fr kenrockwell.com
Photography is a means of expression, just like writing or painting. Because photography is a means of expression, you have to have something to say, or your photos will suck.
Blindly pointing a camera and then expecting to whip it up later in Photoshop always results in crap.
Buying a Nikon D3X, Leica M7 or Canon 1Ds Mk III and expecting it to make sharp photos doesn't happen. Sharp photos come from sharp minds expressing ideas clearly.
You don't need to be able to express whatever you're trying to say in words or any other form, so long as whatever you are trying to express comes out in your photos. Composition is key.
Photography is an art which, like most art forms, happens to use some technology, but photography still has nothing to do with technology. Because some technology is involved, there are always legions of unseeing people who just don't get it. If you're not an artist, it's easy to miss the whole point and spend a lifetime reading books (and websites like this) fretting the tech details and buying too much equipment, instead of learning how to recognize what makes good photos and doing it.
Once you know the basics of how to adjust the camera you already own, no amount of technical knowledge or more equipment is going to make your photos any better.
I know. I was an engineer and the first twenty-three years of my photography sucked for exactly this reason. I could tell you every aspect of lens design, or explain bicubic convolution, sub-pixel processing and JPG quantization matrices 20 years ago, but I still had no idea what made a good photo.
I didn't start making good photos until I started looking at what was in my photos, instead of looking for how sharp they were. You can see everything you need to see in a photo from arm's length, or even as a thumbnail.
I finally learned to pay attention to what I liked or disliked about each photo, and doing more of what made photos I liked, and less or what made photos I didn't.
Photography is nothing but applying your powers of observation. No tech knowledge is needed today; all you need to know technically is if you want your photo darker or lighter (use your Exposure Compensation control) or a different color (use your White Balance control).
You need to recognize what you want and in which way to turn which knob to get you there, but everything else is art: where you are, where you point the camera, and what you're seeing.
Cameras and lenses all do the same thing. Don't even start to worry about lens sharpness until you can make great photos with what you already have. If you can't make great photos with a disposable camera, you can't make great photos until you learn to see.
Worse, if you're still learning (I know I still am), the more complex cameras throw up more adjustments and menus in the way of seeing great photos You'll get worse photos with better gear!
This is always obvious when people send me technically decent, but completely uninspired photos. If they weren't stoked when they took it, and if they don't get off on it being a good photo, no one else will either.
A friend once told me about how sickening it was to judge a photo contest. Numerous entries sucked hard. There was nothing in the photos, yet people thought that if they cranked up the saturation and sharpening in Photoshop enough that maybe the computer would find something interesting in these photos.
Nope. All it does is make these photos hurt our eyes. I get wild colors by pointing cameras at colorful things, and I get sharp photos by looking for hard cross-lighting.
Too many people need to lay off the saturation button and lay hard on their camera's DELETE button. If it sucks, it sucks and it's not getting any better. Try a different angle, a different point of view, different lighting or anything, but try it while you're still out shooting and can do something about it.
Don't shoot like your teacher. It becomes all too obvious who is learning from whom, and who was the teacher and who was the student. Learn how to express yourself from your teachers. Learn the two trivial-to-set but critical-to-making-great-pictures basics of how to set your exposure compensation and white balance, and you're done learning technique. Let your teachers show you to express yourself more strongly, but remember that the key word is to express yourself.
Never try to copy your teacher's, or anyone's photos. Only they do what they do best. No one can be them better than they already are. You can be better at being yourself better than anyone, so follow your own impetus when making your photos. Shoot what you want, how you want it, but make it your own. Never try to do anything to impress anyone other than yourself.
So what makes good photos?
Whatever turns you on. Shoot, look at your work, and keep doing more of what you like. If it's good, you'll see it. If you don't see what you like, try other things until you do. The key is to keep trying different things, not improve on something you dislike.
I found that my favorite work is what I shoot as day turns into night, or back again. I also discovered that even though I shoot everything, the shots I show are almost always shot with my widest lens. Now I'll often go out with just an ultrawide lens, and leave the other junk locked up.
Don't do what you've seen others do. Only do what you want to do. Be yourself; not someone else.
[…]
Losers
Losers give up.
Losers are people who set their standards so stupidly tight that nothing is good enough for them. These are not Leica Men, who always get what they want. Losers are our friends and neighbors who set the wrong criteria for jobs, toys or lovers, and wind up with nothing instead of happiness.
I've heard too many stories of lonely girls staying single way past their expiration dates because they are so picky that they want a boyfriend in only a very narrow range of age, style or income, and too many people who stay unhappily unemployed for too long because they are completely unrealistic about wanting whatever overly bloated salary they used to pull down (all while wasting their boss' time reading the internet at work), or too picky about the hours, location, type of work or whatever.
People stay unhappy when they keep thinking they're going to find perfection.Winners get what they want. Winners set realistic expectations, and are always open to new ideas for things that don't fit in their initial expectations. Winners never give up. Winners adapt and get better. The best jobs I've ever had were those for which I initially wasn't even going to bother to interview, but decided, eh, what the heck, and checked it out!
This applies exactly the same way in photography (I knew you were wondering).
Loser photographers set out with a preconceived notion of what they want to snap. If they find it, which they probably won't, they are happy.
All too often (like every single time), what they want just doesn't happen. They shoot a crappy version of what they thought they wanted, and try to jack it up later in Photoshop.
Winners in photography keep their eyes open. Photography is all about your powers of observation, period.
All my best snaps have been completely unrelated to what I thought I was going to photograph that day. I kept my eyes open, saw something cool, and snapped it. I created the photo because I kept my eyes open to new things, never because I set out to make that photo.
When everyone else is looking for the cliché in one direction, my screwy mind is off looking in some other direction trying to sniff out cool photos.
- Ken Rockwell (www.kenrockwell.com)
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