The biggest contradiction to consider is that the photographer has an emotional context from when they took the photo, that a random viewer does not.
This is at the heart of why so many people overestimate the impact of their photos. They remember being at the Tetons, awake cold and alive at dawn, taking the picture (for example). Or they remember a particular photo session with a model, perhaps someone they knew.
The photographer remembers the moment. But the viewer gets only what is inside the frame of the image.
The crucial thing is that it is totally OK to take pictures for yourself! You don’t need to blow some random person’s mind in order to truly enjoy photography. I think sometimes that gets lost, especially with beginners.
Often people are inspired to take up photography because they loved some images they saw. But delivering that impact to a broad audience is super hard to do. It requires a far more analytical and self-critical approach than most people want to sustain in a hobby.
I'm glad this is the top comment because it's also the deepest insight I've had in my 20+ years of doing photography.
So much of the art and challenge of photography is about creating a single flat rectangular image that somehow conveys the sense of depth, presence, time, and emotional impact that the photographer had while being there in that actual moment in time and space.
A good photo must be super-real in some sense because the act of reducing an entire lived in experience in 4D space-time down to a single flat image discards so much information. It requires just the right subject, framing, composition, light, color, everything so that even after so much is lost, what's left is sufficient for the viewer to fill it back in.
Photography is to experiencing the world as poetry is to prose.
Yes! And if you're trying to please the masses, you risk losing that inspiration if your own vision is not as "mainstream." This may seem minor, but I can tell you from teaching many students that there is a bit of youthful self-identity at work when picking up a camera, and that finding one's vision can be fraught by the desire to receive affirmation for the photos one worked so hard to capture (but that the viewer does not see/feel/appreciate).
That is the art of photography: the challenge of capturing the emotional context in a way that conveys it to a random viewer, drawing on common elements of culture, nostalgia, etc.
The only photographs I regret are the ones I didn't take, because I felt weird about taking them at the time, or just assumed they wouldn't come out. I remember the Tetons, and being at the same place that Ansel Adams made a wonderful photo so many decades ago, before the trees along the river grew to full height and completely made it impossible to recreate, but the experience of being there was worth it.
We're at the point now where photographs and storage are effectively free. Take your photos, in RAW if you like, but do yourself the favor of just throwing away the blurry ones, the ones that were obviously bad. You don't need to keep looking at those forever.
I keep mine in folders yyyy / yyyymmdd / camera folder / image_name, and I never edit the originals... I always save them with a new name the first thing I do... I lost my favorite photo of a late friend that way, and now only have the 1/4 scale thumbnail as a result, never again!
One of my favorite photos was taken with a $90 pocket camera (before cell phones) that I borrowed from my bride after my DSLR died.[1] That little Nikon had a "sports mode" in which it would just keep taking photos until you told it to stop... so I laid down in front of "The Bean" in Chicago and made a hemispherical panorama.
The one time I took my own breath away was when I combined 2 panoramas of Chicago, shot from the same point with the same setup, day and night... when I slide the layer transparency in GIMP and stopped.... I actually gasped.[2]
It's fun to take the DSLR out and shoot with it, when health permits. Have fun.
This is like cooking for yourself vs cooking for others. It is perfectly reasonable to do it for your own health or enjoyment. But you can get a lot of it if you level up and cook for others.
In my own philosophy of photography, I've got a generalized (and admittedly overly simplified model) of:
For me / For others
Memories / Emotions
There are photographs that I take that are "memories for me" - things that I want to remember but are otherwise rather meh for other people. There's also photojournalism which is much more on the memories for others quadrant.
Likewise, the are photographs that are emotions for me... and the sellable ones are emotions for others.
All of those are perfectly acceptable photographs. It's a matter of what expectations there are for me when showing them to others. And likewise, there are photographs that other people other people take for memories for themselves that I hope don't disappoint them when they show them to me and its a "its ok" as the response when it was a memory that they want to maintain. Someone else's wedding photograph isn't something that is particularly interesting to me as a photograph.
