After posting about exposure triangle and how blurring water means decreasing aperture, I got a few questions about other ways to blur the water in your composition. So, here you go.
It seems that water always seems to attract attention in photography…whether it’s an ocean at sunrise, dew on a flower, or waterfalls gushing through a mountain stream, the impact that water can have on our imagery is very powerful. Harness that power to your own creative ends by recognizing 5 ways to blur it to your advantage:
Slow Down!
1. Slow that shutter speed down! Your shutter speed is the best way to blur water…taking things down to at least 1/4 of a second, if not longer. This is what I did in my last post about the exposure triangle. It’s still my favorite way of blurring water to a creamy smooth texture in photography.
Use a Tripod
2. Steady those shots – even without slowing your shutter speed, to seconds, keeping the camera stable to prevent shake when hand holding is near impossible, so please take and use your tripod! Of course, it goes without saying that when shooting at slower shutter speeds, it helps immensely to be solidly mounted on a good set of legs. Without getting into the pros and cons of various features and qualities of various tripods, if you are shooting a 10 second exposure of a beach at sunrise, you need legs!
Palmetto Statue
ND Filters
3. Sometimes even with slowing shutters and using tripods, it’s just not enough. So, you need to find another way to control the light. ND filters are the answer. I’ve seen a lot of people run into an invariably brighter exposure… and to combat extra ambient light in the scene, they use ND filters. These filters essentially prevent those extra rays of light from hitting your sensor. Polarizers can work too, but they are less effective as they can have some downsides to them including elimination of reflections, casting a specific tone on your entire image, and more. When in doubt, always use ND filters.
SC Pier at sunrise
As always, there’s more than one way to skin a can (or blur water)! More involve shutter dragging with fill flash, and lots of others. What ways do you use to blur and control waters’ appearance in your images? Sound off in the comments with tips and tricks of your own! Happy shooting all, and we’ll see you back here again next time with more photo goodness!
So go the words of the famous poem by Robert W. Service in his infamous The Cremation of Sam McGee. As a youth, I actually memorized this poem to narrate for a church talent show, but before my turn, Steven Heffner read the same damn poem from a book. Naturally, I felt like I couldn’t follow his performance with my own as it’d be a copycat one.
Fast forward probably 35+ years and work sends me to Yellowknife for a week of training delivery – the world capitol of Northern Lights displays. Two days of wondrous displays, and a visit to the Snow Castles of Great Slave Lake, and I came away with a few keepers. Some are better than others of course, yet for better or worse, here’s the selections I kept!
Through this experience, I’ve come to appreciate just how cold it is when your lashes freeze to your face. At -15 below zero Farenheit (about -30 Celcius), it was really hard to operate the camera controls. I kept taking my gloves off to try and adjust the settings, but after 3-4 tries to tweak things, I could start feeling the early stages of frostbite, so left some of the settings at less than desirable positions, and just go for composition.
Granted, not the best of those who do this sort of thing regularly, but I consider this a bucket list item checked. The added irony in this storyline is that I now live in Nashville area of TN, and I have some plum pits I’ve been germinating and perhaps planting this upcoming spring. That said, let’s leave the whole bit of Lake LeBarge to the poem though, eh?
As an avid proponent of doing due diligence, I’ve always encouraged people to do research on lenses before buying them. Whether it means renting them from vendors like LensProToGo, Rent Glass, or through vendor relationships, it’s a great way to get a first hand look on how lenses perform under a variety of circumstances. This was the case when I’d been the benefactor of a solid relationship with the folks at Sigma. I spent about a month kicking the proverbial tires on one of their latest lenses to hit the market: the Sigma 8-16mm lens. Continue reading “Hardware review: Sigma 8-16”→
When we look at the elements of composition, the three that everyone constantly considers are shutter speed, aperture settings and ISO (or ASA in the old days of film). These three factors make up something called the Exposure Triangle.
