The eternal rule in photography
Book Excerpt:
The simple truth of it is that even the most experienced shooters still miss the moment, still make mistakes—sometimes mistakes so basic that they wonder if there’s ever any way to really and reliably learn this art and craft.
In this way, digital photography is no different from old-time photography. Good pictures are good pictures; you make some, you miss some…Digital has changed the game, to be sure, but as in sports, the same rule applies eternally: The one who performs best—the one with the most points—wins. Whether we’re talking football or tennis or photography, you play the game the right way, you win…
~Joe McNally from his book The LIFE Guide to Photography
Wishing everyone a blessed and spiritually-filled week ahead.
The frame vision
Book Excerpt:
Photographs are created within a spatial context, and that context is the viewfinder frame. This may be carried through unchanged to the final image, whether print or on-screen, or it may be cropped or extended. In whichever case, the borders of the image, nearly always a rectangle, exert strong influences on what is arranged inside them.
There is an important distinction, nevertheless, between composing photographs in the frame as they are intended to be, and planning ahead to either crop or extend the frame. Most 35mm film photography has been concerned with tight, final composition at the time of shooting, and at times this has led to a culture of demonstrating the fact by showing the rebates (the frame edges of the film) in the final print—a way of saying “hands off” once the shutter has been released. Square-format film…is less amenable to comfortable composition, and is often used for later cropping. Large format film, such as 4×5-inch and 8×10-inch, is large enough to allow cropping without much loss of resolution in the final image, and is also often cropped, particularly in commercial work. Now digital photography adds its own twist to this, as stitching becomes more widely used for panoramas and over-sized images…
Facility at using this frame depends on two things: knowing the principles of design, and the experience that comes from taking photographs regularly. The two combine to form a photographer’s way of seeing things, a kind of frame vision that evaluates scenes from real life as potential images…
~Michael Freeman from his book The Photographer’s Eye
The colors of nature
Book Excerpt: “Just as light has color, things have color. When light strikes a subject, some of the wavelengths are absorbed and some are reflected. The reflected wavelengths bouncing off the subject produce the colors we see. What’s unique about this quality of light is that it’s subjective. Each of us, and each species of animal, sees color differently. Fortunately, most humans agree on the general hues of common colors. In photography, red, blue, and green are the primary colors; yellow, magenta, and cyan are the secondary colors. How you use these colors, how you mix them in your photographs, can mean the difference between a boring image and a contest winner.”~Ralph A. Clevenger from his book Photographing Nature: A photo workshop from Brooks Institute’s top nature photography instructor
Without color you see other elements
Book Excerpt: “There’s something timeless about a good black and white, and in my mind there’s less to get wrong. Don’t get me wrong — I shoot plenty of color images. But getting color right and not dating your work in the process can be difficult. For me, black and white just feels natural. Without a doubt, there are some shots that are better suited as black and whites… It takes a lot of practice to learn to see in black and white, but it can be done. I recommend practicing as often as possible, and you’ll see that you’ll get better with time. The best part of this practice is that it will not only strengthen your black-and-white images, but your color images as well. Black-and-white photography gives us a chance to take away a very important element — color — and focus on the other elements that are harder to envision.”~by Laurie Excell with John Batdorff, David Brommer, Rick Rickman and Steve Simon from their book Composition: From Snapshots to Great Shots
Paying attention to the viewpoint
Book Excerpt: “One of the fundamental tasks of any image maker is to define what the exact subject of the picture is going to be. The capacity to compose succinctly is what gives clarity and cohesion to a maker’s experience. The decisions we make are sensitive to how choices are presented or framed. Being aware that this “framing effect” can influence decision-making, one should be attentive to the viewpoint, or vantage point, for it is a crucial basic compositional device that determines how an image is presented and in turn received by viewers. It is such an elementary ingredient that it is often taken for granted and ignored. The angle of view lets an image maker control balance, content, light, perspective, and scale within the composition. It also determines the color saturation and whether or not the hues form color contrast or harmony.”~Robert Hirsch, The Framing Effect: Viewpoint from his book Light and Lens
Character in monochrome
Book Excerpt: “Character is destiny,” wrote Greek philosopher Heraclitus back in the fifth century BC. And what better way to see character than to observe the lines of someone’s face?…in the absence of color you have shapes–and lines. Therefore, black and white emphasizes lines and portraits created using black and white can show character at a deeper level than those in which the structural issues are masked by color.”~Harold Davis, The Monochromatic Vision from his book Creative Black & White
This is just a sample of the many monochrome images that will be showcased by yours truly, together with four featured photographers, in the all black and white Issue #5 of Junsjazz Images & Inspiration Digital Magazine, coming out at month’s end.
Search for what’s cool
Book Excerpt: “After wandering around for a while and finding nothing interesting to photograph, pause for a minute and analyze the scene. OK, so you found nothing interesting to photograph, but did you find nothing interesting at all? If the answer truly is “nothing,” then perhaps you should go home. If your reaction though is, “This is a cool place!” then ask yourself what’s cool about it and resume your wandering now focused on what’s cool.”~George Barr, Rules for Looking from his book Take Your Photography to the Next Level
Make it a habit – seeing what your camera sees
Book Excerpt: “When you’re outside taking pictures, all of your senses are working, taking in information and making you feel and respond in a certain, usually positive, way. Not only do you see the scene before you, you hear the wind in the trees, smell the sweet aromas of nature, feel the texture of the land and the breeze on your skin, and taste the air. But when you press the shutter, the camera only records what it sees and four out of the five senses that influence how you respond emotionally to the subject are lost…When you think about it, it’s little wonder that a two-dimensional, single-sense photograph might struggle to live up to the actual experience we had at the time of its taking. The real skill in photography that sets apart the great images from the snapshots is the ability to replace this missing/lost information using purely visual tools, to give the viewer a sense of what you felt by recording the image in such a way that it stimulates the imagination and stirs emotions…It is a skill that can be learned and the starting point is to get into the habit of seeing what your camera sees.”~Chris Weston May from his book Nature Photography
A tool to freeze a moment and a memory
Book Excerpt: “Now we live in a place and age I refer to as the Democracy of Digital. Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification. Shoot the picture; look at the picture. Shoot and look, shoot and look. If it doesn’t look good, shoot again. And again . . . and again. It’s just reusable ones and zeroes now, not frames of film winding around in a cassette, each cassette with a processing price tag.”