>To Crop Or Not To Crop? Point: Never crop. Cropping is cheating. Get it right in camera. Zoom with your feet. If you have to crop later, that only means you blew the composition. Counterpoint: It’s almost impossible to “get it right” in camera every time — the real world gets in the way. That pelican on a piling out in the harbor and you’re only sporting the one prime? Zooming with your feet isn’t an option, so it’s all about the perfect crop in post.
That point-vs-counterpoint is leaving out a critical difference between cropping vs zoom-with-your-feet: the geometric relation between the foreground and background objects will change.
Cropping is more comparable to a post-processing version of "zoom magnification" at the expense of pixel resolution. Or flipped around, zoom lenses can be thought of as in-camera "cropping" with max pixel resolution but at the expense of crop boundaries being irreversible. The geometric relations between objects are still the same if your feet don't move in both cases. (Edit add for clarity: zoom and telephoto prime lenses are the same for purposes of "in-camera cropping" being compared to zooming-with-feet.)
Zooming with the feet alters how the background looks in relation to the foreground subject -- which may not be your artistic intention. Examples:
Totally right. I shoot almost exclusively with a 50mm prime and make heavy use of cropping. I get to carry a very light, small, and FAST lens that works in many different situations without needing a flash. Modern cameras have such high resolution that the output still has good quality even after significant cropping.
There are some situations where "zooming with your feet" is the right answer and others where it is impossible. Try everything.
The first time I ever went out with a zoom lens after starting with just a 50mm prime, the amount of creative power and freedom I felt really opened my eyes. Without having to worry about focal length you can actually compose with the naked eye and walk around til you get everything in the right position, then zoom in to get the framing right.
Zoom With Your Feet and other photography minimalist cliches seem to me kind of mystifying, and more interested in a kind of romantic vision of photography than in technical excellence
Zooming in with the lens will also change the background because by zooming in your are changing the focal length. Also there is the lens distortion to consider as well. A portrait taken at 28mm will look very different than one taken at 150mm no matter what you do.
How does the focal length affect the background? Are you referring to the focal length's relationship to the depth of field? Because otherwise, I guess that the effect you're referring to ("A portrait taken at 28mm will look very different than one taken at 150mm no matter what you do.") is an artifact of the same thing the GP comment talked about, which is the effect of the distance between the camera and the subject.
Wide vs. tele foreground/background lens distortion, not just the field of view (framing). Some call this choice of lens "lensing" and as noted, the distortion of a 28mm wide vs 200mm tele are part of their physical design, optical "laws" being what they are.
GP had it exactly right, perspective distortion ONLY depends on the distance between objects to the camera (entrance pupil). The focal length literally does not matter at all.
(This is an interesting point of contention, because conventional wisdom up until a few years ago was exactly what you said, and relaying what GP said got you tarred and feathered as an imbecile in the usual "photog forums". It's also one of these things which were never in doubt at all, and are very easy to check for yourself.)
Zooming with your feet and zooming with a lens will give you quite different results regarding "geometric relations between objects". The word you are looking for here is "Parallax" :-)
Cropping in post is identical to digital zoom and will not change parallax and of course reduce resolution (which neither of the above will do)
All three give quite different results and of course are viable methods depending on what your intended outcome is
Every fixed lens and sensor configuration has some "level of zoom" (better terms would be "focal length" or "angle of view"). There's not some "natural zoom," unless the author wants to prescribe his favorite configuration as the privileged one.
Why are zoom lenses 'in-camera "cropping" with max pixel resolution'? They should zoom physically the same way a prime would, just with a less optimal optic structure, no?
I mean the perspective projection you get from a 70-120 zoom at 90mm should be the same as the one from a 90mm prime
A 70-120 zoom at 90, a 90mm prime, and a 70mm prime cropped in to the same field of view should produce the same perspective projection. Try it sometime – take two photos from the same spot, one at 70 and one at 100 and then crop the 70 to the same field of view as the 100. It won’t be perfectly identical but those differences are due to lens imperfections, not something fundamental.
Not gp, but as an example of what they mean: take a photo at 70mm then at 120mm. You can crop the first photo to be have the same composition as the second, but the resolution will be lower.
A lot of this is not photography advice, because it's not about what print you put on your wall eventually. This is mostly learning advice, eg which path promises the quicker way towards improvement for somebody starting out.
