Tips From a Professional
A blog addressing the way architecture, design and the built environment presents itself to the camera and the way photography becomes the primary vehicle to access places and buildings that may bebeyond reach. I hope it will help photographers reach beyond their technical skill set to become better artists, writers, and thinkers.
A blog about photography, art, aesthetics and conceptual issues explored in a way that I hope will help photographers reach beyond their technical skill set to become better artists, writers, and thinkers.
Your Camera
To start off my tips series in this blog, I want to talk about cameras and your relationship to gear.
Your camera is where it all begins and ends, but it is can be a difficult, expensive territory to navigate.
There are so many high performance, excellent cameras on the market now it is hard to find a bad one but it might be hard to find one that works for you. In the end, you just have to like your camera, or love it. That is the most important thing. Further down the road, when you have an audience and produce work that lasts that people want to look at again and again, the last thing they will know or want to know is what kind of camera you used, its cost, or how many megapixels you had.
If you find yourself getting into heated conversations about how Canon, Nikon, Sony, or Leica are superior or inferior to everything else, this is a sign that you have gone off the deep end and have become a marketing agent for a camera corporation as a volunteer. You are working for a camera company without getting paid and it’s time to get back to what matters - your work, critique of your work, developing your work, finding the thread to stronger images.
There was a time, a few years ago when megapixels mattered. Until recently, the pixel dimensions of your file could create limitations on what you could do with it because a 5K file was not quite large enough for printing large images at high resolution. A 6 or 7K file (7000 pixels on the long side) is now common among professional camera bodies and it will continue to grow. Many people fervently believe that maximum megapixels are essential. But in reality a Leica image, a medium format Hasselblad file, and a Canon file, or even a good cell phone picture, all look about the same in comparison on a website and are virtually indistinguishable on Instagram.
Now, with Artificial Intelligence software at costs around $100, any file can be made larger with no loss of quality and in come cases, improved quality. This is a game changer. Nothing will be the same and who knows what it will mean in the big picture. But for now, it means forget about file size and gear and get back to what matters.
Photoshop
Sometimes I am uncomfortable talking about Photoshop because it’s abused so often. People do crazy things with it, and have a hard time learning what to do with it and what not to do. I understand, because I had the same problems in the beginning. Over many years of working with it I have been able to grasp the essentials of how to use it to put a distinctive finish on my images that doesn’t bring Photoshop immediately to mind. That’s always my goal, and I have made it work for me in that way. When it comes to images I am detail oriented, so the subtleties matter but I use the same techniques over and over much like I did in the darkroom before Photoshop came into existence.
Though I teach Photoshop several times a week to all levels of students, I have trouble sometimes communicating to students how simple it can be to use, if you stick to the fundamentals of dynamic range, color and tonality and learn to make these incredibly accurate tools contribute to the beauty of the image as it is, without taking it over. Sometimes I feel like I could teach everyone to master the tools in an hour or two, because it always comes down to using the same techniques over and over and it seems so simple, but it’s not that easy to pick up without practice. To the beginner, I would recommend first, to master the skill of raw file processing. That’s where the power is. The subtleties after raw file processing are in the Photoshop layer pallet and the skills for that are all clustered around masking and retouching. Those are very different skills, but they also come down to repeating the same principles and just getting better at that. It won’t be long before you realize there are no new Phototshop tricks that really make a difference. Practice. Learn the keyboard so you can stay out of the menus. Keep tuning your work carefully until you can do it in your sleep. That’s what worked for me.
