Change of Direction

this is my second post, and already i've changed my mind. i'm not going to pick one photo from the previous week discuss how it was done. there were too many things floating around in my head for one discussion and it was too hard to write everything down in any way that would be easily understood. so instead, i'm going to try to pick up where others have come up short.

i've seen so many blogs dedicated to helping beginners and amateurs, and while they start off right, after a while they end up with swollen heads, treating beginners and amateurs alike as... well, beginners and amateurs. not ALL blogs are like this... that's not what i'm saying at all. but after seeing some of the 'pros' and veterans, i decided that that's not the kind of photographer i want to be when i grow up.

so i'm going to try to do my part to help you, and ultimately myself, out. i'll be the first to admit that i don't know anything about lecturing, teaching, or guiding anyone through anything, so if you're reading this, keep that in mind. i'll do my best to tell you what i know, why i took a photo a certain way, and most importantly... HOW i did it.

so let's get started...

basically, there are two types of photos... good photos and bad photos. that's a pretty broad statement, but stay with me on this one. as a photographer, your job is to record a single instance of time. that's it. there's nothing else you CAN do. your job as a photographer starts when you set your camera up for a shot and ends when you take that shot. if that's all you're interested in, that's fine, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. photojournalists fall into this group. but there's another side...

in addition to being a science, photography is also an art, and this is where it gets fun. like i said, the photographer captures a slice of time, but it's up to the artist to present that slice of time. and as an artist, it's completely up to you to determine HOW to present that slice of time, and you'll use various tools to pull it off.

so what does this have to do with taking a good photo? that's really up to you. there really aren't any concrete rules that say that one photo is better than another. in other words, show one photo to a group of people and you'll get a set of opinions. show the same photo to another group of people and you'll get a completely different set of opinions. or, show a set of photos to a person, then some time later, show the same set to the same person, and you'll get two different sets of opinion. cool, huh?

so ultimately, what makes a photo good or bad isn't how it was taken or presented, or the idea behind the photo, or who/what is in the photo... what makes a photo good or bad is really up to the person looking at it. in technical terms, photography is subjective; people make up their own minds about what they're looking at.

in my next post, i'll go over some of the different tools every photographer has, regardless of the equipment used. i'll also post some examples where i put some of those tools to use.