Subject

It is fascinating to me how frequently people confuse the subject with the picture. Even a pretty competent amateur photographer will look at two completely different pictures of similar objects, and will declare them to be much the same. The lighting, the point of view, the rendering might be totally different, but the inexperienced eye will see the pictures as "pretty much the same".

This isn't that harmful, I suppose, except when the idea is totally different as well which it often is when the renderings are different. If you are declaring two pictures with quite different ideas to be the same, then you are manifestly missing the ideas entirely. And that's a shame.

Should you find yourself in this boat, or rather should you suspect yourself of perhaps being in this boat, make a list of the differences between two pictures. Focus not on what is the same, but what is different. Light, point of view, framing, depth of field, contrast, blacks, highlights, midtones. How are all these things, and anything else you can see, treated differently?

What sorts of emotions, feelings, ideas, are invoked by the differences, especially in contrast to one another?

How might this affect how you feel about the total picture, in each case?

Here's a sample to start with. I've made some.. modifications to Weston's Pepper #30. See if you can see what they are, and how they change the way you feel about the picture. Some are obvious and ham fisted, and at least one is moderately subtle but, I think, important.

Much better examples exist.

Making the Pictures I Want

This is a followup to the previous, a little discussion of my personal journey, which might shed a little light on what I mean in the previous essay. I'm linking, in here, to quite a few pictures I have shot. Enjoy. Or not.
I've been mucking around with cameras for.. a while. I literally cannot remember when exposure was a puzzlement, it would have been 30 years ago or so, and I suppose I had to struggle with it a bit, but I have no memory of that. The technicalities of making a properly exposed and in-focus picture hold no mysteries for me. I flatter myself that I have long been able to take a decent picture of a thing. A picturesque picture of a shack or a mountain, a moderately flattering picture of a girl, and so on.

About three years ago I embarked on one of those stupid P52 things. I tried to take a decent picture every week for a year, and mostly succeeded. The result was an incoherent mass of mostly decent pictures. I learned a few things, started to get more serious about using flash, and discovered a couple of "looks" I sort of liked.

Somewhere in there I started shooting nudes, experimenting with outré lighting idioms and so on. I learned a few more things about looks that I liked. Those pictures are extremely private. Sorry.

The year following my interesting but uninspiring P52 project I made several abortive attempts at portfolios. I was beginning to understand that the portfolio is really what I wanted to be aiming at. I started shooting people walking dogs, which I think is definitely a good subject. I discovered that I am not, or at any rate was not, the artist to make much of anything of that subject. There was, and still are, occasional feints at street photography. I'm also not Henri Cartier-Bresson, it turns out. None of these subject/method based ideas really seemed to go anywhere. I was not satisfied by the work, I did not feel that it was going anywhere. It seemed banal and uninteresting after a handful of moderately successful pictures.

I don't think that, I can see no reason why, a subject based idea isn't good. I just haven't been able to make one work yet to my satisfaction. I did recently shoot a subject-based mini-portfolio which pleases me moderately well, but this is mainly because I approve of the content so much. The pictures are OK, but the meaning is something that matters to me.

What has worked best for me started with a single visual effect. I ran across a description of how to digitally simulate an enlarger diffusion effect. This effectively "flares" the darker areas into the lighter ones, to a variable degree. It's absolutely dead sexy when applied to nudes, especially female nudes. Holy cow. Yum. Probably at random I applied it to a picture of a flower. Boy oh boy did I like that effect.

At this point I started to shoot flowers in the way I had been shooting nudes. Mostly quite dark. A lot of snoots, a lot of lighting from underneath or behind. Always, enlarger diffusion to taste. A little later, I started to apply the inverse of enlarger diffusion to high-key pictures, and finally I started to airbrush all over everything in a late pictorialist fashion, although possibly with a lighter touch. I shot a lot of these things, and wound up with a coherent portfolio of 27 pictures that I quite like. I am satisfied with them.

What worked for me, here, was to start with a single visual motif: the flower, shot like a fine art nude on black. I inverted the ideas, I modified them, I extended the theme out from there in coherent and sensible ways. With some fits and starts, Quite a lot of things didn't work, but some things did. The result is a coherent set of visual motifs, applied to a common subject. The result is a little portfolio of work that "means" something for me, that satisfies me in a way that previous work has not.

Notice that this portfolio was built with a bunch of stuff I had picked up over the previous years: use of flash, outré lighting idioms, general styling from nudes, enlarger diffusion. It is very reasonable to view this satisfying work as the direct result of a bunch of less satisfying labor. It is reasonable to view this as a successful effort which occurred in the natural process of trying ideas out, and building visual vocabulary, in a series of fits and starts which eventually found a path through to some satisfying place after failing for several years of concerted effort.

As of this writing, I am continuing to pursue these ideas. Can these visual motifs be applied and extended to other subjects, in a similarly coherent way? Can I make something else look like my flowers? Obviously I could shoot some nudes in this style, and that might make a good addition to the portfolio. There might be something to be said about the relationship between flowers and nudes, perhaps. Perhaps there are other subjects out there that are less obvious, but which would extend the body of work further, but in a coherent and structured way.

