Just for the record, it was my co-blogger’s idea for me to write about photography this week. My ego won’t let me pretend otherwise. He said he’d love to read what I’d write about photography and learn what it takes to make a good picture. Those are nice things to say and I appreciate him, even though it made me a little self conscious to not know if had anything worthwhile to say.
I told him that if he wanted me to write about a hobby, maybe it should be a piece about laying awake at 3am worrying about something stupid I said in 1997. I know WAY more about that.
(This is both tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation and absolutely true.)
With that said, what I know I CAN do is tell you some of the things I’ve learned about photography over the last 2 years that I’ve been something like a serious hobbyist.
That’s fair, right?
#1 Cameras aren’t as smart as you are, so they need help.
So, listen, our brains are crazy cool, right? When you look at a sunset, stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or even just watch rain falling outside your window, your eyes scan the whole area and your brain assembles a feeling for you. You never really think about the fact that a scenic view is only really cool because your brain knows things about what you’re looking at and can overwhelm itself with a wash of input. Mind-blowing, right?
PLUS, your eyes move all around like ‘Oooh! There’s an interesting thing!! OOH!! There’s another one!! AND THERE TOO!!!’ and your brain jumps in and stitches it all together in one big interesting scene and it’s just all so AWESOME!!
The lens in a camera is basically the human eye’s much more boring and myopic cousin. A camera can only see part of what you can and, if everything is in focus, it treats everything pretty much the same. So you can go to the Grand Canyon and take technically perfect picture where the light is right, everything is clear, and a clueless tourist isn’t blocking the shot, it can actually be pretty boring.
(I think I’ve just figured out why no one wants to look at other people’s vacation photos.)
One of the differences between a technically correct picture and a great picture is making sure that the viewer’s eye has somewhere obvious to land, something to be the subject.
If there’s no subject, your eyes wander around, looking for something cool to settle on, then get tired and annoyed and want to move on, like a short tempered teenager.
So, taking a picture that has a clear (both obvious and in focus) subject is really important.
#2 Beautiful sunny days aren’t great for pictures.
Yeah, listen, who frickin’ knew, right? Ok, a lot of people knew this, it’s just that I didn’t.
Bright overhead sun feels good, makes you happy, does all of that great stuff, but it does some not awesome things too. It can make your pictures look really flat and uninteresting (at best) because there are no shadows to add any depth. Plus it’s really easy to have the sun overpower your camera and instead of that nice bright blue sky you see, you end up with a bright white and totally featureless sky. Oh, and let’s not forget all of the awesome squinty-eyed looks on the people in that picture. Bright sun is … bright, and it makes us close our eyes.
The solution here? Well, if you HAVE to take a picture in the middle of the day, especially if you’re trying to take pictures of people, get them into the shade. You’ll be able to capture their beautiful faces with nice definition and they’ll be able to open their eyes.
Can’t move into the shade? Get the picture anyway, but if you can adjust your camera at all lower the exposure (make it a little darker) before you hit the button so you don’t have a flat, too bright, blown-out image.
None of those are options? See #4.
#3 There are way more ways to make a ‘good’ picture than things you can do to make a ‘bad’ picture.
If there’s one most important thing that I’ve learned so far, it’s that - not to over simplify here - taking ‘good’ pictures is a lot like trying to get a toddler to eat breakfast. Here’s what I mean: it’s all about doing the things that make your brain (or another brain, someone’s brain) look at the picture and be happy. That’s another over simplification, but let me keep explaining.
There are just things our brains like, that they find satisfying. Now, those things can be different from culture to culture. In the West, we read left to right, so a picture that draws someone’s eye from left to right and lands on a good subject is tasty like brain candy.
Straight lines matter too. If you’re lucky, your head sits pretty much level on your neck, so you’re used to seeing the horizon straight in front of you. (If you’re inside, you’re used to seeing things like doorways go straight up and down. This is all logical, right?) That’s why if you look at one picture that’s just a little bit crooked and an almost totally identical picture that’s nice and straight, you like the straight one better. (Even if you, yourself are not that straight.)
So, the punch line here is that a nicely composed, not tilted picture will be ‘good’ and everything else you do to it to make it interesting or fun makes it great. On the other hand, leave that picture crooked, maybe out of focus, or forget to find an obvious subject, and it’s kind of lame.
In other words, you can do lots and lots and loads and tons of things to make a good picture and just a few things to screw it up.
#4 No matter what, get the picture.
Once I bought my first ‘real’ camera and started to learn how to use it, I fell into this trap of somehow taking LESS pictures. Before the camera, I was taking pictures with my phone ALL OF THE TIME and that suddenly stopped.
Yes, I needed to take the time to get the camera out of its bag and try to capture a picture using what (very, very, precious) little I knew to get the practice, but that wasn’t always practical. I had become some kind of weird photo snob that wouldn’t use a cell phone camera because I needed to get a ‘real’ picture. That was a mistake.
Life is WHIPPING past us, friend, and you need to get the picture now if you want it. Forget if the lighting isn’t exactly right, forget if the house is a little messy, forget it all and get the picture.
His Take:
I love collecting comics. When I was a kid, I had to be in the hospital for a couple of days for something, I don’t remember what and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that one evening, after my family had to go home because visiting hours were over a nice lady came around with a cart full of magazines. They were your standard waiting room stuff, Field & Stream, Good Housekeeping, People, ect. But on the middle shelf of the cart, there was a stack of comic books. She put the stack on the bed so I could look at them, and I picked out an issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. It was an issue where he faced the villain Moonstone.
That launched a lifelong love, sometimes unhealthy, with comics. I say unhealthy and Sue (and the rest of my friends) will back me up on that. During high school, the most full service comic store was in Point. I went up every Friday after school to get comics and usually dragged them with me. You know the post office’s creed of “neither rain nor snow….” well, that was pretty much my motto when it came to getting comics. We drove to Point on a lot of nights that we should NOT have driven anywhere. It sort of became an obsession. In the real world, I wasn’t too popular at school, I was super fat, and I lived pretty far away from all of my friends (this was in the dark days before texting, kids), but when I would open a comic book my whole body would get sucked into the pages and I was right along side GI Joe fighting COBRA, I was web-swinging right next to Spider-man, and I was down in the Batcave with Batman.
Comic book collecting is really 2 different hobbies in one. First, it scratches the entertainment itch. You get to read great stories about your favorite heroes each month, That alone is worth the cover price. When you read a comic, you can think about how the story is going to carry on in the next issue, You can write a letter to the editor of the book, telling him or her what you thought about it. Today, you can reach out across social media to the creative team, and tell them what you thought, heck, you can even get a paper and pencil and create your own next issue of the comic if you want to.
Next, it satisfies the OCD part of your brain. Once your done with comic, you put it in a bag with a board and you can file it away in alpha-numeric order so you know right where it is the next time that you want to revisit the story.
Another reason that collecting comics is great, is because there’s no rules. It’s not like a model where you have to follow the instructions to the letter or it won’t come out right. You can make your collection whatever you want. You can collect any comics that you want, you don’t even have to collect a whole run of a certain title, you can just pick up issues that look interesting to you. The most important thing, as with any hobby, is to do it because you love it. And ever since that lady brought that cart in my hospital room, I have loved it.
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