Readers of the blog have seen this before, in my post about The Future of Photography. The rules of the exposure triangle (such that there are rules in photography…) state that if you want to keep the lighting the same in your shot, as you increase one factor, another must decrease proportionally, while the third is kept the same. What does that mean? Simple – let’s take scenario I encountered when on a photo shoot with some friends touring the waterfalls of South Carolina. While shooting, I saw a perfect scene to demonstrate how this would be manifested.
For our first example, let’s set set up our camera and take a picture of a waterfall. In order to hand hold, and easily compose things, we have the following settings.
A shutter speed of f 1/250
An aperture of f 4.5
And an ISO of 100
Fabulous – but in looking at the photo, we’re not crazy with how the photo looks. Something is off, and we want to change one of our settings to make for a better composition. I’d like to see the same photo but with some blurred water. Now in your own photography it could be something else, like a flower to be sharper throughout the entire depth of the frame, or the background of a portrait to be completely blurred. So, how do we accomplish that? This is where understanding what each factor does to the composition:
Shutter speed
Shutter speed controls how quickly the shutter opens and closes. The higher the setting, the faster the “action” is – so you can freeze something like a speeding bullet, a blade of a moving helicopter, or the wing of a hummingbird.
Aperture
The aperture is the size of the opening on your lens. Think of it like a hose that controls flow rate. You could use a really skinny hose that only lets a teensy bit of water through, or a fire hose that just gushes gallons and gallons. Now, as you open the aperture wider, and let more light in, you also do something called creating a shallow depth of field. And the more shallow your aperture is, the less focused things will be in the foreground and behind your subject.
ISO
The ISO is the noise or sensitivity setting for your camera sensor. This changes how sensitive the sensor is to light hitting it. Lower ISO settings make it more sensitive to light, higher settings make it less sensitive. Back in the days of film, this was done by using films of a certain ASA value (which ironically was referred to as film speed, but I digress…) But the fun thing to consider is that once you inserted film in a camera, you were stuck with that film setting until you finished every frame, so ISO adjustability in digital cameras was a HUGE advancement.
Okay, so now, back to our example photo. Now in our example, we want to make the water more blurred, so we have to slow the shutter down, not speed it up. Okay, so let’s do that:
New shutter speed = 0.5″ (one half second)
So, what’s going to happen? Well, because we are now letting the shutter stay open a LOT longer (0.5 seconds is HUGE, but we need that to really blur water)! As a result, more light is going to hit the sensor, and make it way too over-exposed, so we need to compensate for that by adjusting the other two controlling elements – aperture and ISO. Now in this example, our ISO is already as low as it can go, so our only option is to make our aperture opening much smaller:
A shutter speed of f 0.5″
An aperture of f 29.0
And an ISO of 100
See how we did that? Now, this shot is going to have much more blurred water, and our exposure stays consistent. But, we’ve effectively made the same shot with a different composition!
See how the shutter speed and aperture will change the entire composition? Yes, I blurred the water, which was my primary goal, but look at the log in the foreground. Now it’s a little out of focus due to the shorter depth of field. Pretty fun stuff, eh? I should also mention now that since I slowed the shutter speed to half a second, there was no way I could hand hold that, so I mounted it to a tripod in order to prevent camera shake.
As a reminder, for a strict metadata comparison, that’s what happens when you account for the exposure triangle:
Shot 1
Shutter speed = 1/125th
Aperture = f 4.5
ISO = 100
Shot 2
Shutter speed = .5 seconds
Aperture = 29
ISO = 100
Happy shooting!
Author note: I was going to post this article in response to a question that came to me from Quora. Imagine my surprise when I realized I had never written a post in 10 years on something as fundamental as the Exposure Triangle! It may have been written and lost in the server crash from a few years ago, but thanks to Quora for giving me the reason to re-create it now!