The point of the process I sketch here and in the previous essay is not that it always works, or that it works easily or quickly. The point is simply that this is the only process that I have been able to discover that works at all.

Making the Pictures You Want

Here is a common theme, a common refrain, a common complaint: How can I make pictures that I like? Everything I shoot is banal, or stupid, or a copy of something else. Nothing I shoot satisfies me, it all sucks, is sterile, is empty. What can I do?

For the purposes of this essay, the word meaning will be used in a pretty specific way. Meaning is simply the overall emotional and intellectual experience of a piece of art. It's everything that's not technical. It doesn't have to be expressible as a neat paragraph of text "this picture expresses man's inhumanity to man" nor need it be renderable in words at all. Sometimes it's just emotion, sometimes it is words, sometimes it's a lesson. It can be anything, really, outside of the technical details of the work. It's what I, as a viewer, experience when I look at the piece, whatever that reaction is.

Of course, this essay is ultimately about my process. It works for me, after a fashion, laboriously and slowly.

For our purposes, we will simplify the lament of the frustrated photographer to be: How can I make pictures with meaning, meaning that satisfies me. There might be a side order of dissatisfaction with visual ideas, or with design ideas. We will assume that there are basically no technical issues, however. This isn't about how to focus your camera.

There is here a pretty strong parallel with music, especially classical music. Lots of people are happy just being able to play music as notated. I certainly would be delighted to be able to play more than simple pieces, as notated. However, the problem of playing the notation is essentially pretty simple. You just take the time, you learn how to do it. It is somewhat analogous to learning how to use a camera, although quite a bit more difficult. The person who aspires to play christmas carols as notated is perhaps roughly equivalent to the person who wants to take nice pictures of her children, or wants to make passable imitations of Ansel Adams photographs.

Most of what music school is about, though, is not about playing the piece as notated. It is about how to interpret the piece in a meaningful way, within the notation given. It turns out that even a tightly notated piece of music allows a remarkably wide range of interpretation. Melodic lines can be brought forward or suppressed. Small crescendos and diminuendos can be inserted (indeed, must be, to avoid a ridiculously flat and tedious reading) at will. Timing can be altered subtly, within passages, and overall. The notes within a single chord, or a progression of them can be weighted subtly differently, for various purposes.

The problems to be solved here are: How can I play this music so that it sounds like me, how can I play this music in a way that pleases me, and how can I play this music to express my concept of how the piece should feel, should be experienced, what the piece should "mean" in the sense given above.

This is essentially the same problem that the stymied photographer faces, but I am not aware of any dedicated institution of learning devoted to teaching you how to solve the photographic analog of these problems. Music conservatories, on the other hand, are almost completely devoted to this.

There are really two major starting points.

In the first, you have a pretty clear idea of something you want to express, the problem is how to express it. You want to express, say, how the dot-com technologists are ruining the San Francisco Bay Area, or you want to express the way you feel when you look at Half Dome. This is essentially a pre-visualization problem, and I have written my thoughts about that at some length here, and in a couple of follow-on essays.

The second potential starting point is that you have no idea of what it is you want to express, you wish only to express something. You find your pictures banal, uninteresting, devoid of meaning, and you want to fix that. In this case, I employ this rough analogy: the world, the stuff in front of the camera, is a score. You're seeking to find an interpretation of it with meaning, which satisfies. This isn't the same as Adams' tired saw about the negative being the score and the print the performance, although there are similarities.

The general procedure is something like this, more or less by necessity. Pursue what ideas you have. Do you like a certain subject? Do you like a certain visual effect in your editing software, or at the enlarger? What ideas appeal to you, be they visual ideas, ideas about content, ideas about where you like to visit, anything? Pursue those. This part is obvious, since there really isn't anything else to do, is there? This is what you've got, so go work it. Push it quite far, keep pounding on these individual ideas, no matter how small or superficial. Your goal is ultimately to force, to nurture, to induce, meaning to emerge.

Keep an eye on the bigger picture. Is something bigger, something more satisfying, starting to coalesce? If so, keep going. If not, or if something that felt like it was coming together no longer feels as if it is, back up. Pursue some other idea, possibly just the opposite of what you were doing. Change something, anything.

This is by analogy to working an interpretation of a piece of music. You may simply like a certain melody fragment, you bring it out, articulate it clearly for a few passages. It sounds great. So you carry on through the whole sonata, bringing that melodic fragment to the fore every time it appears in the score. At some point you find that it's not working out, now the sonata sucks and is boring. Back off, try something else. Maybe the sonata is about the interplay of the fragment you like, and some other fragment that you don't like. Maybe that first passage is great, but the next passage needs to bring out a different motive -- but articulated in the same way. Maybe the key here isn't the fragment, but they way you've brought it out, articulated it.

In the same way, fiddle with the ideas you have, nurture them and invert them by turns. See what other ideas they spin off, until you have a whole set of ideas writhing about trying to assemble themselves into a plan, a structure, a bigger idea. Periodically ask yourself if there is something bigger trying to reveal itself.

