Lessons

Lesson Info

The Photographic Process

Okay, so let's kinda talk about, conceptually, how we approach subjects, or at least how I think about things and, kind of, prioritizing what we're doing with the entire process. So, my Photo 5 Step, things that you need to be doing, is typically, it's first about subject identification. If you don't have subject, your photo's gonna be probably little weak. If you have everything else right, but you just don't have a good subject, and so that's kind of the first thing is what am I shooting, what is the point of this particular photograph? Once I figure out what I'm shooting, I'm gonna do an assessment from my point of view. Where can I get to? Is there a ladder? Do I have my tripod that gets really low to the ground? Can I shoot off of the balcony? Can I do this, can I do that? And we're gonna see it in an upcoming section here where I ask one of these questions, and I had to ask a very hard question about can I do this, and it was very inconvenient, but it got me the shot that I wante...

d. So, what can you do about getting where you need to be to get the shot you want? Now, the next three items are not necessarily in order. Usually, it starts with choosing your subject, and then figuring out where you can be to shoot that. The next three depend a little bit on the type of subject, but generally, you're gonna be figuring out your exposure. What's the concept of this photo? Do I want fast shutter speeds? Do I want lots of depth of field? What's special about this image, and how do I need to treat it with the camera's settings? At that point, I'm gonna worry about focusing. In some cases, it's action, and I'm gonna have to constantly be tracking that action. If it's a stationary subject, it's usually pretty easy to figure out exactly what I want in focus and how I want to set my camera up to get that focus. And then, I'm gonna play around a little bit with the composition. And so sometimes, I can tell by a subject, I know exactly from the moment I recognize what the subject is, what the composition is going to be, 'cause I've got something that just clicked in my brain. Other times, you gotta kinda play around with it a little bit. So these last three, they kinda get mixed around a little bit, sometimes you get one set up before the other. So let's talk a little bit about identifying subjects. Well, you can take a photo of anything you want. I mean, that's what's great about photography is photography reflects our own interest in what we do. And so, you can choose anything. Beware that when you shoot a photograph, though, people don't get to know about the other things you see and the rest of your experience. They're only getting small glimpse of what you're experiencing. And so, as I've mentioned several times before, it's not about trying to tell the entire story with one photograph. What can I do with this one frame of a shot? So when you're looking around, think about, you know, this is where studying up on your location can pay off. What are lookin' for, what are you expecting to find, what are you hoping to find? Try to be prepared for where you are, what you are hunting, you might say. What is it that you're, come up with something, what's the perfect thing that you would like to see? It is nice to have, and it's very important, that you have a very open mindset, and so, there's a very careful balance. Here we go to that yin yang thing again, right? You gotta do one thing, you gotta do the other thing equally well. One is, you gotta have a plan, and the other is, you have to be completely open to whatever might present itself because if you're too set on your plan, you won't be able to take advantage of that opportunity. But if all you're doing is just kinda looking for something and you're just kinda floatin' around, not able to pick on anything, you gotta have that balance between the two. A lot of photographers fall in love at first sight, and they have to ask the hard question, is there something better? They see something, they pull their camera out, they're eager to shoot, you know, that first shot of the day. You know, when you take your camera out, you're like, "I wanna get that first shot off. "I'm excited to shoot." And it's really hard to keep that camera in the camera bag and really just, "Is this it, is that it, is that it? "Which one is the right one?" What it's really good to do is just take a little bit of time. One of the things that I'll do on the tours that I lead is we'll go to a location and I'll say, "Everybody, put your camera bag right in here. "Spend the next five minutes "eyeballing what you want to shoot." And what that does is it forces people to walk around, and they see what they're doing, and in some situations, a photographer comes over, and they get caught up shooting something, and then it's time to go and this was the only place that they went to. And if they just spend a minute lookin' around, they might realize that it's much better over here, and they would get a shot that they would prefer than by just taking the camera and kinda letting the camera lead them around. So, does anyone watch the TV show The Voice? Okay. So I don't watch it, but I know of it, and it's a competition of singers, and there are some other singers who are judging the junior singers. And what happens is the junior singers come up and they sing a little bit, and these other singers are gonna be coaches. And what they're doing is they're really doing two things. Number one, they're judging the contestants on how good they are, but they're also judging the contestants on how well they can work together. And it's the same thing when you're shooting photographs. You're gonna be choosing a subject thinking, "How good is that subject?" But you also need to be thinking, "What skillset do I have? "What tools do I have in the tool bag? "Can I deal with this particular subject?" And a lot of this is really gonna come down to how creative are you? What can you do that maybe another photographer can't do? And so, try to think, "How good is this subject, "but what can I do with it? "What can I do with this subject that nobody else can do "or nobody else would think of?" Chances are somebody's thought of it, but just, that's where that creativity that all of us have needs to really blossom and really come out. "I'm gonna do something different here." We need to be honest about our evaluation. I