It all starts with that new camera in your hands. You got sick of your point and shoot and wanted something faster and better, or maybe you wanted to rekindle that long lost desire to be a photographer that the cost of film and developing had extinguished out of your junior high budget.
Now, you have your new camera and the sky is the limit…until you start taking photos. You just cannot get it right somehow. They are still blurred, out of focus, too dark, too bright, boring, and everything but what you had imagined. Fear not. There is hope.
If you are anything like me, your first thought is that you are held back by your gear. “If I only had a nicer lens.” “If I just had a camera with…” lower noise, image stabilzation, or whatever new miracle technology camera makers dream up.
Yes, gear helps, but I am sure Mozart could blow my mind on a $20 electric keyboard. So, the time has come to take back that opening sentence. It does not start with that camera in your hands; I just needed a catchy beginning. That camera is just a tool. It really starts with the person holding the camera.
Those “tools” are now so covered with buttons that most of us are scared into submission. We put the camera on auto, press the button, and hope for the best. We reason, “If the camera has that many buttons and features, photography must be complicated.” Not true.
I try my best to not focus on technology, on bells and whistles, or even on what so-and-so is doing in their photos, but it is so easy to focus on the gear and tech instead of the craft. Photography is actually very simple. That is why I try to focus on the fundamentals of how photography works and then from there to develop my own creative approach to photography.
That makes a ton of sense. I have big dreams in thinking about what I could do in the dark room with film and thinking that there is a whole lot more that can be done with a camera that doesn’t need film. So understanding how the fundamentals can be translated and used with digital makes sense, if that’s what your saying
Well, I am saying that and more. I think a lot of folks are just too scared of their cameras. Back when cameras were fully manual, they were already scared of them, and that was when they only had three or four controls. Now, we have dozens and dozens of adjustments we could make to this and that feature, and it is just dizzying.
There are fundamental differences between film and digital, each having positives and negatives, but my main point is that the real fundamentals cross the film-digital boundary. And all those bells and whistles can be boiled back down to the basics. Once you have those basics, you begin to see the basics for what they really are: extras.