Perhaps your ideas are all visual motifs, so you now have a collection of inter-related visual motifs. Is there a larger idea, a larger meaning, that could be carried by this family of visual ideas? As some point, with some luck, you'll have an inspiration of sorts. You will realize that these visual ideas, these design motifs, together with the subjects you've been shooting, are doing a little bit of a decent job of expressing something about God, or Beauty, or Sex, or Nature, or whatever. There's no reason you need to even be able to put words to the larger thing, just that you can feel its presence. Now you have a larger theme that you can pursue, and a set of tools you can use to pursue it.

What other subjects that you had not considered, could you apply these visual motifs to, to more fully express the larger thing? Or, if contrariwise the subjects have been carrying the water, what other visual motifs could you apply to the same subjects, again to more fully express the larger thing?

In this way, meaning can be teased gently out of some smaller beginnings, and can emerge into a portfolio with some weight. More importantly, it can emerge into a portfolio that you like, that satisfies.

If you just wanted a single picture that you like, a single picture that satisfies you, now go back to the portfolio and find the picture that best expresses the thing you like. If you can't find a single such picture, well, you just spent days or weeks or months or years making a portfolio of work. You should have the tools and ideas necessary to go and make that single picture that says what you have found you want to say.

Go make that picture.

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.

Experience

One of the most common themes in the pedagogy of photography is that it simply takes time and experience to learn to take pictures. The single most common theme, of course, is "take my workshop" so this is probably the second most common theme. We see Cartier-Bresson quoted ad nauseum to the effect that your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. We see blog posts chattering away about how there is no royal road to great pictures, and so forth. I've even written some of them. Implicit in all of these is that you can expect to be terrible for years and years and years, but keep at it, and you'll eventually become good.

Unpacking that a little, we find the planted axiom that very little about photography is teachable. You simply have to go work it all out on your own, except for a few technical things here and there which are themselves quite difficult to master.

There is, of course, a germ of truth hiding in here someplace, but most of it is complete rot.

You can learn calculus of one variable in two semesters, while taking other courses at the same time. You can learn to speak a language passably in two years, if you apply yourself. Mastering the camera is, relatively, trivial.

You can learn the details of exposure and which controls do what with about 50 well designed exposures in a decently designed program of education. It might take you an afternoon to fully grasp how your camera works, and what shutter speed, aperture, and ISO do. It will, of course, take some more time to internalize these things.

You can surely learn the basics of composition, at least enough to have a working grasp of some useful ideas, in a couple of weeks and a couple hundred more well managed exposures. I have written a handy little book based on this idea. There's an endless supply of material to learn about composition, both general ideas, as well as the specifics of certain idioms. Still, a basic toolkit of composition is short and easy to master. Again, of course, the problem of internalizing it rears its head. As an aside: here, specifically, we have a problem with masses of misinformation out there, which can really confuse the newcomer and slow forward progress.

You can learn the basics of photographic lighting in a couple of afternoons, if that sort of thing interests you. Again, there are endless permutations and idioms to learn, but a basic toolkit is compact and easy to grasp. The same issues of internalizing it apply, of course.

In short, the material you need to know to take a pretty good picture pretty consistently is maybe a month or two of work. You're not a great artist at this point, but you can take a reasonable picture much of them time, and you can recognize good ones most of the time and even explain why they're good. In fact, anyone can recognize the good ones, that's sort of the point of "good" after all, so what's important is the ability to explain why they're good.

Of course all this assumes that you're in the hands of someone who's good at teaching, and who isn't invested in the ideas that this material is years and years of labor, that it's very hard, and that you have to figure it all out yourself. It might reasonably take you more than a month or two to figure things out, but I think it is reasonable to say that if you have been applying yourself at least a little for a year, and still cannot take a properly exposed picture with the focus in the right place and which is pleasing to the eye, except by accident, something in the pedagogical process has gone horribly wrong.

The germ of truth, and what Cartier-Bresson was surely talking about, is that having mastered these technical issues you are now faced with the problem of internalizing this material, letting it become second nature to you, and of simultaneously finding your own vision and voice. These things go hand in hand. You need to discover what you like to look at, what you like to make, how to make that stuff, and how to make it without laboriously thinking through what aperture does to a picture.

This is not merely a years long process, this is a journey without end. It is arguably a lot of time to get from simply making copies of things you've seen to making things that look like your pictures. Some people get there remarkably fast, others never get there.

Still, this is the fun part. You're done with the "education" when you can take a nice picture with the exposure and focus and focal length that you want. Now you're discovering your art. Now you're "working" and not "learning" in some reasonable sense.

Composition, Then and Now

As I continue to read older texts on composition and painting, I am struck by just how completely different they are from modern books on photography. It occurs to me that what is lacking in the modern photography book's discussion of composition is systematization.

A modern reference on photography will happily give you a system for exposure (e.g. Expose To The Right) with a very thorough set of instructions. It's a complete system, based on a model of how digital sensors work. You start from some ideas about How Things Work, and some ideas about what kinds of results you want (e.g. As much tonal range as possible, with as little noise as possible) and then you build a set of procedures that will produce that result. It's pretty straightforward.

