Tag: photography
-
You Need Lessons!
I was a self-taught photographer….and it showed. I started my career freelancing…a euphemism for being unemployed….back in the early 1970s. When I got my first full-time newspaper job I didn’t even know how or when to bounce a flash (a basic news photographer’s trick). So when I retired after nearly 60 years of professional shooting…
-
Black & White Blues
This isn’t a great image. It was shot with a Nikkormat with a flaky meter (since fixed I hope). It’s not really composed well and there’s something wrong with the exposure (can’t really blame the meter as I was carrying an incident light meter in my bag). But it gets worse! The HP5 was over…
-
So How Evil Is FB?
It’s worse than you might think! We’re talking specifically FaceBook photography sites. These are the free sites that individuals setup and then as they are the “administrators” they then rule hopefully with a benevolent hand. But as these self-appointed administrators set the rules, they also dictate the ethics and morales and general deportment of their…
-
Yes Virginia
On my local photo walk page some of the photographers were lamenting that in their opinion street photography had grown stale and that nobody was shooting anything close to what Garry Winoguard was shooting several decades ago. I disagreed. Here’s a copy of my post: Sorry (actually I’m not…just trying to be polite) but this…
-
Fix It In LR
On FaceBook a new photographer posted an image of a young woman and she asked for advice. As I’ve said before this is a bad thing to do as you open your artwork up to the confusing, conflicting and often just dead wrong comments from thousands of random strangers. And that’s what she got. The…
-
Should I Ask?
When it comes to street photography a lot of new photographers ask whether or not they should get permission from their subjects before shooting. And the answer is, of course, it depends. Asking permission will automatically kill any spontaneity and naturalness to the image. A lot of the best street photographers don’t. I just got…
-
Will AI Ruin Photography?
All over FaceBook photography sites photographers’ hands are being wrung red and doom is predicted as artificial intelligence (AI) starts learning photography. So what do you think? Are you with doomsayers that artificial photography will ruin photography as we know it? Why even in my photography club (Oakville Camera Club) artificial intelligence is being used…
-
What FB Gets Wrong
Photo by Marion West You see it everyday on FaceBook. Somebody, usually somebody new to photography, asks “what or what settings did you use to get that photo?” What they should have asked was “how did you see that photo!” Asking what settings or what camera tells you nothing about how the photographer saw the…
-
The Photographer In Your Face
I talked about The Oakville Camera Club’s Exploration # 37 “Strangers Up Close And Personal” in my last post but there’s more! This teaching event is all about shooting street photography but with the twist that the photographer must make some sort of personal connection with the subject. So how do you go about walking…
-
How Do I Get Better?
I see this plea daily on FaceBook. Somebody with a new digital camera or a new-to-them old film camera posts a bunch of really bad images and asks for advice on how to improve their photography. How bad could these images possible be? Well a lot of them are really out of focus. Some of…