Lately the internet has been teeming with people fixating on the latest iPhone release, and questions are coming through the woodwork asking the same question over and over. Everyone thinks they are coming up with an original question, just because they changed one word here or there, but essentially all these questions come down to smart phone cameras versus traditional cameras. I’ve answered the question so much via email, in forums, on Reddit, and in Quora that I finally said “enough is enough”. For all who want to ask the question, I am going to direct you to this post!
Smart Phone Cameras in a nutshell
Let’s break down this phrase a bit – smart phone cameras What does this mean? It means the phone vendors like Apple, Samsung, LG, Huawei and the rest are adding cameras as software applications to sit on top of these cell phones. I’ll say that one more time for clarity. At their core, these devices are cell phones. So, on that basis alone, why would anyone want to draw a comparison between an add-on feature to a device designed with photography in mind?
The answer lies in dollar bills. That’s it – money! Vendors want to sell more devices, and if the phones can’t really be improved (let’s face it, cell phones are merely a function of the network they are on), then sales plummet! Think about it – iPhones, Androids, and the rest all must be on a cellular network for their original designed purpose of making phone calls, right? So, off the top of your head, how many cellular providers can you name? Not regional ones. I mean Tier 1 providers! I came up with 4/5:
Verizon
AT&T
T-Mobile
Sprint
US Cellular (don’t really wanna count these guys, but ok…)
I think the phone makers agree:
iPhone Carriers offered
From the Apple iPhone 11 Splash page
Samsung carriers offered
The others, like metroPCS, Cricket, Go Phone, etc. are really just smaller ones that piggyback on the major providers networks (and many are actually owned by them!)
So, don’t fall for the hype. iPhones, Samsungs, and every device out there as far as their phone service goes, is only as good as the network it lives on. They can’t sell products that way, because the experience will be different for everyone, based on the network and where the customer lives relative to the towers. So, cell phone vendors try to stand apart by their add-ons. That is the only reason why every vendor tries to hype their accessory apps like cameras, computer speeds, and media storage aspects of these ridiculous tiny devices (of course tongue in cheek when you consider that these devices have more processing capacity than what we had when sending a rocket to the moon!).
But, everyone likes cameras, and photographs are a part of our lives. We are a visual society, so everyone wants a camera they can always have with them. Naturally, since we always have our cell phones with us, it’s sheer brilliance to make the camera feature the selling point.
But the cameras are crap.
There, I said it. Cell phone cameras are crap compared to dedicated cameras. Don’t believe me? Check this out:
Here is a photographic representation of various camera sensor sizes ranging from a medium format camera, all the way down to the sensor sizes of point-and-shoot cameras, with their actual dimensions (courtesy of Wikipedia):
I don’t even see a cell phone camera listed, so off to Google I went in search of the actual dimensions of a cell phone CCD sensor for capturing images. Here’s what I found…
So, the sensor in a smart phone is about 7mm x 6mm in physical size. The author claims that’s “about the same as a 1/2.5″ sensor”. I actually think it’s closer to the 1/1.7″ range, but that’s miniscule…
A meaningless measurement from the outside looking in, but it looks to me based on the lens that the sensor is about 1/3 of an inch. Interesting that this sort of information is not readily available from Apple, Samsung, or other phone vendors. I wonder why?
The answer is because at the end of the day, the sensor on these cameras are teensy tiny miniscule little things that are crammed into the innards of a phone, trying to get you to buy into the fact that the CCD sensor of the phone (thus making it a “smart” phone) is better than the sensor of an SLR, or even a point and shoot.
I’ll go to my grave saying that it’s not better, and never will be. Simple physics prevents it.