Composition enjoys no such system, in the modern world of photography. You get instead, a disconnected and self-contradictory set of tips and tricks. You get endless rules for where to stick the subject which, when taken all together, mean to not stick the subject in the middle. You get a jumble of material on leading the eye, with some vague hints about where you might lead the eye. There is sometimes some dubious material about How Things Work in the form of some generally bogus discussion of how our brains or eyes work, which may or may not eventually be connected to a tip or a trick. Usually something about leading lines, or something silly, akin to "how purple triangles make us feel cold."

Older texts do give a complete system of composition, based on a model. They generally start out with a pretty thorough, albeit dated, discussion of aesthetics, what is beautiful, what is sublime, and so on. They proceed from there to break these down into more specific bits and pieces that might work together to produce, for instance, beauty. They work through a large number of what we might call worked examples -- well known paintings, generally. The whole produces a method, or a set of interacting methods, which produce pleasing compositions. The trouble, from the perspective of the amateur photographer, is that at some point in these systems taste comes in to play. You cannot simply look at some numbers and charts, turn the dial until the needle touches the widget and press the shutter button. You have to have taste, and you have to use it. Which means that you have to have developed taste. Which means that some people simply aren't ever going to be as good at it as other people. Which means you cannot guarantee that you will become excellent at it simply by practicing.

Composition isn't HDR, or focus stacking, or macro photography, or star trails, or a collection of photoshop skills. It isn't exposure. It isn't any of these technical skills which can simply be taught to, and fully mastered by, anyone with enough will, enough time, and a minimum of intellectual horsepower.

There is no royal road to compositional skill. You've got to slug it out with other people's pictures, and there's no denying that you might never be terribly good at it. Almost anyone can become passably good at it, though. We can't all be concert pianists, but almost anyone can learn to play passably.

Andrew's Composition Course

Go get a free edition of Henry Peach Robinson's Pictorial effect in photography from Google Books.

Now google up a web site or two of great paintings. Many museums have a web site with a searchable collection. You don't need great reproductions of paintings, but you want decent ones. Poke around a bit until you can definitely find a bunch of pictures that you pretty much like, from anywhere between the 1400s to the 1800s. Sure, that's not all the paintings in the world, but they're the ones that will make sense in this context.

Skim over the little section of background I provide below.

Start reading Robinson. When he mentions a painting, use google to find a copy of it to look at before you read on, and take a look at the picture.

Keep reading until the end.

What you read will be somewhat dated, not everything should be taken as gospel truth. Robinson had some ideas about photography that are pretty old fashioned, and other ideas that are so modern that they are only now being viewed as acceptable (again).

When you get to the end, which should take a handful of hours, you will have learned more about composition than a 100 years spent on crummy web sites with their rotten Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratios, and their terrible terrible sample pictures.

Background:

Robinson was writing in the nineteenth century, when film did not exist. Emulsions were coated on to glass plates, instead. Exposure times were long, measured in many seconds, so moving subjects was a big no-no. People had to hold still. For portraits, a head-rest was used, to assist the subject in not moving.

Emulsions were also orthochromatic, which means that it was more or less impossible to take a photograph that included a decent rendering of clouds and landscape at the same time. The sky was normally white in a landscape photograph, without compositing together multiple images.

The long exposure times meant that shutters as we know them did not exist. One simply removed the lens cap, counted for a bit, and then put the lens cap back on.

Chiaroscuro means, basically, the arrangement of light and shadow in a picture.

On Rules of Composition

Let me begin by distinguishing between "rules of composition" and "principles and techniques of composition" in what is perhaps a bit of an arbitrary way. By a rule I mean something like the rule of thirds, or the golden spiral. Something that tells you specifically how to arrange things in the frame. A principle or technique might be to "use leading lines" or "lead the eye to the subject" or "balance visual masses within the frame". A rule tells you where to put things in the frame, a principle tells you how people look at pictures. There's probably overlap. Such is life.

Poking around various web sites for these "rules" is always an exercise in hilarity. You'll find examples of "rule of thirds" with lines carefully drawn through the subject, and nowhere near a one-third line, you'll find ludicrously squashed golden spirals. You'll find golden triangles proudly drawn on top of examples images that bear no graphical relation to the drawn figure whatsoever.

Why do I care about rules of composition, today? I'm interested in whether "good photographs" tend to use these things or not. I'm also interested in, when we examine a "good photograph" for rule compliance, to what extent are we doing ex post facto fitting of patterns to reality, and to what extent the photograph actually deployed some rule or another.

There are two ways to approach this, or perhaps two ends to a spectrum of ways. One can say that in order to be judged "compliant with a rule" the main subject and other elements must be exactly placed according to the rule. One can also allow a moderate degree of latitude, and say that the main subject and other elements must only be placed approximately in the right places to be deemed "following such and such a rule".

One gets in to trouble in both directions.

