فوتوشاپ وب

دسته: ترکیب‌بندی

  • Stronger Photographs With Just One Decision

    [ad_1]

    Watch the short video above, or keep reading if you prefer the written word.

    Too many photographers look to the work they do with the camera as job one, which it is. But it’s not the only job. Your ability to edit down to your keepers, to process them in ways that are consistent with your voice, and to do something with those photographs, are as much a vital part of your craft as the camera work. 

    What about the edit?

    The choice we make to select one final frame from among many is one of the most important choices we can make. It is part of what it means to make a great photograph. When we make a body of work, we have to choose a dozen or two dozen final photographs from what might be hundreds or thousands of sketch images or possible alternatives—the ability to do this is no less important than the ability to choose a shutter speed, aperture, or composition.

    So how should we be thinking about these choices? And why are so few photographers talking about it when I know so many of them are overwhelmed by it? I wonder if it’s as simple as believing that it’s just not as important. Just pick something sharp and well-exposed and move on? Or do we just pick all the images that aren’t stinkers and call it done?

    I think one of the most overlooked ways to improve your photography right now—without the need to upgrade your camera or get the latest version of your favourite lens—is to get pickier. To begin thinking about your choice of final frames more creatively. More intentionally.

    Ansel Adams said that 12 images a year was a good crop. I don’t generally think of my photographs as plants, but I like his point. And I suspect your work would be better if you were more selective, more creative about the ways you looked at editing down to your keepers, and more intentional with what you did with your images. If we all did that we’d make better, stronger photographs.

    So, I wonder:

    • When you edit or select your best work, what questions are you asking yourself?
    • What criteria do you have for making that selection?
    • How much do you trust that process?
    • Are you still deleting everything that doesn’t make the cut the first time around?
    • Are you looking for quantity or quality—and do you have a clear system for understanding what that means to you?

    I’ve heard it said that photographers are their own worst editors, but I wonder if that’s only because we often don’t give the editing as much thought as we give to our gear or our camera work. 

    And—because I’ve been that guy—I wonder how many are just relying on the Un-Suck filter in Photoshop or Lightroom to “polish a turd” rather than choosing an image that’s, ahem, not a turd in the first place.

    I have two points to this. The first is a plea. It’s more than the nudge I might normally give you. I’m practically begging you to ask yourself what it would take for you to be pickier with the images you choose as your final selects and which ones you relegate to the archives.

    Could you be giving the whole process a little more time, or actually—because my approach to editing takes less time—could you be giving it more focus and attention?

    Could you be clearer about your selection criteria and more intentional about what you’re choosing those images for in the first place? What would your accumulated work look like in a year if you didn’t settle on the 3-stars but chose only the ones that were an unqualified “Hell, yes!”?

    Your work can be so much stronger simply by choosing stronger photographs, and you can learn to do this.

    Earlier this week, I talked about three ways we could love our photographs more. This is the big one: desire more for them. Demand more from them. Hold out for the very best of them. Never settle. But how do we do that?

    In a couple days I’ll be inviting you to join me for this year’s Beyond The Shutter course, which I created to help photographers get clearer about one big question and that’s this:

    “I just shot a bunch of photographs. Now what?”

    It’s about editing down to your best work, but more than that, it’s about how you think about editing, how you can make it less overwhelming, what criteria you can use to select your best work, and how you can use the tools in Adobe Lightroom to help with that?
     
    It’s about doing something beautiful and meaningful with your photographs, like monographs, multi-media presentations, or web-galleries and using the tools you already have in Adobe Lightroom to do this much more easily than you might believe possible.
     
    One of my most popular courses to date, Beyond The Shutter is a video course created to help you become the strongest photographer you can be. To be less intimidated, less overwhelmed by the stuff that needs to happen once you put the camera down, in order to make stronger choices. It’s about the neglected other half of our creative process, a part of our craft that—once I engaged with it myself and stopped being so ad hoc about it—has become one of the most rewarding parts of what I do, rather than a dreaded after-thought.

    I want to help change your thinking about it. I want to show you my own process and how I make things like the monographs I send out, and so much more.
     
    You’ll get all the details this Sunday. The ideas and techniques I want to share with you will change your enjoyment of this craft you love so much, and will help you take next steps toward being more creative and intentional in the work you do beyond the shutter, and be more satisfied with the final results.

    Last year’s course was amazing and brought huge changes to the photographers who joined me. They said things like:

    “I never imagined this course would so increase my joy in making photographs. This deeper understanding of the editing process makes my own camera work more creative, focused, and playful,”

    “You’ve hit this one out of the ballpark! I am so impressed with this series. I’m picking up so much concrete advice.“

    Keep an eye open for more details on Sunday and your invitation to join me for Beyond The Shutter.

    Did you miss the second part of this series? You can still read it or watch the video HERE.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 3 Ways To Give Your Images Their Best Chance

    [ad_1]

    Watch the 7-minute video above, or keep reading if you prefer the written word.

    Here’s a question that keeps me up at night:

    Why do photographers get so intimidated by editing down to their best images and the “now what?” that comes once we put the camera down? And are we missing really important creative opportunities because of this?

    For years, I’ve been signing my letters to you with the words “for the love of the photograph,” because I do. And so you do you. Nothing else explains the time and money we spend on making them. No doubt about it, this is a labour of love. 

    But I wonder if we love the photographs we are going to make—the next ones—way more than the ones we’ve just made. We so often move on to the next thing too quickly. The next project. You know the one: the one for which you need that new lens. Or tripod. Or flash. I’m the same way, and there’s nothing wrong with creative momentum or new gear.

    But I think if we loved the photographs we’ve just made as much as the ones we’re about to make, we’d make stronger images and have a richer photographic life.

