This is somethingt that has been brewing in my mind for a while. I didn't have time to do more than just spew it out, without editing. And it was a real challlenge trying to phrase it as "there are people out there doing a lot more work than you realize", and not come across as "I do all this stuff for you, what are you going to do for me?". I hope I succeeded.
If you are reading this, chances are that I've taken photos of you. I have nearly 1,600 people on my friends list, and I'm pretty sure it's not because of my sparkling personality. My social awkwardness is not legendary, but it is no secret. The reason that most people connect with me on social networking sites is because I'm one of the people that gets decent photos at those events where the cell phone photos always look like crap. In just about any social group there are a few of us, generally three or four, that you see at the various events, taking photos. Something like half of the photos ever taken, have been taken in the past year or two. To a first approximation, everybody now has a camera with them all the time. You might call it a phone, but it's also a camera. Meanwhile, the performance of dedicated cameras have improved at the exponential rate that Gordon Moore noticed several decades ago. So, not only can just about anyone take a photo at any time, but there's a decent chance that photo will look OK, or at least the objects in it will probably be recognizable. But in our various social groups, there are three or four of us who fairly regularly hear someone admit that their photos don't turn out as well as ours. There's a dirty secret that the people who make cameras won't tell you. While cameras have advanced to the point that you no longer need to have a good grasp of photographic fundamentals to take a pictures that is reasonably well exposed, and even has subjects in focus, if you don't know your aperture from a hole in the ground, chances are you won't take many good photos. Sure, you'll get lucky now and then. Throw enough darts in the general direction of the dart board and a few of them will hit the bullseye, but quite frankly, most of your photos will be crap, particularly in anything but favorable light. What camera companies will tell you is that to get good photos, you need good (read expensive) cameras and lenses. This is true to a point. A good photographer can get beautiful artistic photos with just about any working camera that you put in their hands, but there are times when you simply need the right tool for the job. If you want pictures of people dancing in a room that is too dark to comfortably read in, you are going to need a pretty good camera body, a decent lens, and in addition to knowing how to use them, you're going to need a decent computer for processing those photos. You can get these things on the cheap, relatively speaking, but if you're passionate about photography chances are that you've spent well over a thousand dollars on your kit. Actually, chances are that you've spent quite a few times that on your kit, but if you're creative, you might be able to take and process good photos in challenging light for under two or three thousand dollars. So, those people getting better photos than you did so because they spent the time to learn the basics of photography, and they spent more time practicing, and they spent a fair chunk of money on decent camera and computer gear. I'm not even going to start on the time, expense and effort involved with film and darkroom, I've Been There, Done That, and while it has it's appeal, it is beyond the scope of this discussion, and possibly even sanity in this day and age. These are arguably reasons enough to appreciate the people taking those photos of you dancing, riding bikes, playing guitar. racing cars or whatever. But we've barely even started. If we're taking photos at an event, there are things that we're not doing, and most of them are the reasons that we started going to those events at the first place. If it's at a dance, and I'm taking photos, there isn't a pretty girl in my arms moving to the music. If I'm at a class and taking photos, I'm missing a lot of what the teacher is saying, because while the teacher is talking, I'm also looking at the light, thinking about when something interesting is going to happen, taking care not to disturb class myself and very little of my brain is left over to absorb what is being taught. I'm not saying that taking photos isn't fun. It is a lot of fun, or we wouldn't be doing it on our own time, and giving away the photos for free. There are a lot of reasons to give them away for free. The big one is that most of us do this as a way to give back to the community and our friends. The other reason is that if we tried to sell our photos, we wouldn't get any money for them anyways, in no small part because we'd be competing against the people who are giving them away. But, we aren't done yet. Taking the photos is the easy part. Remember that I mentioned computers. The difference between crappy photos and decent photos may be skill and equipment, but the difference between decent photos and good photos is polishing them up in post processing, and the difference between good photos and great photos, is spending the time to go through them and deciding which 90-99% of them to throw away. If I spend an hour taking photos, and I'm just doing a quick and dirty job to post them on facebook, I can probably process them in an hour's work at home. I upload them to the computer, do rough exposure and color correction, pre-render them so that I can scan through them quickly, take several passes throwing away the worst ones, and then spend a bit more time, making another pass through them to throw out all but the best. LIke I said, for something like facebook, I generally do a quick and dirty, because most people seem like they'd rather have a decent photo of them doing something they love, than no photo, and a lot of people would rather have even an embarrassingly bad photo, than no photo at all. For the serious photos, I tend to spend as much, or more time, going over the ones that are left to pick the few really god that make it to the next cut. So, where you might think that each photo you see posted on facebook only represents the ten seconds it might take you to pull out your cell phone and take a snap, even ignoring the time and effort spent hauling the (very expensive) bag of camera gear around, each photo that you see, actually represents several minutes of work waiting for the right moment, taking that photo, and the other then that got thrown away, plus at least that much time, generally late at night, working on the photos so that the ones you see are better than pretty decent. And, if you actually run events, and appreciate having good photos of the event so people can see how much fun it is, think about ways to make the people who put the effort in to take those photos feel appreciated. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
