On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Bill <anotherdrunken...@gmail.com> wrote:
The best you can do is go through your work, first removing the obvious
junk
first. The out of focus, the very badly exposed, the ones that won't make
a
good print for purely technical reasons.
After that, you can start culling based purely on aesthetics, culling out
the ones that fail for non technical reasons, and this is where training
in
the arts comes in.
A good strategy for teaching yourself composition (after doing some
reading)
is to take the images from a shoot, take out the good ones and don't look
at
them again. They have done their job, they have shown you that there is
hope.
Study the failures, ask yourself why the image failed. By doing this, you
determine what doesn't work. Eliminate what doesn't work from what you
are
doing, and eventually, you will find that more of what you are doing
works.
Keep putting the images that work into a folder, either real or digital
for
a year. After a year, open that folder, arrange the images by date and
watch
how your photography has progressed.
I have to admit that out of all the replies so far, the section
quoted above is the most useful. I guess it provides a brief and
adapted description of your edit workflow. In general it matches how
I would approach this, and what I want to accomplish in the long term.
(I've yet to reach the one year milestone.) :)
You have yet to separate the aesthetic from the technical, and you think
that you can wrap aesthetics up into a formulaic approach that will allow
you to make judgement calls regarding your images, but until you have the
ability to judge the final image for what it is, separate from the
technical
elements that make it what it is, you are going to find this to be a
disappointing avocation.
I agree with your statement, and as said in previous replies to
other posters, I do try to edit my images first based on what I think
is aesthetically pleasing to me, and then on the technical qualities
when alternatives are available. I was just debating the approach for
the second part.
(Beyond this point in my reply, I go off-topic, especially since I
know that some of the mailing list members love to argue, myself
included. Thus one can easily skip the rest.) :)
One of the things I have noted over the past decade is that the very
geeky
avocation of photography has attracted geeks from other interest groups,
especially computer geeks.
At least, by the above observation, we are all geeks in one way or
another, thus we all have crazy ideas from time-to-time. :)
The new photographer who has cut his teeth on
computers is used to success via formulaic approach.
On the contrary, a good computer geek (or as we call them
"hackers" in the good sense), is far from "formulaic approaches". It
involves a lot more creativity that what people usually think.
(Indeed perhaps a lot of the industry has morphed into software
assembly factories, but there are some original "codes" are works of
art in their own right.)
I want this as an end result, and to get there I plug in this line of
code,
If this were true we would have by now programmed programs to
program our programs. (And SkyNet would be up-and-running.) :D
You would do better to read some books on composition than to try to make
what you are wanting into a numbers game.
But to get back to photography and "formulaic approaches". Like
all crafts, even photography has its own so-called "magic-formulas"
that are preached in most materials, especially when it comes to
composition. But in the end I understand that the author has to
address both the beginner and the advanced; plus he can't describe
into words the creative process without sounding too "formulaic".
(Don't take the above as me dismissing those materials.)
As technical a craft as photography is, the successful photographer
masters
the mechanical parts to the point of not having to think about them any
more, and then concentrates on the aesthetic, in much the same way that
the
person learning to drive masters using the controls on the vehicle to the
point that driving is more or less automatic, allowing the person to
enjoy
the drive.
To keep the analogy with driving, I guess that the equivalent of
"artists" in the automobile world are the Formula 1 drivers (or
similar). However I bet that they master their controls well beyond
"driving more or less automatic", up-to taking highly informed
decisions almost subconsciously. Thus I guess that at least some of
the artists in the photography world have done similarly, i.e.
mastered the technical details beyond "automatic".
(As a small case-study, looking at what books are published by
Ansel Adams --- according to http://www.anseladamsbooks.com/ --- three
are technical, the rest are "albums", none(?) are about technique.
Although I most concede two things: (1) I clearly see that the
"albums" are technique "manuals" without too many words; (2) this is
only one data-point, and there are countless other counter-examples.)
Ciprian.