    So, here are three ideas, or three ways, that we can carry the love of the photograph and the making of photographs, a little further and in the process, learn more, make stronger photographs, and find more joy in all of it.

    Spend More Time With Them

    In my last video, I suggested you consider doing smaller edits when you’re working on a project. I like daily edits when I’m photographing, but whatever “smaller edits” mean to you and your work, I think you’ll benefit from doing it. I also think multiple edits are important, and though I suggest spending more time, this multiple-edit approach is actually more effective and, in the end, takes less time—and is more enjoyable and effective than one big marathon edit session (that you may never get around to).

    When it comes to choosing my keepers, I never completely trust my first instincts. We choose our best work by looking through all kinds of different filters. There’s no telling what I might have been looking for when I did my first edits—was I looking for colour images or vertical images or images that tell a certain story?—so it’s always worth giving my images another look, and doing so at least three times over a few months rather than doing one gigantic, mind-numbing edit session to find the best of my work.

    One of the best reasons for doing this, especially if you’re doing smaller edits as the work progresses, is that what a project looks like at the end and what it looked like at the very beginning are usually very different. So going back to do another edit, once you’ve seen where the project is leading can be very effective in finding new images that work with that project.

    Our work grows and changes, as does how we look at that work. I know we get excited by the next thing, but one of the best ways to make new photographs when you can’t be out there with the camera is to revisit older work. Do another pass. See what comes to the top now that you’re seeing it with fresh eyes months or even years later.

    I think not being in such a hurry with finding the best of our photographs, of revisiting them and giving them a second or third chance after we’ve shot them, is a stronger way of editing than the way it’s often done: one big marathon edit session after which we call it done and never give the un-selected images another glance. That’s the first way we can give our photographs a little more love, and the result is stronger final images.

    Do More With Them

    I used to tell anyone who would listen to “print yer damn work!” Maybe you don’t make the prints yourself, that’s OK; I don’t anymore, either. But I do have it printed by someone who is really good at printing, and getting my work in print makes me a better photographer.

    There’s also such joy in holding the work and sharing it in tangible ways. When’s the last time you made a book, a slideshow or a collection of prints to pore over? When’s the last time you submitted them to a magazine or swapped out the prints on your wall? When is the last time you did something with them?

    If you want to love your photographs more, consider making something with them. The benefits are huge, and they’re practical. When we output our work, we spend more time with it.

    When that output is larger than what we might put on Instagram, or we have to spend money to make it happen, I think we’re more critical of that work. We see the flaws and that keeps us honest and growing in our craft. 

    I’ve found knowing what I will make with my photographs gives me an end game of sorts. It makes the edits easier when I know what I’m choosing my best images for. 

    Protect Them

    If we love something, we protect it. One way to do that is with an archive of prints, but let’s talk about back-ups for a moment. 

    It seems like every other week I hear another story of a photographer who lost all their images because a hard drive crashed. I’ve heard stories of theft and fire or water damage as well, and I can’t for the life of me understand why photographers will spend so much money on gear and balk at buying whatever sized hard drives they need to create a simple backup of the work they’ve invested so much in.

    If your computer crashed right now or your main hard drive failed, how easy would it be to get back up and running without missing a beat or losing an image?

    In case it’s been a while, this is just a reminder to consider giving your backup plan a second look. And if you aren’t current with your backups, maybe to take a moment a do that, you know, for the love of your photographs.

    I’d love to hear from you on this. What do you do with your photographs once the camera goes back in the bag? You can be part of the conversation in the comments below.

    Did you miss the first in this series? You can still read it or watch that first video HERE.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Between What If? and What Now?

    Between What If? and What Now?

    [ad_1]

    I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it.

    You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of winter, only to arrive to a sunny week with nothing but blue skies and sunshine. You go to the pyramids to find them under renovation, flanked by scaffolding.

    Most recently, I arrived on the Chilcotin plateau in British Columbia, only to discover I’d come too early. What was “right on time” the past five years (the past 38 years, according to my guide, Brian) was poor timing this year. The aspens hadn’t yet turned, the weather was unusually warm, and the salmon that would be the main attraction for the bears once they had spawned and died had themselves only just arrived and still had work to do before they gave themselves to the bears. It was all out of whack, and with the change in schedule (of which I had not been apprised), all my “what ifs” about my time photographing the bears became “what nows.”

    It happens more often than I would like. All the plans, the gear lists, and the packing, the shot lists I dream up all go out the window with some frequency. This year, I built a rig to float on the water and get some split shots with the bear in the top of the frame, the salmon underwater in the bottom third. It was going to be epic! But 2/3 of the frame was empty in the absence of the bears, and without tools and some reimagining (read: fabrication), there was no way to use the rig. It never left my truck.

    I had another shot in mind, too. So many sockeye salmon wash up on the shores after spawning that I thought it would be easy to put one aside and do some macro work. I had this idea that the green curve of the cheek against the red scales would be a nice image, not knowing the salmon would mostly be alive, still in the water, and too preoccupied with spawning to get ready for their close-ups. Also? When they turn red, they have lost their scales. Well, there goes that idea.

    But “what now?” can be as helpful a creative question as “what if?” The latter is proactive, an act of the imagination, and results in plans and daydreams, shot lists, etc. The former is reactive, an act of response. No less imaginative, but a little more grounded in reality, the biggest hurdle is getting over the disappointment and wiping the mental slate clean to make room for new ideas and perceptions.

    Now what? I came home with thousands of images, only a few of them contained a bear after one lone grizzly showed up to check things out. Finding his timing was off, I suspect he went back to his colleagues to report: “Not yet, friends. Almost.” In those eight days of waiting before my own timing ran out and I had to move on, I asked myself many times: What now?

