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I've said it before, I'll say it again; REVERE THE SNAP-SHOT!
I'm no Pro, and I have ALWAYS been a 'photographer'.. all it needs to be a photographer is to take photo's! And I have been doing that since I was about 6 years old and I got given a 110 instamatic for my birthday!
Being a 'photographer' ISN'T about knowing your f-stops and getting all pretentious about 'shooting RAW' or 'Always using manual'... a dangerous route you are peering down, now you have entered the world of 'enthusiast' photography, and faced the enthusiasms of so many others...
ITS ABOUT TAKING PHOTOS!
Back to them three questions..
- WHY are you taking these photo's?
- Who is going to look at them?
- What will they be interested in, in the photo's?
Whole purpose of a photo is to be looked at. If no-one looks at it, no point in it ever having been taken, is there? So WHO is the 'audience' you expect or hope to look at your photo? What are they going to want to look at? What is going to interest THEM?
Now, being a bit brutal, but... your kids dont really interest me.. sorry; I dont know you, I dont know your kids, I have no 'connection' to the subject. I quite like your daughter's smile in the shed-shot, and I appreciate the aesthetic of the 'scale' provided by the context of the shed door around her, and the tools hanging on the wall in the shaddow behnd, B-U-T? Does't really 'mean' very much too me; doesn't inform me of anything remind me of anything, or envoke any feeling or idea in me.... other than maybe I ought to tidy up my own garden shed! Your photo, has no interest to me, other than the 'academic' being discussed here, of the technique in its creation.
This is no criticism, this is a simple fact.
Photo's should 'give' something to the viewer; it should enrich their existence in some way. It should inform or educate inspire or 'move' them in some way.
Baby-Photo's? Family snap-shots? They CAN do that, and for a very small audience, often do more of it than ANY other genre... but that audience is small and select; its the photographer, the subject, the subject's family and friends; and probably not immediately, but on review in years to come, when they are 'memories', rather than mere records.
But for the most part, few are ever going to be particularly interested in your photo's.
Phil, there IS a Pro, and I believe the main-stay of his work is wedding photo's; Even there, the 'interest' in the pictures that pay his mortgage are of limited interest to a limited audience; mostly the wedding couple and their friends and family, and then usually only briefly. I mean, would you buy a stranger's wedding photo to put on your mantle-piece, just because its so well shot?
And the point IS, what makes the photo interesting, what makes some-one want to look at the photo is the SUBJECT.. if the subject is interesting to them, they will look at it. Doesn't matter how perfectly composed it is, doesn't matter how perfectly exposed it is; doesn't matter how technically innovative it is, or how much photographic dexterity has been employed... a boring photo is a boring photo!
SUBJECT IS ALL!
Concentrate on your subject! And remember your audience.
And revere the snap-shot!
Flikr is full of pretentious 'art-shots' taken by enthusiastic camera-technicians, that are all perfectly composed, perfectly exposed, wonderfully processed and occasionally mildly innovative or technically challenging, and ALL perfectly 'boring'....
Because in getting 'in' to this photography lark, they have forgotten WHY they first picked up a camera to start with; they have got so wrapped up n the camera and 'doing' this photography 'thing', in playing cameras.. they have lost the plot, and rather than taking pictures that please themselves, they are more often disappointing themselves trying to make something that probably wont even impress other photographers, trying to 'make art' rather than capture memories.
The humble Snap-Shot, even where I have no connection with the subject, like your little girls; has some 'meaning' to me; there is an 'honesty' an actual lack of pretension in the snap-shot, NOT trying to be anything but what it is, not trying to be 'art'; its some-ones 'memory', its proof of life still happening the world, that yet another milked out water-fall, or over-processed, over filtered sun-set just doesn't do.
DON'T derogate the snap-shot! Don't derogate your own photo's because they aren't the 'art' other photo-nerds suggest aught to be the object of the pursuit.