know some of us just get so excited, we pick the camera up and we point it up there and we're not even really sure what we're taking a picture of. Be clear about what your subject is. Is it the best subject? Think about the lighting for a moment. What is the lighting? And so just considering everything about that photograph. The more you think about it, the more you'll be able to pick out what's right and what's wrong with it, and how to make it better or worse. All right, figuring out where you can be, and so this is partly physically where you can get to, legally, where can you get to? Ethically, where can you get to? It's figuring out what angle of view and what lenses do you have? Because in many cases, you can move up a little closer with a wide angle, or a little bit back with a telephoto depending on what type of shot you want to get. And so, be thinking about all of those different options and the homework assignments, the learning projects that you got earlier. This is where that homework assignment pays off because now you are more familiar with what a particular scene looks like from here with a 24 versus here, a 35, and here, a 50 millimeter lens. And so you don't need to spend as much time trying different stuff when you're out there, and you'll be able to get faster and better shots the more experience you have because you don't need to go through the trial and error on every single shot that you shoot. Next up comes the photographic treatment, and this goes back to the exposure section that we talked about. You remember we went through the five different scenarios where we're setting up our shutter speeds and our apertures, and then we're looking at our light meter and making adjustments so that we can kinda stick to the plans that we originally started the photograph with, depending on what is most important in that photograph. And certainly you go through the process of setting the exposures, however they need to be set. You're gonna focus, we had a whole section on focusing. Think about that, what did we spend? We spent close to three hours figuring out how to focus our lenses and our cameras, and that's just part of it, and so we want to get it nailed as best we can. And then composing the image, trying some different compositions along the way. So once you shoot your perfect shot, what are you gonna do then? Well, it would probably be wise to check your image, whether that's in your viewfinder, and for the mirrorless camera, on the back of the camera with an SLR. The things that you want to check for is you want to check the exposure by looking at the histogram. Hard to tell by looking at the back of the camera whether you got the right exposure. The histogram is where the truth lies. If it's really important, you want to magnify in and check the focus to make sure that you have the depth of field and the subject that you want in focus. I remember earlier in this talk, there was the little boy who had the big white turban on, and I remember when I shot that photo, I got, like, a shiver up my spine, but I was still busy shooting photos, I didn't have a chance to check that photo. And I was walking back to the bus, and I was like, "I gotta get that photo "and I gotta zoom in and I want to look at that eye. "The eye is sharp, yes!" 'Cause it's just as likely that I would've had it out of focus, but you know, when you nail that focus, you feel really good about it. And it's nice to go home going, "I got that one. "It's good, the exposure looks good, "the focus looks good, I know it's gonna be fine." Check the composition, look at that horizon, look around the edge, is there something that you didn't notice in the viewfinder that was kind of poppin' through the corner? Like, every once in a while, I've taken photographs where wasn't paying as close to the corner as I should've, and something was in there that shouldn't be in there. So, if you take everything right, you do everything right, should you take a second photo? And I would say no. If you've done everything perfect, there's no reason to take another photo that is exactly the same, so if you're on a tripod, and you go click, click, that second click is not doing anything for you. All it's gonna do is you're gonna come home and you're gonna, like, "Which one should I choose? "Is something better about this one than that one?" And then you're gonna spend all this time trying to figure out why you took two photos? And so, if you are gonna take a second shot, change something, change anything about the photograph. Figure out what's the most likely problem that you're gonna have in the photograph. Might be exposure, you might need to do a little overexposure or a little underexposure, a little bit of that bracketing, maybe just a two-stop manual bracketing. Maybe you're right on the cutting edge of focus and you're not sure if it's gonna get right. And so sometimes what I'll do is when I'm shooting a landscape shot where I'm trying to get everything in focus, I'll shoot at F22, and then I'll change it to F16. If I don't really need F22, maybe I can get away at F and I won't have as much diffraction, and I can determine that a little better later on in the computer than I can live out in the field. And then finally, composition. It takes a little while, if you remember the metal spiral that we talked at the beginning of section nine, it took me a little while to kinda figure out where I wanted to be, so it was a work in progress. And so, just shooting slightly different compositions. And we had talked earlier about this, there was a question that came in about shooting too tight because the format that you're gonna use actually needs to be a slightly different format, and so shooting a second photo that's a little bit wider off. And this is why it's really handy having a zoom lens for these situations because you can just back it off, you know, 10, 20 millimeters depending on what the setting is. If you have a fixed lens, little bit harder to do that, but maybe sometimes you shoot a few portraits really tight, and then you come back a little bit. And so that's my Photo 5 Step is how I usually approach a subject. Identification, figure out where I'm gonna stand, and then it's the other three elements. As I said, those get mixed up, depending on the type of subject that they are. So, hopefully, that makes sense and kind of gives you a little bit of a battle plan, if you will.