    The answer was all around me. The Chilco River, cold and turquoise, was running crimson with the most salmon the river system has seen in something like 15 years. Over 3 million of them, if the guy from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is to be believed, and all of them making their way upstream to their natal spawning grounds, a riot of reds and greens that seemed as good a subject as any, and would fill a hole in my work that I hadn’t yet explored. Fleshing out the story, if you’ll forgive the pun. After a while, it captured my imagination enough to become its own “what if?”

    What if I could capture this extraordinary colour, this dazzling motion? How would I do that? What tools did I have that might help with that? Weirdly, I had a polarizing filter with me. I never have a polarizer. What made me throw that in at the last minute, I wondered. That would make it easier to get through the reflections on the surface of the water. I also had an Insta360 X5, an action camera I bought this summer (highly recommended!), along with a water case and a 12-foot pole.

    Every day, twice a day, we went out looking for bears. We never gave up on them. But as we looked, I played with the salmon, both above and below the water. Fast shutters, slow shutters, intentional camera movements sometimes, and more literal efforts at others. I put the video camera in the water and worked through the learning curve of that, giggling away at both the failed attempts and the unexpected successes. I combed through thousands of frames shot from the surface, looking for one or two that felt right.

    In the end, I learned a lot. I found myself infatuated, newly fascinated by the salmon, too. And I got a couple of images and some video that I love—neither of which is disconnected from my existing work with the bears.

    So important to bears and the forests in which they spend so much of their lives that we call them salmon forests. Bears drag the salmon by the millions into the forests to eat them, leaving much of their bodies to decompose, their nutrients returning to the forest.

    To the bears themselves, the salmon provide the calories necessary to survive the winters and, for the females, the body fat needed to allow the embryos of their future cubs to implant, which only happens when they reach 33% body fat. A bear needs to consume over 20,000 calories a day to prepare for denning in the winter, almost all of which comes from the fat-and-calorie-rich salmon. To say the two species are connected is an understatement.

    I didn’t get what I hoped for on this trip. But looking back on most of my trips, I often don’t. I get different, for sure. Sometimes I get better. Rarely do I get nothing. The “what if?” prepares me and gets me thinking, but as long as I don’t let it blind me, it’s the “what now?” that’s usually responsible for the work I actually make. I would be surprised if I were the only one.



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • A Better Edit Makes Better Photographs

    [ad_1]

    Take a few minutes to watch the video above or, if you’re more of a written word person, keep reading.

    It’s not uncommon for me to come home from a trip with thousands of photographs. On a wildlife trip I can average 1,000 photographs a day, which is really easy to do when you’re in a moving boat, excited about bears and your cameras are set to shoot 10 frames a second. Even when I’m not photographing wildlife, if I’ve had a good day out with my camera I can come back with hundreds of images. 

    But even on those trips when I’m gone for a month and come home with 30,000 photographs, I still get home with my edits mostly done, and my development mostly finished and ready to print. Often I’ve also got a PDF monograph ready to send out to the photographers in my community.

    In contrast, I have a friend who shoots trips like this and he won’t get around to doing anything with his photographs for years. Until then they will sit there on hard drives begging to be seen, to be printed, learned from, and put into some form of creative output that can be shared with the world. 

    Why? It’s not some kind of strategy, and he’s not giving them time to get objective about his edits. He just gets overwhelmed by it all. And he doesn’t have a system. He looks at all those images and gets paralyzed. So while I’m excitedly making prints and sequencing monographs or updating my web galleries, he and so many like him are doing…nothing with their images. No bodies of work created, no beautiful prints, no learning from their mistakes or experiencing the joy of seeing—and sharing—their finished work.

    I know so many photographers who walk in the door after making a bunch of photographs and say, “Well, that was fun. Now what?”

    The edit—choosing your keepers—can be so intimidating that it gets reduced to an ad hoc effort at picking a few good shots,  pushing some sliders around in Lightroom, and throwing them onto Instagram before moving on to the next thing. I’ve been there. 

    Before I started doing assignment work, my editing was scattershot and intimidating and took forever. But client work forced me to get intentional about how I imported and organized my images, to be clear about my criteria for selecting the best of that work, and more systematic about the output.

    Knowing I would be shooting for something, that my work would be used in certain ways made a big difference to me. It still does. In my personal work I know I will be making something—a book, a web gallery, a collection of prints—and that helps me make better choices about which images I shoot and how I select the best of that work. 

    This email is the first in a series in which I want to explore what you do with your images after the camera goes back in the bag and the ways that can make you an even stronger, more intentional, and more creative photographer when you take it out again.

    The first question I want to ask (on your behalf) is this:

    “How can I make the edit easier, less intimidating, or overwhelming?” 

    I’ve got three simple initial ideas that I think can be really helpful, and they’re a big part of how I am able to regularly come home with up to 30,000 images already mostly edited and the best of that work ready for output rather than dreading the pile of images I had yet to go through. Here are those ideas. I hope they help.

    Just Look for the Best of the Best

    We all photograph for different reasons and we all do things differently, but I think edits (especially the first edits done relatively soon after shooting) should be selections, not ratings. Pick them or don’t pick them, but don’t rate them. at least not at first.

    My own edit process goes much more quickly because I’m not looking for every single image that meets some basic minimal technical standard. I’m looking for the ones that make me lean in. The ones that make my heart sing. The ones that grab me and won’t let me not select them.

    You might have a great reason for rating images, but I think trying to decide whether an image deserves 2, 3, or 4 stars slows the process. Because I’m looking for a few frames that are a decisive “Yes!”, I’ve found rating them makes me look for the wrong thing.

    For me, a 3-star image isn’t a Yes! It’s a yawn.