Absolutely NOT! - You do, with practice and lots of studying other folks photo's, acquire a 'sense' of photograph aesthetic, and a 'better' eye for composition... that can be dangerous and direct you towards making a lot of pastiche and cliché's... though
Tips, Hints and a little teaching; things like holding the camera properly; checking the corners of the frame, before firing; looking around you, looking for alternative / better view-points; particularly getting down low for kids and cars; or using exposure compensation in the snow to stop the pictures coming out under-exposed, or using fill-in flash on the beach to avoid shadowed faces... These quite quickly can dramatically improve your technique, and you'll start getting more 'better' photo's from what you shoot..... BUT... as has been mentioned; the 'hit-rate' is probably less than 1 in 10! MOST of what we shoot, will fall far below par. A certain amount of that will be that as we start to take 'better' photo's our standards will increase, but at the same time, we'll also tend to start taking more photo's, and the net result is that the 'yield' of keepers will tend to drop off.
So, yes and no. As we get 'better' we'll tend to get a better idea of what might make a better shot... and (if we are honest!) we will probably more often fail to get it!
Here we are back to 'settings'! Sod the settings, worry about the SUBJECT ;-)
I rarely use 'settings' on the electric-picture-maker! Most of the time, I will shoot on one of the icon automatic modes! Let the camera worry about that sort of sheet! I did NOT spend a couple of grand on an all-singing, all dancing computer controlled wonder-camera with a brain the size of a small planet and the photographic expertise of six hundred and fifty professionals condensed into its coding, to 'faff' with apertures and shutter speeds... if I wanted to faff about with the camera rather than take photo's I'd dig out the old clock-work Zenith and be done!
I do though, and confessed to it earlier when I was talking about legacy lenses; and 'metering' by the f-16-Sunny rule, and using a manual focus 135mm 'prime' to selective focus...
Its all circumstance dependent; but I am coming at it from the other end to you, as a beginner, to whom all these 'settings' are something of a novelty, to get to grips with and understand how they work and what they do. I've bee through all that, when the cameras I had to play with didn't give us much choice! We had to get to grips with them or we didn't get pictures; but having done that?
No, quite happy to let the camera get on with it all for me, and let me worry about SUBJECT not SETTINGS! With some 'feel' for the settings, yeah; I can and occasionally do 'go-manual' and can, like that shot of the lickerish stick in the garden, make all my own settings, even the focus 'by eye'.. but most of the time, the settings I would make, are unlikely to be much if any different to what the camera's programming would suggest for me on an auto-mode.
Its very rare occasions, where any-one is likely to know better than the camera what settings are more appropriate, and where going 'manual' or semi-manual would actually make for a 'better' let alone significantly 'better' photo.
As the examples for 'selective' focus as opposed to 'shallow-focus'. That snap of the grand-daughter in the garden, yup, the oof back-ground makes it a better shot. That's the only 'bit' of that picture improved by making my own 'settings' rather than trusting the cameras automation, and then simply because I have focused on thin air in front of my subject, which the camera wouldn't do for me, wanting to red-dot on her face....
If I had been using the 55-300 in fully auto? I would still have got a 'nice' photo; the exposure settings the camera would have selected for me, might have been a tad brighter, and its likely it would have selected a smaller aperture and given me a greater DoF, and centred on her face, so the back-ground would have bee less de-focused and more distinct.. BUT... it would still have been a 'nice' picture, and the 'interest' for the intended audience... me, the O/H lickrish's herself, in years to come, and her Dad? It would still be a photo that would make us smile in the family album.
Might not be using it on here for other photo-nerds to look at as an example of more refined 'technique'.. but that is NOT why I took the photo!
Think I have covered that one, and I think few could hand on heart say they didn't!
I rarely print photo's these days; so no. But brings us back to that question of the 'audience'.