And as with most learning advice, both sides of each argument are great advice. As somebody who is learning a craft, throw a coin and re-evaluate every once in a while.
Using primes or zooms? Using vanilla VSCode vs a highly customized environment? Putting every picture through a raw converter with split toning vs taking candid snapshots? Using copilot vs typing everything yourself? Flash vs natural light? Microservices vs monolith?
All answers are right answers. The whole point is that not knowing an answer to each means that the photographer should explore the topic until they have formed an opinion. No matter how, and no matter where their opinion ends up on.
And naturally, online places tend to attract people of equal experience who discuss each of those topics, without realizing that they're all just taking part in the same learning experience.
Exactly. Both programming and photography seem to attract technicians who want to believe there is a “right” way. Fast forward 20 or 30 years, and anyone still practicing has given up on absolutes and false dichotomies.
this is like a rambling of a mad man, it reminds me of the many, many posts on any XXX photo gear forum where majority of the time people will dedicate their time arguing about edge sharpness performance of lenses or pixel peeping and only a small portion of the forum is dedicated to actual pictures, and when you see those pictures you quickly close out of the forum because 99% are visually just not interesting.
use the auto mode and don't worry about it. if you acutally want to have some control then learn the relationship between shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I learned this very long time ago through a Sunny 16 rule on my Leica M6 and outdoors during the day that rule works just fine with today's digital cameras that have 8+ stops of dynamic range anyways.
otherwise photography is about in interesting picture. unless you crop it so much that it's so pixilated that it hurts your eyes no one will scrutinize it or chastise the photographer that they took it with a tripod or cropped it and this article is just a gigantic self serving vent that really doesn't give anyone any better advice on photos.
True. Good photo is either good light or something extraordinary happening - that is content quality. Technical quality is all that noise, edge sharpness, full frame, and this does not matter. If 40 years ago people were able to create masterpieces on 135 film, then it is also doable using camera in cellphone.
As a professional photographer, I'll say that a lot of these are just overhashed and oversimplified arguments that most photographers don't consider or even think about, with the possible exception that high ISO causes noise.
Sure, high ISO causes noise, but what's the alternative? Both longer shutter times and larger apertures cause blurriness, which is worse! People are way too scared of noise.
Having had to push 400 ISO film to 3200 during development, I'm super impressed by how little noise modern sensors produce. Sure, colour noise looks awful but it's also really easy to remove because humans are not really sensitive to high-frequency components of chroma anyway.
Yep. The fact that I can casually "push" to 1600 or 3200 ISO at a poorly lit conference or other setting is fantastic. When I was in college, shooting at 1600 in a poorly-lit lecture hall or sports arena was about as far as I could reasonably go even playing games with development chemistry. (Could go somewhat higher but the results were generally pretty poor.)
High ISO even for relatively small sensors is an often overlooked benefit from digital photography. I got a lot of pleasure out of my many hours in a darkroom but I wouldn't go back.
Agree. Mostly, the “rules” help a beginner to understand the levers they can pull to get the intended effect. Then they can experiment and develop the artistic taste & technical experience so they can choose what to apply.
Having a hobby which is pretty much "trying every hobby to find the right one" I've been doing multiple variants of photography. Drawn and painted art. Some quickly aborted starts at creative writing. A half decade shattershot effort at solo gamedev(involving a branching multi-artistic art-sound-code-design efforts) and several other probing efforts.
I thus could consider myself as an experienced advice-reader and advice-evaluator.
My conclusion is that everyone is addicted to bullshit advice that signals about discipline and purity. If you want to get into anything the best approach is to stop reading generalist advice. Either probe it in a spotwise creative fashion on your own or do follow-along practical work flow tutorials. Advice for overall approaches and strategy is a waste of time at best or actively harmful and will undermine your enjoyment
Lots of bad photographers can’t seem to figure out photography is art. All the rules get in the way of them understanding that. I do wonder if photography attracts people who were never interested in other art forms. Certainly the best photographers have an artists mindset.
The dilettante who cares more about the equipment than the work is a well worn cliche, but on the other hand lots of "real" painters love the smell of paint.
Lots of photographers, good and bad, like how finicky and mechanical cameras are.