“You found during your research that digital photography is a fast-moving river; you just have to jump in at some point and start swimming. No more waiting to see if a new model is coming out next month. You already know it is, and it will have 20 or 30 million more pixels than the model you bought today. No matter. You now have a camera, which is this miracle device you’ve been longing for, a tool designed to catch, record and interpret light. To freeze a moment and a memory. And this magical instrument can go with you everywhere.”~Joe McNally from his book The LIFE Guide to Photography.
Understanding mood and ambience
Book Excerpt:“…mood refers to a state of being or emotion, while ambience describes the atmosphere associated with a place or setting. Thus, a photograph that conveys a sense of mood will have an emotional quality or feeling to it, such as serenity, joy, anger, fear or foreboding. These moods can be conveyed photographically in a number of different ways. For example, by a subject’s expresion, the use of bright versus dreary colors, heavy shadows versus bright settings, and so forth. Ambience, on the other hand, will tend to manifest itself generally, such as through all encompassing qualities like color rendering…,the hardness or softness of a light source, or the use of soft focus filter, for example. And certainly, there are times when mood and ambience merge to create an effect on the viewer.”~Joseph Meehan from his book Capturing Mood, Ambience & Dramatic Effects: The Dynamic Language of Digital Photography
Give your eye a visual workout
Book Excerpt: “Certainly, new places can inspire and motivate. But exceptional photography really starts at home. This can be in and around your own backyard, neighborhood, home-town, or surrounding countryside…The whole idea is to give your shooting eye a visual workout. Plus, photographing close-at-hand locations is not only easy but is also enjoyable—and you may find that you come up with some worthwhile images, too…In his book Photo Impressionism, noted Canadian photographer Freeman Patterson wrote, “Learning to see subject matter well, learning to design image space well, and learning to use your tools effectively takes discipline—and discipline is something you rarely develop on a trip. You acquire it before you go, and then you take it with you.”~Jim Miotke from his book The BetterPhoto Guide to Creative Digital Photography
The frame plays a dynamic role
Book Excerpt: “In traditional, shooting-to-the-final-composition photography, the frame plays a dynamic role, and arguably more so than in painting. The reason is that while a painting is built up from nothing, out of perception and imagination, the process of photography is one of selection from real scenes and events. Potential photographs exist in their entirety inside the frame every time the photographer raises the camera and looks through the viewfinder.”~Michael Freeman/Chapter: the Image Frame from his book The Photographers Eye
(Photo location: Anhawan Beach Resort, Oton, Iloilo)
Find something interesting, even in ordinary subjects
Book Excerpt: “I think that “trying hard” is probably the worst thing you can do as a photographer. I don’t mean you shouldn’t be careful, but rather that the harder you look for a good photograph, the less likely it is you will find one…What if, instead of hunting for great images, you were to go out looking for things that interest you?…What I’m trying to say is that the interest usually precedes the finding of the photograph, and that what we should be looking for is not the photographable but the interesting, and I don’t think they are the same thing at all.”~George Barr, Take Your Photography to the Next Level
It’s all about vision
Book Excerpt: “Vision is the beginning and end of photography. It’s the thing that moves you to pick up the camera, and it determines what you look at and what you see when you do it. It determines how you shoot and why. Without vision, the photographer perishes.”~David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
(Photo location: Tri An Lake, Vietnam)
Photographers are communicators of light
Book Excerpt: “Light is the most positive energy we know. It reveals truth. Most of the energy that light emits strikes a surface, bounces off , and then goes elsewhere. Light is so essential that we cannot exist without it. Our lives depend on light as much as they do upon water. Through photography, we capture for ourselves and share with others the glory of that positive, critical energy. Just like life, light brings us great joy. Light comes in many colors. As photographers, we are communicators of light. The images that we create enter the body through the eyes and travel to the brain, evoking a response. Love the light, the energy, the joy, the color: communicate positively for the rest of your life. Celebrate and share every visual exploration.”~Brian & Janet Stoppee, Guide to Photography and Light
(Photo location: Man-made forest park at Bilar town, Bohol)
You need pictures to go with the story
Book Excerpt: “In our blog-mad, tweeting, Facebooking, Citizen Journalist world…this digital camera is not just required of the ardent hobbyist, it is needed by just about everyone. You record, therefore you are. In one way or another—be it in a blog or on Flickr or in an electronic album that you put together for the family and then print—you -publish. You share your news with the world. The airwaves no longer belong to networks. The news is no longer gathered and disseminated by the select few. You are the news. You are the editor and publisher of your own life and times. And just like any cranky, old-time newspaper editor with a hole to fill in the Metro section, you need pictures to go with the story.”~Joe McNally, Guide to Digital Photography
Note: I titled this picture Sisters Act and would like to thank these gracious nuns for gamely posing for this shot in Tagaytay Highlands.
Junsjazz Images & Inspiration 