I have an AWFUL lot of family shots on my own Face-Book, A lot of them date back decades and have been digtised from film. My Grannies 50th Wedding Anniversary, an aunts Wedding, my little bother' Christening earlier example shot came from.
For the intended audience; the folk who were at those events, or their kids who weren't born then; The 'faults' REALLY dont matter!
So, scanned from film, the pictures are riddled with faults; dust & scratches or damage on the negatives; then the scanning can be rather questionable, with rather poor colour rendition and detail resolution. I have a dedicated film scanner I bought in Y2K, that with more modern software can take images off film with a much higher resolution and colour depth than any digital camera in the man-n-the-street price range, until probably the last fve years; and can probably still do better than a lot thats about these days in some ways;
But, taking 10Mpix high quality scans from film, and looking at them blown up to, what, Well I have a 32" TV as a monitor on the computer I use for scanning! But even on the work-horse 'editng' PC I have a 17" monitor, that's displaying my photo's far larger than the 10x8" I was ever likely to enlarge a film photo to on paper, making 'faults' so much more apparent when they were originally taken, and likely viewed on a 5x4" print!
As mentioned, sized down to under 1Mpix for web-display, most of them faults aren't THERE in the digital rendition to be seen by the audience, and what's left? They really dont much care about.
Now, we were possibly a little more discerning & cautious when all we had was film, and each shot cost us 20p, to not 'waste' film'; and rare to shoot more than a roll of film at an event; so 36 pictures per set then, so slim pickings to be too discriminating and only pick the 'best' for display! So sticking up almost all of a set, the good the bad and the ugly; quite revealing what the audience 'like'. The ones I look at and think are 'nice', that show more artistic effect or technical dexterity or creativity, often dont get a second look. The smudgy ones, with fingers in front of the lens, often get raved about;-
"Oh look! George when he had hair!" or "Oh, Samantha! Wasn't she so cute when she was a baby, before she died her hair black and started dressing like a corpse!"
They dont care that the photo's got a chair back covering the bottom 1/3 of the frame, or that it was shot on day-light balanced film, but taken under florescent lighting in a working man's club so come out slightly green! Or that the horizon s a little wonky, or that the back-ground is a bit cluttered. What interests them, is that person they have a connection with.
The SUBJECT
So I display'em.. warts 'n-all! Cos it doesn't matter how great the photo is technically, its whether there is some interest to the viewer.
Shooting digital? Not constrained by the cost of film or 36 shots to a roll, easy enough these days to shoot 10x the number of shots in a set, so 36 becomes 360... and we have a lot more photo's to choose from... but, the 'keeper' yeild is probably a lot lower; might have shot 10x the frames, but still only the same number of 'opportunity' for a good'n.. you probably just get two or three of almost the exact same one! and two or three times as many complete duffers to parse out!
And selecting 30 or so for the album? Well, take out the near identical ones, you probably come down to around 60 or 70, to choose from, and again, might as well bung 'em all. or most of 'em up, as the viewers probably wont care much for the technical merit of any of them, it will all be down to the interest in them to them.
I have thousands of photo's only n the hard-drive or still in the negative binders, that are probably far more 'competent', BUT, they are landscapes or holiday photo's or pictures of motorbikes or land-rovers at shows or rallies or events I have attended, that have absolutely no relevance or interest to any-one but me, for the most part... But an awful lot of those are probably not even all that interesting to me any more!
Particularly those I took when I made concious effort to go and take photo's, rather than as I had before I got a bit 'in' to this photography lark, when my camera was my companion in travel and doing stuff, rather than my reason for it! Typical flikr fodda.. pretentious excerses in 'art' photography for its own sake; perfectly composed, perfectly exposed and perfectly BORING, as there was abslutley NO interest in the picture, it's sole reason for being taken was to 'play cameras'....
Which brings me back to the last post suggestions, that you are probably being a little bit over critical of your own pictures, trying a bit too hard on doing better, worrying about the wrong things a bit too much trying to be a 'photographer' rather than just getting on and taking photos!