    Consider being more binary. Yes! Or no. After all, how many images do you really need? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look for the best 12 or 24? It is for me.

    Do Smaller Edits

    Break it down. Make it easy on yourself. You don’t have to edit thousands of images all at once.

    I do daily field edits and come home with main selections already made. This makes it manageable, but it’s more than that. Doing daily edits means things don’t get away from you. And—as a bonus—it gives you a chance to spot things that aren’t working. For example, you’re more likely to notice that you accidentally shot small JPGs all day when you thought you had been shooting RAW. Or you discover your lens isn’t focusing quite right. Or your sensor needs cleaning. It’s better to discover that after one day of shooting and be able to fix it, rather than much later on when it’s just too late.

    Maybe you don’t do big multi-day projects, breaking your edits down into bite-sized pieces, perhaps into sequences or using Lightroom’s Stacking feature, can still make the process much more manageable and keep you excited, rather than doing one big exhausting edit later on. You don’t have to do it all at once and you probably should consider doing it all more than once. I have found multiple smaller edit sessions make the best of my limited resources of time and attention, which wane after a few thousand images, let me tell you!

    Consider Your Output

    Don’t just make photographs; make something with the photographs.

    I’ve found that knowing what I’m going to do with my images has made me a much better photographer and a much better editor because I now know what I’m choosing images for. 

    If you know you’re going to be making a book, you’ll make different choices. If you know you want a dozen horizontal prints, again, you’ll make different choices. If you know you want a body of work that explores a theme, what you shoot and how you edit will be affected by that. 

    When we edit we’re asking which are the best images, but first we need to ask “best for what?” And that is entirely your choice. Just don’t let it only be best for a couple Instagram posts or a handful of random images that never leave your hard drives. 

    These three ideas alone will make your editing simpler:

    1. Look only for the best and don’t worry about the others.
    2. Do smaller bite-sized edit sessions, and
    3. Consider—or make intentional choices about—what you want to do with your pictures so you can think not only about which images are best, but best for what.

    I’d love to hear from you on this. Where do you find your greatest challenges when it comes to choosing your best work and doing something with them, staying organized, and doing all the work that happens beyond the shutter? If you feel like talking about it, drop me a note in the comments below.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Change Your Lens, Or…?

    Change Your Lens, Or…?

    [ad_1]

    Imagine this: we’re side by side at a local pond, a thermos of coffee between us as the first light comes up. You’ve got your camera with a 24-105mm lens. I’ve got mine, too, but chose to bring my 300mm lens instead. As we set up, you say you wish now that you’d brought a longer lens. 

    “Funny,” I say, “I was just thinking the same thing,” though I was wishing for something shorter.

    How many times has this scenario played out for you? You make choices, bringing one lens only to wish you had something else. If you have 400mm, you want 600mm, and if you have 600mm, you want 24mm. And just knowing that can make the choice painful, even paralyzing.

    But here’s what I know: whatever you bring, you will make something of it, because that’s how creativity works.

    Creativity works with what it has. What you lack will always force a constraint upon you and (here’s the benefit) force you into looking at the scene in a new way.

    If we’re walking through the streets of Venice and I have a telephoto lens and you have a wide-angle lens, we will look for different things and see different possibilities in the very same scene; we’ll see in different ways because of the gear, not despite it. I will be looking wider, taking it all in, trying to find order in the chaos. You will be looking for tighter scenes, scenes that play well when compressed and cropped tight.

    The lens you have will force you to say no to photographing some scenes in ways to which I am eagerly saying yes, and vice versa.

    Back to the pond. We’ve settled down in the grasses, still wet with dew, and just as the first licks of that golden light hit the pond, a loon emerges from the reeds, probably flushed out by our presence, and we both raise our cameras. The loon takes off, a belaboured affair with a lot of splashing. You, having accepted your limits, photograph the whole pond, shrouded in fog, the loon only a detail in the larger image, which will tell a bigger story than what I’m making. My image is much tighter and you can see every drop; there’s detail and mood, and it says both less—and more—than your photograph. The images are so different from each other. Not necessarily better, or worse. Different.

    This same scene plays out in similar ways, minus the loons, on every safari I lead. You will not bring the same gear I brought, and vice versa. But we’ll both make something of it, and probably something wonderful, so long as we’re not sidetracked or distracted by our constraints, but allow them to help us see in new ways.

    It is usually (maybe always) easier and more productive to change our thinking than it is to waste that energy wishing we could change our lenses.

    If we’re willing to have this conversation with it, the gear we have says, “OK, you have what you have: long, wide, fast, slow, whatever. What are you going to do with it?” It’s an invitation to see differently. The bear is too close, and all I’ve got is my stupid 600mm! Maybe now’s the time to isolate the details in the claws, or explore the textures of the fur. Maybe it’s not about the bear at all, but the salmon in his mouth.

    I don’t know what you photograph or what kind of gear you’ll have with you as we sit together, but I do know I’ve yet to find the scene that has only one way of looking at it, or a scenario where there isn’t a dozen ways to photograph.

    I wonder how our perspective would change, or what kind of energy we’d bring to our work, if we gave as much thought (or more) to the different ways of looking at a scene than to the gear we choose. Different gear means different possibilities, but eventually, we hit the limits of those choices. Accepting this—and embracing it—is a way forward into greater creativity.

    You can’t always change your gear, but you can always change your thinking.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David

    The biggest challenges for most photographers are not technical but creative.  They are not so much what goes on in the camera but what goes on in the mind of the person wielding it.  Light, Space & Time is a book about thinking and feeling your way through making photographs that are not only good, but truly your own. It would make an amazing gift for the photographer in your life, especially if that’s you. Find out more on Amazon. 



