EdinburghGary
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Thanks very much Gary...very kind
I have been using digital compacts since they first came out. My first was a 0.6mp unknown brand that cost me £100 and in poor light produced god awful noise and was pretty much useless unless in realy bright lightBefore that I had dabbled with compact film cameras when I was younger but nothing serious. I only really started to take it seriuosly when I brought a 350D about 3 years ago and forced myself to learn the basics of exposure and technical aspects so that I justify the expense of the camera.
I am desperatly trying to a think of a good reply to your rule question but I am finding it really difficult to answer. Intead I am going share my honest opinions with you.
Outside of the technical I am a true believer there are no rules (check out my siggy) to photography only guidelines you can use to help your creative decsions now and then but are by no means set in stone. You can take what you consider to be a great shot one day and think you have spotted what made it good. You then create yourself a rule based on that observation thinking if you follow that rule again you will get another great shot but is never the case and you can find on another day another shot that completely breaks that rule is also a great one :bang: Best save yourself the agony and accept the conclusion there are no rules. That's what I have done. Throw out logic and go on pure feeling (hard for me when my job is thinking in pure logic all day). Believe it or not if a composition looks naff in the viewfinder it will most probably look naff when shot. If you find instead it starts to excite you and smile starts to form on your face and you find yourself thinking "this is gonna be good!" then 9 times out of 10 it will be. If it's not it will most likely be a technical misjudgement which takes me onto the next thing
Now for the technical side there are the things I could describe as rules. Here are some rules I have learnt that I found more important to my progression than anything else:
- Practice makes perfect - Your ability to pre-vizualise a scene will never come from magazines or books but by experiance more than anything else. The camera always lies
The most obvious one is dynamic range but often overlooked is colour. Most beginners don't percieve this to be important but even slight changes in colour hues change change the look and feel of any photograph to a suprising degree. Everyone sees colour differently. Some small differences in the actual colour are due to the way our brains are wired differently to each other. As well as this when the brain sees a scene and it sees something it recognises to be white it will then try to compensate for whatever colour influence the surrounding light has on that object so that you still see it as white. The cameras best stab at this is white balance but it's just a stab! We have all taken a cloudy day scene that just seemed gray but turned out to have a horrible shade of blue in the image. Well the blue is actually closer to reality than what you saw. Cloud cover allows more blue light though than the other colours and everything takes on a shade of blue. Your eye however picked up visual clues and made the scene grey. Another reason for colur difference is because of the reduced lattitude (dynamic range). Even if you nailed the exposure for the scene you will never have the a balanced exposure for each and every element of the scene and this has an effect on their colour. An underexposed blue or green will produce darker versions of those colours. An overexposed will produce lighter but a under/over exposed red in certain light conditions will actually produce purples and yellows (Just like a sunset sky). So by no choice of your own the colours in your image have changed and sometimes dramatically.
Outside of color there is 3d perception. Our eye builds up a 3d image of a view by collecting each element as you study it and look around the scene then puts it all together in you mind as a 3d map of what is in front of you including perceptual distances e.t.c. A 2d picture can never show what you percieved in your mind but only a flat compacted version of the square section of it you chose the camera to point the camera at. It loses all it's perspective distance cues this is why it helps to create leading lines and other depth tricks to give the mind visual clues and help it to build up that 3d image There are other reasons but I do have a point to all this.....honest.
It is impossible to predict how these things will change the scene you are looking at. You could probably spend hours using scientifc measurements of light in all parts of a scene if you were an expert on colour theory and the exact specifications of your cameras sensor then you could have a good stab at predicting the outcome but that's not likely and as we all know light moves to quickly for that but there is a way. Just by taking lots and lots of photographs and studying them you unconciously program your brain to remember how the same scene will most probably photograph the next time you recognise the same lighting conditions. It's simple but (I am happy to say) the brain is suprisingly good at it. Think about each and every shot you take but take lots of shots and try to remember what the scene looked like to your eye when you study your image. This is why digital photographers are learning quicker than those that started with film.
Taking all this into consideration though you probably won't be able to recreate the exposure you want again without my next rule.
- Understanding how to expose properly and exactly how the meter works - There are many digital photographers that will tell you this is unecessary these days with all the complex matrix metering built into modern cameras but I strongly disagree. I consider the moment I understood it completely a big step forward in my photography and I would not be exaggerating to say it changed the way I "saw" completely. I could write pages on why this is but I instead I just say that once you know you will understand why
- Expose for the highlights - Once you understand the above then this is a rule I abide by and fits in very well with the nature of digital photography.
These are what at the moment I consider the most important aspects to my photography. Sorry I would have like to sum them all up in one made up rule but I would rather tell you what I really believe.
Thanks so much for taking the time mate. Inspirational photos you take, I am chuffed I am able to ask you questions and get a response!