I'm no Pro, and I have ALWAYS been a 'photographer'.. all it needs to be a photographer is to take photo's! And I have been doing that since I was about 6 years old and I got given a 110 instamatic for my birthday!
Being a 'photographer' ISN'T about knowing your f-stops and getting all pretentious about 'shooting RAW' or 'Always using manual'... a dangerous route you are peering down, now you have entered the world of 'enthusiast' photography, and faced the enthusiasms of so many others...
ITS ABOUT TAKING PHOTOS!
Back to them three questions..
- WHY are you taking these photo's?
- Who is going to look at them?
- What will they be interested in, in the photo's?
Whole purpose of a photo is to be looked at. If no-one looks at it, no point in it ever having been taken, is there? So WHO is the 'audience' you expect or hope to look at your photo? What are they going to want to look at? What is going to interest THEM?
Now, being a bit brutal, but... your kids dont really interest me.. sorry; I dont know you, I dont know your kids, I have no 'connection' to the subject. I quite like your daughter's smile in the shed-shot, and I appreciate the aesthetic of the 'scale' provided by the context of the shed door around her, and the tools hanging on the wall in the shaddow behnd, B-U-T? Does't really 'mean' very much too me; doesn't inform me of anything remind me of anything, or envoke any feeling or idea in me.... other than maybe I ought to tidy up my own garden shed! Your photo, has no interest to me, other than the 'academic' being discussed here, of the technique in its creation.
This is no criticism, this is a simple fact.
Photo's should 'give' something to the viewer; it should enrich their existence in some way. It should inform or educate inspire or 'move' them in some way.
Baby-Photo's? Family snap-shots? They CAN do that, and for a very small audience, often do more of it than ANY other genre... but that audience is small and select; its the photographer, the subject, the subject's family and friends; and probably not immediately, but on review in years to come, when they are 'memories', rather than mere records.
But for the most part, few are ever going to be particularly interested in your photo's.
Phil, there IS a Pro, and I believe the main-stay of his work is wedding photo's; Even there, the 'interest' in the pictures that pay his mortgage are of limited interest to a limited audience; mostly the wedding couple and their friends and family, and then usually only briefly. I mean, would you buy a stranger's wedding photo to put on your mantle-piece, just because its so well shot?
And the point IS, what makes the photo interesting, what makes some-one want to look at the photo is the SUBJECT.. if the subject is interesting to them, they will look at it. Doesn't matter how perfectly composed it is, doesn't matter how perfectly exposed it is; doesn't matter how technically innovative it is, or how much photographic dexterity has been employed... a boring photo is a boring photo!
SUBJECT IS ALL!
Concentrate on your subject! And remember your audience.
And revere the snap-shot!
Flikr is full of pretentious 'art-shots' taken by enthusiastic camera-technicians, that are all perfectly composed, perfectly exposed, wonderfully processed and occasionally mildly innovative or technically challenging, and ALL perfectly 'boring'....
Because in getting 'in' to this photography lark, they have forgotten WHY they first picked up a camera to start with; they have got so wrapped up n the camera and 'doing' this photography 'thing', in playing cameras.. they have lost the plot, and rather than taking pictures that please themselves, they are more often disappointing themselves trying to make something that probably wont even impress other photographers, trying to 'make art' rather than capture memories.
The humble Snap-Shot, even where I have no connection with the subject, like your little girls; has some 'meaning' to me; there is an 'honesty' an actual lack of pretension in the snap-shot, NOT trying to be anything but what it is, not trying to be 'art'; its some-ones 'memory', its proof of life still happening the world, that yet another milked out water-fall, or over-processed, over filtered sun-set just doesn't do.
DON'T derogate the snap-shot! Don't derogate your own photo's because they aren't the 'art' other photo-nerds suggest aught to be the object of the pursuit.