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Golden Merganser: About the Image

    The Golden Merganser: About the Image

    [ad_1]

    My best photographs are usually a surprise to me. Long after I’ve made them, they feel familiar and almost inevitable as I look back on them, but not one of them could I have really ever anticipated at the time. The light, the composition, even the subject—I often never see them coming. Sometimes, the surprise is that the image even worked at all, as is the case with my image of a common merganser in flight against golden water.

    Last week I once again found myself sitting on the banks of a northern river—the aspens just starting to turn gold, the air full of the smells of autumn. I was there for three short days to photograph grizzly bears, and while I came home with a couple of photographs I love in which a bear is the star of the show (below), the one I am most in love with, and surprised by, is my golden merganser (above).

    A grizzly bear takes his prize of a spring salmon (also called a chinook, or king salmon) into the forest to eat in peace. I made this image by triggering my camera remotely while watching from a respectful and safe distance. 

    Back to the merganser. The simple version of “here’s how I made this photograph” is this: 1200mm (600mm + 2x), 1/30s, f/10, ISO 125.

    But that’s not really a “how,” is it? That’s the math, but it’s not the method.

    To begin with, this was supposed to be a photograph of a bear; that’s why I was there. But in this moment, the bear had chosen to be elsewhere, ignoring (not for the first time) the art director whose directions about the art had been clear: be there. He wasn’t. While I waited there, the river rushing past me, I had time to look around and really take things in. A patch of river to my left caught my eye, the reflections of the aspens turning the otherwise silty water a beautiful gold. The odd merganser (but then all mergansers are a little odd, are they not?) would drift through that water, and eventually I turned my lens towards them.

    Mergansers are weird little diving ducks. They bob and weave through the water, ducking below the surface to fish before coming up and thrashing around and flapping their wings in something that looks like a bit of a ritual and a little bit like a seizure. Drying off (or showing off), they’re goofy little creatures, and if you watch them long enough, your indifference towards them can turn to fascination, even affection. And I don’t say that lightly because I am not (emphasis heavily my own, and a little defensive, which is hard to show with italics) a birder. I digress.

    It was in one of these moments of fascination, the bear long forgotten (but seriously, where was he?), that it occurred to me that my efforts to photograph these birds were not stirring my imagination. They were still just ducks on the water, and the behaviour that most interested me was translating poorly into a photograph at 1/1000s: just very sharp pictures of ducks.

    There was something there—I could feel it—and I had nothing but time to try to find it. I also had nothing to lose. To say I wasn’t invested in the pictures I was making would be an understatement, and that was probably part of the problem. I simply didn’t care. There was no challenge. Just a bored photographer making boring pictures.

    For a moment, I turned my attention to the moving water, spun the shutter to 1/30s, and started playing with the shapes and colours as blurred by the slow shutter speed. There was something magical in that. I know, it should have all been so obvious to me, but it took a while to shift my thinking from the literal to the more creative. Now I needed a merganser in that moving water!

    It is not uncommon for my photographs to improve dramatically when I finally say “f*ck it!” and start to play, to experiment with my process with no real concern for the resulting image. It’s a shame I can’t get there faster, but it seems necessary for me to pass through the boredom and the “nothing else is working” first. By the way, I’m trusting you to keep this to yourself: I’m pretty sure the “real photographers” out there can jump straight to the part where they make brilliant images, but that’s never been my path, and I would hate for them to find out just how defective I really am.

    I’d like to now explain the magical thinking that ultimately led me to make this image, which I am very much in love with, but I can’t. That’s usually what happens when you’re playing. One “let me try this” leads to “that didn’t work at all” which leads to “hey, this might be cool!” and somewhere in there I saw one of these daft birds taking off, which is a hell of a process and exhausts me just watching it, so I panned with it in a wild “this will never work.” And that’s when the magic happened.

    No it didn’t. Not even close. It was a disaster. It didn’t work at all. Some frames were just a little blurry head sticking into the frame; others were nothing but tail feathers, also very blurry. Sh*t! Sorry, I say salty words when I play and start to get too invested in the results. But I saw something I liked. A glimmer of hope. So I tried again. And again. And after years of talking about panning and knowing exactly how to do it (even pulling it off once every couple of years or so), one of the frames was good. It made my heart leap. Not perfectly sharp, but that wasn’t really the point. Perhaps perfectly sharp would have ruined it, I don’t know. To me, it was poetic, and that’s better than perfect. To me there’s an echo of Robert Henri’s “paint the flying spirit of the bird, not its feathers.” I loved it, and there was no “I love it, but….” Just that giddy feeling you get when you make something that thrills you—something that feels like magic.

    For those of you who skipped to the end: I just used a long lens, a slow shutter speed, and panned with the duck. Easy peasy. 😉

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David

    Save 50% on all Craft & Vision eBooks – Last Chance!



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Evolving Photographer

    The Evolving Photographer

    [ad_1]

    I am not the photographer I once was—and neither are you. Change is inevitable (and desirable), and as you look at your work, I hope you see that change reflected in the photographs you have made. As the months and years roll by, the camera becomes a little more familiar, a little less intimidating. At some point, it just feels like a part of you: your fingers moving to buttons without conscious thought, your hands moving the whole rig left and right to frame compositions you aren’t aware you’ve envisioned. Slowly, ever so slowly, you become the photographer you are. Some of that is intentional, and some of it feels like it just…happens. And some of it is hard-earned, a matter of trial and error and (finally!) figuring out that one technical problem that’s been dogging you for years. The pictures become better when you experience this kind of growth.