Lenses
If you ask any photographer the question of what camera to buy (excluding talk of the smart phone cameras), invariably, they will tell you that it’s not the camera you buy into – it’s the camera system. More specifically, it’s the glass that matters. The reason for this is because the camera is just a box that houses the sensor, and it’s the lens that defines the clarity of the shot, your aperture range, and even the sharpness of the glass comes into play. I know photographers that refuse to by Tamron or Sigma glass because they claim it’s “not as sharp as Canon” lenses. I’ll leave that argument aside for now, because the point here is to highlight that even if we were to exclude the sensor as not being as much of a factor based on this concept, we need to now look at the lenses in these phone cameras.
So, let’s do that for the iPhone 11:
That’s actually better than I would have thought, because most predecessor phone cameras had fixed or nearly fixed aperture sizes on their lenses. But a range from 1.8 – 2.4 aperture opening is impressive, as it’s nearly a full stop (read more about apertures and F-stops here) so I’ll grant that. Now let’s compare that to the absolute cheapest lens for a Canon lens at B&H Photo (I looked at the EF and EF-S lens mounts). I also could have picked Nikon, Pentax, or another maker, but I am CanonBlogger for a reason: 🙂
So, for $125, I can get a lens that goes from an f1.8 all the way up to f22? (That’s about a 6 full F-stop range by the way, for those of you keeping score..) A smart phone camera will never compete with that. Now, for the average Joe (or Josephina) consumer, what does that matter or mean? It means from a smart phone, you’ll always get images that look like this:
And never get images that look like this:
Now, with my rant over on the differences between the camera apps and sensors in phones versus the dedicated SLR and even point and shoot cameras, I need to clarify something.
Software
The way that phone cameras are able to get some apparently stunning imagery is not because of the camera – it’s because of the software. So, if you really want to compare apples to apples, the comparison should be between phone camera software and standalone software. And I will grant you that the software the developers at Apple and Samsung have done some amazing work as to what’s baked into the computational algorithms. The problem lies in the fact that it’s baked into the phone. We have no control over it.
Now, devil’s advocates will say “There’s an app for that” and sure, there are tons, but that’s not a fair comparison, now is it? Comparing a software app from a phone camera to a dumb SLR that has the sole purpose of capturing images makes no sense. So, if you want to get into a discussion of software comparisons, we can do that, but we need to make it an apples to apples comparison. Which one would you like to start with? We could start with a comparison to Lightroom, Photoshop, and others…
But if anyone tries to tell me that the hard baked software for photo editing in a phone can compare with Photoshop, Lightroom, or any of the above, I’ll… well, just don’t! 🙂
Printing
Does anyone print images anymore? I am not sure about that to be honest. With social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn (and probably a whole host of others that I am not hip to), we often are looking at images through this medium rather than by prints. So, my argument here could be meaningless, but…
Take a photo with a smart phone camera. Take the same photo with a point and shoot camera. Try to print them at your local print store. My guess is you’ll be able to print up to perhaps an 8×10 photograph from the cell phone. From the SLR camera – you can go billboard and poster sized effortlessly. Why? Because of the sensor and the pixels.
You see, cramming pixels more tightly together in a small teensy sensor is going to produce something called artifacting, which ultimately translates to bad pictures when you try to print to a larger medium. So, there’s that too…but again, perhaps I am long in the tooth because I don’t know anyone who prints photographs anymore. 🙁
Conclusion
So, there you have it – the full explanation as to why a smart phone camera will never truly compare with a dedicated camera. The SLR will always win. In any category.
What say ye all, interweb citizens of the world? Agree with my assessment? Hate it? Sound off as to why you like what I have to say, or where I am just flat out wrong in my preconceived notions. Otherwise, I’m ready – what’s the next question…?
A while back I was doing some testing of new software for displaying larger panoramas on the blog here and came across a site called Momento360. Has anyone heard of this company before? I bet there are some truly spectacular photographs on display there but I’ve not uploaded enough to try to start finding others and sharing! So, in a lame attempt to see how well my photographs convert and then show up when shared, I thought I’d give it a try:
This photograph was taken a few years ago when I was down in Panama going from the one side to the other, and we hit the lake at the top between the locks. It was an amazing trip, but am not sure the photograph really conveys it well enough. That said, what I am more interested in right now is the user experience.
