Advancing Your Photography. Marc Silber
If you don’t like it, see if you can dig in and find out why. Maybe there was something distracting about it or it had a technical flaw. Or it simply didn’t interest you.
This kind of careful looking will help you when you go out to capture your own images. You’re building a kind of visual collection in your mind from which to work.
When I was learning photography as a pre-teen and teenager, I looked at a few photographers and their books over and over, and I recommend you do, too. Google them to see their images:
Edward Weston: He is the master of capturing the beauty of forms, often everyday objects, whether a pepper, a tree or even a toilet. He also captured the form of nudes and landscapes, many times woven together in his unique and powerful way. Look at his work and you’ll see why I was so inspired by him.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: He was the master of “capturing the moment” – shooting the events of the day, whether it was a formal ball or the man on the street. He had the ability to make art out of everyday events and bring us into direct contact with them. Cartier-Bresson used a Leica, a small handheld camera.
By closely studying the work of these two master photographers, you will get some insight into two of the most prolific and popular photographers of the twentieth century, and by looking deeply, you can find out why they became that way. I also invite you to search for photographers you admire and study their work as I’ve described.
Another book of the time that I looked at often for inspiration is “The Family of Man,” which began as an exhibition and later became a book. It is a collection of 503 images by 273 photographers from 68 countries; each image tells its own story, but like pages of a book, they fit together to tell a whole story about mankind.
There were many, many other books and exhibits that inspired me, and I’m sure you have your own favorites too. These will all help you to develop your own “voice” as a photographer.
Let’s talk about how to use visualization when you go out to take a photograph. Instead of being someone who just pushes the shutter and snaps a lot of pictures (snapshots), a photographer first visualizes the image he or she wants and then goes through the steps to capture it. The moment I really learned to visualize is when I became a photographer, and it has been a lifelong love affair ever since.
The next stage of the cycle is knowing your camera and equipment. To bring to life what you have visualized, you have to know your tools and know them well. I will demystify your camera and make it an easy-to-use set of tools that will help you create the images that you love.
You might have felt intimidated when you first picked up a professional camera, it seems like there are just so many knobs, buttons, and menus and things. How could you possibly know them all? The good news is you don’t need to!
For over 100 years cameras have had only four or five key controls that you had to know how to work with. The same is mostly true today.
Let’s go back to the kitchen and imagine you were learning to cook in a well-equipped kitchen – which made your head spin with all the appliances, cooking utensils, pans – and on and on!
But let’s say you decided to watch and follow a good cook at work who made it look easy and simple. You noticed they also used the same key “tools” over and over, no matter how many dishes they cooked: They used knives to cut with, they used pots and pans of different sizes, spatulas and spoons – and hey, they seemed to do all their work with just a few key tools of the same kind! Then it really hit home that it’s simple and that you too could learn to cook!
The same is true with photography: once you learn the five or so key controls, you will simply use them over and over again, no matter what type of photograph you’re creating. When we get to that section, we’ll cover them all so that you know how to use them, then with practice, these will become instinctive for you.
When your visualization is coupled with your ability to use your camera, you will then be able to capture the image that you want, so capturing the image is a blend of those two stages, but forms its own stage in the cycle. When you go to the next stage of processing you may find you will change how you develop an image, but you must know how to expose it and capture it correctly in the first place with your camera and your other tools.
As an analogy, if you were recording music, you would need to do so in a way that captures it faithfully and clearly, so when you play it back you hear clear sounds that are harmonious with other instruments and sound pleasing. Have you ever been to a concert where you were so totally captivated with the performance, you shot video of it on your phone and played it back the next day for a friend? I doubt they had the same experience you did – your friend may have smiled weakly and tapped their foot a bit and hoped you turned it off soon!
I’m sure you’ve had the same experience with a photograph of a sunset. Standing there, you were completely surrounded by a moment so beautiful that you knew you couldn’t help but get a killer image of it. You took the photograph, but then looked at it the next day and thought. “Why are the colors so muted? The sunset itself is so insignificant! I’m ready to delete the whole image!” Then maybe you might see a pro’s shot of the very same sunset that blows you away!
What happened? It’s all about knowing how to use your camera to make it capture (record) the image you visualized. That’s where we’ll be going, and that is what is so captivating about photography: you will continuously learn to tell your stories by writing with light with increasing effectiveness.
» Processing your images in Lightroom
The next stage is processing those images. This is where you play the music that you captured in the last stage. In our modern world this is mostly done digitally, so we will focus on the use of Adobe LightRoom, which I highly recommend as your processing platform.
Remember, the process of visualization is at the center of and carries through each stage in the cycle of photography: What you first visualized and then captured with your camera now needs to fully come to life as your final image. This is where you learn to interpret your image and have it express what you saw and felt and what you want your viewer to feel when you share it in the next stage.
When I was 12, my teacher, who happened to be a photographer, asked if I wanted to see how negatives were developed and printed. I jumped at the chance, but really had no idea of the magic I was about to experience. He showed me how to develop a roll of film. That was exciting, but it wasn’t until it was dried and he put a strip in the enlarger that I began to realize that this was going to be a passion. I stood by in amazement as I watched him expose the paper with the enlarger and then place the paper in the developing tray. Moving it gently back and forth, with only faint yellow light to see by in the darkroom, I could gradually perceive an image forming on the paper, stronger and stronger as the seconds ticked by. Then there it was, fully formed, so he placed it briefly in the “stop bath” to do just that – stop the development. Then into the fixer bath, so it would remain fixed in the process and not fade in the light. And finally a long rinse in water to wash out all the chemicals, which completed the whole development cycle.
Once I had experienced this magic, I was hooked! It wasn’t long before I had convinced my parents to allow me to convert the laundry room/shop to do triple duty as a darkroom. Now the magic was complete because I was fully in control of the process!
When all this came together for me and I compared my new final prints that I had made myself to the washed-out, muddy, tiny prints that the drugstore had previously provided me, I never looked back. I was now the master of my own ship