These were typically not available to consumers. The first digital camera available to the consumer appeared in 1990. What makes the invention of digital photography so great is that it led us to where we are today with digital cameras built into our cellphones and modern digital cameras. The invention of digital photographic technology is as big an advancement as the original Brownie cameras. Just think about it, there are over 1.8 billion (1,800,000,000) photographs uploaded to the internet every day! That is just uploaded! We are the most photographed era ever.

Why is this important

These two advances are truly important to us as modern photographic artists for a number of reasons. The single most important reason, to me, is that they brought photography to the common people. Many of us may not have been able to create the art and images we do today had these advances not happened. Photography is available to most of us in our pocket. We can instantly create. Let’s create something beautiful today.

It seems that for many people photographs never get printed but rather they depend on electronic devices to keep their photographs. This may not apply to many of us who do fine art style photography. I have many prints of photographs I’ve taken hanging as wall art. I also have prints of grandchildren and family members. It seems that the most common way people display their photographs today is via their smartphones.

A case in point, several years ago when I was still working on setting up a photography business I was approached by a potential client who wanted a price on photographing her wedding. She stated she didn’t want any prints only digital files. I turned down the job for two reasons, I believe a life event is too important for just a digital file and she was searching for prices I would not work for.

I have tens of thousands of photographs, the vast majority will never become a print, but I also have photographs I print and do change out my wall art with photographs, along with updated photographs of my family.

If you haven’t printed any of your photographs, consider doing so.