Did this work for you when you viewed it? If so, did you view it on a desktop computer, a laptop, or a mobile device? Were you in an app or on a browser like Safari, Chrome, or other? Let me know your experiences here…
Additionally, do you have any particular software programs that you have used for photographing and then sharing panorama photos in your social media streams? What has worked (or conversely, not worked) for you?
“Welcome to Whitehorse”, the sign says, “Capital of the Yukon”!
Shortly on the heels of work sending me to the frigid north of Yellowknife, where I had a rare opportunity to see the Northern Lights in all their glory, I found myself sent back to the north again, for a second round of training in none other than Whitehorse. I was ecstatic. This trip to Whitehorse was cathartic for me on several levels:
The first predates me. My father visited this town over 50 years ago when he and my uncle transported a car to the owner from the US to Fairbanks Alaska. Their route landed them in Whitehorse prior to the final trek of the Alaskan Highway when it really was nothing more than a roadway of rocks and gravel. Apparently, back then the trek did quite a number on the tires of those who struck out for points west. This was even before Alaska was officially a state of the US (I think they went in 1962). The shanty town they stopped in was the last stopping point for those destined to points west during the Gold Rush of the late 1800’s. They said it had changed little in that time up to the 1960’s, and I learned why when I checked in:
Best Western Gold Rush Inn
The rustic décor and nature of the Best Western and Goldrush Inn notwithstanding, the remote town of about 28,000 people was very quaint and reminded me a bit of Oneonta NY where I went to high school. Not a lot of the “fluff” of civilization here, and apparently Whitehorse has some of the purest cleanest air in the world if you buy into their promotional content from the Yukon News of 2011.
My training events covered a period of seven days – five on the first week, and two days on the following week. Thus, I had a unique opportunity to do a number of excursions while I was there. These included:
A hike to Miles Canyon (30 minutes one way)
A hike from the Black Stairs to the White Horse
A trek along the Yukon River
Sampling brews from the local breweries (there were 3 of them) that proudly claim using frozen hops as their ingredients.
A trip to Skagway Alaska
1. The Hike to Miles Canyon
Miles Canyon is named after General nelson Miles from the US Army as he explored the Yukon back in the 1800’s. I did not even know about it, until on one day (I think my first Sunday), I was scoping out how to get to Robert Service Way, and drove past a road that said “Scenic Area – closed seasonally”. There were a lot of cars parked around the entrance though, suggesting people were walking down the road to the canyon, which did turn out to be the case.
Me being the intrepid explorer of paved roads across the Americas, looped back, parked and hiked/walked the canyon on a whim. I’m so glad I did:
The most incredible part of these scenes is that these photos are (for the most part) straight out of camera. I did a few minor edits for exposure and white balance, but that green is real! One of the tourist placards says the green is from the basalt rocks at the river bottom, so it is not green algae or anything. We are seeing down to the river bottom there!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the kind gentleman, Chris Wheeler (and his wife), who I met while they and their dog were walking back up from the canyon below. He had a camera strapped to his chest, so we got to talking and he shared a comment on my prior post about Yellowknife. I did not know what I was messing with. If you want to see some spectacular photographs of the Northern Lights, check out Chris’ photo stream on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisnorth/
2. Black Stairs to the White Horse
A clever heading, but that’s really what they call these points of interest locally, despite the fact that neither the stairs are black, nor is the horse white, but it does have a nice poetic ring to it! Nonetheless, the climb of over 270 steps was in and of itself without taking a break an accomplishment for me, even though a kid immediately after me ran up in 30 seconds and didn’t even look winded!
Once at the top, a trail loops around the back side of the local airport, and you can continue on to the White Horse, which I thought was a pretty cool sculpture, made from donated parts of broken down equipment from local residents over time.