It's not really that different from a musical instrument. The camera might be finicky but you need to get to the point you're not focusing on the camera and it just becomes a tool that is there. The way digital photography has turned into a measuring contest where everyone is always getting the newest gear doesn't help with that.
Nothing in photography annoys me more than advice conflating zooming with repositioning the camera. A wide angle lens up close gives a completely different result than a zoom lens from far away.
I've been seeing this awful sentiment for nearly two decades now.
Here's my advice: try everything and try to capture whatever feeling you had in the moment. If you convey the feeling, you've succeeded.
> Do you... A) take the shot from where you are and crop/zoom in post OR B) walk a block and get the shot composed correctly from the start?
If you walk, the composition totally changes. If you like the composition where you are, but it's too small, walking that block will give you something worse.
The steps are:
1. Get the composition right (walking around)
2. Zoom or crop if the subject is too small.
3. Do not walk closer - it messes up the composition.
There's a whole other thread discussing this.
Hint: For the type of photography I do, I almost always get a better composition by being farther and zooming in. You won't get those shots by getting nearer to the subject.
I've been a photographer for years and it's the first time I've heard most of these. Crop vs no-crop, who debates that? Raw vs jpg? DSLRs allow you to store both simultaneously.
As for lenses, it all depends on what works for you. A zoom used to be my go-to for the longest time, but nowadays I much prefer the prime (a Sigma DG Art). It also depends on what you're taking photos of. Shoot a lot of wildlife and a zoom is your best friend. Shoot a lot of architecture and a prime with excellent distortion correction is far better than most zooms. I just happen to shoot more architecture nowadays, so the prime is what I pack. It's all about using the right tool for the subject.
Most cameras have an option to save both the raw (which depends on the camera make, probably .dng/.cr2/.nef) and also a JPEG using automatic white-balance and exposure options, so you can have the best of both worlds of a quick workflow (using just the JPEGs) or tweaking exposure/balance/tone in 12/14 bpp.
If you import into something like Lightroom and, given the price of modern storage, it generally makes sense (for me) to mostly shoot raw. Pretty much the only time I'll shoot both is if I (rarely) may need to hand off the JPEGs to someone in real-time.
I used to think like you but lately I just can’t be bothered with editing too much and with the raw workflow so I mostly shoot in JPG these days. I shoot in raw when I’m shooting in situations where the lighting is difficult.
Probably hard to make a general statement. Lightroom is better these days at making automagical editing decisions. And I like heavily culling photos and adding at least some metadata (although with shooting most of my current photos on an iPhone which adds GPS it's less of a big deal). However, JPG on that iPhone is also pretty good. Not a big deal one way or the other. I just bias to not throwing away data rather than not having it or having to make real-time decisions about how much data to collect.
Yeah that’s a good point about the real-time decisions. I’ve been thinking about it since my comment and I think I’ll give raw another shot. It has such a wider dynamic range* than jpg and maybe it’s a way to almost future proof your photos.
*jpg photos in sRGB
Also bit depth difference is huge
I would also add that modern cameras can be incredibly opinionated about how they process photos. At times they can make reasonable choices and at times poor choices all with varying consequences.
My consumer grade Olympus bodies allow heavy tweaking of the JPG profiles - color and intensity curves, etc (not just selecting from the 10+ art filters). Pretty sure Fuji does the same. IE, anybody who's willing to dig into editing RAWs can also drill into the camera's settings and tweak the JPG output.
RAW is still more powerful, but if you don't want to spend time in post, there are usually ways to get JPG output that's closer to what you want.
I noticed that all my edits lately were lighter and lighter, so I switched to jpeg and I am Adobe free. Thing is, no amount of postprocessing would help if photo is bad, then, when photo is good, tweaking it is not really needed.
It's a nice comparison of advice that I was pondering with when I started photography.
As an advice I'd like to give about the comparison: stick to one of each options for a series of pictures. Do not change these principles too often.
It pays off to develop an intuition about whichever option you choose.
Just personally, I try to limit my max ISO, I do crop pictures, but I do not alter them. Fujifilm has awesome color grading, so I only need JPG. I love my prime lenses and I don't wanna use zoom anytime soon.
And all these things were different 5 years ago.