Rules of composition tend to be very crop-sensitive. If you change the crop, the designated locations for subjects and so on move around, sometimes quite dramatically. Surely a great photograph remains great if you shave off 10% on one edge or another? Or at any rate many of them do. If you demand extreme precision in placements, you will find almost no good photographs that follow the rule -- although you will certainly find many postcards and calendars that have the bear's nose, or the boat, or the top of the waterfall slavishly placed exactly on the intersection of two 1/3 lines. These photographs would in general be improved by any crop at all, the more complete the better.

If you permit rough compliance, then many more good pictures will be found to be in compliance with some rule or another. If you have enough rules, you can find one for any occasion. This image:



Shows the subject placements in a 4:3 crop permitted for Golden Triangle, Golden Spiral, and Rule Of Thirds, if we permit a 5% deviation in any direction, which isn't really all that loose. It's not quite "stick the subject anywhere but in the middle and on the edge" but it's inching firmly in that direction. The Golden Spiral doesn't even apply, really, to any crop except the Golden Rectangle, which nobody uses, anyways. You can, of course, apply your rules of placement to a rectangle within the frame, not to the full crop, but at this point all bets are off. Now you have an more or less arbitrary rectangle in the frame, with presumably some slop to it, and then you're putting things inside that rectangle with their own fudge factors.

Why not just say "stick the things that matter in the frame, not at the edges and not in the center, unless there's a good reason for it"? Why not talk about balance of visual masses, eye leading, and so on?

It is absolutely the case that every rule of composition can produce a pleasing balance of forms within the frame. To codify these things as rules, however, is to place the cart well before the horse. We might as well say that to produce an appealing cheese, you should wrap whatever it is you have handy, some milk solids, old clothes, a dead cat, perhaps some mud or a set of house keys to a house you no longer own, in a layer of suitable wax and place the result it in a cave for a few months.

This is, after all, how many excellent cheeses are made. So it works, some of the time.

Stop Making Tests

Something I find myself doing too much of is: testing. I'm not making a real picture, I'm just experimenting with an idea, I'm testing out a new technique, I'm making a test shot of a potentially interesting subject. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

If you're doing this too, here's my advice to you:

Knock it off.
Take pictures like they're the last ones you'll ever make, like this is your sole legacy. Take pictures like you're going to be killed if they're not good enough. At least make a picture like you're going to frame it and try to sell it. Stop making tests.

At least for a while. You gotta learn, too, but you gotta do something with what you've learned.

Rule of Thirds Redux

I have talked before about the rule of thirds. In summary, there are two of them:

• The photographer's rule says: place important objects at 1/3 lines, ideally where two of them intersect.
• Everyone else's says: divide the image up into regions on 1/3 lines and place things within the regions.

In order to underline this, I have selected at random some iconic photographs. Which, of course means, not random at all. These are simply the first few that occurred to me, so who really knows what my subconscious dredged up. Anyways. These all have a helpful grid of 1/3 lines placed on them, just as all those terrible "pep up your snaps" web pages have to show you where to stick the boat, or the flower, or the little girl's eyes, to make the photograph look awesome and professional.

Let's see what actual professionals, producing actual superb images do. You may not recognize all of these, but each of these images has been hung in museums, most of them (if not all) multiple times:

How often are things of importance placed on 1/3 lines? How often are things of important placed at the intersections of 1/3 lines? How often is the image divided into thirds vertically, with important things placed within the three resulting horizontal bands? How often is the image divided into thirds horizontally, with important things placed within the three resulting vertical bands?

Think up some other photographs which are iconic enough that you remember them. Use google to find a copy, and place your own grid of thirds on it.

Don't listen to those idiots with their idiotic canned advice about composition. Go look at some good photographs instead.

You Gotta Know The Rules To Break 'Em

You have to know the rules to break them. I've addressed this bit of conventional wisdom before, but my thoughts have been refined on this point.

You do not, strictly speaking, have to know the rules first. What you need are two things: a grasp on the problems that are solved by the rule, and another solution to those problems.

The rule of thirds is truly about placing things off center, to create a livelier visual result. Various rules about portraiture are, mostly, about creating a flattering look, avoiding making the subject's nose look too big, and so forth. Perhaps your approach to portraiture plunges the nose into darkness, so it's OK if it's too big. We focus on the eyes, perhaps, because as animals we're most interested in the eyes of other animals. By creating or observing an equally interesting element, we might focus on that element instead of the eyes -- the main thing here is to not focus on something random and uninteresting. And so on.

Knowing the rule, therefore, is perhaps nice, but knowing what problem the rules solves is essential. You might well grasp the problem without knowing the rule in the first place.

Solve the problem, don't worry about the rule.

The Histogram

Another favorite tool of the Internet Expert is the histogram. They like to show you the histogram of your photograph and point out features of it to explain to you why your photograph sucks.

Ignore these people.

In fact, ignore the histogram, for the most part. It can be a useful learning tool, but it's really not showing you anything that is not blindingly obvious in the image, so learn to see the image instead. By all means, compare with the histogram a few times, until you can pretty much visualize what it will look like for any image. This should take a very short time.

The only other time the histogram could be useful if for checking your images as you shoot. The histogram just tells you what your photograph looks like, after all, but sometimes it's pretty hard to tell what your photograph looks like when you're peering at the back of your digital camera. So, consider looking at the histogram instead when it's hard to see the image.

