Mind Over Matter

My name is Rob, and I matter. I'm gonna tell you a true story about a famous photographer from New York City. But, I can't tell you his name, because he doesn't have one. Because this is a fictitious tale.

This famous photographer was invited to a dinner party. When he arrived the hostess offered to take his coat, and in recognizing him, paid him a compliment.

I just love your pictures, she said. You must have a wonderful camera!

He took his compliment graciously, handed over his coat, and made his way to the bar.

After a delightful dinner, the famous photographer piped up to pay gratitude to the hostess.

What a delectable dinner! You must have an amazing stove!

If this joke makes any sense to you, then you already know what I'm going to tell you. But, keep reading. It's the polite thing to do, ya know.

It's a popular theme amongst new photographers and people who don't know shit about shit - that it's the camera that makes the picture.

It's true. The camera does make the picture, but it doesn't make the picture. The photographer does.

The camera you use doesn't matter.

Sort of.

You can hand a $7,000 rig to any putz that isn't a photographer and he'll be able to take a picture, but it probably won't be a good one. Sure, the colors will be accurate, and it might even be in focus, but it won't be anything to write home about.

On the other side, you can hand a Fisher-Price camera to Henri Cartier-Bresson, and he'll end up with something stellar because he knows what he's doing.

The father of street photography shot with a Leica range finder and a 50mm lens almost exclusively. It's all he needed to capture the images he desired.

So, why, then, do all the folks with multi-thousand dollar outfits say the camera doesn't matter? And why do the folks to just bought a DSLR with a kit lens say if only I had such-and-such, then I'd be able to take amazing pictures!

The answer is simple. We get paid to be fast.

We could get the same results with a super-zoom point and shoot, but fiddling with it takes away from time we could spend shooting. If you have to dig your way through 150,000 layers of menus just to change the ISO you're gonna miss your shot.

My big fancy camera looks daunting and complicated with it's gazillion buttons because every one of them does something quickly. I change virtually any setting on the thing with a press of a single button and the flick of a dial. More importantly, all this can be done on the fly with the camera held up to my face.

The other thing, where the "Sort of" up there comes into play, is fast glass. You can't really take pictures like this with a standard 18-55mm kit lens.

There's an incredibly shallow depth of field here at f/1.4, but does this sort of thing come into play often?

Not at all.

Shots generally don't happen with a wide-open aperture. When they do, the bride's eye will be in focus, but her nose won't be. Super shallow depth of field is for specialty shots.

Even at f/4.0, you can throw the background out of focus enough to make your subject pop.

See? Even if the background isn't fuzzy enough for you, you can usually move your subject further away from it to accomplish the same thing.

You don't need a fast lens, but it sure does come in handy from time to time.

That brings us to the gist of the whole thing.  Pro photographers don't spend thousands on bodies and lenses to make them better photographers, they spend money on efficiency.

Our time isn't best spent farting around with menus, or moving subjects around. Our best time is spent just farting.

Farts

My name is Rob, and I fart without shame. Ken Rockwell is a pretty polarizing figure in the world of photography. Some folks think he's a no-talent hack. Some think he's the best photographer since Ansel Adams. Whatever your opinion, he came up with an acronym that I'm going to expound upon to make your pictures suck less.

What's the acronym, you ask?

F.A.R.T.

The F is for feeling - when you get the feeling to take a picture. Whether you're at a backyard barbeque, or on a photo-walk, or you're a paid professional on a shoot, the feeling is the same. Something catches your eye that you think is photo worthy. The subject could be a dog throwing his toy up in the air, or a glint of light off of a lake, or a sunset. Sometimes it's so overwhelmingly obvious that you ventured to that spot solely to take a picture, like the grand canyon.

The next step is to Assess. What, exactly, made you want to take a picture? Was it the way a shadow laid on the ground? Was it some action that you want to capture, or the colors of sundown? This portion can be quite tough. You can think it's totally obvious what caught your eye, and end up with an extraordinarily boring snap shot, because you didn't narrow down what it was that you saw to begin with.

This is where bad photographers reside. They see something interesting, hold the camera to their face and press the shutter release. They might end up with something wonderful, but more often than not they end up with something boring because the camera doesn't see the same things we do. They end up with branches growing out of people's ears, or sunsets with power poles distracting you from the brilliant colors, or a busy street filled with people taking your attention away from the Lamborghini parked on the side of the road.

That brings us to the most important and most difficult part - Refining. This is where you actually compose and frame your shot. The object here is to remove or minimize anything and everything that distracts the viewer from what it is you want them to see. It often requires moving back and forth, getting up in the air or laying on the ground. It can require whether or not to use a flash to fix the lighting or if you want the background to be out of focus or not. Anything you can think of should be taken into account of how to accentuate your subject, and mitigate any distractions. Sometimes it takes quite a while, and other times it's instantly apparent how you should compose the shot.

But, you should always study your composition because, again, the camera sees things differently than we do. The camera is not discerning - capturing everything that is there - while your eyes will filter out things that aren't important, like your camera bag sitting in the corner of the frame or the power lines running across the architecture.

Once you've managed to get everything you want out of the frame, you've reached the easiest and final step in the farting process.

Take the picture. After you've thought about what grabbed your attention, decided what it was that did, and organized your shot to bring as much attention as possible to it, all you have to do is press a button.

Voila! you now have a spectacular picture to bring back memories or to share with friends and family. If you can think about farting when you're out with your camera you will become a better photographer. You'll receive more fulfillment when you fart, and other people will enjoy your work more if you farted first.

Now, go forth, out into the world around you, and fart with every opportunity!

Alone in the Crowd

My name is Rob, and when I take pictures alone, I prefer to be by myself. Ok, that's not entirely true, but I only came to that realization recently.

Most of the time I'm out having fun with the camera, I'm out by myself. When it's just me, I can block out everything else in the world except the subject I want to focus on.

heh, focus. See what I did there?

Ok, Rob, Focus!

hehe, there it is again.

Concentrate!

Right, so when other folks are around, I tend to either get lost and ignore whoever is with me, or ignore my camera and the reason I took it wherever it was that I went. Neither of these scenarios are really pleasant for me, hence why I usually go out on my own.

That feeling changed last week. I joined the North Alabama Photographers Guild recently, and my first outing with the group was a photo-walk of the Tinsel Trail in Big Spring Park.

I showed up a little late, because that's how I do. Upon arrival I ran into two guys that I'd not met before. One immediately started jabbing me about shooting Nikon, and the other started jabbing him about shooting Canon. This was to be a fun group.

We started on one end of the trail where one guy set down his tripod because he saw a shot he wanted. The two of us remaining looked around and set up shop nearby.

We then proceeded to shut the hell up, and concentrate on what we were there to do - make photos.

When everyone got the shots they were after, we picked up the conversation right where we had stopped as we worked our way to the next destination.

Maybe it's because I'm fairly new to the world of photography, or maybe it's just that particular group of folks. Either way, that's the first instance I can think of where I managed to strike a balance of being social and getting what I wanted out of the trip. I can't wait until the next outing with this group.

Here's what I managed to walk away with.