It was about a 5K walk to the horse sculpture, so round trip, a 10K! The reward for this walk/hike/excursion was a view of the road down into the main area of Whitehorse proper.
The Cremation of Sam McGee
The second bit of nostalgia, comes from the poem by Robert W. Service. I believe this got a nod on my prior post, so won’t regale that story again here, except to say that Service was kind of smitten by the Yukon in his day, and he actually wrote that poem while living in Whitehorse. The reference to Lake Lebarge in the poem was none other than Lake Leberge just north of Whitehorse.
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.” And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum Then “Here!” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum!”
From Memory, Google if you want to find a source 🙂
I did visit but it was completely covered in snow, so the photographs are rather underwhelming and not worth sharing. Instead, just to show for frame of reference, the lake itself is actually quite large considering – 20 miles long and 3 miles wide according to Google anyway. It’s no Lake Superior but a substantial body of water nonetheless. The shape reminds me of Long Lake in NY where my dad and I often did canoe trips as a kid. I bet that’d be a fun canoe trip. But if I see the Alice May though…I’m outta there!
Conclusion
This post is getting rather long-winded, but I’m ok with it, and I hope you, dear readers – all 12 of you anyway, are too. I shall return tomorrow or perhaps next week with the rest of the stories from this trip, along with some more photos.
Walking the Yukon River
Whitehorse Brewery Tour
WHitehorse to Skagway
It’s the cliffhanger effect, I know, because I am saving the best for last. The pictures from my trip to Skagway are just incredible! Tune in again to hear “the rest of the story”!
Yes, it’s been a while, but decided with 2022, it’s time to breathe a puff of life into the blog. In recent years, I’d been more inclined toward the written word over the photographic story-telling. That journey has led me down new creative paths to include short stories, novellas, a few poetic endeavors, and the like. While chasing the creative muse, several rabbit holes have revealed themselves to me and I find myself using my background from the photographic world in new and exciting ways.
And as the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In my stories, and artistic efforts, my photographic library has been a source of inspiration, and it made me realize that much of my library has never really seen the light of day. With that in mind, I am going to share a few images – new images – every month or so here on the blog.
This month, I’ll start off with some of my landscapes:
For the last month or so, I’ve been sitting on the back porch looking at and listening to the songbirds of the morning fly about the trees in our abode here east of Nashville, TN. Finally decided to get a bird stand and see if some safflower and sunflower seeds would attract any. Had some decent success:
Cardinal
Bluebird
Finch
Titmouse
Female Cardinal
Hummingbird
Carolina Wren
More to come for sure – it’s my new morning past time. I feel like one of those people on an HGTV show when they say “Yeah, I could see myself sitting out here each morning enjoying my coffee.” Turns out I actually do that.
A few others I’ve seen but not had the camera out to capture yet include blue jays and a snowy woodpecker. I did see a quail (specifically a Bob White) a while back, but had not pulled out the SLR yet, so just a grainy photo from the iPhone. That was pretty cool!
The blog here, as I think pretty much anyone has come to realize, is not really active much lately. It’s not been active due to a number of reasons, and is leaving me at a crossroads regarding what to do:
#1 – The Blog Crashed
After the server crashed where an old buddy was hosting it for me, the wind was really taken out of my sails. I hadn’t really considered that not only might the web host crash, but that the person who was graciously hosting it for me, would not be able to resurrect it.
But, as Murphy’s Law always wins, that exact scenario happened round about 2015. Suffice to say, not only was the outage one that I could not recover, but the friendship with the “host” was strained. I actually no longer even talk to that individual.
#2 – The Friend Left
I’m not sure if he felt guilty, or what, because things never really got sorted out. We’d become what I thought were friends dating all the way back to I think 2008ish? So from 2008 – 2015 = 7 years? Yeah, that kinda hurt. He stopped returning my emails, does not call, nor has he likely even given me the time of day in nearly five years now.