Absolutely NOT! - You do, with practice and lots of studying other folks photo's, acquire a 'sense' of photograph aesthetic, and a 'better' eye for composition... that can be dangerous and direct you towards making a lot of pastiche and cliché's... though
Tips, Hints and a little teaching; things like holding the camera properly; checking the corners of the frame, before firing; looking around you, looking for alternative / better view-points; particularly getting down low for kids and cars; or using exposure compensation in the snow to stop the pictures coming out under-exposed, or using fill-in flash on the beach to avoid shadowed faces... These quite quickly can dramatically improve your technique, and you'll start getting more 'better' photo's from what you shoot..... BUT... as has been mentioned; the 'hit-rate' is probably less than 1 in 10! MOST of what we shoot, will fall far below par. A certain amount of that will be that as we start to take 'better' photo's our standards will increase, but at the same time, we'll also tend to start taking more photo's, and the net result is that the 'yield' of keepers will tend to drop off.
So, yes and no. As we get 'better' we'll tend to get a better idea of what might make a better shot... and (if we are honest!) we will probably more often fail to get it!
Here we are back to 'settings'! Sod the settings, worry about the SUBJECT ;-)
I rarely use 'settings' on the electric-picture-maker! Most of the time, I will shoot on one of the icon automatic modes! Let the camera worry about that sort of sheet! I did NOT spend a couple of grand on an all-singing, all dancing computer controlled wonder-camera with a brain the size of a small planet and the photographic expertise of six hundred and fifty professionals condensed into its coding, to 'faff' with apertures and shutter speeds... if I wanted to faff about with the camera rather than take photo's I'd dig out the old clock-work Zenith and be done!
I do though, and confessed to it earlier when I was talking about legacy lenses; and 'metering' by the f-16-Sunny rule, and using a manual focus 135mm 'prime' to selective focus...
Its all circumstance dependent; but I am coming at it from the other end to you, as a beginner, to whom all these 'settings' are something of a novelty, to get to grips with and understand how they work and what they do. I've bee through all that, when the cameras I had to play with didn't give us much choice! We had to get to grips with them or we didn't get pictures; but having done that?
No, quite happy to let the camera get on with it all for me, and let me worry about SUBJECT not SETTINGS! With some 'feel' for the settings, yeah; I can and occasionally do 'go-manual' and can, like that shot of the lickerish stick in the garden, make all my own settings, even the focus 'by eye'.. but most of the time, the settings I would make, are unlikely to be much if any different to what the camera's programming would suggest for me on an auto-mode.
Its very rare occasions, where any-one is likely to know better than the camera what settings are more appropriate, and where going 'manual' or semi-manual would actually make for a 'better' let alone significantly 'better' photo.
As the examples for 'selective' focus as opposed to 'shallow-focus'. That snap of the grand-daughter in the garden, yup, the oof back-ground makes it a better shot. That's the only 'bit' of that picture improved by making my own 'settings' rather than trusting the cameras automation, and then simply because I have focused on thin air in front of my subject, which the camera wouldn't do for me, wanting to red-dot on her face....
If I had been using the 55-300 in fully auto? I would still have got a 'nice' photo; the exposure settings the camera would have selected for me, might have been a tad brighter, and its likely it would have selected a smaller aperture and given me a greater DoF, and centred on her face, so the back-ground would have bee less de-focused and more distinct.. BUT... it would still have been a 'nice' picture, and the 'interest' for the intended audience... me, the O/H lickrish's herself, in years to come, and her Dad? It would still be a photo that would make us smile in the family album.
Might not be using it on here for other photo-nerds to look at as an example of more refined 'technique'.. but that is NOT why I took the photo!
Think I have covered that one, and I think few could hand on heart say they didn't!
I rarely print photo's these days; so no. But brings us back to that question of the 'audience'.
I have an AWFUL lot of family shots on my own Face-Book, A lot of them date back decades and have been digtised from film. My Grannies 50th Wedding Anniversary, an aunts Wedding, my little bother' Christening earlier example shot came from.