Anyone who tells you that the histogram has to start at the bottom and go all the way to the top is a twit. In the first place, they're gabbling away in technical terms about something that's extremely obvious visually -- a full range of tones, from blacks to whites. Presumably they're being technical to make themselves sound smart, or because having finally understood the histogram they think it is important. In the second place, it is simply not the case that every image needs black blacks and white whites. The tonal range has a profound effect on the mood of the image, and sometimes you want one of the other ones.

Of course you should think about the tonal range of your photograph, and what the emotional impact of it is. Adjust to taste. There is no "right answer" here.

Correct White Balance

Another in my ongoing quest to stomp on conventional wisdom where it is wrong.

A canard one sees from time to time online and, I suppose, in camera clubs and other places where the amateur with a little knowledge congregates, is the idea of "correct" white balance. This generally means that white objects are rendered as white on the screen or print. This is a classic case of a technical detail that is easy to understand and, in this age of digital, easy to adjust. The amateur with a little knowledge loves these things, they are handy stand-ins for actual knowledge and understanding, like shutter speeds, EVs, and so on. Since they can see it and you cannot, they get to feel superior and correct you. They can easily edit a copy of your picture, and show you. It's one click in most photo editors.

White whites are not, however, "accurate" white balance. The normal reason white objects fail to render as white is because the light falling on them is colored. A white shirt in shade will be a bit blue. The same white shirt under incandescent lights will be a little yellowy orangeish. The camera sees and faithfully records this. The white balance settings in the camera will try to make some effort to work out the color of the ambient light and make white things look whiter, but this is a somewhat haphazard affair. White whites are not always even pleasing, or flattering, white balance. Getting the whites white is, at best, a reasonable starting point and at worst a purely arbitrary measurement that weenies can use to feel smart.

Our eyes and the massive amount of brain we devote to seeing don't really care. We see white objects as white, almost no matter what the ambient lighting is. We mentally subtract the blueish tones of shade, and the yellowy tones of incandescent light. We do this when we're looking at photographs as well, which is why the angry yammering about "incorrect white balance!" is so confusing the new neophyte. We literally have to train ourselves to see white balance in photographs.

In reality, white balance is simply an effect. It can no more be correct than contrast, saturation, or any of a number of other effects we can apply to an image. It can certainly be ugly, it can fail to support the image, it can be visually confusing. It certainly affects the way we feel when we see a photograph. Like contrast and saturation, when a set of images are presented as a collection of related frames, we should try to make the white balance more or less match image to image, to help support the coherency of the set as a set. We can make the white balance more blue or more yellow, to subtly alter the way the viewer feels when the view the image.

A photograph obviously taken in shade, with the white balance adjusted to render white things a pure white arguably looks a little off. Our visual cortex sees the shade and tries to subtract the blue, and then things are just all wrong. We expect a slight blue tone to the whites, and miss it when it is gone.

When someone tells you your white balance is incorrect, by all means take a look. If all the people look orange, they might have a point. Your white balance isn't wrong, but it is ugly. If, having taken the time to examine the colors, they are where you want them, the correct response is "go pound sand, weenie."

But I don't want to be Ansel Adams

Maybe it's just my perception, but I see a lot of people starting out in photography (some of them have been starting out for years) who don't want to do the work to become better. They don't want to be Ansel Adams, they just want to be pretty good. They want to become better photographers. Surely they don't have to do the work, right? Surely one can just practice a bit, talk to some people online and read a couple web sites. I don't want to be Ansel Adams, after all!

The trouble with this attitude is that it's wrong. You don't see people saying that they don't want to be Robert Oppenheimer, they just want to be pretty good quantum physicists, so surely they can just make some stuff up about particles. You don't just creatively invent your way into being a pretty good amateur plumber, you at least read a book. People actually do think they can write their way into being a novelist, but they're completely wrong almost 100% of the time -- you read your way into being a novelist.

The only difference between being a decent amateur photographer and being a really good photographer is that you don't do the work as hard or as thoroughly. You still need to do the work. Read some stuff about composition, look at a bunch of photographs. Look at a lot of photographs, and think about them. Read more things about photography and photographers and art. You have to do the work. You just don't have to do it full time.

If you're having fun just going out and shooting, like everyone online tells you to, great. You're not really going to get any better, but you'll have a good time, I bet.

Learning to See III

I've spent some time telling people to look at photographs. This is still good advice. A novelist might read 1000 novels for every one written, a poet might read a 1000 poems. A plumber looks a lot of plumbing before installing a system. A naval architect in training is admonished to go to the boat show and look at a lot of boats, years before the first finished design comes off the board.

Now I am suggesting that you look at the world, but with a photographic eye. Leave the camera at home, it'll get in the way as you fuss with dials and buttons and timing. Just look at the world, and think about what would make a good photograph. The aim here is to get past the that's a cool thing or ooo I want to capture that and proceed to that would make a good photograph.

Throw imaginary frames around things, or hold up your hands and make a rectangle with your fingers so everyone knows you're an Artist. Most cool things stop being cool when you put them down in a two dimensional rectangle, it turns out.