    Some of that growth forward is personal rather than technical, an evolution that is tied to the way you think and feel and see the world. It’s often this progress that is the most noticeable. A moment of courage to try something different, like the way (for example) so many people experiment with intentional camera movement, and it becomes their new thing. A moment of curiosity when you think, “I just want to try something,” and that something is so fascinating to you that it becomes one of those threads that unravels the sweater the more you pull it, only in reverse, because in this metaphor, the sweater becomes more complete, not less. Over time, this kind of growth leads to images that are not just good, but truly your own.

    One could argue (here I go!) that the first kind of growth is a movement forward in craft, and that the second represents an onward journey in vision. The former satisfies the technician in us, the latter satisfies the artist. Both are necessary, perhaps not in the same measure, but I’ve found that they feed each other, even require each other. Learning some new technique, even just playing with some new piece of gear, gives me glimpses of creative possibilities I had never considered, and the technician nudges the artist forward. The artist, ever curious and disinclined to sit still, tries to do something, imagines something they don’t know quite how to do, and the technician is called in to figure it out, to find new ways or new tools. And the artist moves into new territory, makes something different than they’ve ever made or even imagined before.

    The technician pushes the artist in us forward; the artist pulls the technician into places they’ve never been needed before. Iron sharpens iron, as they say.

    I have long felt that this tension is one of the keys to growth. Most of us naturally fall more to one side than the other (artist or technician), but that’s not a liability; it’s an opportunity. It’s the way forward for the photographer who wants to evolve and keep up with the human being they are becoming. That tension is a gap—a space into which we can move—and it’s key to our evolution.

    The question of growth or evolution is often phrased in the negative: how do I get unstuck? How do I escape my rut? Sometimes (often?) it just feels like boredom, a deep sense of dissatisfaction or ennui, but the need to escape from it remains. Everything hinges on opening the gap, or finding where it already exists, and exploring it. The tools of that exploration are curiosity, challenge, and change.

    Learn New Things

    Curiosity is the exploration of a knowledge gap. You realize you don’t know something, and a fissure opens. You can either shrug it off, accept a posture of “don’t know, don’t care,” or you can give yourself over to curiosity and peek inside. Sometimes that peek reveals something new that doesn’t particularly draw you in; other times, your eyes blink a little in the darkness, and what you see is a cave of wonders that invites you deeper. To accept that invitation, you move forward. Perhaps it’s the moment you look through the macro lens and see an entirely new world of colour and shape. Maybe it’s a first experience with a subject that so intrigues you that it pulls you down one of those rabbit holes from which you never really emerge.

    Want to evolve as a photographer and get out of your rut? Nurture your curiosity, ask questions, follow the gaps in your knowledge, and you will open yourself to new directions in your work.

    Do Hard Things

    Challenge, often seen as an obstacle to our best work, is instead the way forward into it. I’ve said it so often it’s beginning to sound like a mantra: your creativity needs something to push against. It needs a problem to solve. Challenge leads to flow, but it also sets the stage for the kinds of microfailures that lead to learning, and learning pulls us forward. Learning is the engine of evolution and growth. If you want to continue growing as an artist, you must continually find new challenges, even create new challenges for yourself.

    When people ask me how they get out of their rut, what they’re telling me is they’re bored.

    Boredom comes when we lack challenge. Like curiosity, which is willfully stepping into a knowledge gap, taking up challenge is stepping into a gap created by what we can and can’t do (yet) or what we believe we can or can’t do. Bite off more than you think you can chew and see where it leads.

    Do Different Things (In Different Ways)

    Change is hard. But no growth happens without it. When you evolve into a new person doing new things in new ways, you must leave the old things behind. Scary. Hard. But that’s the cost. If the idea of pursuing your curiosity or creating challenge for yourself is a little too abstract, this one is concrete: do something differently. Change what you do. Change how you do it. Photograph new things. Photograph in new ways.

    The rusting hull of an abandoned ship off Vancouver Island’s west coast drew my eye in a way I can’t explain. I was there to photograph wildlife and could have, instead spent hours exploring this wreck. Does it signal a change in direction for me, away from wildlife, probably not, but it made me aware of something inside that is drawn by the texture and colour, an itch that my current work doesn’t scratch.

    I’m more drawn to the first two images. I like the abstraction, the un-identifiable-ness of them. I like that there’s no scale, no real frame of reference. But this one has its own magic. It’s different from what I normally photograph and in order to grow forward you need to explore the detours that interest you. They might not lead anywhere, but you have to follow them to find out.

    Most of us resist change, choosing to avoid it rather than chase it down. But it’s the price demanded by life if we’re to grow. We don’t love to be in a rut, but it’s so much more comfortable than change. Change is unpredictable. It’s the devil you don’t know. It’s scary. Change threatens the labels we apply to ourselves, and by which others recognize us. Change can alter the story we tell about ourselves: I was a travel/humanitarian photographer, now I seem to be a wildlife photographer. It’s difficult to know what to do with that, but unless we’re willing to explore it, we’ll never move forward into it.

    All of this can be said about our passage through life. You don’t grow into the new without letting go of the old. For some, the struggle is to accept that; for others, the struggle is to accelerate it. If you’re among the latter and you long to move forward in your art, consider being more proactive about nurturing your curiosity, accepting and even chasing challenge, and re-evaluating your relationship with change. 

    Learn new things, do hard things, and do different things (differently), and you’ll move forward. Life, and your art, will also be so much more interesting. 😉

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David

    The biggest challenges for most photographers are not technical but creative.  They are not so much what goes on in the camera but what goes on in the mind of the person wielding it.  Light, Space & Time is a book about thinking and feeling your way through making photographs that are not only good, but truly your own. It would make an amazing gift for the photographer in your life, especially if that’s you. Find out more on Amazon. 



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Diminishing Returns? I Don’t Think So.