The last time we talked, I’d reached out as a move loomed large, and I asked him if he wanted some memorabilia from a photo event we taught at jointly. He shared with me that he was getting a divorce, and that he’d love to catch up, and he definitely wanted the poster. Then – nuthin…
Even with the corona virus outbreak three months ago, I didn’t even hear a peep from that person to check in and see if I’m doing ok. I’d already resigned myself to stop initiating contact, my wife saying I’m just setting myself up again, and to let it go. So, I resisted the urge to reach out. It’s kind of sad, because with friends like that, well…it’s a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that they were never really all that much invested.
#3 – The Blogging Stopped
So, the blog lagged. As followers dropped off, I struggled to remain active. No one really was giving me encouragement anymore. Sponsorships eventually ended. Which brought me to today. It’s been apparently five years of maintaining this blog, at my own expense, which admittedly has not really been too much since consumption has pretty much dried up.
#4 – Occasional reposts
As time permits, I visit the Wayback Machine, to resurrect files (mostly images and an occasional article) because there’s something I want to share with a friend. I’ll scour the Wayback Machine, find a few articles and think “yeah, that was a good one, I wanna get that one back.”
And I’ll re-post it. You saw one just hit last Monday.
#5 – Remembering Maggie
Another reason is because of a fateful day where I put down my beloved dog, Maggie, and she was eulogized here. I lost the comments from the crash, but the memory is still there, and I’ve been maintaining it because I don’t want to forget.
Well, this year, I forgot. The article didn’t re-post as it was supposed to. It was two weeks ago today. I’ve not forgotten the dog, I’d just forgotten the day. A new level of sadness has weighed heavy on me, because I have considered giving up the ghost of the blog, so to speak.
#6 – The Final Straw
The re-post from last week, titled “Skin in the Game”. Re-reading my post from back when it first it the internet was kind of cathartic. I realized that:
I stopped shooting.
I stopped marketing
I stopped learning
I am out of practice, and have not touched my SLR in several months. I remember the essentials for sure (shutters, apertures, and such – I still read a lot, but it’s been, well 5 years since I’ve been active). In those five years I have to grudgingly admit I’ve stopped learning. And, at the end of the day, that means I am not producing content.
When is it time to give up the ghost? When the gear sits in a bag collecting dust? When your audience has left? When you no longer feel motivated to hit that “publish” button?
I started this blog as a way of helping myself remember things as I developed my skills in photography back in 2007. Thirteen years ago, I had a vague idea of shutter speeds and apertures. I knew what made photos work, but I’d never really studied it. In the following years I actually studied photography. Now it was self-study, but I literally consumed everything I could get my hands on. And, as a result, I got pretty good. Really good? Well, that’s open to interpretation.
Okay, well maybe not really good, but good enough to where I had about 20K people reading the words I wrote every. single. week. And now the industry has likely forgotten all about me.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, and I don’t think I am ready to sell my gear. In fact, I am going to wake up early tomorrow and see if I can get some shots of the birds chirping in the trees that dot my new home in Nashville TN. I’ve seen red cardinals, bluebirds, chickadees, and more. Just waiting for my camera. And me to get my ass out of bed…
But I am not sure I have the stomach to blog anymore. My photographs will likely just go on Instagram and maybe Facebook. The only thing that may prevent this blog from going off of life support is whether anyone checks in here anymore.
Whenever photogs start conversations with me about their gear, their studios, their work, or any other such thing, I get a lot of questions. Once we get the normal fun stuff out of the way (new gear, new shoot locations, new software, new this and new that), we eventually settle down into more serious topics that I don’t see discussed a lot in most outlets. These conversations usually take one of two paths:
Shoot time versus business time
Shoot time versus continuing education
While each consideration is valid in its own right, my problem as I have these conversations more and more is that photographers are always look at them in an A or B scenario. The truth of the matter is, nothing ever really occurs in a vacuum. We can have conversations that start with the platitude of “All else being equal…” with the best of intentions. But, if you think about it, do things ever happen like that? Of course not!
