December 29, 2009.................................................................................................................."Make Bad Pictures To Make Good Pictures"
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Who’d have thought the way to make good pictures is to make bad pictures!
If you’re taking bad pictures now, you may well be on your way to being a better photographer.
Many years ago I was a tennis pro, teaching in the summer during college. When I’d work with a client, they often had multiple issues that needed attention. You quickly discover that you can’t tell someone to change two or three things at once. The brain is an amazing organ, but conscious thought regularly chokes on too much information. So I discovered the best thing to do was isolate a single problem and work specifically on its improvement. If we were working on the correct toss of the ball for the serve I would say, “I don’t care if the ball goes over the net or not. All I am interested in your tossing the ball up the right way. Go ahead, swing through and hit it, but only concentrate on the toss itself.” Unburdened by any expectation of a successful serve, the student could easily concentrate on the just the toss. Soon, almost inexplicably, their serve was improving. If other minor adjustments in the service motion needed work we’d isolate and work on those too. With a little concentrated effort, they found a serve that worked for their game.
Guess what? This works for photography too. And on many different levels.
Having trouble with focusing? Decide that your primary goal is just mastery of how your camera focuses. Don’t worry a lick about subject matter or exposure. Just shoot anything, practicing with different focusing modes, moving the focusing target around in your viewfinder, etc. Experiment with single focus, continuous focus, manual focus. And then go look at your images. See which ones are sharp. Look at the metadata and correlate with shutter speed. Learn what conditions make focusing difficult and what tricks you can use to improve focus in those settings.
Having trouble deciding on ISO at different times during the day? Forget about critical focus or choice of subject. Shoot anything, but do a series on one subject using every ISO setting on your camera. Look at the files and critically compare shadow and highlight areas at higher magnifications. Note how much noise you perceive and at what ISO it becomes an issue for you. Also explore noise reduction setting in your image editing software, and take a look at some free downloads of noise reduction programs or plug-ins.
Can’t decide what aperture to use in aperture priority mode? Forget about ISO and histograms. FInd a subject with decent illumination and make a mindless series of images focusing on exactly the same point every time, but go through the entire range of aperture settings on the camera. Then compare images looking at how the depth of field changes.
Not sure how fast a shutter speed you need to freeze action. Forget about depth of field or composition. Pick an ISO that gives you a decent range of shutter speed possibilities, go in search of a variety of moving subjects and shoot series, only concerned about shooting with a spectrum of shutter speeds. Then compare how the action is stopped.
As you go through the motions, you’ll be making a LOT of throw away pictures. Just like my tennis student (“I don’t care if the ball goes over the net”), you shouldn’t care if the photo stinks, as long as the variable you were concentrating on helps provide you with answers. Then at some point, you’re going to notice everything you do with the camera is coming together, and the quality of your photographs is improving. “Bad” pictures will make you a better photographer.
Sometimes you should make a bad picture just to prove a point.
There is a school of thought about digital exposure that says you should expose your histogram to the right, “overexposing” the image without blowing out highlights in order to maximize detail. I wasn’t sure if this had practical applicability or not. After all, I’d made lots of images that were underexposed and I could correct them in Photoshop pretty darn well. So I decided to go make some “throw away” pictures to figure this out.
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If you’re taking bad pictures now, you may well be on your way to being a better photographer.
Many years ago I was a tennis pro, teaching in the summer during college. When I’d work with a client, they often had multiple issues that needed attention. You quickly discover that you can’t tell someone to change two or three things at once. The brain is an amazing organ, but conscious thought regularly chokes on too much information. So I discovered the best thing to do was isolate a single problem and work specifically on its improvement. If we were working on the correct toss of the ball for the serve I would say, “I don’t care if the ball goes over the net or not. All I am interested in your tossing the ball up the right way. Go ahead, swing through and hit it, but only concentrate on the toss itself.” Unburdened by any expectation of a successful serve, the student could easily concentrate on the just the toss. Soon, almost inexplicably, their serve was improving. If other minor adjustments in the service motion needed work we’d isolate and work on those too. With a little concentrated effort, they found a serve that worked for their game.
Guess what? This works for photography too. And on many different levels.
Having trouble with focusing? Decide that your primary goal is just mastery of how your camera focuses. Don’t worry a lick about subject matter or exposure. Just shoot anything, practicing with different focusing modes, moving the focusing target around in your viewfinder, etc. Experiment with single focus, continuous focus, manual focus. And then go look at your images. See which ones are sharp. Look at the metadata and correlate with shutter speed. Learn what conditions make focusing difficult and what tricks you can use to improve focus in those settings.
Having trouble deciding on ISO at different times during the day? Forget about critical focus or choice of subject. Shoot anything, but do a series on one subject using every ISO setting on your camera. Look at the files and critically compare shadow and highlight areas at higher magnifications. Note how much noise you perceive and at what ISO it becomes an issue for you. Also explore noise reduction setting in your image editing software, and take a look at some free downloads of noise reduction programs or plug-ins.
Can’t decide what aperture to use in aperture priority mode? Forget about ISO and histograms. FInd a subject with decent illumination and make a mindless series of images focusing on exactly the same point every time, but go through the entire range of aperture settings on the camera. Then compare images looking at how the depth of field changes.
Not sure how fast a shutter speed you need to freeze action. Forget about depth of field or composition. Pick an ISO that gives you a decent range of shutter speed possibilities, go in search of a variety of moving subjects and shoot series, only concerned about shooting with a spectrum of shutter speeds. Then compare how the action is stopped.
As you go through the motions, you’ll be making a LOT of throw away pictures. Just like my tennis student (“I don’t care if the ball goes over the net”), you shouldn’t care if the photo stinks, as long as the variable you were concentrating on helps provide you with answers. Then at some point, you’re going to notice everything you do with the camera is coming together, and the quality of your photographs is improving. “Bad” pictures will make you a better photographer.
Sometimes you should make a bad picture just to prove a point.
There is a school of thought about digital exposure that says you should expose your histogram to the right, “overexposing” the image without blowing out highlights in order to maximize detail. I wasn’t sure if this had practical applicability or not. After all, I’d made lots of images that were underexposed and I could correct them in Photoshop pretty darn well. So I decided to go make some “throw away” pictures to figure this out.
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As a photograph, this one is very forgettable. But that’s not why I took it. I wanted to experiment with development of an underexposed image, comparing it to the same image exposed with the histogram more to the right.
Here is the underexposed image and the adjusted version from Lightroom by adding 2.3 units of “exposure” to improve the histogram and lighten the image. The original brightly exposed image at (far left) in contrast needed only a minor darkening adjustment with the “blacks” slider to set the black point correctly for rich darks without loss of shadow detail. At low magnification the two “bright” versions look very similar.
Then I went to 100% magnification and looked at detail. Whoa! Was I ever surprised.
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The coarse artifact in the underexposed image (left ) was awful compared to the beautiful smooth detail in the image exposed to favor the bright side of the histogram (right). If I wasn’t convinced about the principle of exposing histograms to the right for optimal quality before, I was after this exercise. I didn’t throw these pictures away (yet), because they are valuable for teaching. You might keep some of your throw away shots too, as reminders. Going out to shoot with low expectations in general, but very specific expectations about mastering a camera function or exploring a photo technique can do great things for your photography.
Go make some bad pictures!
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