I'm old enough to remember that the preference for prime lenses over zoom was because early zoom lenses were crap. Even now, (mumble) decades later, intellectually knowing that thanks to improvements in glass and cadcam manufacturing techniques, today's zooms are much better than what I grew up with, I still don't use them.
And I've been listening to the whole crop-no crop thing most of my life too. BUt ECB didn't crop! people say (though he sometimes did). I try to shoot to get it 'in camera' as close as I can to what I want, but as the article says, sometimes you just can't. You still get to choose what your final image is going to be. And that's the thing about 'rules' and 'advice'--they're just some guidelines, things to think about, but they're highly contextual, depending on the situation.
Alright here’s my counter point. The useful range (min focal length to max focal length) of most zooms is small enough that if you have a high end sensor and you’re not doing large prints you might as well use a prime. It’s like you don’t need those intermediate steps.
With zooms, if you need wide angle you have to switch to a wide angle zoom, if you need telephoto you need to switch to that. There are some exceptions like zooms that cover ~35-140 but most of them fall into one of the categories that a prime falls into
I kind of regret not having started shooting raw earlier. Sometimes I want to print an old shot and my options are very limited by the profile applied by the camera. But back in the time, I tried raw, and it was too much hassle. Maybe now the shot I worry over wouldn't exist because when I'd stuck to raw I'd have given up the hobby entirely.
So the takeaway is to try things repeatedly and see what works. The article also argues in that direction. Though I think there's much nuance lost in how the article stays in the extremes. The camera I always have with me is not a cell phone but a proper digital camera that fits in my pocket. These are amazing!
working pro for more than a decade now, maybe some off this was relevant very early on but it's really just all web forum gear chatter. What people miss is that a photographer's job isn't using a camera or lamenting settings, it's lighting. Done artificially or by modifying what's available, you have to master both. The camera is incidental and what he's describing his just picture taking. If you're interested in photography it's more useful to take a studio lighting course and learn about fixtures and modifiers than worrying about iso.
> If you're interested in photography it's more useful to take a studio lighting course and learn about fixtures and modifiers than worrying about iso.
When you do primarily street photography, and you have almost no ability to change the light, knowledge of studio lighting is all but useless.
In street photography, and any photography really, paying attention to light is super important. I’d argue it’s more important when you can’t control it.
Sure you could just go out onto the street, take a bunch of photos and pay no attention to light, but if you want to improve your photos, or know why good photos are good, paying attention to light is just as important as say composition
I'm not saying knowledge of lighting is unimportant. I'm saying knowledge of studio lighting is of little use when you don't have control over things like the type of lighting (daylight vs. incandescent vs. fluorescent, etc.) and lighting placement because you're shooting outdoors and you're limited largely to natural lighting (perhaps with the exception of a flash), and no ability to bounce lighting.
I'm a surf photographer and rely on my camera automatics a lot. They are allowed to move freely within defined limits.
99% of my pictures are technically fine.
I only use full manual if the picture job needs it.
Most of the time setting the aperture is enough (and the camera allows to set the exposure time and ISO automatically, but set limits which to automatics is not allowed to cross). On the other side action/sport photography is mostly shutter time bound - then the other side around.
my mom thought all photos had to be taken with us kids squinting into the blinding sun (her with the sun in her back) in order to get enough light for the camera
Depending on the camera and film she had, she might not have been totally wrong. Or, at minimum, this likely allowed a higher "keep" rate for shots without futzing about with the ISO setting, exposure compensation, or anything else (which might not have been available if she was using a basic P&S).
i don't know how old you/your moms are, but chances are that even if you're younger your moms' mom probably did that because she was taking pictures with something like kodachrome 64 than unless you're in the sun it ended up having 0 shadow detail. so it was better to have a least a squinting picture of a kid than have half their face be complete darkness.
I always crop, but always and only 8x10. Why? Because I saw the results from my past clients. There is something about that ration, whether it is genetic or historical, that makes people feel more drawn to my photographs.
And I agree with all of his points. Modern cameras have made people focus more on the technical and less on the art. I sold a photograph I took with a point and shoot Canon A series for $150 multiple times.
> Modern cameras have made people focus more on the technical and less on the art.
