 Jim
Griffin
The PhotoGryph
P.O. Box 50752, Tulsa, OK
74150-0752
Email to Jim
The
most basic thing!
There are many things that are pretty basic about
photography. I'm not going to get into all those on this page. However, in order to
understand what I believe to be the most basic thing, you've got
to understand one other thing. And that one thing you need to realize is that photography
is the capability, learned skill, and art of capturing light!
There's a reason I'm pointing this out, so please read on.
The word "photography" comes from the Greek word "phos" meaning
light, combined with the other half of the word which we all can recognize. That other
half, "graphy," would come from the same root as "graph" which is also
Greek. That Greek word is "graphein" and means "to write". Boring? Possibly if you just look at those
statements as definitions of words. Read on, don't stop now!
Okay, so the word itself tells us what photography is all about. Writing with light!
What's that mean to you and to me and how does it relate to the most basic thing we need
to know about photography? We need to realize that everything we "see" with our
eyes is either reflected light or a light source. Light sources are the sun, the moon
(actually reflected light from the sun), light bulbs, neon tubes, lightning, fire, etc.
Those types of things are easy to recognize as "light" but you need to remember
that even things like tables and chairs come to our eyes (and our cameras) as light. They
don't travel to our lens as tables and chairs and they don't make their own light, but
they do reflect light. So, anytime we want to take a photo of anything
we need to realize that what we're actually doing is recording light!
So what?? In order to improve
our photos we need to look at the scene that's captured our
attention. Something about that scene grabbed our attention and
made us think, "That would be a great photo!" What was
that something? Many times that something was the way the light was reflected off a
surface, or the way the light shined through a thin part of the object, or the way the
shadows were shaped. Without the shadows, the above photograph would be pretty dull. I
always like the contrast of old architecture and new, but what really grabbed my attention
and made me take that shot was the way the light played with,
and accentuated, the lines of the actual object. Click here to
check out the photo again.
It could be that you're saying, "I
don't ever think about those things. I just want to take a photo of my daughter."
Great! But even if your intentions are simply to record an event or a person's face or
image, wouldn't it be nice to record that event or person in the "best light?"
And you must be interested in making your photos better or you
wouldn't be reading this, right? The key point I'm trying to get across here so far is
that we need to remember that LIGHT is a
major part of what we should be considering when we're taking a photo.
So, either you want to take great art photos or you want to make your family pictures
look more like those "typical" families you see in advertisements all the time.
Either way, you want to improve your photos. How do you do that? You LOOK
at what you're going to shoot (including the light). You LOOK at the way the light's playing across or
reflecting from the subject. You THINK about
what's attracted you and made you go and get your camera. You THINK
about how a change of position of your camera's or your subject's position might affect
the way the light goes into the camera. AND
you think about the differences between what your eyes see and what the film will record.
What? The film won't record things exactly as I see them?
Absolutely the truth. You've heard a phrase something like, "The camera never
lies," right? Well, that's more true and, at the same time less true, than most
people realize. Film is a chemical coating on a plastic type carrier. Film's gone through
a lot of changes since photography first started, but one thing's been constant throughout
it's history. It can't record exactly what you see!
Why's that? No matter how much more
research goes into film and how much better it gets, no inanimate thing (film) will ever
be able to record exactly what we see. The reason is simple when you think about it. Our
eyes don't see. Our eyes are simply receptors, things that receive light. They don't
interpret that signal and decide what it means. They don't put all those millions of
signals they receive together and send a "picture" to our minds. Our minds
are what do the actual putting together and translating! That's the key
word..."translating." What's the mind to do with millions and millions of
signals that it receives from our eyes. Well, one of the things it does is to ignore
a lot of it. It can't help it. We've trained our mind to ignore things that don't matter.
Why? Again, too many signals arriving to translate and pay attention to. It has to
determine what's important and what's not.
So, when we look at a scene where our family is outdoors on a Spring day, under a
beautiful sunlit sky, with the birds chirping, and a wonderful mountain view behind them,
we think it's beautiful and we want to remember our family in that setting. So, we pull
out the camera and line up the family and take a photo.
But...what do we see when we get the photo back? We see that everyone in the picture is
lined up squinting into the sun making their faces look screwed up and in pain. We see
dark spots where their eyes should be because the sun is so bright that it created shadows
under their eyebrows. We see a telephone pole behind them that we didn't notice before,
and it seems to be growing out of our spouses head! We see an overflowing trash can just
to the left of and behind the family. Our son is standing on a candy wrapper. We see
another family walking across the field behind our family and they appear to be walking
right into our daughter's ear. In other words, we see a LOT of things that we didn't
notice before we pressed the shutter!
Why???? Our mind filtered them out! Our
mind was concentrating on the beautiful way we were feeling as
the sun was warming us. Our mind was feeling in addition to
translating what it was seeing and it translated/filtered out
all the bad stuff! All that garbage in the photo didn't register in our mind's eye! That
garbage didn't have anything at all to do with the great feeling that we were having at
the time. However, the camera (and the film) saw it all and recorded exactly what was
there!
So here's the most basic thing we
should know about photography.
Think & Look !
We've got to override our mind's natural response to a scene. We've got to begin to
teach our mind to see in a different way. We've got to
concentrate on details in the scene and consciously decide what's good and what's bad in
the actual physical scene we're witnessing. We can then try to downplay or eliminate the
bad stuff and emphasize the good stuff.
But, we've got to remember to think about it and LOOK
every time we begin to take a photo. Analyze the scene before you put
the camera to your eye, and then analyze it again when we're looking through the camera's
"eye." Don't let your mind push you around!
Take charge of your photography!
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