Think about the objects that you see and their relationship to one another. Do they appear larger or smaller? Does one obscure the other? Are there contrasting textures, or repeated shapes? What is the balance like in your imaginary frame? How would all this change if you were lower down or higher up? How would it change if you moved left, right, or all the way around to the back?

Look at people. Watch the human interactions, look at the body language. What are they looking at? Are there instants in these human interactions that are interesting, versus other instants that are not? When she buys a cup of coffee, what is the instant in the transaction that most perfectly clarifies expresses the moment?

Kill The Rule of Thirds

This thing, frequently cited in amateur circles, seems to not even be a rule at all, in any sense of the word. Go look at some actual photographs, commercial stuff that people have sold or "important art" or any category you like that counts as successful photography.

You will, most likely, find all kinds of stuff neatly centered. If you closely examine the 1/3 lines of the frame you will of course find something there. Is it the important something? Sometimes, more or less at random, yes. Usually not. Frequently it is a boundary between one thing and another, see below for more on this important case. Sometimes it's clearly just random stuff. Sometimes, to be sure, it is strongly the subject. More or less at random, the subject will fall pretty close to one or two of the 1/3 lines.

This horrible bit of anti-pedagogy should be stated more as the Not in the Center principle and should not be stated as a rule. Putting things in the center makes them look one way, and putting them not in the center makes them look another way. It is no more a rule than black-and-white is a rule. Both centering and black-and-white are effects which you can deploy, or not, as the case demands.

Photographers seem to think this rule of thirds comes from graphic design, so let's go look around and see if that's true. We run across amusing things like this advice: divide the page into thirds horizontally, vertically, or both. Now place important elements either within the zones defined by these lines, or in the case of a photograph, you might also place them on intersections of those lines. Let's think this over. So either within the zones.. or.. on borders between the zones. So. You're saying that I can place important elements anywhere at all, correct?

The painters, and later the graphic designers, created regions, and then placed things within the regions. Photographers are urged by the "pep up your snaps" people to place things on the boundaries between the regions, that is to say, in exactly the place where the painters and graphic designers teach not to.

There's something from graphic design here. Thirds are in fact a sort of pleasing way to chunk up a design, or a page. Graphic designs are not the same as photographs, and photographs are not, primarily, graphic designs (yes, there's some overlap, indulge me here). Photographs, in particular, have a subject and graphic designs do not. The graphic design principle is in fact not to place things at intersections of the third lines at all, but to organize the page around thirds. The one-third lines are boundaries between things, in design.

Applying graphic design ideas to the problem of where to put the subject is silly, and it's simply wrong. We might as well try to apply ideas about depth of field to graphic design.

Learning to See II

This could be considered a followup to this post.

A surprising number of new photographers seem to be unable to see things like contrast or saturation. They seem to be able to tell when their image isn't very good, and they certainly like it when someone increases the saturation or whatever, but they don't seem to see what's missing, in any particular detail.

I do, generally, and I dare say you do as well. Still, here's a handy little test chart of the sort (right down to the somewhat crummy photograph used as a basis!) that appears in every How To Take Pictures Book ever. Do you see what's going on in each row? You can, I assume, see that the three images in each row differ. If you can't see how they differ, look more. It'll be educational!

This image is now public domain. I made it, I say it is so. No rights reserved.

Kill The Exposure Triangle

I love this stupid graphic. Every stupid web site that wants to teach you how to use your digital camera (oh, and by the way, monetize your eyeballs by showing you a ton of ads) has this pig on it someplace.

Take a minute to think about what it actually manages to capture and convey. It definitely covers the idea that Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO are all interconnected. Possibly it even conveys the idea that changing one means you have to change one (or is it both?) of the others.

Work through it a little. We see Shutter Speed at one corner. Say that you cut your shutter speed in half. What does that mean? Does it mean that angle at the corner should be cut in half? And what on earth does that even mean for the other parameters? Does the ISO have something to do with the angle at the corner (which is always 60 degrees in the pictures anyways) or is it the length of something? Maybe it's the length of the opposite side! Awesome! So I've doubled the ISO, that must mean I double the length of the opposite side (why don't they label the sides instead of the corners?) so that means I guess I should do something with the other sides of the triangles. Should I double them too, to keep the triangle equilateral?

Ok, great! This is working! I double the ISO, the shutter speed, and the aperture all at once! What? No.

It's just chartjunk, and proof that all these stupid web sites that want to "teach" you are just stealing ideas from one another, regardless of whether they make any sense whatsoever.

Kill the Exposure Triangle.

The Light Pile/Bucket Theory

To support my assertion that the technical stuff is trivial, I introduce the light pile theory.

A picture is made up, more or less, of little dots. On every dot, there is a little pile of light. The bigger the pile, the brighter the dot. Itty-bitty-tiny pile, the dot is pretty much black. Big tall pile, white. If the light piled up is mostly green, green dot.

Exposing a photograph just means letting light in to pile up for a while. Make the hole light passes through bigger, more light piles up on each dot -- this is the aperture. The word aperture even means hole. Let the light pass through for a longer period of time, you get bigger piles again. This is shutter speed.