For the intended audience; the folk who were at those events, or their kids who weren't born then; The 'faults' REALLY dont matter!
So, scanned from film, the pictures are riddled with faults; dust & scratches or damage on the negatives; then the scanning can be rather questionable, with rather poor colour rendition and detail resolution. I have a dedicated film scanner I bought in Y2K, that with more modern software can take images off film with a much higher resolution and colour depth than any digital camera in the man-n-the-street price range, until probably the last fve years; and can probably still do better than a lot thats about these days in some ways;
But, taking 10Mpix high quality scans from film, and looking at them blown up to, what, Well I have a 32" TV as a monitor on the computer I use for scanning! But even on the work-horse 'editng' PC I have a 17" monitor, that's displaying my photo's far larger than the 10x8" I was ever likely to enlarge a film photo to on paper, making 'faults' so much more apparent when they were originally taken, and likely viewed on a 5x4" print!
As mentioned, sized down to under 1Mpix for web-display, most of them faults aren't THERE in the digital rendition to be seen by the audience, and what's left? They really dont much care about.
Now, we were possibly a little more discerning & cautious when all we had was film, and each shot cost us 20p, to not 'waste' film'; and rare to shoot more than a roll of film at an event; so 36 pictures per set then, so slim pickings to be too discriminating and only pick the 'best' for display! So sticking up almost all of a set, the good the bad and the ugly; quite revealing what the audience 'like'. The ones I look at and think are 'nice', that show more artistic effect or technical dexterity or creativity, often dont get a second look. The smudgy ones, with fingers in front of the lens, often get raved about;-
"Oh look! George when he had hair!" or "Oh, Samantha! Wasn't she so cute when she was a baby, before she died her hair black and started dressing like a corpse!"
They dont care that the photo's got a chair back covering the bottom 1/3 of the frame, or that it was shot on day-light balanced film, but taken under florescent lighting in a working man's club so come out slightly green! Or that the horizon s a little wonky, or that the back-ground is a bit cluttered. What interests them, is that person they have a connection with.
The SUBJECT
So I display'em.. warts 'n-all! Cos it doesn't matter how great the photo is technically, its whether there is some interest to the viewer.
Shooting digital? Not constrained by the cost of film or 36 shots to a roll, easy enough these days to shoot 10x the number of shots in a set, so 36 becomes 360... and we have a lot more photo's to choose from... but, the 'keeper' yeild is probably a lot lower; might have shot 10x the frames, but still only the same number of 'opportunity' for a good'n.. you probably just get two or three of almost the exact same one! and two or three times as many complete duffers to parse out!
And selecting 30 or so for the album? Well, take out the near identical ones, you probably come down to around 60 or 70, to choose from, and again, might as well bung 'em all. or most of 'em up, as the viewers probably wont care much for the technical merit of any of them, it will all be down to the interest in them to them.
I have thousands of photo's only n the hard-drive or still in the negative binders, that are probably far more 'competent', BUT, they are landscapes or holiday photo's or pictures of motorbikes or land-rovers at shows or rallies or events I have attended, that have absolutely no relevance or interest to any-one but me, for the most part... But an awful lot of those are probably not even all that interesting to me any more!
Particularly those I took when I made concious effort to go and take photo's, rather than as I had before I got a bit 'in' to this photography lark, when my camera was my companion in travel and doing stuff, rather than my reason for it! Typical flikr fodda.. pretentious excerses in 'art' photography for its own sake; perfectly composed, perfectly exposed and perfectly BORING, as there was abslutley NO interest in the picture, it's sole reason for being taken was to 'play cameras'....
Which brings me back to the last post suggestions, that you are probably being a little bit over critical of your own pictures, trying a bit too hard on doing better, worrying about the wrong things a bit too much trying to be a 'photographer' rather than just getting on and taking photos!
