Seeing the light, in creative photography 2
Well we talked briefly about aperture in the basics of photography; to be sure I have just scraped the surface on aperture, what it does and how it is used.
Personally I believe in all my years of learning how to use a camera and teaching others what I know and always learning from everyone, that what makes CORREECT EXPOSURE so difficult to get our mind around is our eyes do in an instant what we have to tell the camera to do. That is why so many photographers never take their camera off of auto or one of the preprogrammed settings.
It just is not something we have to do, our brain just does it and we never stop to think about the light.
Seeing the light is a saying that all serious photographers spend a major portion of their learning curve on that it is a slogan, a mantra if you will. Seeing the contrast between shadows and brightness becomes second nature to an experienced photographer. We get a jolt of excitement when we see beautiful light, and the absence of light that we do stupid things trying to capture this most exquisite and elusive of things that others just take for granite.
Trust me you will too when you learn to see the light!!!
There are two kinds of light, natural and artificial. Both types of light take a certain understanding of, to be able to use either or both to generate a great photo. A huge misconception is a Professional photographer just goes click and the shoot is done. “It’s a wrap!!!” Thinking that a pro should be able to get the job done quickly and efficiently and wham it is done! ”WRONG!” Out of necessity yes we can click off a couple of shots and nail it, but the cost to do the shoot, the clients need for just the right photo means we can shoot a 1,000 or more shots a day just to turn in 50.
While we are on it another misconception is that photography is glamorous job, and “boy you sure are lucky to be able to take photos all day….. Blah, blah, blah.” There are times when this is true, but what others don’t see is the countless hours of travel, set up, break down, sales calls, portfolio reviews, settling our nerves to walk into the roar, remembering we are hired to be calm, cool and collected on the outside but there is always that inner voice saying “boy don’t let me screw this up and let down my client!”
In some cases the whole crew, makeup artists, hair stylists, or how about a wedding where there is no re-shoot? Not to mention the 10,000 hour of practice. Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t switch my occupation for nothing, but it is hard, breaking rocks in the hot sun work too.
So now that I have said this we are going to help you to quickly learn and skip the whole process of, burn while you learn photography lessons or how to learn photography through the college of hard knocks and get the basics of basics, the fundamentals of photography, to build our skills on. There are no short cuts, a short cut is the long way around the barn just to get to the same spot, so lets get the basics correct and then build on those ideas and become more and more confident when we pick up a camera, to use a manual setting because we know exactly what we are looking for in a exposure or photograph that we can not rely on some auto program to possibly blow the shot.
Wedding photography, glamour photography, creative photography uses light to record an image; different types of professional photography require different types of light modifiers, lenses and cameras to get that Professional look.
We will look into all of these things as we travel down the road of photon writing together.
Michael Knapp
06-02-2011