    Diminishing Returns? I Don’t Think So.

    [ad_1]

    I came home from Zambia with a small handful of images I love. Maybe eight. The jury is still out. But a couple of them I really love. The rest are just meh, a collection of sketch images that don’t make me lean in or quicken my heart. Far from failures, they’re what it takes to get me to the good stuff. Between game drives last week, I found myself telling one of my guests that I was experiencing something like “diminishing returns.”

    But that’s not it. Sure, the returns are fewer, but they’re also much better. I’m using a different metric than I once did, measuring my best work in single or low double digits instead of the bigger numbers, hoping I’d come home from a trip with many more workable photographs.

    These days, I don’t want workable. I want WOW. I want wonder.

    These latest images might not be your wow, but they are mine. That’s what I’m aiming for, and if I hit that target, then the returns aren’t diminished at all.

    But there’s something else I’ve noticed. The longer I do this, the more I get a sense of what works and does not work for me, the more I know what gives me that “Hell, yes!” response to the photographs I best love, the more I am willing to leave the camera in my lap and give myself over to the wonder. Or to pick up the camera—photographs be damned—and let it pull me closer to that same awe but relax into the watching, into absorbing the light, the moment, and the wild thing that has allowed me to share its space.

    There is nothing diminishing about wonder. Or being in the moment and letting it pull you above the fray of your daily life and the din of the endlessly chattering monkey brain.

    I’ve noticed something else. This freedom to simply watch, with no expectation that what I’m looking at might become a photograph, often becomes exactly that: a photograph. More times than I can count, the camera has revealed something that I didn’t know about myself. It has proven me wrong so many times. And from that comes curiosity and exploration, and often, the kind of new perspective that leads to new work.

    “I don’t like baboons,” I’ve said so many times. Nasty little buggers. And yet this time, my camera showed me backlit baboons, and I let my gaze linger a little longer, finding myself first questioning my prejudices, then succumbing to the wonder.

    I said the same thing about hyenas (evil critters!) until I saw a mother tending her cub so tenderly that I fell in love. Watch a white-backed vulture for long and you’ll find all kinds of things to fully draw your interest, if not your emotions. And don’t even get me started on hippos, but somehow I found myself eye-level at a hippo pool, having the time of my life—and from the looks of it, so was the hippo!

    It’s not just wildlife, either. The camera has this amazing way of showing us everyday things in new ways, if we let it. I woke on one of the eternal flights home, somewhere between my connections in Nairobi and Frankfurt to the light of dawn painting red squares on the cabin wall, pairing as best it could with the blue of unlit clouds, and it took my breath away.

    What’s that quote? Life is not in how many breaths we take but how many moments take our breath away? Perhaps the same could be said of photographs: it’s not how many moments we capture, but how many moments captivate us.

    I may make fewer photographs than I once did, but there’s nothing at all diminishing in the evolution of my craft. With or without it in my hand, the camera has amplified my life, extending the briefest of moments into years of enjoyment. I’m guessing it has done the same for you. More than trophies, the best of them are a collection of silent whispers: “Remember when? Wasn’t that…incredible?” They allow us to drop an anchor, of sorts, into the fast-flowing current of time, to hold ourselves within it for much longer than our forward-looking minds seem to do on their own.

    We learn young to look ever-forward, but as time pulls us along and so much of our life is converted to memories, the ability to hold still within that tidal pull of time becomes more important. Not to always be looking back, but to have a present imbued with the flavour of all that we’ve lived. These things don’t pass us by; they accumulate. More so when we have a net to catch them with. The camera has helped me widen that net and tighten the spaces between the holes. Maybe it’s the net itself. I wonder at smaller things now than I once did, and where there is wonder, there’s a chance at not only a photograph, but a life.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David

    Do you photograph wildlife? My publisher has had a lapse in judgment and is letting me write another book, this time about photographing wild things. Before I get too deep into it, if you photograph wildlife, would you be willing to answer a couple of questions? Take the time and I’ll draw three names for a signed copy of the book when it comes out. Click here to take the quick survey.



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Change is Hard (At Least You Aren’t a Lobster)

    [ad_1]

    Something a little different for you this morning. 

    My heart stopped dead when I saw the black snake in my tent. Walking barefoot to the washroom in the middle of the night, my mind needed no time at all to jump to the certainty that what I was looking at was not just any snake but one of the most dangerous snakes in Africa—a black mamba. 

    I froze, very nearly freeing myself from the need to go all the way to the toilet to do that for which I’d awakened. My mind raced, my heart quickened, and my vision did that thing where everything goes blurry but then gets super-humanly sharp, which I guess is nature’s way of helping us deal with danger, to assess threat, and, in my case, to slowly realize that what I was looking at was not a black mamba, but the black camera strap I’d removed from my 600mm lens the day before. It must have fallen on the floor as I got ready for bed. God, I hate camera straps.

    I still like snakes, though. When I was a kid, I collected them. At one point, I had 30 snakes in my bedroom, all quite harmless. They lived in aquariums that I would buy at yard sales and kept from escaping—for the most part—with pieces of plywood across the top. Now and then, a snake would get out, and the woman who came in once a month to clean the house would burst into tears, threaten to quit, and never return. My mother would happily find the snakes, pick them up, and return them to their glass homes without blinking an eye and then, I’m certain, renegotiate our cleaner’s hourly rate.

    I kept the snakes for the summers and every fall, returned them to the woods and marshes where I found them, leaving behind half a dozen empty aquariums and, if I was lucky, some snake skins.

    Snakes, like many animals, shed their skins. In the case of snakes and lizards, what they leave behind is a husk—a ghostly structure from which they crawl. Humans also shed their skin, though we do it constantly, a few cells at a time, and not all at once on the bedroom floor, which is probably a blessing for a guy who gets freaked out by something as harmless as a camera strap. Can you imagine?