It's just like filling a bucket. If you use a bigger hose, you fill for less time. If you fill for less time, you need a bigger hose. If you want to stand around filling for a long time, use a smaller hose.

That's all there is to exposure.

If one pile of light is twice as big as another, we say the first one is "one stop" brighter. If you leave the shutter open twice as long, twice as much light piles up. That's one stop. Or, if you leave the shutter alone, but make the hole twice as big (1.4x as wide -- that's geometry), twice as much light piles up. That's one stop as well.

Ok, there's one more thing about exposure: ISO, which is just how big of a pile makes "white". The higher the ISO, the smaller the pile you need to make "white". Make the ISO twice as big, you only need a pile half as big to make white. You can also think of it has how big your bucket is.

So you wanna fill a bucket up. You can use a big fat hose for a really short period of time, or you can use a medium hose for a medium amount of time, or a really skinny hose for a long time. (wide open aperture, fast shutter speed; medium aperture and shutter speed; closed down aperture, slow shutter speed). Or you can use a bigger or smaller bucket (ISO).

Your camera probably tries to get all the buckets, on average, filled up halfway. That way some buckets are full, some are empty, and most of them are in the middle. So your picture has some black parts, some white parts, but mostly it has parts that are between the two. If it's nighttime, the camera doesn't know that, but you probably want you picture to look dark, like nighttime. That means your light piles all need to be smaller, you want to fill the buckets up less. How do you fill the buckets up less? Smaller hose (aperture), or fill for less time (faster shutter speed), or use bigger buckets (lower ISO). Similarly if your scene is supposed to be bright and light (maybe you're photographing a bride's dress, here in the USA where they are white): Bigger hose, slower shutter speed, smaller buckets.

There's a few subtle details here and there but you really don't need to know one single damn thing more about the technical nonsense of photography, even if you're going for a pretty fine level of control. You probably don't need to know this much. Most of the people going on about technology and urging you you to learn about this and that probably don't know as much as this.

It's just making little piles of light, or filling little buckets with light. It works the same as water, except the names are all different.

P.S. Wider apertures (bigger holes, bigger hoses) use smaller numbers. 2.8 is bigger than 4.0 is bigger than 11. Go figure.

Eschew EXIF

There are forums out there on the internet where people spend far too much time looking at EXIF data for photographs, and not enough time looking at the photographs. I've even seen cases where people got irate because a photograph lacked EXIF data. Apparently, some people need to know what shutter speed was used for your photograph, before they can tell you what's wrong with it.

In the first place, don't listen to these people. They have nothing to say.

In the second place, don't be one of those people.

EXIF data, histograms, all that technical ancillary data, it tells you nothing that matters which cannot be seen in the photograph. Look at the photograph. EXIF and so on can be used to test yourself, to help you learn and judge whether you're seeing correctly, but it's never authoritative.

If you can't tell roughly what focal length was used to shoot a photograph (relative focal length, the number of millimeters doesn't matter and depends on a bunch of factors -- all I mean is "super wide", "wide", "normal", "long", "super long") then one of two things is true:

• it doesn't matter to the photograph
• you can't see very well

There are plenty of photographs where the focal length doesn't matter, because the scene is pretty much two dimensional. In that case, who cares what focal length was used? Anything will do. If it does matter, and you still can't tell, learn to see better. Practice. This is where looking at EXIF can help you. Just don't talk about it, do it quietly.

Aperture? Can't you tell by looking? Either it doesn't matter, or you can't see. Shutter speed? Ditto. Exposure? Contrast range? Don't you be looking at the histogram! Not until you've made an honest guess, at least.

Lighting? Don't go asking about what lights went where. Look at the photo. Any light that matters made itself known by casting some light. Go find that light.

And whatever else you do, criticize anyone based on their EXIF data. Don't be a stupid nerd! Look at the photo and talk about that.

Advice for New Photographers II

This post is a followup to this post and this post.

This is the part where you practice, purposefully.

Take some pictures of some things, and look at those pictures. At some point, maybe before shooting, maybe while looking at the pictures, some ideas should come to you. Perhaps it's the idea of an emotion you want the photograph to convey, or a sense of place, or an optical illusion, or the relationship between two objects, or something. Any idea that's a step beyond "a sharp picture of my dog" will do. Let's call this idea your Concept.

Look at your pictures again, and ask yourself how you could make your Concept clearer or stronger. A different point of view, different light, a different arrangement of props. Go re-shoot, testing these ideas. Look at the results. Does your Concept come across more or less clearly? Do you have a new, better, Concept?

Repeat. This is science, this is practicing purposefully: you are formulating a hypothesis, and testing it. Perhaps that by getting down on the floor, the Concept of "angry chair" will be enhanced, will come across more clearly in the resulting image. Test the hypothesis by getting down on the floor and shooting. Look at the result, see if that worked.

You don't have to shoot and re-shoot every subject over and over, but it's very instructive to shoot and re-shoot a subject over and over, from time to time. You may be surprised at how, even after an absurdly large number of exposures, you're still able to easily pick out the one that you consider the best.