It's not modern cameras that have done that. It's the fact that technology reduces the relevance of human experience, so that the only way for people to feel a sense of relating is by talking about gear, and that sense is superficial indeed.
that's not cropping, that's resizing -- you're resizing the aspect ratio of your image from its natural dimensions to 8x10. cropping would be if you cropped your image to only show 10% of that image...
Almost all "advice" is ultimately an artistic decision: It's an arbitrary rule that each photographer can change.
However, there are rules that DO help improve the quality of photos, especially if you're a beginner. Then, to move beyond being a beginner, it's good to know how to break the rules (as with any art or discipline).
As a new photographer, I‘m disappointed at how bad most cameras are at HDR. No in-body exposure stacking / combining, no HDR tone mapping, ancient JPEG format with only slow adoption of newer formats. Getting certain landscape shots without a blown out sky is genuinely impossible without post editing (or graduated ND filters, which feel like a workaround to me). Smartphones get this right.
I’m someone who actively dislikes editing, on a computer or elsewhere. I love going outside, I love the challenge of getting a good photo. But once I press shutter, I want to have it. I want it to be fully baked.
I want a camera to be more than just a good sensor + dials. I want it to take good pictures, not just good measurements in the form of a RAW file.
I've been doing photography as a hobby since I was a kid, learning from my dad who also did photography as a hobby. We've both won numerous awards, although I have not won as many as my dad, and none of them are particularly prestigious (mostly local / regional contests, often tied into a fair)
Pretty much all of the stuff being discussed here is meaningless, although a table stakes that every person should learn. The most important thing in photography is learning about light and lighting, how light works, how the camera interacts with light, and how to capture and harness light. Every single thing you see with your eyes, and every single thing you capture with your camera is just a reflection of light off your subject and the subject's surroundings. If you don't understand light, you cannot formulate a composition, and if you can't formulate a composition it doesn't matter what settings you use on the camera, it's not going to be a good photo.
I love the technical aspects of cameras, both film and digital, and I delve very deeply into that myself out of my enjoyment of these aspects, but they're really ultimately not important to the actual art of photography and taking good photos. They're just tools. What matters most is composition. I see a lot of great photos online that are taken with smartphones, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have complicated gear because I enjoy futzing with complicated gear and some of the things I do visually are not possible (easily) with a phone, but for the most part these days I take most of my photos with a phone and some have even been printed and hung in galleries.
There's no reason to worry about any of the meaningless things this article talks about until you understand light, composition, and have figured out what you want to say with that photo. Keep in mind your phone, and any camera you can buy today has more digital resolution than any of the professional grade digital gear available just a decade ago, and in some cases more digital resolution than was available on 35mm film. Even with the revival of film today, you get more stops of dynamic range on a current-generation professional mirrorless camera than you can get on 35mm film.
These technical details basically have ceased to matter within the last 3-5 years, all that matters is composition, storytelling, and lighting.
> Photography is an art form and that means you get to do whatever you want. Edit freely [...]
This has made me lose faith and interest in (most of) photography. While I can't speak for the past, modern photography often feels dishonest to me. Many photographers heavily retouch their images, yet allow viewers to believe that the final result reflects reality.
It would be more honest if photographers acknowledged that their published work is a creative interpretation rather than a direct representation of reality. But of course, admitting this would diminish the "wow" factor.
True, they are for likes. Images with the most likes are kind of kitschy to me, sunset, mountains, or stuff like that. As a mediocre, or even bad photographer i can photograph whatever pleases me, and as amateur I am out of that race.
This is at the heart of why so many people overestimate the impact of their photos. They remember being at the Tetons, awake cold and alive at dawn, taking the picture (for example). Or they remember a particular photo session with a model, perhaps someone they knew.
The photographer remembers the moment. But the viewer gets only what is inside the frame of the image.
The crucial thing is that it is totally OK to take pictures for yourself! You don’t need to blow some random person’s mind in order to truly enjoy photography. I think sometimes that gets lost, especially with beginners.
Often people are inspired to take up photography because they loved some images they saw. But delivering that impact to a broad audience is super hard to do. It requires a far more analytical and self-critical approach than most people want to sustain in a hobby.