So, why do we always look at A versus B scenarios? A successful photographer is best served (at least I think), by considering all three of the above facets at the same time. The same holds true in other sectors too. You have to spend time in all three or else you will find one (if not more) of three things happening:
#1 – You Stop Shooting
If you stop shooting, you get rusty. You get out of practice. You forget how to do some of the advanced things that got you to where you are in the first place. Mastering your gear means staying on top of it, and like anything else in life, you either use or it lose it. There’s no two ways about this. I’ve heard people say that shooting is like riding a bike – once you learn, you never forget. While there may be a modicum of truth to that, I can promise you that if you’ve not ridden a bike in ten years, your first few outings may be a little wobbly. You may have the basics down pat as that part is rote, but the rest only comes back with continued use. The same holds true across any discipline. This is why the best athletes in the world are training year round (there never really is an off-season for NFL, MB, NBA, or NHL players. They are the best of the best because they are always practicing.
Whether it’s football, baseball, basketball, hockey, or even cycling – the serious ones are always training:
#2 – You Stop Marketing
If you don’t spend any amount of time marketing, promoting, and working on the business side of things, you may be one of the best shooters in the world, but no one is going to know you very well. It’s one thing to tweet and Facebook or Google chat with your friends and colleagues, but it’s another thing entirely to cold call or submit proposals to businesses for photographic needs. If you don’t submit your work or get any buzz out there about your work to other businesses on a regular basis, then you are likely leaving business opportunities behind. Clients don’t just line up at your door waiting for you to answer, and while some may fall backwards into prime opportunities, most only get there with hard work and persistence. If you stop being persistent in your business, then it won’t be much of a business. So, keep at the business side too!
#3 – You Stop Learning
Probably one of the most needed, least justified, and most difficult things to address is continuing education. It’s ongoing, never ending, and sometimes the most difficult thing to address. I’ve seen so many photographers who have reached a certain degree of skill and success who fall into this trap and think “Who is gonna teach me about software or composition? I know what I’m doing!” The ego is a fragile thing for photographers, and its important to be cognizant of this. If you close your mind to learning new things, or consider learning resources as ones that are “beneath” you, there are likely opportunities being left behind. The best example I can think of here is the film to digital transition. Many film shooters failed to recognize the benefits of digital and these old school success stories became the ones trying to catch up once the worm had turned and everyone was going digital. Early adopters were able to stay current and stay relevant. Stragglers are now struggling to keep up.
If you don’t stay current, and don’t keep fine tuning your talents (because we are always learning no matter who we are), then I promise that you will begin to fade. Not learning also means that you are not staying on top of new trends and needs of the market. It’s important to do things like attend seminars, workshops, and to read! (Yes, I said read!) There are so many resources out there that it can be tough to whittle things down to the best resources to learn from, and while some are better than others, there’s good material out there everywhere.
So, whether it’s shooting time to keep your skills up, business time to keep things afloat, or learning to stay on top of new and trending markets, it’s important to balance all three of these. Do I have a magic number or proportion that will fit for everyone? Of course not – this formula is not a static number, and will change depending on not only the person, but where you are. If you’ve spent the last 4 years in a photo school, the practice and education are likely good for a while, but the business needs attention. Likewise, someone who’s at the five year mark may need to consider getting in a few workshops or conferences to get up to speed on current trends and market shifts.
What formula do you need? Only you can really know what the best thing to focus on next should be. The important thing though is to make sure you keep your skin in the game – on all fronts! Where you go from here is up to you, but hopefully today’s post has given you food for thought!
With that in mind, what are your thoughts? Are there other factors here? Sound off in the comments with your own ideas on how to keep current and stay afloat. As is always the case, you gotta keep shooting, so don’t forget that part of it, and we’ll see you back here next time!