    Snakes shed their skin because they grow, and their skin does not. Lobsters experience the same thing. In order to grow, they molt, shedding their old shells and emerging with a new, soft one that hardens over time until it too is cast off, and the cycle repeats itself. Lobsters literally crawl out of themselves alive to grow. Meanwhile, I can’t even bring myself to throw out a favourite old t-shirt that no longer fits. Harder still to cast off habits or ways of thinking we’ve outgrown.

    So what does this have to do with your photography or creative life? The first lesson should be abundantly clear: don’t leave your camera straps lying around if you prefer not to piss yourself in the middle of the night. The second is a little more abstract: sometimes, you have to make wildly uncomfortable changes to accommodate the person you’re becoming or want to become. Big, scary changes. I can’t speak to the emotional life of the lobster, but I can’t imagine it feels great about leaving its armour behind and living without the comfort of that protection for the couple of weeks it takes for its new shell to harden.

    I wonder if the lobster even knows what’s going on. Does it understand these changes, or, like me, does it freak out, Google its symptoms, and assume the worst? In these moments of perceived calamity, is it certain that its world is never going to be the same or that the end is nigh? Does it go to the same dark places in its mind that I do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep? Do snakes? Can you imagine crawling out of your own skin? And what do you do with the husk that’s left over? Is it garbage? Recycle? Does my municipality allow it in the organic waste bin? You could be grateful you’re not a lobster; they eat their discarded shells.

    Wow, this one got away from me quickly. Snakes? Lobsters? Sorry about that. Too much coffee this morning. I just wanted to remind you that change is hard. It’s uncomfortable and scary. It’s often the cost of moving forward in both life and art. And very often, it feels like failure. I doubt lizards and lobsters are as neurotic as we are; they simply do what they need to do to move forward and grow into their new selves. They don’t look back at their old selves with recrimination, the way we sometimes do, as if the person we once were could have (or should have) done the kind of work we do now. As if they should have known better or done better.

    Forward, ever forward, my friend. Change is necessary. Sometimes we grow and need to change to accommodate that forward momentum. Sometimes it’s the other way around, and we need to change to stimulate that growth. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which, though I’m not sure that really matters. It only matters that we change, and it might help if we’re not so freaked out by it all. So often the thing we’re afraid of isn’t at all what we think it is. 

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David



    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Check Your Composition

    [ad_1]

    I gotta tell you, I have no idea how any of us ever managed to learn this craft well enough to make the photographs we do. There’s just so much to learn! Exposure alone can be tricky at first, but these days, there are so many different modes and buttons and dials. With time, it becomes intuitive-feeling, but it’s a lot.

    And even then, we can master the camera without ever really mastering the skills needed to make a compelling photograph.

    Last week, I was going through the many resources I’ve created for you over the years, and I came across one that you might not have seen: The Composition Checklist.I’d like you to have a copy of that, together with a video I made with three suggestions on how to make the most of the checklist.

    When I first introduced these two resources, I made the mistake of advertising them on Facebook. Totally free resources—no catch, no strings attached—and they still drew out the haters and the critics! 😂 One of them berated me for the idea that composition could be reduced to a checklist, which, of course, it can’t (and I didn’t at all mean to imply that it could be). But there are ideas that are helpful to remember when you’re framing a photograph, and I thought an easy-to-reference guide might be useful to you.

    Composition is important; it’s the visual language photographers use to make their photographs compelling. And for some reason, it’s some of the last stuff we are taught (if we’re taught at all).

    A quick story. Years ago, before Covid wrecked everything, I did a series of workshops in places like Italy. We’d put some time aside in the middle of the day to look at images and discuss them. The assignment was (I thought) simple: look at the image and describe one decision the photographer made to make the image and what that decision contributed. You could talk about balance and how it was achieved. You could talk about how the vertical framing reinforced the vertical elements in the image. Perhaps you might talk about how the main subject was well isolated using depth of field or a longer lens. Or you could talk about what didn’t work. Maybe important elements were getting cut off by the edges of the frame. Maybe the chosen moment wasn’t strong enough to create a dynamic composition. I mean, the sky was the limit. Yet, the reply I most often got was just a blank stare and a mumbled, uncomfortable version of, “Well, I like it…”

    “That’s all? That’s all you can say about this photograph? That you like it??” I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I wanted to have a lively conversation about composition, and it always ended up feeling like an interrogation.

    It taught me an important lesson. I was asking photographers to think in ways they hadn’t yet been taught. I had ambushed them and expected them to have the same vocabulary that I did. Many of them knew cabalistic things about cameras that I still don’t understand, but when it came to photographs, they struggled. Ideas like balance and tension, or using contrast or juxtaposition (I talked about this in this recent post/article). Ideas like repeated elements or thinking about the energy of the photograph were all a bit foggy.

    So let me ask you: how’s your composition? Do you think about the way the elements in the frame relate to each other and what they accomplish in the image? Is it time to check in with some of those ideas? 

    Anyways, The Composition Checklist is a simple thing, but combined with the accompanying 10-minute video, I’m hoping it can give you a bit of a nudge and maybe help you ask some important questions as you shoot.

    You can get your copy of The Composition Checklist by clicking here. Still free, still no strings attached. Just click this link, tell me where to send it and I’ll send you both the PDF checklist and the video to download.

    Don’t be that photographer who knows more about camera design than visual design. And once you’ve checked out these two free resources, if you want to chat about composition or ask questions, I would love to have that conversation in the comments here on my blog.

    For the Love of the Photograph,
    David



    [ad_2]

    Source link